Alexandra Kollontai was a writer, a revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social welfare as well as one of the first female ambassadors in the world.  This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy, asks: How to read Kollontai’s vision of love today and relate it to current feminist struggles?

Can the ethnological observations and feelings on Afro-diasporic cultures of a German writer be “restituted”? What are the possibilities and limits of using self-reflection and gay sexuality as research tools? The exhibition and publication project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology has followed these questions through Fichte’s cycle of novels.

It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.

It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level.