1. The ‘Woman Question’: Recognition of Women’s Dual Burden

1.1 Introduction

Among the most universal and painful forms of oppression is that of women in a male-dominated world. The pioneers of women’s liberation showed that the mass participation of women themselves is essential to overthrow this monstrous tyranny and bring about the necessary fundamental changes in social relations. Confronting the subservient position of women in society and the family and challenging male domination was a vital issue for the Russian Revolution of 1917. Understanding what happened in Russia, warts and all, is necessary for solving the ‘Woman Question’ and to achieve women’s full liberation.

In its initial stages, the Soviet regime was the most progressive on the planet in terms of its policy towards women. The early Soviet republic is well known for introducing the most radical and wide-ranging laws that placed women on an equal legal footing with men. Not so much is known, however, about the struggle by Bolshevik women for women’s emancipation, nor the attempts to realise women’s rights in the new Soviet republic. This shortfall means that we have only a partial understanding of the October Revolution – the apex of the struggle for women’s rights – and the Soviet society which followed. That needs to be rectified.

The period immediately after the revolution was a time of great scarcity, of hunger and starvation, but despite these constraints the Bolshevik leadership did all it could to advance women’s equality. However, without a socialist revolution in a modern industrialised country coming to its assistance, the infant Soviet Union was laid waste, first by the Great War and then by the civil war that followed. A reactionary bureaucracy grew, exerted its authority and shaped the country to its own image. It imposed an increasingly conservative policy towards women, including strengthening the family, severely curtailing the grounds for divorce, and removing the right to abortion. Simultaneously, it made homosexual acts illegal. By these actions alone, Stalinism showed itself to be a false and vicious caricature of revolutionary Marxism. Nonetheless, despite this, we will show the power of the revolution was such that important gains made after 1917 were retained by Soviet women while Russia remained a workers’ state, even under the excesses and deformations of Stalinism. Today the horrors of Stalinism are often presented as representing the true nature of socialism, so it is necessary to explain how this anti-Marxist ideology dominated the workers’ movement for more than a generation.

Marxism, however, stands for the complete emancipation of women. There cannot be the slightest doubt on this. Marxists are expected to challenge all and any oppression of women, and under no circumstances allow it to become a secondary issue. Women cannot be expected to put to one side their immediate, pressing demands and await the arrival of socialism. It would be fatal for a socialist revolution if women believed that Marxists were not prepared to struggle for their rights here and now.

1.2 Marx, Engels, and Bebel: Recognition of Women’s Double Burden

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) dominated the world socialist movement before World War I (1914-18); and the analyses of the ‘Woman Question’ as developed by the Bolsheviks before and after the October Revolution were rooted in the works of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, and the activities of Clara Zetkin in Germany in the decades before 1914. This was at a time when capitalism’s essential attitude to women was symbolised by the Christian acceptance that all humanity had been banished from the Garden of Eden because Eve persuaded Adam to eat an apple and, by that one act, all women were condemned for ever to subservience to male domination.

The German bourgeoisie was among the most conservative and intolerant of the European bourgeoisie, having abandoned any claim to democratic liberalism in 1848 when it had entered into an alliance with the landed aristocracy against the proletariat. The growth of the socialist movement in Germany was the product of Germany’s rapid industrial development within a rigid class structure that reflected the culture of the Junker landed aristocracy, with the result that an independent proletarian movement developed faster there than anywhere else. Of course, it also benefited from the direct intervention of Engels both organisationally and politically, which can be seen in his Critique of the Gotha Program. The SPD became a founding member and the most powerful section of the Second, Social-Democratic International until 1914.

Engels wrote at length about the large number of employed women in the UK, and the effects of capitalism on them, their families and children.^[1] While there are sharp condemnations of women’s oppression, with copious details of their hellish working conditions, the stage of development was not yet ready for specific strategies to attract women workers to the communist movement. In 1846, Marx and Engels published The German Ideology in which they first suggested that the family was a social institution that corresponded to the mode of production. They asserted the root of women’s oppression lay in their subordinate role within the nuclear family; that women’s liberation required the communalisation of domestic labour leading to the abolition of the family as we presently know it.

In the following year, in a draft of the Communist Manifesto, Engels argued that the communist society would:

… make the relation between the sexes a purely private relation which concerns only the persons involved, and in which society has no call to interfere. It is able to do this because it abolishes private property and educates children communally, thus destroying the twin foundation of hitherto existing marriage – the dependence through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents.^[2]

Engels lived up to this in his personal life. When Marx attempted to intervene in the emotional life of his daughters, “Engels gave him carefully to understand that such matters concern nobody except the participants themselves”.^[3]

The Communist Manifesto stands out as a bold programmatic statement on communist goals concerning women and argues against idealisation of the family: “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation”.^[4] Capitalism, it declared, had revealed the cash nexus at the heart of family life. “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course […] with the vanishing of capital”.^[5]

From the early 1850s Marx and Engels were fully engaged in building the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, First International). At that stage, they were struggling for acceptance of the core concept of class-against-class, of the contradiction between capital and labour, of the working class as the emancipator of society, and of the necessity for socialising ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Indeed, many in the First International saw any sectional demands such as votes for women, however justified, as dividing the working class in the face of the capitalists.

In 1864 the General Council of the International took the decision to admit women in the face of opposition by the French section. Two years later, in 1866, the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in May 1863, published a discussion document which said, among other things: “The rightful work of women and mothers is in the home and family… The woman and mother should stand for the cosiness and poetry of domestic life”.^[6] These reactionary proposals were rejected by Marx and Engels who continued in their determination to appoint women to senior positions in the International, as in 1868 when Marx wrote to his friend Kugelmann: “Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment.”^[7] A statement fully confirmed by the women leaders in the First International who leapt to the defence of the Paris Commune. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, for example, who had helped found the Russian section of the International, went to Paris immediately and plunged into the work of organising women’s groups, fighting on the streets of Paris against the troops of the Versailles government, before escaping into exile.

In 1867 Volume 1 of Capital was published. In this Marx spent considerable space discussing the effects of the factory system on women, children and the family system:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution […] of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. […] Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.^[8]

In June 1867, Harriet Law, freethinker and editor of The Secular Chronicle, with Marx’s support was voted onto the General Council and from this point all addresses and declarations of the IWMA written by Marx no longer addressed only “working men” but also “working women”. The IWMA was not a revolutionary party, but at the General Council in September 1871, Marx himself moved the following resolution:

The Conference recommends the formation of female branches among the working class. It is, however, understood that this resolution does not at all interfere with the existence or formation of branches composed of both sexes.^[9]

During the 1860s, Friedrich Engels began working closely with August Bebel, a founding member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP). After Lassalle’s death, Bebel played a key role in the merger of the SDAP and ADAV at a Congress held in Gotha in May 1875 to form the SPD. The programme proposed to the Congress was silent on the question of women’s suffrage. Bebel moved an amendment proposing “the right to vote for citizens of both sexes” but it was rejected by sixty-two votes to fifty-five.

This spurred Bebel into beginning work on what was to be the most widely read and influential book on the ‘Woman Question’. In 1879, Bebel published Women and Socialism, in which he argued that there was an identity of interests of working women as women and as workers, that women could be genuinely independent of men and equal in rights only after they achieved full economic and social independence, and this required a social revolution. The book was written at a time when Germany’s reactionary Laws of Association denied women the right to join political parties and threatened them with arrest if they attended political meetings. Every federated State had its own Law of Association, with local authorities interpreting the legal texts so arbitrarily that in some states three women together could constitute a political meeting, with the women subject to arrest and “severe punishments”.^[10]

Women and Socialism set the political framework for the ‘Woman Question’ internationally and, it is claimed, that in his twenty year-long collaboration with Bebel, Engels never raised a single criticism of the book. The book sold nearly one and a half million copies, went into no fewer than thirty-three editions, and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Despite the outcry in the bourgeois press that the book contained the ‘improper’ and ‘scandalous’ proposal that women should have the right to dress as they wished, and the utterly ‘shocking’ and ‘immoral’ suggestion that women had the right to control their own bodies and have sex when they wanted, it was generally accepted as the declared position of the SPD. Bebel had initiated a serious, widespread, and ongoing discussion on the ‘Woman Question’ as a force for revolution.

Bebel’s book described in simple but dramatic terms the dual burden on women. The portrayal was a synthesis drawn from numerous cases of wives of industrial workers. Bebel’s focus on gender roles in the working-class family was not to place blame, but to demonstrate that the bourgeois social system allowed little or no possibility of escape by the individual. The emancipation of women was possible only after a struggle to change society. In the year following publication, Marx helped draft the programme of the French Parti Ouvrier – the first to adopt a call for the end of gender discrimination:

[…] the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race […] Removal […] of all the articles of the Code [Napoleon] establishing the inferiority of the worker in relation to the boss, and of woman in relation to man […] Equal pay for equal work, for workers of both sexes.^[11]

Engels and Bebel supported, as a principle, the entry of female industrial labour into factories and mines and fought the hostility of those men who considered such a development should be seen only as a manoeuvre by employers to lower wages. The fight should be for equal pay, and against the abuse of female labour, not against the employment of women. Among working-class women these arguments encouraged their identification of socialism as the means of women’s emancipation and soon they constituted an important element of the socialist movement.^[12]

In 1884, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which represented a great theoretical step forward by explaining women’s oppression from a materialist view of history – a concept that would become recognised by many feminists, revolutionaries and scholars as a major contribution to the understanding of women’s position in society. Engels cited the source of the monogamous family and the political, economic, and sexual subordination of women not in an unchangeable human nature, but in private property. He argued that in a different social order, women could achieve equality but on two conditions: that they gained productive employment outside the home, and housework be transformed into a social service paid for by public funds.

When reading Women and Socialism it is necessary to read it in its historic context which helps explain the extensive opposition to Malthus’ idea that poverty was the result of too many people for the available resources. At that time the claim by Reverend Thomas Malthus that the world was threatened with over-population was a burning issue and Bebel devoted one of the six parts of his book to refuting Malthus, pointing out that theories of overpopulation had been around since the times of the Ancient Greeks and the fall of the Roman Empire. He showed that these theories mushroomed whenever there was a severe crisis in society, but were nothing more than those responsible for the crisis attempting to place the blame on those most suffering the consequences.

Bebel’s book did not shy away from sexual matters. The sexual impulse was neither moral nor immoral but a natural desire in every healthy adult, a private affair in which no third person had the right to interfere. Birth control was acceptable because a woman had the right to control her own body: “gratification of the sexual instinct and begetting and conceiving are not the same thing …”. Despite significant internal opposition, the SPD did finally support birth control on the grounds that working class families would never be happy until they were able to decide on the number of children they should have.

It is fair and just to say Marxism has always been at the forefront of the cause of women’s emancipation.

1.3 Clara Zetkin, the SPD and Bourgeois Feminists

The structure of German politics before 1914 meant that all politically-active socialist women were organised in or around one organisation – the SPD. During that time, Germany was home to the largest, best organised, most militant and class-conscious socialist women’s movement in the world, largely due to the dedication and organisational skills of Clara Zetkin. She was accredited with founding and developing a mass movement of socialist working women, formally part of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), that grew to over 170,000 members by 1914.^[13] Zetkin’s approach was that of a clear division between women of the exploiting and exploited classes.

The strength of the SPD women’s movement and her talent as an organiser meant Zetkin was, for over forty years, the key figure in organising the international socialist woman’s movement; a leading and active member of the Bookbinders Union in Stuttgart, secretary of the Woman’s Bureau of the SPD, editor of the SPD Woman’s paper (Equality), member of the SPD national executive, secretary of the Woman’s Bureau of the Second International, founding member of the German Communist Party and International Secretary of Communist Women for the Third International. Until the Russian Revolution of 1917, Zetkin was universally accepted as the principal spokesperson on the ‘Woman Question’ and her model the accepted model for socialist women’s movements.^[14]

In 1878, Clara Zetkin (nee Eissner) left the Steyber Institute in Leipzig as a top student but, as a woman, was excluded from all German universities, on the grounds that women were incapable of attaining that level of education.^[15] She took up work as a governess and shortly after joined the SPD, although at that time women were legally barred from joining political parties. At the age of twenty three, Clara became the lover of a young Russian revolutionary named Ossip Zetkin, and when he was expelled from Germany as an undesirable alien, went into exile with him. They lived in poverty in Paris for nearly a decade, during which time Clara had two children. The patriarchal laws of Germany meant that if Clara and Ossip married, Clara would lose her German nationality. The idea that a woman could not be a citizen in her own right persisted in, for example, the UK until 1948. To retain her German citizenship, she chose not to marry but to take the name Zetkin as her own.

Well-known because of her political activities and her writings on the question of women’s emancipation, Zetkin was asked to deliver the first ever policy statement on the ‘Woman Question’ to the Founding Congress of the Second International, in Paris, on Bastille Day, 1889, only six months after Ossip’s death due to spinal tuberculosis. She argued that within capitalism, a woman, even if she gained economic independence from the working man and engaged in her own right in socially-productive labour, would be exchanging slavery to the man for slavery to the employer. Only with the destruction of capitalism and the victory of socialism was the full emancipation of the female sex possible.

Bourgeois women’s rights groups, whose credo was that women of all classes should gather into a politically neutral movement, striving exclusively for women’s rights, held their own international congress in the French capital that same summer. The conflict of interests between working-class and bourgeois women was starkly visible with the refusal of the latter to support the protests and struggles of working women to improve their conditions. The two congresses marked a significant stage in the growing divergence between bourgeois feminism and socialism.

Zetkin returned to Germany in 1890. The following year the SPD Erfurt Congress adopted a programme drafted by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein stating unequivocally:

The German Social Democratic Party […] [fights for] equal rights and equal obligations for all, without distinction of sex or birth. […] [And fights] every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race.

[…] The German Social Democratic Party demands […]:

Universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot in all elections, for all citizens of the Reich over the age of twenty, without distinction of sex. […]

Abolition of all laws that place women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private law.^[16]

The SPD was hounded out of polite society by an ultra-conservative bourgeoisie, with virtually no social exchange between working class and bourgeois organisations. Anti-Socialist Laws, while not banning the SPD outright, banned any mechanism whose purpose was to spread social-democratic ideas. SPD newspapers were closed arbitrarily and SPD meetings were raided by police. The organisation was riddled with police spies and trade unions were outlawed. The result was that every and anyone who considered themselves a socialist – of any hue – joined the SPD.

The Erfurt Congress took place soon after the Reich had allowed the national policy of open persecution to lapse by not renewing the Anti-Socialist Laws. It had a somewhat euphoric atmosphere. However, the individual states were permitted to continue to forbid (until 1908) political parties from having women or school-aged children as members. Engels criticised the Congress as opportunist on the grounds that even if every Congress demand were attained, socialism would “in no wise have been achieved”.^[17]

Marxists continued to highlight the divide between themselves and bourgeois feminists. Louise Kautsky (divorced wife of Karl, who was then living in London) wrote a series of articles during 1891-92 for the Austrian Arbeiterinnenzeitung (Working Women’s Journal) under the general title ‘Working Women vs. Bourgeois Feminism’. Typical pieces described the attacks by bourgeois feminists on a bill presented to the UK Parliament to control hours worked by persons employed in retail stores on the grounds that it was ‘unjust’ to reduce women’s working hours before giving them the vote. Other articles condemned bourgeois feminists for being prepared to accept some women gaining the vote based on property qualifications rather than standing firm for universal franchise.

The 1892 Trade Union Congress had formally adopted a resolution for the formation of mixed trade unions, but little practical work had resulted. Zetkin, in an effort to spur the trade union leaders into action, published a major article on 1 November 1893, ‘Women’s Work and the Organisation of Trade Unions’, demonstrating that in several industries, women comprised the majority of workers, that there had been an indisputable growth of the female proletariat, but no corresponding growth in union membership. Demands such as setting up childcare centres challenged the concept that it was the individual woman’s duty to look after children. The demand for paid maternity leave, rather than automatic termination of employment on becoming a mother, was radical. It was claimed that every woman had a right to work, and bourgeois notions of motherhood were explicitly challenged. Zetkin’s efforts bore fruit and between 1891 and 1907 the number of women in trade unions rose from 4,355 to 136,929.

In 1894, the Social Democrats introduced a bill for women’s suffrage in the Reichstag, but it was rejected. This was followed by the SPD Breslau Congress of October 1895 at which the party agreed to fight for the extension of protection to domestic workers. Zetkin was elected to the National Executive Committee of the SPD in November 1895 and chosen to present the first major policy statement of the SPD on the ‘Woman Question’ at the party Congress the following October, known as ‘Only in Conjunction with the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious’.

At that time, most employed women in the larger towns worked as domestic servants and most middle-class households had at least one ‘domestic’. Naturally, socialist women throughout Europe (and America) attempted to unionise these workers through such organisations as The Domestic Workers’ Union, with demands for higher pay, shorter hours, maternity leave, and longer holidays. The claims made by this section of workers naturally encountered stiff opposition from many bourgeois feminists, not only because their personal interests were directly affected, but also because they had no intention of doing away with hierarchy and privilege. They preached equality for themselves, while supporting policies that kept most working women in poverty and economic dependence.

As any other propertied and privileged class, capitalists place preservation and promotion of their economic interests above democratic rights, just as we see in a post-COVID world the modern bourgeoisie define democratic rights as their right to preserve their super profits and the unequal distribution of wealth. Since capitalism became the supreme world system, the more conservative and less democratic it has become. The American Civil War (1861-65) was the last time the big bourgeoisie placed itself at the head of a revolutionary struggle; at no time since then have they led a mass struggle for the extension or deepening of democratic rights.

The October 1896 Congress accepted Zetkin’s report and adopted a programme which presented the ‘Woman Question’ as due to the exploitative nature of the capitalist mode of production, and rejected any suggestion that there was a single all-encompassing women’s movement. Instead, Zetkin proposed the existence of a ‘woman question’ for each class of capitalist society. She argued that bourgeois women were engaged in a struggle to manage their own property, and middle-class women sought equality in education and job opportunities, and that for both, men were seen as the primary enemy. She then argued that the economic interests of proletarian women were genuinely united with men of the same class, and that the emancipation of proletarian women could only be the work of the entire proletariat, regardless of sex.^[18]

As a direct result of their approach to women’s rights, Marxists dismissed bourgeois feminists’ rejection of the demand for labour legislation to protect pregnant women, nursing mothers, etc., as nothing more than a defence of unrestrained exploitation of the masses by property-owners. For Zetkin such demands were for social recognition of women’s social activity as wives. The depth of these divisions was seen in Zetkin’s declaration to the 1896 Women’s Rights Congress in Berlin, that she was the ‘adversary’ of the other attendees, that socialists should not collaborate with bourgeois feminists (often referred to as ‘women’s rightsers’), even on issues of common concern.^[19] There was more than an element of bravado about this statement. It could be made only in a situation where the SPD monopolised the political perspectives of working women, and it ignored the many joint actions taking place on local issues between SPD women and petty-bourgeois feminists that were being reported in the SPD press. The activities of socialist women were officially separated from those of the bourgeois feminists; certainly, there were no major joint campaigns by SPD women with bourgeois feminists. Nevertheless, on a day-to-day basis, there were many local instances where SPD women were joined by petty-bourgeois women in short-term campaigns on specific issues, particularly against sexual improprieties by a member of the supervisory staff when searching women workers leaving a factory or store. Bebel had noted this and commented on it in the Introduction to Women Under Socialism, “though they march in separate armies they may strike a united blow” on all matters related to “equal rights of women under the present social order”.

The Gotha Congress also approved steps to recruit more women to the party. To circumvent the Laws of Association forbidding women to be members of political associations, the SPD decided to create a small network of vertrauenspersonen (women spokespersons), to be at the heart of the battle to win more women members. The women chosen for these posts were given the task of educating proletarian women in political and trade union matters, and awakening and reinforcing their class consciousness. Alexandra Kollontai (born in St. Petersburg, the daughter of a general), then a Menshevik but later an active Bolshevik, being fluent in German, became a vertrauenspersonen and in that capacity gained valuable organisational experience. Officially responsible to the SPD National Executive Committee, these spokespersons operated with relative freedom and were incredibly effective, as demonstrated by the wave of women recruits to the SPD as soon as the Laws of Association ended in 1908.

The Congress adopted the following eight-point programme drafted by Zetkin, to “improve the situation of women” and this was the programme on which the vertrauenspersonen based their activities:

1. Equal political rights for men and women.
2. Abolition of all laws that placed women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private (domestic) law.
3. Equal and free education for boys and girls, entrance to higher education to be determined by academic merit alone.
4. Freedom from sexual discrimination in hiring, firing and promotion.
5. Equal pay for equal work.
6. Extension of protection for working women (provision of crèches, paid maternity leave, reduction of working hours).
7. Abolition of the system of servants.
8. Active and passive voting rights for men and women in industrial courts (the right to vote is the active right, and the right to run for office is the passive right).

Zetkin had noted that the bourgeois feminist movement was successfully appealing to some working women across the class divide, threatening SPD hegemony. She was determined to confront head-on the feminist claim that women had more in common with each other than with men from their own class. Hence the eight demands deliberately included some that were of interest to petty-bourgeois women but were anathema to the bourgeoisie. This approach flowed naturally from Zetkin’s analysis, that only through SPD policy would women in Germany achieve equality, a policy that has been likened to aspects of Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution:

The German bourgeoisie enjoys the undisputed honour of being among the most backward and narrow-minded of all bourgeoisies. […] In Germany, therefore, […] the task of solving the question of female emancipation in the bourgeois sense has also fallen to the working class.^[20]

However, her attempts to push the SPD into working with and amongst women, led more conservative members to accuse Zetkin of the very thing she was trying to combat – feminism.

Radical activists, and even many feminists, especially those working in the classical petty-bourgeois occupations of teachers or junior civil servants, where anti-woman prejudices were so strong that if a woman married, she was forced to resign, supported the eight demands. Indeed, many of the 30,000 women who, on the lifting of the Laws of Association, flooded into the SPD in 1907-08, were from the petty-bourgeoisie. This increase in women members was in no small part due to the effectiveness of the vertrauenspersonen, and as the repression was relaxed their number was increased from twenty-five to over 400.^[21]

Before the Gotha Congress the thrust of the SPD campaigns amongst women had been for improvement in the conditions of female factory and domestic workers. However, after the Congress the SPD became increasingly preoccupied with the vote as the major means of attaining its goals, and that meant increased attention was paid to “Votes for Women”. It was more and more accepted that the struggle for equality, for bourgeois rights, was a means of enabling working-class women to wage class war on the same terms as men. From the founding congress of the Second International in July 1889, the SPD stood in the forefront of European socialist parties in the battle for the enfranchisement of all women. This contrasted with the bourgeois feminists who formally committed themselves to female suffrage only in 1902.

In 1899, Bernstein published his revisionist Manifesto, Evolutionary Socialism in which he rejected the two basics of Marxism: historical materialism and class struggle. A major debate on revisionism resulted in widespread rejection of Bernstein’s ideas, in particular by Zetkin in alliance with her close friend and political co-thinker, Rosa Luxemburg. In this she was supported by the SPD Women’s Bureau which, of course, made it a target for the right wing of the SPD.

Simultaneously, the first issue of Lenin’s Iskra was published in Leipzig in December 1900. Zetkin was a key figure in getting the newspaper going, the organisation of secret printing presses, the acquisition of Russian type, etc. Also, in 1900, the first and hugely successful conference of SPD women was held in Mainz, organised largely by the Women’s Bureau and Equality. One reason given for a women’s conference was that the Laws of Association required a substantial degree of autonomy in developing tactics, even though the political line was determined by the entire party. In 1902 the Prussian Secretary of State agreed that women could be allowed to attend political meetings provided they were segregated and sat in a separate area (often behind a curtain).^[22] The 1903 SPD Congress, held in Dresden, resolved to campaign for women’s suffrage whenever any demand for suffrage reform arose. It also formally rejected Bernstein’s revisionist platform but did nothing substantial to change the methods of working that had led to it, leaving in place the root cause of the revisionist ideas.

The 1905 Russian Revolution inspired Luxemburg to write The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, a pamphlet that extended the lessons of Russia to Germany and argued that a general strike by German workers should not be constrained to reformist goals and could burst into revolution. Luxemburg was supported in her analysis by Zetkin, but both were forced to concede:

The plain truth is that [the leaders of the SPD] have completely pledged themselves to parliament and parliamentarianism, and whenever anything happens which transcends the limits of parliamentary action they are hopeless – no, worse than hopeless, because they then do their utmost to force the movement back into parliamentary channels, and they will furiously defame as “an enemy of the people” anyone who dares to venture beyond their own limits.^[23]

Having come to this realisation, it was the responsibility of Luxemburg and Zetkin to begin organising a Marxist opposition within the SPD. This they did not do. They rejected the very idea of setting up a revolutionary tendency within the SPD. It would take the revolutionary pressure of mass action to push them into launching the Spartacus League. Too little, too late.

Zetkin worked hard to ensure that Equality and the women’s organisation remained committed to revolutionary change. At the First International Conference of Socialist Women (fifty-nine delegates from fifteen countries), and the immediately following Seventh International Congress of the Second International, both held in Stuttgart in August 1907, Zetkin was chief speaker on suffrage. She led the fight against the gradualists, demanding that wherever socialist parties waged campaigns for suffrage, women’s suffrage was to be “vigorously advocated in the agitation as well as in parliament”. During the ensuing debates Zetkin forcefully criticised those delegates who refused to promote women’s suffrage on the grounds that universal male suffrage might be jeopardised by association with the more controversial demand of “Votes for Women”. Lenin’s report on the Congress refers favourably to Zetkin no fewer than nine times.^[24]

Zetkin continually stressed that the right to vote was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Getting working-class women onto local and legislative assemblies would serve to strengthen the struggle against class domination and the private ownership of the means of production – the real source of women’s double oppression. In Eleanor Marx’s words, to “organise not as ‘women’ but as proletarians; not as female rivals of our working men but as their comrades in struggle”. Zetkin’s young followers and political supporters in Russia would exert significant influence along these lines within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

The SPD and the proletarian women’s movement made important gains; in 1908 the working day for women was reduced to ten hours, and this was used to prise open the door to a general reduction in working hours. The response of the bourgeois feminists to shortening the working day was, at best, ambiguous. They certainly did not offer wholesome and complete support. Their energies remained directed towards improving their own situation within the existing social order, they had no quarrel with the capitalist system, only their subordinate role within it. Their goal was to share power with the men of their own class, they had no intention of the bourgeois surrendering power.

However, Zetkin took what today would be considered a reactionary position on the right of a woman to control her own body. For Zetkin, abortion and birth control were Malthusian practices, based on assumptions that poverty was the product of overpopulation rather than private ownership of the means of production, and like many socialists at that time she bitterly opposed such measures. Zetkin also rejected birth control as the “easy-out of all egoists who want to have as many and as convenient enjoyments in life as possible,” by “feigning bourgeois decency during adultery and sexual intercourse outside marriage and egoistically avoiding care and responsibility for a child”.^[25] When the American revolutionary socialist and birth control pioneer, Dr. Antoinette Konikow (later a founding member of the American Left Opposition) visited Russia to share her extensive knowledge of birth control with Russian physicians, she met Zetkin who condemned her argument that birth control was integral to the right of a woman to control her own body as Malthusian population control, and ignored her offers of help.^[26] Zetkin never ceased her opposition to any demand for easy access to contraception and/or abortion. That a woman had the right to control her own body was, apparently, unintelligible to Zetkin; in this she was trapped within her cultural heritage. Zetkin, as with other late nineteenth century socialists, demanded women’s economic independence as workers and recognised their dual oppression, but made no corresponding demands to change their status as wives and mothers.

Lenin understood the revolutionary potential of women proletarians and the importance of winning them to the revolutionary cause. He was a consistent supporter of women’s rights. The only direct, but highly significant reference in his Collected Works to a woman’s right to choose occurs in‘The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism’:

It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc. Such laws are nothing but the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. These laws do not heal the ulcers of capitalism, they merely turn them into malignant ulcers that are especially painful for the oppressed masses.^[27]

Lenin saw access to contraception and the right to an abortion as “protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women”.^[28] This was confirmed when the new Soviet Union legitimised abortion.

Malthusian ideas are still alive and kicking today. For example, neoliberal economics, marketisation of healthcare and the racism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading India’s government has continued with previous policies of mass sterilisation of women from poor, landless and Muslim families as a solution for poverty, hunger and social unrest. Many such population control initiatives have been in partnership with global capital at the expense of sections of the population deemed superfluous, and legitimate targets for displacement and dispossession. This is particularly true with the targeted sterilisation of women in indigenous (Adivasi) communities who live on mineral-rich land and are viewed as obstacles to its exploitation by corporate capital. This has resulted in the appropriation of agricultural land, the uprooting of entire villages and the displacement of tens of thousands of Adivasi by paramilitary vigilante groups claimed to be funded by companies such as Tata and Essar.^[29]

It was Bolshevik women such as Inessa Armand, supported by Lenin and Trotsky, who developed the views of Bebel and Engels, that personal relations between men and women were a matter of free choice (whether in marriage or not), relationships based on the personal commitments of two equal people, free from social pressure, religious hypocrisy, financial chains or unwanted childbirth. Even though these women considered abortion as immature and selfish, they would be amongst the foremost fighters for decriminalisation of abortion by the Soviet state after the revolution.^[30]

1.4 Marxism and the Lesbian and Gay Question Before 1914

For over 2,000 years, since the Book of Leviticus condemned practising homosexuals to death, and Deuteronomy (22:5) warned cross-dressers that God hated them, Christianity, Islam and Judaism have consistently condemned homosexuality. The last execution in mainland Europe took place in Holland in 1803, but in England executions occurred at the rate of about two or three a year until 1835, though the death penalty for sodomy was not abolished until 1861 when it was replaced by a jail sentence of ten years to life. This change in the law was not because of any reasonableness by the Houses of Commons and Lords, but because juries were refusing to convict when the accused faced the death penalty. To increase the number of guilty verdicts, the penalty was made more ‘merciful’. Naturally, official discretion was exercised, and those in high places who were caught in the act were encouraged to take a long holiday in the South of France.^[31]

Lesbians were treated somewhat more leniently, which many researchers attributed to the then-current belief that “anything that women did amongst themselves was beneath the serious interest of men”.^[32] An additional factor could have been the numerous royal lesbians such as Queen Anne who had very public relationships with Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Abigail Masham. Lesbian women who passed themselves off as men were common in the armed forces and when found out, generally received no more than a curt dismissal. Cross-dressers could live relatively uneventful lives. The exception were lesbians who passed themselves off as men in respectable society and dared to get married. Here the punishments were clearly vindictive. No statute covering such an outrage to public decency existed, so fraud and vagrancy would be added to the charge sheet. When the woman was duly found guilty, she would be sentenced to public whipping: one Mary Hamilton was sentenced to be publicly whipped in each of four market towns (Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shipton-Mallet).

In Spain and Portugal, until at least 1794, the Inquisition hunted down suspected homosexuals who would be systematically tortured until they confessed, after which they were burned. The lucky ones were strangled first. A steady stream of suspects was ensured by handing over half the belongings of those found guilty to their accusers. These practices were vigorously extended to the New World.

The French Revolution of 1789 had inscribed on its banner the democratic rights of man, including privacy in all matters concerning sexual preference and behaviour, unless children were involved; later formulated by John Stuart Mill as “an activity that does no harm to non-consenting others should not be regulated by law”. The revolutionary Code Pénal of 1791 was a major gain of that revolution and deliberately omitted any reference to sexual relations between men, effectively decriminalising homosexuality. The reform was incorporated into the 1810 Napoleonic legal code which regarded matters of sexuality, where consent was given, as private. This code became law in the European countries occupied by Napoleon, and the model for the colonies of the French empire and emerging republics in Central and South America.^[33]

However, it is one thing to change the law, and quite another to change social reality. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the bourgeois family model, based on marriage between men and women, with strictly-defined gender-roles and clear patriarchal supremacy, was extended to the whole of the population. Such a structure required the labour of women, especially for the care of children, and minimised the cost of reproducing the labour force. Its rigid hierarchical structure mirrored the domination and subordination necessary for the reproduction of class society. The freedoms gained in the French revolution were increasingly in conflict with the realities of a bourgeois economic system, and European capitalism imposed the bourgeois form of the nuclear family on all of society, which robbed women, and homosexuals (male and female), of many of their bourgeois democratic rights. Across Europe and North America this development soon led to the stigmatisation and criminalisation of all aspects of sexuality that deviated from capitalism’s heterosexual family, the most recent form of the traditional norm of all class societies.

With the unification of Germany, in 1871, the condemnatory attitudes towards homosexuality existing in Prussia were extended across the country replacing the Napoleonic code in, for example, Bavaria. The German government incorporated Paragraph 175 into the imperial legal code, stipulating “Unnatural coupling undertaken between persons of the male sex and between people and animals is punishable by imprisonment. Civil rights can also be withdrawn”. These punishable offences carried heavy prison sentences. The introduction of Paragraph 175 was especially worrying as the German police had extensive files on the sexual habits of numerous political activists.

The long-running campaign for the repeal of Paragraph 175, dove-tailed with the protests against the trial of Oscar Wilde (1895) by well-known Social Democrats.^[34] Ferdinand Lasalle made a point of publicly welcoming Johann von Schweitzer, a trade union organiser arrested for his homosexuality, into the leadership of the ADAV. However, these efforts emphasised defence of the bourgeois democratic rights of the individual, rather than addressing the matter in a historical, materialist manner.

Here we need to address two common misrepresentations of Marx and Engels’ views that are often accepted as good coin. For example, it is claimed in the Wikipedia entry on ‘Socialism and LGBT Rights’ that Marx suggested to Engels that he smear gay socialist Johann von Schweitzer by placing homophobic jokes about him in various newspapers. The allegation is based on a letter from Marx to Engels dated 10 March 1865. The allegation is repeated in the Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality. However, any objective reading of the letter reveals quite clearly that the allegation has absolutely no basis. This short letter makes no reference to either Schweitzer’s homosexuality or his arrest. What is being deliberately projected is the idea that when Marx and/or Engels expressed political differences with someone who was homosexual, it was the sexuality of their opponent that determined their views. That is a scandalous assertion without a grain of truth.

The most-widely distributed translation of Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was by Alick West in 1940, revised by Dona Torr, both prominent members of the British Communist Party. West, for his own reasons, took the 1934 Russian edition not the original German text as his starting point. When discussing the Ancient Greeks, West translated the Russian as: “They fell into the abominable practice of sodomy”. However, in the German original Engels uses the word ‘Knabenliebe’ which means not sodomy but pederasty, and the Marx-Engels Collected Works, published in 1990, translates this as “the perversion of boy-love”. Engels was criticising not homosexuality, but pederasty – the sexual abuse of children. Marxists consider that adults who have sexual relations with children are violating their rights. Given the disparity in power, we do not accept that any child can give meaningful consent to sexual relations with an adult. We note that West’s use of the term ‘sodomy’ fitted with the re-criminalisation of homosexual acts by the Stalin regime. Unfortunately, ever since, misinformed leftists and malicious anti-Marxists cite the mistranslation as ‘proof’ that one of the founders of Marxism was anti-gay.

The writings of Bernstein and Bebel and, in particular, the Reichstag debates of 1898 and 1905 informed the socialist movement internationally on the necessity of defending the democratic rights of homosexuals. However, the approach of the SPD to homosexuality was split; Bernstein challenged the idea that homosexuality was unnatural, others emphasised it as an illness that should be cured not punished. Notwithstanding these differences, the efforts of the SPD, as the only political party to defend those prosecuted under Paragraph 175, won for it the support of gay men.

In Russia, the Orthodox church had long been anti-gay, to the extent of condemning men who shaved as guilty of ‘sodomitical sin’, but it was not until the early eighteenth century, under Peter the Great, that Russia’s first secular law against sex between men was adopted, in the Military Code of 1716. From 1835, until rescinded by the Bolsheviks in 1918, the criminal code banned male same-sex relations, but not lesbian relations. Men who engaged in voluntary sodomy were exiled to Siberia; but sodomy with minors or the use of force meant exile with hard labour.

The 1905 Revolution had a substantial impact on the way homosexuality was dealt with. Despite a significant increase in the number of homosexuals being convicted by the courts, there was less censorship after 1905. There was also much hypocrisy in the application of the law, with members of the upper classes receiving more lenient treatment. Those in high places who knew the right people could get strings pulled, so that the police and authorities in tsarist Russia largely ignored homosexual activities among the upper classes. Powerful supporters of the Romanov dynasty, and members of the Tsar’s own family, were openly gay and had de facto immunity; there were no homosexual scandals in pre-1917 Russia to match that of Oscar Wilde.

However, homosexuality could not be legislated out of existence. Being a natural variant of human sexual relations, it could be repressed but not eliminated from society. Homosexuality continued to be a criminal offence, but psychiatrists, influenced by developments in Europe, began to consider the phenomenon from a medical viewpoint rather than a moral one. Sections of the scientific community believed homosexuality should be treated as a psycho-pathological or biological illness rather than a crime. Flowing from this, the idea developed that homosexuality could be ‘cured’ and that the development of children should be structured to avoid the emergence of homosexual ‘deviations’. Weston quotes from People of the Intermediate Sex, a text published in 1908, to show that a small but growing number of medical personnel were coming round to the opinion that:

The law should protect children and the insane and forbid all manner of assaults. But that which two adult persons, in their own room, do with their bodies by mutual consent and causing no harm does not concern the state.^[35]

1.5 A Distinct Women’s Organisation Within the Party?

The class divisions in German society were so deep and clear cut, and the SPD so dominant that all politically active and militant workers, regardless of sex, would be expected to join the party. However, Emma Ihrer, a long-time trade union activist (and Zetkin’s co-delegate to the International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1899), realised this was not happening with proletarian women. To Ihrer and other leading women within the SPD, it was clear that the barrier was not only the Laws of Association, but also male chauvinist attitudes within the SPD. Bebel and the SPD leaders agreed, and accepted it was necessary to have a women’s paper to create a dedicated space for women members and women workers. With Ihrer as editor, the weekly Die Arbeiterin (The Woman Worker) was launched in January 1891 with the aim of developing women cadres and taking the SPD messages against exploitation, inequality and socialism to the masses of working women. In October 1891, it agreed to form a Women’s Bureau within the SPD, with Clara Zetkin as its political and organisational leader.

After only a year, Die Arbeiterin folded through lack of funds. Dietz, a firm of socialist publishers, acquired the paper, and in January 1892, on the advice of Bebel and Kautsky, offered Zetkin the post of editor; she renamed the paper Die Gleichheit (Equality). This fortnightly paper published in Stuttgart was to become the major voice for proletarian women. By 1900, Equality had a circulation of four thousand; its message was that socialism, by emancipating the whole of humanity, necessarily emancipated the female sex.

Despite the reactionary laws restricting women’s participation in politics, Zetkin had achieved the formation of a women’s organisation with its own journal. However, the same laws aided Zetkin in achieving within the SPD a substantial degree of organisational autonomy. Her great success meant she became a model for many revolutionary socialists. Zetkin popularised Engels’ analysis, arguing that the destruction of private property could transform the family from a unit held together by economic interests into one united by understanding, love, and mutual respect. This was taken as a truism, and little effort was put into determining what mechanisms would have to be established after the socialist revolution to eradicate the old patriarchal social order.

The first issue of Equality, dated 1 December 1891, declared on its front page that women’s subordination was ultimately based on property relations. The editorial explained that the journal would deal not only with ‘feminine’ issues, but also with general issues affecting working-class women. Equality systematically attempted to persuade the SPD to face the obvious fact that women were simultaneously exploited as workers and oppressed as women. As women workers, they could be paid less; they faced the problem of keeping their jobs during pregnancy, childbirth, and the immediate postnatal period, since not only child-bearing but child-rearing was seen as a woman’s responsibility. Women were also saddled with family duties which meant they had to rush from paid work to housework; leaving them no time to, for instance, organise unions even in industries where only women worked, which meant that in industries where men and women worked side by side the union was overwhelmingly male.^[36]

From its outset, the wives, daughters, and sisters of male SPD members were the major target for sales of Equality. The paper was what Zetkin described as ‘avant-garde’, much space was devoted to describing conditions in industries hiring large numbers of women, but it also regularly published articles of a theoretical nature. This was a dual policy – on the one hand the party was being made aware that women’s issues were very much class issues and, on the other hand, women were being equipped to understand all manner of topics and to participate in all struggles, rather than remaining confined to narrowly-defined women’s issues.

Restrictions on women’s political activity had consequences beyond the immediate one of denying women formal membership of political parties. The Laws of Association meant that the socialist women’s movement had a high degree of independence and being under constant police surveillance meant that it was brave, radically-minded, working women who joined. The activities of the Women’s Bureau were a means of giving women experience of public speaking, debating, discussing and organising, that otherwise would have been denied them. As part of this perspective, Zetkin, with the SPD’s agreement, organised separate women’s meetings to elect female delegates to the SPD and International Women’s Congresses. She also campaigned in Equality for women’s demonstrations on issues with which women particularly identified. The circulation of Equality rose fast, reaching around 70,000 by 1907.^[37] Inspired by these successes the SPD leadership approved the establishment of a bi-annual women’s conference.

However, the SPD leadership was moving inexorably towards an open break with Marxism and increasingly attempted to restrict the independence of the SPD women’s movement which, under Zetkin’s leadership, had become an enclave of radical Marxism. Immediately after the repeal of the Laws of Association in 1908, the revisionist elements in the leadership called for the women and youth sections, both of which were vigorously opposed to the reformist direction of the SPD, to be brought under tighter control. The argument used was of opposing ‘separatist tendencies’, justifying their dissolution on the grounds that the new, more liberal, laws made such organisations unnecessary. The leadership of the SPD was framing the discussion in terms of whether a women’s organisation within the party was necessary, given that the new laws allowed women to openly be members of the SPD, but the reality was an attempt to eliminate a bastion of Marxism within the party.

To minimise opposition, the SPD leadership maintained the appearance of a functioning Women’s Bureau, but its independence, authority and powers were rapidly stripped away. To camouflage this fact, a woman was guaranteed one seat on the Party Executive, but with no right to vote. Significantly, the seat was given not to Zetkin but to a lesser known, much milder, and more amenable character, Luise Zietz. The same year that Zetkin was pushed aside, the youth organisation was also purged.^[38]

In 1909 Zietz supported the Party Executive’s moves to restrict Zetkin’s independence as editor of Equality and defended the decision to postpone the 1910 bi-annual Women’s Conference. This one-year postponement was, of course, just a prologue to abolition. Next the party took control of the sales of Equality by making it obligatory for trade union and SPD branches to take a prescribed number of copies, which meant sales leapt to an artificial 140,000. Having reined in the editor and gained control over circulation, the Party Executive demanded that the paper focus less on politics and more on the domestic needs of rank and file women trade unionists.

Zetkin continued to argue that women’s groups provided the SPD’s women members with the opportunity, generally withheld by society, to make decisions on their own and of learning to think for themselves. This, in turn, enabled them to contribute more fully to the SPD and support its activities. Zetkin and her supporters had not seen the Women’s Bureau as merely a technical organisation, but also as a forum for political expression by women workers. In 1909 she wrote The German Socialist Women’s Movement, a pamphlet that sought to justify the continued existence of the Women’s Bureau and the vertrauenspersonen by listing their achievements including: recruitment to the SDP, spreading SPD ideas amongst working-class women, providing effective opposition to the bourgeois feminists, and improving working conditions for working women. However, the right wing within the SPD leadership was quite willing to sacrifice these gains to silence the opposition to their class-collaborationist policies being voiced in Equality and by the Women’s Bureau. Zetkin and her co-thinkers continued to push to retain the Women’s Bureau and Equality. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women (in August 1910, with over 100 delegates from seventeen countries), in a personal capacity to circumvent the SPD bureaucracy, Zetkin moved the resolution:

On the occasion of the annual May demonstration – without regard to its form – the request of full political equality of the sexes must be proclaimed and substantiated. In agreement with the class-conscious political and trade organisations of the proletariat in their country the socialist women of all nationalities have to organise a special Women’s Day, which in first line has to promote Women Suffrage propaganda. This demand must be discussed in connection with the whole women’s question according to the socialist conception of social things. […] – Clara Zetkin, Käte Duncker and other comrades.^[39]

The conference, which included representatives from trade unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs and the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, unanimously approved Zetkin’s proposal. March 8 was chosen because on that date in 1908 hundreds of women workers gathered at Rutgers Square in New York’s Lower East Side, demanding both the right to vote and to create a trade union. The call for an International Women’s Day (IWD) went out to women in every country and had great impact in social democratic parties. However, there is no record of the Eighth Congress of the Second International, dominated by the SPD, which met one week later, endorsing the call.

IWD allowed for a public display of self-expression by hundreds of thousands of working-class women, everywhere deprived of the vote, a concrete symbol of their internationalism. In 1911, IWD was celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland when more than one million women and men attended rallies calling for an end to discrimination against women; for a woman’s right to vote, to work, and to hold public office.

Zetkin’s drive to organise SPD women as a defined group within the SPD was mirrored in the important role she played within the Second International. With hindsight, it is clear that when she argued for, and obtained, an International Women’s Bureau run by women and acting as a centre for women’s activities, she was attempting to compensate for the running down of the SPD Women’s Bureau. She also attempted to give Equality a protected status when she moved, and gained agreement, that the paper be recognised as the official organ of the international women’s socialist movement.

Zetkin’s status in the Second International was confirmed when, in 1910, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks both agreed to suspend their separate publications and to put their financial resources into a common pool under the trusteeship of three German Socialists, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, and Clara Zetkin – Kautsky represented Menshevik interests and Zetkin the Bolshevik.^[40]

In early 1912, Zetkin travelled the country addressing countless meetings on the threat of war and the need for resistance. Outside of the major towns Zetkin could not avoid observing how few women attended. When she raised this matter with local SPD officials, she was often met with the argument that party membership was fine for individual educated women, but for most women this was a utopian and foolish idea. Zetkin considered this to be indicative not simply of backwardness on this issue, but also of a failure to grasp that socialism is the only possible way to emancipate the whole of society. On trying to debate the issue, she was met with a lack of interest, understanding and independent thinking among party members, many of whom, in common with Bernstein, now saw socialism as a series of bread-and-butter issues rather than revolutionary political change.

In 1912 the SPD dissolved the Women’s Bureau, and gradually most SPD women activists were relegated to charitable and welfare work of the kind which polite society considered appropriate for women.

1.6 Clara Zetkin and WWI

Luxemburg and Zetkin fought against the rise of revisionism within the SPD, first against Bernstein and, after publication of Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, against Kautsky who, at that time, was hailed internationally as the greatest Marxist theoretician. When Kautsky justified the Kaiser’s colonial and imperialist ambitions in Morocco in 1911, Luxemburg and Zetkin broke politically with him.^[41] The seriousness of the differences required an organised left opposition within the SPD, but Luxemburg and Zetkin limited themselves to forming a group of like-minded friends rather than a political faction.

The same weakness would be demonstrated after the outbreak of the inter-imperialist war and the collapse of the Second International into social-chauvinism. Each in defence of its own fatherland, the social-democratic parties fell into line behind their own ruling classes, suppressing the class struggle and leading the working masses into carnage. The SPD was the most spectacular example. On 4 August 1914, the SPD members in the German Reichstag voted unanimously to grant Kaiser Wilhelm II’s imperial government war credits.

Once Lenin understood the seriousness of the situation, he immediately and decisively proclaimed a complete break with the social chauvinists and called for the launch of a new communist international. Luxemburg and Zetkin hesitated. Nevertheless, on 2 December 1914, Liebknecht raised a lone voice in the Reichstag and voted against further war credits.

In 1914 the Bolsheviks launched their own women’s journal, Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker, see chapter 2.4) and in November 1914, the editorial board wrote to Zetkin, as secretary of the Women’s Bureau of the Second International, urging her to call a conference of socialist women opposed to the war. Zetkin agreed to convene the March 1915 International Conference of Socialist Women in Berne. This followed close on the heels of a Conference of RSDLP groups outside Russia, also held in Berne the previous month, and which had accepted Lenin’s position of a decisive break with opportunism and the formation of a Third International.^[42]

The March Conference was attended by twenty-six delegates of whom four were Bolsheviks, including Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya. Lenin hoped that the women’s conference would be a first step toward the founding of a Third International, issuing a rallying call for socialists to recognise that the war could be ended only by a clear and public break with the leaders of the SPD and other social patriotic parties. Zetkin, however, sought the widest unity against the war, and had invited women from all wings of the anti-war spectrum. On the key issue of a complete break and denunciation of the pro-war socialists, Zetkin opposed the Bolsheviks who were defeated by a vote of twenty-one to five.^[43] Lenin’s appraisal of the lack of decisive action by Zetkin and Luxemburg was justifiably harsh. Later, referring to the revolution that broke out in 1918, he wrote, “the German workers lacked a genuine revolutionary party […] owing to the burden of the accursed tradition of ‘unity’ with capital’s corrupt […] gang of lackeys”.^[44]

Returning to Germany, Zetkin was arrested and held in ‘protective custody’ for four months. Equality, though editorially opposed to the war, was forced by the SPD leaders to carry more and more letters and articles in support of the war and the paper was increasingly censored by the authorities. Matters came to a head as Equality appeared with a blank front page when Zetkin attempted to report on the March Conference. The SPD decided to remove this thorn from its side. Zetkin was forced to resign and replaced as editor by Carl Legien, a trade union leader. Soon after, Equality was closed and substituted by a family magazine.^[45]

Opposition to the war was spreading throughout the SPD. Local party branches and regional conferences were passing resolutions condemning the war policy of the leadership. In the Reichstag, the number of SPD deputies voting against war credits was twenty-five in March 1915, thirty-six in August 1915, and forty-three in December 1915. Luxemburg, Mehring and Leibknecht, joined by Leo Jogiches and Paul Levy decided at a meeting on 1 January 1916 to begin establishing an underground political organisation, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League) and to begin publishing an illegal newspaper, Spartacus.

Loss of life at the front, the increasing number of wounded seen on the streets, and the falling living standards meant opposition to the war within the SPD was rapidly increasing. By the end of 1916, following mass demonstrations against the war in Berlin and Frankfurt, oppositionists had control of the party organisations in Berlin, Bremen, and Leipzig, and were a sizeable influence in many other towns. In January 1917, these oppositionists called a national meeting as a first step to becoming an organised faction within the SPD. The SPD leadership reacted quickly, and immediately expelled all known leading oppositionists, who responded by forming the Independent German Social Democratic Party (USPD) a centrist party with about 120,000 members, but no clear policy.^[46] After the Russian Revolution the bulk of the USPD members would form the major part of the future German Communist Party.

Endnotes

[1] See F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England.

[2] F. Engels, Principles of Communism, Marx and Engels Collected Works (henceforth referred to as MECW), Vol. 6, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, p. 354.

[3] L. Trotsky, ‘Engels’ Letters to Kautsky’, The New International, June 1936, Portraits, Political and Personal, Pathfinder Press, 1977, p. 127.

[4] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, The Classics of Marxism, Vol. 1, Wellred Books, 2013, p. 6.

[5] Ibid, p. 19.

[6] W. Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German Social Democracy 1863-1933, Pluto Press, 1973, p. 20.

[7] K. Marx, ‘Letter to Kugelmann’, 12 December 1868, MECW, Vol. 43, p. 185.

[8] K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 492-3.

[9] A. Nimtz, Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough, State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 201.

[10] C. Zetkin, ‘German Socialist Women’s Movement’, 9 October 1909, Justice. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1909/10/09.htm (accessed 2 November 2022).

[11] K. Marx and J. Guesde, The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier, 1880. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm (accessed 2 November 2022).

[12] See K. Honeycutt, ‘Socialism and Feminism in Imperial Germany’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(1), 1979, pp. 30-41.

[13] C. Frencia and D. Gaido, ‘“A Clean Break”: Clara Zetkin, the Socialist Women’s Movement, and Feminism’, International Critical Thought, 2018, p. 2.

[14] See K. Honeycutt, ‘Socialism and Feminism in Imperial Germany’.

[15] In 1890 Philippa Fawcett, a radical feminist, was allowed to attend the degree course and take the Mathematics Tripos exams at Cambridge University. These were the most testing of all the undergraduate examinations, the top scorer was given the title Senior Wrangler and fêted throughout the University. Fawcett obtained 13 per cent higher than the second highest score, but she was denied the title and a degree because these were for men only. Fawcett died aged eighty in 1948, the year in which, for the first time, Cambridge University awarded a degree to a woman.

[16] The Erfurt Program, 1891. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm (accessed on 2 November 2022).

[17] F. Engels, ‘A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891’, MECW, Vol. 27, p. 225.

[18] C. Frencia and D. Gaido, ‘A Clean Break’, p. 4.

[19] M. Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept “Bourgeois Feminism”’, The American Historical Review, 112(1), 2007, pp. 131-158.

[20] R. Evans, Comrades and Sisters, Prentice Hall, 1987, p. 28.

[21] S. Marik, Revolutionary Democracy, Haymarket Books, 2018, p. 110.

[22] A. Bebel, Women and Socialism, Socialist Literature Co., 1910, p. 301.

[23] Quoted in R. Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Humanities Press, 1981, p. 7.

[24] See V. I. Lenin., ‘The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart’, LCW, Vol. 13.

[25] C. Zetkin, ‘Letter to Karl Kautsky’, 5 April 1902, quoted in K. Honeycutt, ‘Clara Zetkin: A Socialist Approach to the Problem of Woman’s Oppression’, Feminist Studies, 3(3), 1976, p. 136.

[26] See D. Feeley, ‘Antoinette Konikow: Marxist and Feminist’, International Socialist Review, 33, 1972, pp. 42-46.

[27] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism’, LCW, Vol. 19, p. 237.

[28] Ibid.

[29] See K. Wilson, ‘For Reproductive Justice in an Era of Gates and Modi: The Violence of India’s Population Policies’, Feminist Review, 119(1), 2018, pp. 89-105.

[30] R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 355.

[31] See for example G. Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century.

[32] R. Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, Chapter 16, The Chalford Press, 2006.

[33] See L. Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilisation.

[34] See for example E. Bernstein, ‘The Judgement of Abnormal Sexual Intercourse’ and A. Bebel, ‘On Homosexuality and the Penal Code’.

[35] Quoted in F. Weston, ‘Bolshevik Decriminalisation of Homosexuality – Intentional or Oversight?’, In Defence of Marxism, April 2018. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/bolshevik-decriminalisation-of-homosexuality-intentional-or-oversight.htm (accessed on 3 November 2022).

[36] See C. Zetkin, ‘Women’s Work and the Organisation of Trade Unions’.

[37] T. Cliff, Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation, Bookmarks, 1984, p. 75.

[38] Ibid, p. 79.

[39] ‘International Socialist Congress, 1910, Second International Conference of Socialist Women’, p. 21. Available at: https://archive.org/details/InternationalSocialistCongress1910SecondInternationalConferenceOf (accessed on 3 November 2022).

[40] I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 194.

[41] R. Luxemburg, ‘Concerning Morocco’, 1911. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1911/07/24.htm (accessed 3 November 2022).

[42] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Conference of the RSDLP Groups Abroad’, February 1915, LCW, Vol. 21, pp. 158-164.

[43] O. Gankin, and H. Fisher (eds.), The Bolsheviks and the World War, Stanford University Press, 1940, p. 300.

[44] V. I. Lenin, ‘A Letter to the German Communists’, August 1921, LCW, Vol. 32, p. 513.

[45] See W. Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women.

[46] R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, Wellred Books, 2018, p. 71.