Clara Zetkin: Pioneer of international socialist women’s movement who opposed feminism

By Harsh Thakor 
Clara Zetkin’s name has carved a permanent niche in the annals of the history of working women’s liberation. A remarkable document “Struggle against fascism”, was presented 100 years ago on 20 June 1923 by Clara Zetkin, manifested the essence of Marxist analysis and gave the cutting edge to Leninism. It uncovered aspects like the social democratic view of fascism, the social roots of fascism, failure of proletarian leadership, fascism’s ‘mass character', the bourgeoisie and fascism, rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and the workers’ self-defence and the United Front. No person in that time formulated such an incisive, theoretically sound or lucid analysis.
Quoting Zetkin in the document, 'Fascism confronts the proletariat as an exceptionally dangerous and frightful enemy, being the strongest, most concentrated, and classic expression at this time of the world bourgeoisie’s general offensive. That is why the struggle against fascism must be taken up by the entire proletariat. There has been great confusion regarding fascism, not only among the broad masses of proletarians but also within their revolutionary vanguard, among Communists.
'Fascism is is not at all the revenge of the bourgeoisie against the militant uprising of the proletariat. In historical terms, viewed objectively, fascism arrives much more as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution that began in Russia. And the base of fascism lies not in a small caste but in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the proletariat. Military means alone cannot vanquish it; we must also wrestle it to the ground politically and ideologically.
'The view that fascism is merely a form of bourgeois terror, although advanced by some radical forces in our movement, is more characteristic of the outlook of many reformist social democrats.'

Early Life history

Clara Zetkin was born on July 5, 1857 in the village of Wiederau, near Chemnitz, in the German province of Saxony into the family of H. Eisner, a country schoolmaster. At the age of seventeen years she entered the Leipzig Teachers’ College for Women, where she established contact with a circle of revolutionary socialist students and émigrés from Russian Poland, one of whom, Osip Zetkin, subsequently became her husband. Through this circle she received her baptism in Marxism and became acquainted with the intellectual fights of the Russian labour movement.
From the 1870s Clara Zetkin got integrated in the German socialist movement and in 1881, a year when the Exceptional Law against the Socialists imposed by Bismarck was in force, she joined the German Social Democratic Party and participated in its illegal work. When her husband was expelled from Germany as an ‘undesirable alien’ the Zetkins were forced to embark on the path of political emigration. Thereupon Zetkin participated in the socialist movements of France, Austria and Italy. During her sojourn in Switzerland she edited the illegal newspaper “Der Sozial Demokrat” from Zurich and helped to organise its distribution in Germany. In Paris she drew close to Laura Lafargue, the daughter of Karl Marx, as well as prominent leaders of the French socialist movement such as Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde.
Clara Zetkin was one of the organisers of the founding congress of the Second International held in Paris in 1889. At the congress she spoke on the role of women in the revolutionary struggle for socialism, expressing the imperative nature for a programme for the proletarian women’s movement. It was the first ever time ever that a woman had defended female equality at an international assembly. Indeed it was a result of the role of Clara Zetkin that the Second International laid the base for socialists of various countries to draw women into the struggle for revolutionary socialism. As a result to the resolution of the Second International on the women’s question, the Erfurt Programme of the social democratic party of 1890 demanded full economic, political and legal equality for women.

Women’s Socialist Movement

Upon the death of her husband Clara Zetkin returned to Germany in 1890 where the Exceptional Law against the Socialists had been repealed. There she headed the women’s movement of the Social Democratic Party and from 1892 served as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the German working women “Die Gleichheit” (Equality). Zetkin considered that it was her principal goal to educate working class women to grasping their own true class interest and to save them from the morass of the bourgeois women’s movement. Due to her efforts the German proletarian women’s movement rose from the very beginning as an integral part of the general labour movement, having no relations with of the bourgeois suffragette movement.
The work of Clara Zetkin and other women socialists such as Louise Zietz and Ottilie Baader in organising women into the socialist trade unions spurred the task of winning over working class women to the labour movement. Clara Zetkin was herself a member of the Stuttgart Bookbinders’ Union for over 25 years and was active in the Tailors’ and Seamstresses’ Union at whose second International Congress in London in 1896 she was elected as the provisional International Secretary.
The feminist movement limited itself to the demand for a restricted women’s suffrage which would, if successful, have preserved the exploitative relationships of bourgeois society. As a result, the socialist women’s movement was from its inception compelled to distinguish itself from feminist perspectives. In her remarkable speech entitled ‘Only with the Proletarian Women Will Socialism be Victorious’ delivered to the social democratic party congress at Gotha in 1896 Clara Zetkin forcefully adumbrated her views: ‘There is no such thing as a ‘women’s movement’ in and of itself’, for in a society divided into classes ‘there is only a bourgeois and a working class women’s movement, which have nothing more in common than does social democracy with bourgeois society’.
She continued: ‘The woman of the working class has achieved her economic independence but neither as a person nor as a woman or wife does she have the possibility of living a full life as an individual … For her work as wife and mother she gets only the crumbs that are dropped from the table by capitalist production. Consequently, the liberation struggle of the working class woman cannot be – as it is for the bourgeois woman – a struggle against the men of her class… The end goal of her struggle is not free competition against men, but bringing about the political rule of the working class. Hand in hand with the men of her own class, the working class woman fights against capitalist society’. Only through the ending of capitalist exploitation and the construction of a socialist society could the emancipation of women take place. In consonance with this evaluation, the minutes of the Gotha social democratic party congress recorded.In spite of the many points of contact in legal and political demands for reform, the working-class woman has no common ground with the women of other classes, regarding the decisive economic interests. The emancipation of the working class can therefore not be brought about by the women of all classes, but is solely the task of the working class irrespective of difference in sex.’
It was tthrough “Die Gleichheit”, subtitled ‘For the Interest of the Woman Worker’, that the working women of Germany were won over for the revolutionary socialist movement. Clara Zetkin’s own analysis on the character of the journal was manifested in the annual editorial which appeared in the 1890s: ‘Die Gleichheit is directed especially to the most progressive members of the working class, whether they are slaves to capital with their hands or with their brains. It strives to school these theoretically, to make possible for them a clear understanding of the historical course of development and an ability not only to work consciously in the battle for the liberation of the working class, but also to be effective in enlightening and teaching their class comrades and training them as fighters with a clear goal’.
The journal was mainly addressed to the activists of the socialist women’s movement rather than the mass of women workers. It exposed the condition of work in those branches of industry where women were dominant, in details describing the factory legislation which could be utilised for emancipating working women; it covered the activities of women workers in other countries. The paper persuaded its readers to bring up their children in such a manner that girls revolt against the shackles of traditional gender roles and boys also participate in housework. But in this matter Clara Zetkin was in a tiny minority in the party.
The circulation of the journal in its early years was limited, rising from 2000 in 1891 to 11,000 in 1903-4. Only after 1904 when Die Gleichheit came to be distributed free to women members of the social democratic party did the circulation of the journal jump from 75,000 in 1907 to 125,000 in 1914. From 1905 the leadership of the Social Democratic Party pressurised Clara Zetkin to initiate a series of changes in the content and form of the journal as a result of which regular supplements were issued for housewives, mothers and children. This had some positivity, as reading materials of revolutionary writers and writers of fiction had access to the working class and so refuted the distorted viewpoints which existed in the official school system.
From 1908 when women were permitted to become members of political parties, the increasingly reformist social democratic party leadership diluted impact on the paper. As a result, Clara Zetkin’s editorial control was weakened. Within two years Die Gleichheit was carrying dress designs, recipes and articles on fashion and cooking. The social democratic party removed Clara Zetkin from the leadership of the socialist women’s movement and replaced her with the reformist, Luise Zietz.
As one of the leading exponents amongst the left-wing of the German Social Democratic p Partyarty, Clara Zetkin consistently waged the struggle against the revisionism of that epoch. Already in 1894 at the Frankfurt congress of the Social de Democratic Party she spoke out against the opportunist draft agrarian programme advanced by David and Vollmar. Clara Zetkin jointly with Rosa Luxemburg – with whom she was bonded by strong ties of friendship – led the struggle against Bernstein’s attempts to rob Marxism of its revolutionary character in order to induce the working class to renounce the fight for socialist revolution.
When Kautsky attempted to nullify the debate by refuting the dictatorship of the proletariat, and David rejected altogether the slogan of proletarian dictatorship, Zetkin exposed the reformists’ point of view as ‘slave morality’. In 1906, with reference to these leaders, she wrote that they wished ‘to convert social democracy into a tame lap-dog of a national social or social-liberal character, into a dog which offers its paw to every bourgeois scoundrel.’
During the Russian Revolution of 1905-07 Clara Zetkin became convinced that the German working class had to imbibe n the experiences of the Russian proletariat. Writing in “Die Gleichheit” in 1905 she stated that the Russian working class had ‘become the fighting vanguard of the entire proletarian revolutionary movement and especially of the European proletariat’. The journal summarised the developments crystallizing in Russia and sprouted emerged in the uprising. Both Luxemburg and Zetkin stressed the importance of the mass political strike in the revolutionary struggle.

International Women’s Movement

Clara Zetkin played a leading role in the international women’s movement. From 1900 she had been decisive in organising a regular women’s conference to take place every two years in association with the congresses of the social democratic party of Germany. On Zetkin’s initiative the first international women’s conference, morally a Socialist Women’s International, was organised in 1907 in collaboration n with the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International at which 59 women from 15 countries participated.
Differences emerged in the conference on the stand e to be adopted towards universal suffrage and the issue of feminism. The delegations from France, Austria, Belgium and Britain argued that it was more practical to fight for a limited suffrage restricted by property and income qualifications than to demand universal suffrage. The British and French delegations further criticised the ‘sectarian’ attitude of Clara Zetkin and her supporters in relation to the feminist movement.
The consistent Marxist views of Clara Zetkin supported by Alexandra Kollontai and others triumphed marginally due to the sustained dominance of the German delegation. The resolutions noted that ‘socialist parties of all countries have a duty to struggle energetically for the introduction of universal suffrage for women’ and that ‘socialist women must not ally themselves with the bourgeois feminists, but lead the battle side by side with the socialist men’. 

Three years later the second international conference held at Copenhagen in 1910 reiterated the demand for universal suffrage and adopted the resolution prepared by Clara Zetkin to establish 8th March as International Women’s Day. In this way the demonstration of American socialist women in New York on 8th March 1908 in opposition to the local bourgeois suffrage movement became an annual world-wide event of the socialist movement. As early as March 1911 a million men and women in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark participated in mass activities on International Women’s Day.
In collaboration with left socialists such as Karl Liebknecht, Zetkin actively campaigned against militarism, imperialism and colonialism. In 1912 at the Basle Congress of the Second International she called upon the international workers’ movement to actively confront the threat of imperialist war. With the outbreak of the First World War Zetkin condemned the chauvinist and imperialist policies of the social democratic party. When, in blatant violation to the resolutions of the Second International which had advocated mass action against imperialist war, the German social democratic party shamefully vouched for military credits to the Kaiser’s government in the Reichstag in August 1914. 

Zetkin, in an article written in 1915 commented: ‘With its support of the war credits and with its liberal-bourgeois dogma of the defence of the fatherland the German social democracy is proclaiming the bankruptcy of the Second International. Karl Kautsky countersigns the bankruptcy declaration with his childish and cowardly theory that the proletarian international is a weapon in times of peace only and not during a war.”

In an article entitled ‘Working-Class Women, Be Prepared’, published in “Die Gleichheit” on 5th August 1914, Clara Zetkin proposed that the war patronised the Junker big landlords and big capital. She ended with an oblique call to revolutionary struggle: ‘For the working class, brotherhood between people is not a hollow dream, world peace is not just a pretty word… What must be done? There is a single moment in the life of the people when they can win all if only everyone is set. Such a moment is here. Working Women, Be Prepared’.
In the brief period between the beginning of the war and the removal by the social democratic party leadership of Clara Zetkin from the editorial board of “Die Gleichheit” the journal became the principal organ opposed to the war. Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin promoted the International Women’s Socialist Conference in Berne, Switzerland, against the war. For her efforts Clara Zetkin was imprisoned for ‘attempted treason’ by the Kaiser’s government and removed from the editorial board of “Die Gleichheit” by the socialist party. After her release Clara Zetkin returned to Leipzig where she edited the women’s supplement of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. 

The majority of the women socialists of the Social Democratic Party reconciled with the feminist movement in support of the war just as the party itself established a ‘civil truce’ with the German government during the course of the war. With Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring and others Clara Zetkin became a founder-member of the internationalist Spartacus League. After the war, together with the revolutionary Marxists, she joined the Independent social democratic party and, finally, joined the Communist Party of Germany and its Central Committee.

Communist International and International arena

Clara Zetkin warmly welcomed the Russian revolution and promoted establishment a solidarity movement with the new workers’ government. She participated in the activities of the Communist International from the Second Congress, 1920, and in the following year became a member of its Executive Committee and Presidium. Zetkin headed the International Women’s Secretariat of the Communist International and the International Organisation for Aid to Revolutionaries, more popularly known as ‘Red Aid’. She was a die hard supporter of Stalin and opponent of Leon Trotsky.
One of her last major speeches in the international arena was delivered in 1932 at the Anti-War Congress held in Amsterdam. Despite infirmity she journeyed from Moscow to Berlin for this function and in spite of heavy threats of the fascist press – which threatened that it would pay her back with her life if she dared to appear in the Reichstag – she delivered a heart touching revolutionary speech against the fascists, which exposed the compromising nature of the social democratic party and called for the forming of an anti-fascist united front. Zetkin analysed that the victory of fascism in Germany was planted in the surrendering of German social democracy before the bourgeoisie.
The death of Clara Zetkin took place just a few months after Hitler’s ascendancy to power at Arkhangelskoe near Moscow on June 20, 1933. Six lakh working people attended her funeral procession in Moscow from the Hall of the Columns of the House of Trade Unions to Red Square. Among the pall-bearers were Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Kuibyshev and the members of the Presidium of the Communist International.

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Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist