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Special pages :
Letter to Inessa Armand, January 17, 1915
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 35, pages 180-181.
Dear Friend,
I very much advise you to write the plan of the pamphlet in as much detail as possible.[1] Otherwise too much is unclear.
One opinion I must express here and now:
I advise you to throw out altogether § 3âthe âdemand (womenâs) for freedom of loveâ.
That is not really a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.
After all, what do you understand by that phrase? What can be understood by it?
1. Freedom from material (financial) calculations in affairs of love?
2. The same, from material worries?
3. From religious prejudices?
4. From prohibitions by Papa, etc.?
5. From the prejudices of âsocietyâ?
6. From the narrow circumstances of oneâs environment (peasant or petty-bourgeois or bourgeois intellectual)?
7. From the fetters of the law, the courts and the police?
8. From the serious element in love?
9. From child-birth?
10. Freedom of adultery? Etc.
I have enumerated many shades (not all, of course). You have in mind, of course, not nos. 8â10, but either nos. 1â7 or something similar to nos. 1â7.
But then for nos. 1â7 you must choose a different wording, because freedom of love does not express this idea exactly.
And the public, the readers of the pamphlet, will inevitably understand by âfreedom of loveâ, in general, some thing like nos. 8â10, even without your wishing it.
Just because in modern society the most talkative, noisy and âtop-prominentâ classes understand by âfreedom of loveâ nos. 8â10, just for that very reason this is not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.
For the proletariat nos. 1â2 are the most important, and then nos. 1â7, and those, in fact, are not âfreedom of loveâ.
The thing is not what you subjectively âmeanâ by this. The thing is the objective logic of class relations in affairs of love.
Friendly shake hands![2]
W. I.