V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v49; en:CW/CW35;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

Dear friend!* I strongly advise you to write the plan of the pamphlet in greater detail.71 Otherwise too much is unclear.

I must express one opinion right now:
§ 3—“(woman’s) demand for freedom of love”—I advise you to delete altogether.

This is really not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.

Indeed, what do you understand by it? What can be understood by it?

*—Dear friend! Ed.

1. Freedom from material (financial) calculations in affairs of love?
2. The same from material worries?
3. From religious prejudices?
4. From the prohibition of papa, etc.?
5. From the prejudices of “society”?
6. From the narrow environment (peasant or petty-bourgeois or intellectual-bourgeois) milieu?
7. From the fetters of law, court and police?
8. From seriousness in love?
9. From childbearing?
10. Freedom of adultery? etc.

I have enumerated many (not all, of course) shades. You understand, of course, not Nos. 8-10, but either Nos. 1-7 or something like Nos. 1-7.

But for Nos. 1-7 a different designation must be chosen, for freedom of love does not express this idea precisely.

And the public, the readers of the pamphlet, will inevitably understand by “freedom of love” in general something like Nos. 8-10, even against your will.

Precisely because in modern society the classes that are most talkative, noisy and “top-dog” understand by “freedom of love” Nos. 8-10, precisely for that reason this is not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.

For the proletariat the most important are Nos. 1-2, and then Nos. 1-7, but this is actually not “freedom of love.”

The point is not what you subjectively “want to understand” by this. The point is the objective logic of class relations in affairs of love.

Friendly shake hands!

W. I.*

*—Friendly shake hands! V. I. Ed.

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Written on January 17, 1915

Sent from Berne

First published in 1939

in the magazine “Bolshevik” No. 13

Printed from the manuscript