A letter by Vladimir Lenin, to Inessa Armand, 17 January 1915, in Collected Works 34, suggests that the hippie New Left’s sexual degeneracy is (at least in the eyes of Lenin) related more to bourgeois society than to socialism:
‘I feel bound to make one point right away. I suggest you delete altogether paragraph 3 dealing with “the demand (on the part of women) for free love”. This is, in fact, a bourgeois, not a proletarian demand. What do you really mean by it?’
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I shared this on one of my social media accounts. People seemed to appreciate this.
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It’s true. What kind of working-class man agitates for the right to ‘free love’? He may avail himself of such degenerate pleasures, but I have never seen that demand coming from genuinely working-class politics.
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Yes, Lenin could sound a little like one of “us” sometimes. As he told Clara Zetkin in 1920:
“You must be aware of the famous theory that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls….
I think this glass of water theory is completely un-Marxist, and, moreover, anti-social…. Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? But the social aspect is most important of all. Drinking water is, of course, an individual affair. But in love two lives are concerned, and a third, a new life, arises, it is that which gives it its social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community.”
(None of this, of course, prevented his affair with Armand…)
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I dare say that Lenin is more ‘of us’ than all the liberals who fill the West, including the classical liberals who think of themselves as conservatives.
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