Clara Zetkin

The Communist Women’s Movement – high point of first wave feminism

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Leon Trotsky on Clara Zetkin

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was the leading figure of socialist feminism in the mass international socialist movement before 1914; an important figure in internationalist left during World War One and in the early Communist International — and then in old age, nominally still a leader of the by-then-Stalinist Communist International. Leon Trotsky assessed the evolution in 1929 . For a long time Clara Zetkin has been a purely decorative figure on the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. This cruel characterisation might not have been necessary if Zetkin did not...

Clara Zetkin: founder of International Women's Day

The death of Clara Zetkin removes from the revolutionary labor movement one of that diminishing handful of true founders of the Communist International still left in its ranks. More than half a century of undivided devotion to the cause of working class freedom lay behind the great militant whose last public act was her appearance a few months ago in Berlin to preside, as senior member, over the last session of the Weimar Reichstag before its dissolution by those same snarling brutes in brown shirts whom she compelled to listen to the eloquent defiance of a tongue which proclaimed the...

Letters: Hands off Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg

I was nauseated by Eric Lee’s unwarranted attack on Clara Zetkin in Solidarity 664 . Zetkin was an outstanding revolutionary socialist, feminist and fighter for working class politics over 50 years, whose mistakes towards the end of her life did not make her a loyal Stalinist. Zetkin’s incredible life (1857-1933) and record deserve to be better known. She joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1878 and became one of its most prominent leaders. They built a mass working class party of one million members, a model followed by the best socialists of that epoch, including the Bolsheviks...

The tragedy of Clara Zetkin

As International Women’s Day approaches (8 March) some mainstream media will run their usual articles about the day and its history. Some may point out that the original name was International Working Women’s Day and that it was decided upon at a 1910 socialist congress in Copenhagen. It may be mentioned that one of the proponents of the holiday was Clara Zetkin, a little-remembered German socialist today who was, at the time, a household name. Among some of the famous revolutionary women of that time, Zetkin stands out. Her friend Rosa Luxemburg was an early critic both of Lenin’s ideas about...

Reading about Rosa Luxemburg

As we go to press on 15 January 2019, it is exactly the 100th anniversary of the murder of the Polish¬German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. She was killed by a right-wing militia operating under the Social¬Democratic government which was heading off the German workers’ revolution. We have a pamphlet in production on Luxemburg and the German revolution. Readers can also find a good summary of Luxemburg’s political work in two articles, from 1935 and 1938 , by Max Shachtman. The 1938 article is in print as an item in our book In Defence of Bolshevism . Much more on Rosa Luxemburg on our...

Brexit and fighting the far right

Stopping Brexit isn’t anti-fascism Callum Cant takes issue over the 9 December counter¬demo The Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) are obsessed with trade unions. When their march was blocked in October, their leadership couldn’t stop themselves from fantasising about beating up organised workers. For many of their supporters, the organisation’s high point was when a DFLA group launched a serious physical attack on RMT members in a pub in Whitehall. The essence of their politics is a hatred of the organised working class. This is not a new dynamic – indeed, Clara Zetkin wrote about the...

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