Clara Zetkin & the socialist origins of International Women’s Day
“Zetkin, along with Rosa Luxemburg, was among those who understood that the development of capitalism had not made either the task of social reform or international relations more peaceful.”
German socialist Clara Zetkin founded International Women’s Day to acknowledge working women’s contribution to the struggle against capitalism. It’s no wonder that German socialist, Clara Zetkin’s legacy has been erased by the corporate sponsorship of #IWD – it’s all too relevant, as Katherine Connelly explains
There are many reasons to draw inspiration from Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). She dedicated her whole life to fighting for socialism no matter what the considerable personal costs. Shortly after joining the Social Democratic Party in the 1870s, which was swiftly banned by the German authorities, she was forced into an exile that lasted ten years. Whilst in exile, her husband died leaving her with two young children.
Zetkin’s own life ended in exile after she was forced to flee Germany again, this time from the Nazis. She broke that exile briefly in August 1932 when she claimed her right to open the Reichstag, as its oldest elected member. Seventy-five years old, nearly blind and in very poor health, she had to be helped to the tribune past uniformed Nazi thugs who had threatened to attack her.
Literally facing down the Nazis, she called for working-class unity against fascism. She ended her speech by voicing her wish that she would soon open the first government of German workers’ councils. It was an extraordinary final act of courage and defiance. Zetkin died less than a year later.
Revolutionary Zetkin
Born in 1857, Zetkin belonged to a generation of German socialists who had known Friedrich Engels in the last years of his life and been able to interpret the work of Marx and Engels for an emerging younger generation.
There were sharp debates between these socialists about how to apply Marxism to the problems of the early twentieth century. Leading figures in the SPD, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein argued that the changing nature of capitalism and imperialism made redundant Marx and Engels’ revolutionary conclusions – perhaps the contradictions of old could be overcome piecemeal and peacefully?
Zetkin, along with her close friend Rosa Luxemburg, was among those who understood that the development of capitalism had not made either the task of social reform or international relations more peaceful. Instead, the contradictions of competitive capitalism were deepening, making the world a more dangerous place, and could only be positively overcome through the revolutionary action of the expanding and increasingly international working class.
Their revolutionary perspective was, tragically, vindicated in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, driven by the competition of rival, imperialist nations. The SDP leadership, which had rejected revolutionary socialism in favour of changing the system from the inside, capitulated into supporting that system and voting for war credits.
Zetkin and Luxemburg, however, campaigned against the war, for which both were taken into custody. They also began to create new organisations, independent of the SPD, which resulted in the German Communist Party.
In 1919, after a failed communist uprising in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the proto-fascist Freikorps. Against the repression of the counter-revolution and rising antisemitism, Zetkin defended the memory of Luxemburg, who was Jewish, and the importance of her ideas.
Zetkin on women’s liberation
Alongside Zetkin’s commitment to building an effective revolutionary left that was anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist, she was one of the most important socialist theorists of women’s liberation. International Women’s Day originated from the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference, which met in Copenhagen ahead of the left’s Second International. The Day was proposed by Luise Zietz, a member of the Unskilled Factory Workers’ Union and the SPD, and seconded by Zetkin.
What happened in Copenhagen in 1910 was the result of years of thinking, writing and organising by Zetkin on the questions of women’s oppression and liberation. Zetkin was challenging assumptions on the left that questions about women’s rights were somehow subordinate to the struggle for socialism, as well as the dominant view among contemporary feminists that women’s emancipation was separate from socialism.
Once again, Zetkin drew on the legacy of Marx and Engels who in their last years had become increasingly interested in questions about the historical origins of women’s oppression at a time when women were becoming more central, as workers, to capitalist production. Like Marx and Engels, Zetkin explored how the economic organisation of society affected women. She understood that in a class-divided society, women were going to be affected differently.
The rise of capitalist society had excluded women who belonged to the capitalist and upper classes from the public sphere. Confined to an idealised domestic sphere, with a profitable marriage and continuation of the family line (in property) upheld as their ultimate aims in life, these women wanted to expand their horizons and compete with men in the professional world. Their male counterparts were, in the majority, excluding them from that world, and so it made sense to these women to organise separately, as women against men.
Zetkin did not dispute that their aims were ‘completely justified’. But she did not accept that this minority of women represented the interests of all women, nor that their narrow aims for equal inclusion within a class-divided society could realise emancipation. Once they achieved their own inclusion, Zetkin predicted, wealthy women’s language of egalitarianism would swiftly be replaced as they fulfilled the functions of the offices they had so longed to join. Today’s female CEOs and Tory ministers surely prove Zetkin right.
By contrast with wealthy women, for working-class and poor women, the rise of capitalist society had not resulted in confinement to the private sphere. On the contrary, the old patriarchal system of production, where families laboured together in ‘cottage industries’ under the control of the father, were replaced with individual family members having to compete with each other in the labour market.
And women’s subordinate social status meant that working women could be subject to greater levels of exploitation through even lower pay than male workers. Therefore, for working women, the problem was not that their male peers were excluding them from ‘free competition’. The problem was the entire economic organisation of society which pitted workers against each other in a race to the bottom.
It was therefore in the interests of working-class women and men to reject those divisions by uniting in resistance to exploitation and oppression. For revolutionaries, this meant overthrowing women’s oppression had to be seen in this context: not as an abstract ‘principle, but in the interests of the proletarian [working] class.’
Anything less was to concede the ground to those who believed that women’s oppression could be solved by a bit of tinkering with, or greater ‘inclusion’, into an inherently exploitative system. Consistent with her approach to capitalism and imperialism, Zetkin’s approach to women’s emancipation was informed by the need for revolutionary change.
Zetkin today
Today, almost all big, globalised corporations manage to genuflect annually before #IWD and utter some unintelligible slogan that commits them to change precisely nothing. And none of these slogans will be ones that, as Lindsey German pointed out, working-class women are today raising in an urgent fight against inequality through widespread strike action. But these strikers are the women who stand in the real tradition of International Women’s Day.
- This article was originally published by Counterfire here.
- Kate Connelly is a writer and historian. She led school student strikes in the anti-war movement in 2003, co-ordinated the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign in 2013 and wrote the acclaimed biography, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire‘
- Kate is speaking at our event Clara Zetkin – Socialist fighter against fascism, women’s oppression & war on April 9 at 18.30. Register and full info here.
Submitted by SJW on 10 March, 2020 - Author: Kelly Rogers
International Women’s Day has its roots in some of the most significant moments of our movement’s history. It is our task to remember this history and to turn International Women's Day into a day of strikes and struggle once more.
It was at the second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, that the idea of an International Women’s Day was first formally agreed. German delegates Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin brought the proposal in front of a hundred women delegates, from seventeen countries. The resolution read:
“In agreement with the class-conscious political and trade union organizations of the proletariat of their respective countries, socialist women of all nationalities have to organize a special Women’s Day (Frauentag), which must, above all, promote the propaganda of female suffrage. This demand must be discussed in connection with the whole woman’s question, according to the socialist conception” (emphasis mine).
These delegates had aspirations much grander than simply winning universal female suffrage. They sought the triumph of socialism: the liberation of workers from drudgery and wage slavery, and the liberation of women from the shackles of domestic slavery.
The first official International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19 1911, a date chosen to celebrate the 1848 Revolution in Berlin. In Germany, more than a million women, mostly (but not exclusively ) organised in the SPD and the unions, took to the streets. They put on dozens of public assemblies, over 40 in Berlin alone, to discuss the issues they were facing in their day-to-day lives and prospects for the women’s movement.
That same year, workers in the United States chose March 8 for their Women’s Day. It was a significant date: In 1857, garment workers in New York City had struck and staged a demonstration against inhumane conditions and low pay. Fast forward to March 8 1908, and again 15,000 women garment workers, many of them Jewish immigrants, went on strike and marched through New York’s Lower East Side to demand higher pay, shorter working hours, voting rights and an end to child labour. ‘Bread and Roses’ became the slogan of the garment workers’ struggle: they didn’t merely seek money enough to eat, but fulfilling and enriched lives worth living.
From 1914 it became common practice to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8. A famous poster depicting a woman dressed in black and waving a red flag (which Workers’ Liberty has adopted for its logo) marked the occasion in Germany. It was considered so dangerous in the run up to the First World War that police prohibited it from being posted or distributed publicly. The day turned into a mass action against war and imperialism.
Three years later, March 8 1917 (in the Gregorian calendar), IWD witnessed the explosion of the February Revolution in Russia. In spite of opposition from Bolshevik men, working class women in Petrograd turned International Women’s Day into a day of mass demonstrations for “bread and peace” - demanding the end to World War One, to food shortages and to tsarism. They marched from factory to factory calling their fellow workers onto the streets and engaging in violent clashes with police and troops. Trostky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution:
“A great role is played by women workers in relationship between workers and soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us.” The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd.”
Not only did these women workers spark the beginning of the Russian Revolution, they were the motor that drove it forward. 7 days later Tsar Nicholas II abdicated.
SOME THOUGHTS ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
From Freedom News UK
It’s International Women’s Day, and I am conflicted. I feel both elation at the opportunity to share the work and ideas of groundbreaking women throughout the centuries and thoroughly depressed that we still need a ‘day’ to remind the world that women exist, that our creative expression matters, that our intellectual endeavours are valid, and that the emotional labour we often give freely in service to our communities is valuable.
I also write this as Freedom’s new Culture Editor. It is both an honour to be working at Britain’s oldest anarchist publication and a responsibility. I’m not here to write fluff pieces. I aim to focus on the behaviour of those in power while envisaging ways in which to dismantle this power through curating thoughtful, cultural responses; the Romantic in me seeks to nourish our anarchic hearts with truth and beauty.
Speaking truth to the power of the patriarchy is unimaginably difficult, even as I live a life of relative privilege. In the past, I’ve experienced deep levels of discomfort at writing one small truth because there’s the worry that I’ll be branded a troublemaker, a man hater, a difficult woman to work with. All of which heightens my respect for those women across global history who’ve had to fight like lions for the barest modicum of political and/or cultural change.
To quote Emma Goldman, The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.
Today, I asked someone who naturally uses poetic imagery in their conversation why they don’t write poetry, and they replied, Poetry doesn’t kill fascists.
But it does, I returned; Poetry darns holes in our tattered imaginations, forces difficult dialogue with the Self, and encourages a deep empathy for all living beings. How is this radical approach not the most beautiful way to end fascism? Afterwards, I wish I’d remembered to cite the great Audre Lorde in the opening lines of her poem, Power:
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
Poetry asks us to take a deep-dive into the psyche, to kill the ego and emerge bare-naked and battered from the assault. In this way it also kills fascist ideology because the two are, in my mind, mutually exclusive. Audre Lorde, black woman, feminist, poet, lesbian, and activist understood this, as well as the horrors that rhetoric can unleash, and then managed to distil the entire philosophy down to just four lines of pure genius.
Having said that, Ezra Pound was a great poet and a fascist, which also proves that there’s no singular solution to some people being absolute cunts.
Is fascism the biggest threat to women today? I’m not sure. Perhaps I would argue that the sheer volume of men and women who have internalised that particularly noxious mix of capitalism and patriarchy is our biggest enemy. Especially when it manifests as gossiping about, or competing with, women in place of empathy and support.
But if that is our weakness, then our strength is the inordinate number of women (and people across the gender spectrum) who are recognising this toxicity and actively taking steps to disconnect from those elements of our culture, instead endeavouring to lift up our sisters wherever and whenever possible. There’s a great, and hilarious, example on Instagram from The Speech Professor calling out the ridiculous expectations some men have of women.
Poetry, language, film, music, and art continue to be beautiful tools for disseminating ideas that then rage across our collective psychological landscapes like La Niña.
Take the viral Barbie speech by America Ferrara that begins:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
Hands up, how many of you cried during this speech? I did.
So many innovative and creative women make up the rockface of our herstory, and I wonder how many of them we inadvertently clamber over or use for a leg up without fully recognising their contribution to the artistic landscape we now inhabit.
I’m currently reading The Gentrification of The Mind by Sarah Schulman, an outstanding memoir on AIDS, queer culture, downtown arts movements, and innovative people from history being erased by the gentrification not only of place but of the collective memory. It’s got me thinking about the many women who create vibrant, inspiring lives during their time on earth who are no longer recognised or who’ve been side-lined, ignored in life and death by a gentrification process that doesn’t recognise idiosyncratic women even as it absorbs their singular brilliance. But that’s how the diminishment process works. Writes Schulman.
What halts this erasure of women’s words, activism, art, and herstories are the people who recognise our pioneering women in their lifetimes and continue to celebrate them after death; who work to vividly portray the dynamic, intelligent, multifaceted woman without reducing her to the caricature of a jumble of red lipsticks or oversized cardigans or cats or plethora of lovers.
We’re more than that, better than that, and anybody saying otherwise should have the world’s population to contend with—at least they would in my utopia.
I’ve been handed some recommendations from Freedom Bookshop, firstly for a book that has now landed on my To Be Read list: Anarchafeminist by Chiara Bottici. Reading the blurb, I’m already taken by the author’s intersectional and anti-speciesism approach. At the bottom of this article, you can find a further list of recommended books from the bookshop that you should be able to get your hands on in-store, and below that, an eclectic (but not exhaustive) list of books by women that have spoken to me over the years.
I’ll finish with a poem by the great anarchist poet Voltairine de Cleyre, writing in memory of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft:
Mary Wollstonecraft
The dust of a hundred years
Is on thy breast,
And thy day and thy night of tears
Are centurine rest.
Thou to whom joy was dumb,
Life a broken rhyme,
Lo, thy smiling time is come,
And our weeping time.
Thou who hadst sponge and myrrh
And a bitter cross,
Smile, for the day is here
That we know our loss; —
Loss of thine undone deed,
Thy unfinished song,
Th’ unspoken word for our need,
Th’ unrighted wrong;
Smile, for we weep, we weep,
For the unsoothed pain,
The unbound wound burned deep,
That we might gain.
Mother of sorrowful eyes
In the dead old days,
Mother of many sighs,
Of pain-shod ways;
Mother of resolute feet
Through all the thorns,
Mother soul-strong, soul-sweet, —
Lo, after storms
Have broken and beat thy dust
For a hundred years,
Thy memory is made just,
And the just man hears.
Thy children kneel and repeat:
“Though dust be dust,
Though sod and coffin and sheet
And moth and rust
Have folded and moulded and pressed,
Yet they cannot kill;
In the heart of the world at rest
She liveth still.”
Philadelphia, 27th April 1893
Taken from Collected Poems, The Anarchist Library.
Freedom Bookshop recommends:
• Means & Ends by Zoe Baker
• Radical Intimacy by Sophie K Rosa
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Feminist & the Sex Offender by Eric R Meiners and Judith Levine
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
• Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune by Carolyn Eichner
• In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
• Labour of Love by Moira Weigel
• Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis
• Wages for Housework by Louise Toupin
• Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith & Juno Mac
• Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath
• Innocent Subjects by Terese Jonsson
Also anything by Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Ruth Kinna, Bell Hooks, or Audre Lorde.
Editor’s eclectic recommends:
• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
• Oneness Vs the one percent by Vandana Shiva
• What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimha
• Mama Amazonica by Pascale Petit
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K le Guin
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Problems by Jade Sharma
• The World Keeps Ending and The World goes On by Franni Choi
• Deep Listening, a composer’s sound practice by Pauline Oliveros
• The Last Samurai by Helen de Witt
• Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
• Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
• Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler
• Adrienne Rich by Selected Poems 1950 – 2012
• The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
• Remains of a Future City by Zoë Skoulding
• Fleabag original script by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• Vengeance is Mine, Marie Ndiaye
• The Veiled Woman, Anaïs Nin
Also anything by Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.
AGAINST PATRIARCHY, IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NEGATING PATHS OF ANARCHY
Via Abolition Media
By: Mónica Caballero
The economic system that currently governs the territory dominated by the Chilean State and practically all Western states, is capitalism. Capitalism, in simple words, was based on the fact that trade and industry (means of production) are organized and controlled by their owners, that is: entrepreneurs.
In order for capitalism to take root and endure over time as a political-economic system, it needed a patriarchal social structure, the latter being understood as the social organization in which the authority of the male is exercised from the family, leading to all practices of domination. Therefore, it would be difficult to propose a radical emancipatory change without ending with the total destruction of capitalism and patriarchy.
Patriarchal authoritarian oppressive structures have (de)formed virtually all the relationships we have with each other and with ourselves. Another human is no longer another individual equivalent to me with whom we could help each other and develop integrally, now the relationship between humans is subject to what position they occupy within the social hierarchy.
On the other hand, the relationship with other non-human beings is contingent on the economic benefit that it could give me, transforming it into a consumer product. And finally, the vision that patriarchy has created of ourselves is limited and circumscribed to imposed canons or standards, whether aesthetic, gender, etc.
Obtaining the necessary tools to destroy the logics of domination, which makes us reproduce and perpetuate in various ways the need to dominate and to be dominated, is the task of all of us who are committed to seeing this reality burn…
Visualizing that patriarchal capitalism brings wealth to a few at the expense of the lives of many others could lead to the identification and targeting of the beneficiaries of this system of terror.
Against Patriarchy, in order to achieve the foundations of the negating paths of anarchy.
Mónica Caballero Sepúlveda
Anarchist prisoner
San Miguel prison
Written in the context of March 8, 2024.
Source: LA ZARZAMORA
