07.03.1996

International struggle

International Working Women’s Day celebrates the fight for women’s liberation, the fight for communism

International Working Women’s Day is one of the most important dates in the communist calendar. It was first celebrated on March 8 1911, at the initiative of Clara Zetkin, head of the International Women’s Socialist Organisation and a leading member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Clara Zetkin later played a prominent role in the formation of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Third (Communist) International.

The date marked a demonstration three years earlier in which women machinists of New York’s Lower East Side marched demanding better working conditions and the right to vote.

The significance of this demonstration was that it was directed both against the bosses and against the bourgeois women’s suffrage movement, which refused to call for women workers’ votes. It was because this was an independent, explicitly working class action that the IWSO chose to commemorate it.

The IWSO resolved that “Socialist women must not ally themselves with bourgeois feminists, but lead the battle side by side with socialist men.” Clara Zetkin and other revolutionary fighters carried this stance, through a revolutionary defeatist position in World War I, into the Communist International, established in 1919.

This was also the line of march chosen by the Bolsheviks when International Working Women’s Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913. Through their women’s paper Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker), they argued - in opposition to the Mensheviks - against cross-class collaboration with feminism and for a demonstration of both women and men workers to celebrate March 8.

In debating the plans for the demonstration in Rabotnitsa Nadezhda Krupskaya attacked the Mensheviks for wanting to cooperate with “bourgeois women” who “always oppose themselves to men and demand their rights from men”. For working class women the question is “quite different”. They are united with working class men because of “their common struggle and their common goals”.

German communists like Zetkin and Russian communists like Alexandra Kollontai fought a dual struggle for women’s liberation and against feminism, which advocated an alliance of working women with their bourgeois ‘sisters’.

Zetkin fought tenaciously against the ‘socialist feminists’ of her day. Against them she declared that there is “no such thing as a women’s movement”. Bourgeois women will struggle for improved conditions from men of their own class but, Zetkin argued, working class women can only achieve their liberation “through the political rule of the working class”.

Kollontai correctly stressed that “the women’s world is divided, just like the world of men, into two camps”, bourgeois and proletarian.

The Bolshevik line shook the world. On March 8 1917 (February 23 in the old Russian calendar) strikes by women celebrating IWWD acted as the catalyst for the February Revolution. Women workers in Petrograd delivered the initial blow which shattered the Tsarist autocracy and paved the way for the Great October Revolution.

“Hail the women! Hail the International! The women were the first to come out on the streets of Petrograd on their Women’s Day. The women in Moscow in many cases determined the need of the military; they went to the barracks, and convinced the soldiers to come over to the side of the revolution. Hail the women!” (Pravda editorial after the February revolution)

The international aspect of this celebration is one which militants should take to heart. Capitalism is international, thus so is women’s oppression; from the struggle of women for abortion rights to women’s enslavement by Islamic reaction.

IWWD is a day to reconfirm our unity across national frontiers and rededicate ourselves to the liberation of women. It is a day to remember the heroic women of past class struggles and to call forth a new generation to the cause of communism.

Women’s rights are not negotiable. IWWD was initiated to make this loud and clear. History gives many, many examples of working class women leaders of the class war for socialism. Today we remember Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollantai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Inessa Armand and countless other women communists and call upon working class women to follow their example.

Linda Addison