*Playwright's Corner- From The Pen Of Jean Genet-"The Balcony"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French playwright Jean Genet's play, "The Balcony".

Book Review

The Balcony, Jean Genet, 1957

Recently, in reviewing the text for the plays “The Maids” and “The Blacks’ by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I wrote the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of the play under review, “The Balcony”, as well:

“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his somewhat autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same societal intersection in America, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play ,“The Maids”, was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”

As I have mentioned elsewhere once I “discover” a writer I tend to read through everything else that he or she has written to see if there is anymore gold in store. That is the case here with “The Balcony” . If “The Maids’ centers on the sexual fantasy and the social distortions that the class struggle accentuates, and “The Blacks” delves deeply into the “masks” worn to survive in the class and racial struggle, then “The Balcony” underscores the centrality of the real and illusionary in Genet’s work. Here he tackles theme of revolution and counter-revolution as seen and felt through the characters who inhabit a brothel, clients and customers alike. That struggle, real enough in our world, is what drives the plot here. This is not, however, some quirky Marxist interpretation of revolutionary struggle, win or lose. It is not Leon Trotsky’s theory of revolutionary tensions between the old and new societies and degeneration of the latter but it is a nice theatrical, stripped down look at those interpretations. If the play is acted and directed correctly it is well worth seeing. In the meantime read the text.

*The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee-Free Lynn Stewart And Her Co-Workers- Lynn Stewart Must Not Die In Jail!

Click on the headline to link to the Lynn Stewart Defense Committee Website.

March Is Women's History Month.

Markin comment:

On a day when I am honoring the great revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, the "Rose of the Revolution", it seems very, very appropriate to enter a post from the Lynn Stewart Defense Committee Website. Both women have worked the same side of the street- for the poor, for the working people, for women, for the downtrodden. I will repeat here what has become something of a constant refrain-and will continue so until Lynn Stewart and her co-workers are free. Lynn Stewart must not die in jail!

*All Out On March 4th To Defend Public Education- A Guest Commentary From The Committee At U/Mass-Boston

Click on the title to link to a "Boston Indymedia" posting from the "U/Mass Boston Committee To Have Fun" (nice name) about their efforts to defend public education with activities on March 4th, 2010.

Markin comment:

You know where I will be on March 4th. Harvard and Boston University are closer (and not public)to where I live but the old Harbor Campus at U/Mass across town is where defense of public education will be on the march in March. Read the article for a list of their very supportable demands.

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- Old Left "Culture Wars"-Lillian Hellman vs.Mary McCarthy-Ouch!

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Lillian Hellman.

March Is Women's History Month

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1980-81 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.


Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy:

What Becomes a Legend Most?

Two such literary legends as Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy squabbling over who's a liar and who's a slanderer, with over a million bucks at stake, certainly isn't very becoming. But these really aren't two bitter old ladies locked in senile death-battle over whose cat killed the canary. Although New York intelligentsia clique fights are often best left to Woody Allen ("I hear Dissent and Commentary are fusing—they're calling it Dysentery," he said in Annie Hall), this case did provoke a few thoughts.

Two self-serving myths of American liberalism are in collision here, with roots going back to the '30s when so many literati had heady affairs with communism. The current fracas was kicked off by Mary McCarthy's caustic comment on the Dick Cavett show last January that "Lillian Hellman...is terribly overrated, a bad writer and dishonest writer... every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." So liberal darling/ feminist heroine Hellman, author of Scoundrel Time and the memoir which became the popular movie Julia, promptly sued McCarthy et al. for $1.7 million, claiming "mental anguish" and "injury in her profession."

But it isn't really the money, or literary reputation, that Hellman and McCarthy are fighting over—the real question is whose legend will prevail. Hellman's defenders cite her defense of "simple decency" before the infamous 1952 HUAC trials. Many of McCarthy's partisans, on the other hand, recall her image as a righteously indignant seeker-for-truth, attacking Stal¬in's brutal repression and exposing the cheery "men of good will" Popular Front lies fellow travelers like Hellman spouted. Of course it is to Hellman's credit that she refused to fink to HUAC—unlike Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets and so many others—and to McCarthy's that she recognized the Moscow Trials for the vicious frame-up they were. Yet the truth is rather more complicated, and even though a lot of blood's flowed under the bridge since the '30s and '40s, it's obvious the old wars haven't been forgotten (and why not; after all, for many their brush with communism was the most vivid, important part of their lives). As we pointed out in a Workers Vanguard (18 June 1976) review of Scoundrel Time: "Hellman's memoir...confirms the general warning appropriate to the confessional genre: look out for what is omitted— although [Hellman] explains her stand before HUAC by 'these simple rules of human decency,' life was not so simple, she was not so simple, and it was all political."

Hellman was a well-known Stalinist fellow traveler, as McCarthy remembers full well. Hellman joined the Stalinists in cheering on their bloody Popular Front policies in the Spanish Civil War, while McCarthy supported the POUMists being butchered on Stalin's orders. Hellman's "simple decency" didn't extend to the victims of the 1936 Moscow Trials frame-up, nor to the Trotskyist leaders sent to prison in 1943 under the U.S. Smith Act, nor to artists like the Russian composer Shostakovich, muzzled and harassed by the bureaucra¬cy while she burbled on about the progressive culture of the USSR. No wonder McCarthy today still can't stand Hellman, wrapped up in her Blackglama mink and utterly snobbish self-congratulations as just another well-bred white Southern lady steeped in "old-fashioned American traditions."

Of course Mary McCarthy did her bit for the Cold War, abandoning her earlier Trotskyist sympathies. During the '50s she opposed the anti-Communist witchhunts only because they gave real anti-Communism a bad name with their "red-neck anti-intellectual boorish methods," and attacked "the Communist's concealment of his ideas and motives" in a speech to the notoriously Cold War, anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Still, to her credit McCarthy did break with the Cold War crowd relatively early during the Vietnam War, and wrote a good book exposing U.S. imperialism's crimes in Vietnam—and attacking those '50s organizations she had addressed. Polemicizing against Diana Trilling in her book Hanoi, McCarthy wrote:

"I reject Mrs. Trilling's call to order.... And if as a result of my ill-considered actions, world Communism comes to power, it will be too late then, I shall be told to be sorry. Never mind. Some sort of life will continue, as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavski, Daniel have discovered, and I would rather be on their letterhead, if they will allow me, than on that of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which in its days of glory, as Mrs. Trilling will recall, was eager to exercise its right of protest on such initiatives as the issue of a U.S. visa to Graham Greene and was actually divided within its ranks on the question of whether Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend or enemy of domestic liberty."

It's too bad Hellman and McCarthy have chosen to battle it out on the rather obscure terrain of purely personal "morality," since both know where plenty of bodies are buried. But they seem to have settled for enshrinement in a panoply of petty-bourgeois legends of liberalism. As Trotskyists we have long pointed out that such legendary "personal morality" does not stand outside class politics. This case proves it doesn't even stand above vicious squabbles over money. Nor can we help noting that Hellman hasn't forgotten at least one of the grand old Stalinist traditions—she's still seeking revenge against her enemies through the capitalist state.

* From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy

Click on the headline to link to a "Clara Zetkin Internet Archive" article, dated November 19, 1914, "The Duty Of Working Women In War-Time."

March Is Women's History Month

Markin comment:

The following is a two-part article from the Spring and Summer 1975 issues of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

Foundations Of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy-Part 1:1875-1900

"The beginnings of the class-conscious organized proletarian women's movement in Germany are indissolubly bound up with the coming into being and maturing of the socialist conception of society in the proletariat, with the process of its being welded together as a class, politically and socially represented by a class party which is ideologically and organizationally sound. The beginnings of the women's movement are a part, and in fact a very characteristic part of this entire path of development, giving an index to its increasing depth. The first efforts to gather proletarian women on the ground of the proletarian class struggle take place especially in close connection with the rising trade union movement. They are consequently social-democratic in essence, for in contrast to other countries, as in Great Britain, the trade unions were summoned into life by political parties."

—Clara Zetkin, Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands (1928)


Between 1875 when it was founded and its historic betrayal over support to the imperialist war in 1914, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) became the recognized theoretical'and organizational leadership of the world proletarian movement. During those years it succeeded in fusing the Marxist theoretical approach to the woman question with the strategy and tactics which continue to this day to serve as models for communist work among women. Far from occurring spontaneously, this fusion was the product of some 40 years of arduous struggle by and within the German party in the course of its pioneering work among women.

Debates on the woman question were intricately tied to industrial/political developments in Germany (and thus all of Europe), as well as to the many-sided factional struggle which festered within the German party as early as the 1890's.
Germany's industrial boom in the second half of the 19th century, which coincided with its national consolidation under the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck, brought whole new layers of the population—including women—into industrial production for the first time and placed the woman question in the forefront of the young socialist movement. These were the years when both the SPD and the Free Trade Unions (which were allied with the socialists, as opposed to the company unions and non-socialist unions) developed into mass organizations.

Bismarck attempted to disguise his fundamentally reactionary and repressive regime with a few fragments of democratic reform and social welfare legislation. But the Reichstag, aptly dubbed by Wilhelm Liebknecht "a fig leaf for absolutism," possessed no political power. The so-called "universal" suffrage which Bismarck enacted excluded broad sections of the proletariat, including, of course, women. Laws of Association severely restricted the operation of political parties (and were particularly enforced against radical parties); women and youth were forbidden to join any political parties or, until 1890, any trade unions. The labor movement was thus required from its inception to participate in a struggle for political democracy as a precondition for its very existence. This fact put the Social Democracy in the leadership of the greater part of the union movement in the early years.

In 1878, only three years after the founding of the SPD at Gotha, Bismarck enacted the Exceptional or Anti-Socialist Laws, which illegalized the organization, forcing it underground, while allowing individual socialists to run for office and sit in the Reichstag. During the 12 years that the laws were in effect, 1,500 persons were imprisoned and 900 deported. This period of clandestine operation proved to be one of great expansion for the socialist parties (as well as for the trade unions). Electoral support for the SPD grew from a half million votes in 1877 (nine percent of the total vote) to one and a half million in 1890 (20 percent of the total), despite Bismarck's attempts to upstage the Social Democrats with wide-reaching social security reforms during the 1880's. But the organizational preconditions for the degeneration of the SPD were laid in this period when its only public manifestations were the Reichstag fraction, function¬ing almost autonomously from the party leadership, and the trade unions.

The Anti-Socialist Laws were especially repressive toward women. For instance, when, inthemid-1880's, clubs for the "self-education of women" were estab¬lished by women close to the SPD (the first "special work among women"), an extraordinary decree was passed outlawing such groups. However, the political victimization of the entire workers movement was sufficiently severe to foster a close political working relationship between the men and women within it, born of shared oppression and shared aspirations.

The early battles over the rights of German working women were fought out not in the feminist movement, which limited itself to bourgeois demands, but in the embryonic socialist parties and trade unions. Working-class women were therefore traditionally
bound up in the struggle of the working class as a whole against capitalist oppression.
Questions posed by the growth of the female proletariat, such as those dealing with protective labor legislation for women, the role of the family in society and women's suffrage, had been hotly debated within the German socialist movement since the 1860's, particularly between the Marxian and the Lassallean wings, which fused in 1875 to form the SPD.

Ferdinand Lassalle's "socialism" was a society based on state producer cooperatives which were to be achieved by the introduction of democracy (i.e., universal suffrage) and a unified Germany under the Prussian sword. Clara Zetkin made a fundamental criticism of the Lassalleans in her book, Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands, which exposes, at least partially, the reason for their inability to come to a correct position on the woman question. Commenting on the "iron law of wages" theory mechanically upheld by the Lassalleans, she said:

"Marx recognized it neither as 'iron' nor as a law. It was more a stumbling block for the Lassalleans than an asset. Lassalle had attempted to prove by means of it that the continuing rise in the income of the prole¬tariat above and beyond the absolute minimum for survival was impossible under the wage system. Occasional adherents of Lassalle may have maintained, following this, that wage-earning by women did not signify a continuing improvement in the position of the proletarian family, but rather merely the competition over the 'wage fund' by labor power that was in itself cheap for the capitalist. The position of women could only be improved through the improvement of workers, that is, through abolition of the wage system. This assertion is based on a correctly felt but incorrectly proven historical truth: that, as the liberation of the proletariat is possible only through the abolition of the capitalist productive relation, so too the emancipation of women is possible only through doing away wit!' private property. However from this truth it is still a long way to the fundamental exclusion of women from all political and economic movements."

At its Sixth General Meeting in 1867 the Lassallean General German Workers Association adopted the position that:

"The employment of women in the workshops of modern industry is one of the most scandalous abuses of our time. Scandalous, because it does not improve the material situation of the working class but makes it worse, and because the destruction of the family in particular reduces the working class population to a wretched state in which even the last remnants of its ideal possessions are taken from it. This gives us all the more reason to reject the current efforts to increase even further the market for female labour. Only the abolition of the rule of capital can ensure the remedy, through which positive organic institutions will abolish the wage-relationship and give every work¬er the full proceeds of his labour."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation of Women—The Rise and Decline of the Women's Movement in German Social Democracy 1863-1933

At the same time, the Lassalleans raised ademand for wages for housework and, flowing from this, issued a call for male workers to strike to keep women out of industry in order to keep men's wages up, in the hope that this would economically strengthen the family and thus encourage women to marry instead of going to work.
The Marxians themselves did not have a clear view of the woman question at each historical moment. Marx correctly analyzed the necessity of female labor for the capitalists:

"In so far as machinery does away with the need for any considerable expenditure of muscular power, it becomes a means for the utilization of workers with comparatively little strength, and those whose bodily growth is immature but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first word in the capitalist utilisation of machinery! This mighty substitute for work and workers speedily transformed itself into a means for in¬creasing the number of wage workers by enlisting all the members of the working-class family, without distinction of sex or age, to them under the direct sway of capital. Forced labour for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children's play, but also of free labour in the domestic circle, carried on for the family itself, and within moderate limits."

-Marx, Capital, Vol. I

Furthermore, he had commented in the Communist Manifesto on the "nauseating" "bourgeois phrase-making" about the "intimate relations between parents and children," and had derided the hoax of bourgeois marriage and the family, saying: "Just as in grammar two negatives make an affirmative, so we may say that in the marriage mart two prostitutions make a virtue" (The Holy Family). Nevertheless, the embryonic German section of the Marxist International Workers Association (First International) published the following in a discussion document of 1866:

"The rightful work of women and mothers is in the home and family, caring for, supervising, and providing the first education for the children, which, it is true, presupposed that the women and children themselves receive an adequate training. Alongside the solemn duties of the man and father in public life and the family, the woman and mother should stand for the cosiness and poetry of domestic life, bring grace and beauty to social relations and be an ennobling influence in the increase of humanity's en¬joyment of life."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation of Women

The desire of socialists to protect women from the real brutality of the factory and confine them to the "cosiness and poetry" of the home is understandable. During this period of rapid industrial expansion in Germany, working conditions, particularly for unorganized women and children, were abominable. And while parents worked, proletarian children were left to raise themselves on the streets. High infant mortality, crowded city housing, disease and starvation were the hallmarks of emergent capitalism. Furthermore, the influx of women, who normally received lower wages than men for the same work, presented a clear and immediate threat to the workers movement. Therefore, although the integration of women into industry was later to become an unquestioned position in the Marxist-Leninist program, its correctness appeared less than obvious at the time.

Marx had argued in Capital that:

"However terrible, however repulsive, the break-up of the old family system within the organism of capitalist society may seem; none the less, large-scale industry, by assigning to women and young persons and children of both sexes, a decisive role in the socially organised process of production, and a role which has to be fulfilled outside the home, is building the new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes."

-Marx,' Capital, Vol. I

It was this materialist analysis, which saw beyond immediate conditions and recognized that wage labor opened the door to the only real possibility of fundamental social change through the wielding of industrial power, which enabled Marxists over a period of time to develop a correct revolutionary perspective, whereas the positions of the Lassalleans remained grounded in the bourgeois prejudices of the day.

Protective Labor Legislation

The question of protective labor legislation for women in many ways paralleled the dispute on the integration of women into industry. Here again, the facts were that conditions of work among women were inferior even to those of men at the time. Women, who possessed few skills and little education and who had been schooled in docility since infancy, were susceptible to the worst exploitation. Thus there developed a widespread demand for special protective labor laws for women workers—a demand which was quite radical in that it was a direct challenge to the employers' right to determine the conditions of work.

At the Eisenach Conference of 1869 the question of protective laws was discussed in the newly founded Social Democratic Labor Party, the first organized Marxist group in Germany. Led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, in opposition to a Lassallean tendency within the party, a successful struggle was waged for the restriction of female labor and the prohibition of child labor. While this still did not represent a revolutionary stand on the subject, it nonetheless recognized that the drawing of women into the labor force was progressive—the question for socialists after this time was how to do it.

At the unification of the Lassalleans and the Eisenachers at Gotha in 1875, a program was adopted representing a compromise which generally favored the theories of the Lassalleans over the Marxians, but which was closer to the Marxist position in favor of protective legislation on child and female labor. This remained the official position of the SPD until its legalization with the expiration of the oppressive Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890.

At the Halle Party Conference of that year, the leaders of the party's work among women—Emma Ihrer, Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin—put forth a position rejecting special privileges for women while demanding protection for all workers. But this position, which correctly resolved the question of protec¬tive labor legislation for women, Was rejected by the party.

Women's Suffrage

The suffrage issue was particularly important for the socialist movement in Germany because of the arbitrary and class-oppressive suffrage laws which remained in force until 1918. Even as late as 1908, when the SPD won six seats in the Prussian Diet for the first time, the six socialist deputies were elected with 600,000 votes while 418,000votes gained the Conservatives 212 seats!

But even on the suffrage issue, there were years of dispute before the position of clear and unequivocal support for women's suffrage emerged. The Lassalleans had held a position in favor of equal and direct suffrage for men from the age of twenty. At the Eisenach Conference in 1869, the Marxist proposal of voting rights for "all citizens" was defeated.

At the Gotha unification conference six years later, Bebel and Liebknecht fought vigorously for equal suffrage:

"Admittedly, opponents of female suffrage often maintain that women have no political education. But there are plenty of men in the same position, and by this reasoning they ought not to be allowed to vote either. The 'herd of voters' which has figured, at all the elections.did not consist of women. A party which has inscribed 'equality' on its banner flies in the face of its own words if it denies political rights to half the human race."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation.
of Women

Liebknecht's amendment was voted down, but a proposal for "general equal and direct suffrage with secret and obligatory voting for all citizens over twenty years of age" was incorporated into the program. This formulation neatly skirted the issue of whether or not women were part of the citizenry. Finally in 1891 the positive and unambiguous support of the SPD for women's suffrage was proclaimed in the Erfurt Program, which included a demand for "universal, equal and direct suffrage, with secret ballot, for all citizens of the Reich over twenty years of age with-our distinction as to sex." It further demanded:

"... the abolition of all laws which discriminate against women as compared with men in the public or private legal sphere, free educational materials, and free care for those girls and boys who, because of their abilities are considered suitable for further education."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation
of Women

After 15 years of struggle, the party had finally taken a strong stand in favor of women's emancipation, but the Erfurt Program in which it appeared also encapsulated the growing political rifts which already had begun to divide the party. The revolutionary-sounding theoretical section of the pro¬gram was barely reflected in the essentially reformist programmatic section. As became clear later, the right wing of the party viewed the suffrage issue merely as an aid to its parliamentary aspirations. Women's suffrage, which was for revolutionists a means of educating the whole class for revolutionary struggles, was for the revisionists simply another vote-getting gimmick within the bourgeois order.

Clara Zetkin

An outstanding milestone in the clarification of the SPD's position on work among women was Clara Zetkin's pamphlet, The Question of Women Workers and Women at the Present Time (1889), which synthesized the key components of the Marxist position on this widely disputed question. The positions which she set forth—above all her insistence that the socialist women's movement could not exist outside the socialist workers movement as a whole—were later adopted by the Third International in 1919-22 and remain fundamentally the positions of Marxists today.

Zetkin's pamphlet—which argued that "women must remain in industry despite all narrow-minded caterwauling; in fact the circle of their industrial activity must become broader and more secure daily"—was grounded in the writings not only of Marx, but also in the Marxist position on the woman question set forth in August Bebel's Women and Socialism (1878) and Frederick Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). She demonstrated how industrialization was already forcing capitalism to take over some of the functions of the family (education, for instance), but she insisted that only socialism could guarantee the possibility of the socialization of all essential family functions and thus lay the basis for the liberation of women.

Against those who objected that female labor should be abolished because it was harmful to women, Zetkin argued that the expulsion of women from industry was a reactionary proposal which would result in their relegation to their previous position of powerlessness and that the destructive effects of labor on women would be overcome only through its socialization, i.e., through socialist revolution. Toward that end, she maintained, the industrialization and education of women as part of the organized working class was essential:

"The organization and enlightenment of working women, the struggle to attain their economic and political equal rights is not only desirable for the socialist movement. It is and will become more and more a life-and-death question for it, the more the further development of industry forces men out of production, the more the huge army of the female proletariat swells. A socialist movement that is carried out not only by the male proletariat but by the millions of industrial women workers as well, is bound to be victorious, to lead to the political and economic liberation of the whole working class twice as fast."

—Clara Zetkin, The Question of Women Workers and Women at the Present Time

In 1891, the year of the Erfurt Conference, Zetkin and Emma Ihrer became the editors of a special SPD newspaper addressed specifically to the question of women's emancipation. It was called Die Gleicheit (Equality). The editors wrote that Die Gleicheit would:

"...fight with all energy and sharpness for the full social liberation of the world of proletarian women, because this is possible only in a socialist society. For only in such a society, along with the disappearance of the property and economic relations presently dominant, will the social contradiction disappear between those who own property and those who do not, between man and woman, between intellectual and physical labor. The elimination of these contradictions can however only come through class struggle: the liberation of the proletariat can only be the work of the proletariat itself. If the proletarian woman wants to be free, she must join forces with the common so¬cialist movement.... But the characteristic standpoint, the standpoint of the class struggle, must be sharply and unambiguously emphasized in an organ for the interests of proletarian women. And this must be done all the more sharply, the more the bourgeois women's righters make it their business, by the use of general humanitarian phrases and petty concessions to women workers' demands for reform, to throw up obstructions in the world of proletarian women and to seek to draw them away from the class struggle. But the schooling of proletarian women precisely for the class struggle will also in the future continue to be the foremost task of Die Gleichheit."

—Thonnessen, Die Frauenemanzipation

The following ten years were enormously successful for the SPD and for its work among women, in particular, but its functioning was overshadowed by the growing political differentiation within the party which was to lead, in 1914, to an open split. Thus the party's intervention into the mass movement through the medium of Die Gleicheit, although congruent with the theoretical position of the party, contradicted the main momentum of the party leaders under Karl Kautsky, who sought to appease the purely parliamentary and trade-unionist appetites of their constituency. For a shift was taking place toward ever more confidence in the possibility of effecting fundamental social change through parliamentary activity. Since the party's base rested mainly on the northern industrial proletariat and its trade-union leadership, there was strong pressure for concessions to pure trade unionism. Furthermore, during this period, membership in the trade unions was quickly outdistancing that of the SPD. In accordance with the "two pillars" theory (that the trade unions deal with economic issues and the party handles "political" questions), the trade unions adopted a politically "neutral" stand. It was only in the next decade that this illusory compromise broke down as the trade-union leaderships demonstrated their fundamentally reformist intentions. The party leadership under Kautsky, forced to choose, capitulated.

The central leadership of the work among women, notably Zetkin, fought the rightward drift of the party majority. Throughout this period, and in fact until 1916 when Zetkin was finally removed from editorship, Die Gleicheit was continually attacked by the right wing for being too theoretical, too inaccessible, not "popular" enough. Attempts were made to liquidate the paper and print instead a Sunday supplement dealing with women, written to be "understandable to all." Zetkin, Zietz, Ihrer and others in the left wing argued that the paper was not intended to be a family newspaper, but an instrument for the theoretical instruction of revolutionists; that it was a form of special work among politically conscious women primarily directed at female members and sympathizers of the SPD. Year after year, the leftists blocked these attempts to "simplify" (depoliticize) the newspaper, and managed to resist liquidation until 1916, two years after the decisive political betrayal by the party majority.

It is notable that the growing revisionist currents within the party were considerably weaker among readers and supporters of Die Gleicheit. When the Socialist Caucus of the SPD voted tor war credits in 1914, Die Gleicheit went into open opposition. It was a measure of the systematic political education that had been carried on and the intransigent leadership of the party's work among women that most of the experienced comrades involved in this work did not side with the reformist SPD majority. From this point until Zetkin's final removal as editor,Die Gleichheit was known as the international women's publication opposing the imperialist war. It served as one of the few voices of the antiwar left wing of the Second International and—through ties with left-wing socialists in Russia, Austria, England, Belgium, the U.S. and elsewhere—became a political lifeline for many women who later found their way into the Third International.

The second part of this article, dealing with the period 1900-14 and focusing on the establishment of a women's section of the party, the struggle against feminist currents within the party and the widening rift which finally split the party in 1914, will appear in the next issue of Women and Revolution.

Foundations of Communist
Work Among Women:

The German Social Democracy
Part 2: 1900-1917

"The collapse of the Second International is the collapse of socialist opportunism. The latter has grown as a product of the preceding 'peaceful' period in the development of the labour movement. That period taught the working class to utilise such important means of struggle as parliamentarianism and all legal opportunities, create mass economic and political organisations, a widespread labour press, etc.; on the other hand, the period engendered a tendency to repudiate the class struggle and to preach a class truce, repudiate the socialist revolution, repudiate the very principle of illegal organisations, recognise bourgeois patriotism, etc. Certain strata of the working class.. .as well as petty-bourgeois sympathisers within the socialist parties, have proved the social mainstay of these tendencies, and channels of bourgeois influence over the proletariat."

—V.I. Lenin, Conference Resolutions, Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. groups abroad, February 1915

By the second half of the I890's, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), based on the powerful industrial trade unions, had become a real social force capable of leading whole sections of the German proletariat and had thus gained preeminence in the world socialist movement. This growing social weight was a strong motive force behind both the reformist and revolutionary wings of the party; the left envisioned as a real possibility the party's leading the proletariat in socialist revolution, while the right sought increasingly simply to maintain its powerful bargaining position within capitalist society.

A study of this history sheds light on the woman question partly because of the ground-breaking theoretical and practical work done by the SPD in the pre-war period. But, just as importantly, the history demonstrates, in life, that a genuine solution to the oppression of women is inseparable from a revolutionary world view and that the struggle for women's liberation must be linked to a truly revolutionary party.

It was no accident that those, like Zetkin, who fought unswervingly for special, high-level, agitational and propagandistic work among women, were among the leading radicals in the SPD who staunchly defended their revolutionary proletarian vision against all forms of narrowness and chauvinism, from trade unionism, parliamentarianism and nationalism to male chauvinism and feminism. Many of these comrades were among those who formed the Spartacist group in 1916 and the German Communist Party (KPD)in 1919, the organizations which carried forward revolutionary work among women.

The Foundations are Established

Following years of debate on the woman question, the 1896 Gotha Congress made major steps forward by passing a lengthy memorandum on the woman question and codifying the approach of the SPD to the organization of the female proletariat in an eight point program including demands for equality in suffrage, education and wages. The same congress passed resolutions affirming the need for special work among women and established the organiza¬tional rudiments for the work. This approach was reaffirmed at an international gathering the same year attended by about thirty socialist women from England, Germany, America, Holland, Belgium and Poland, which was held in conjunction with the International Congress of Socialist Workers and Trade Unions. The 1896 conferences underscored the essential counterposition of the bourgeois-feminist to the proletarian-socialist women's movement, proclaiming that the latter must be organized as part of the revolutionary proletarian movement because of the unbreakable connection between women's human and social position and the private ownership of property. These resolutions, embodying a revolutionary perspective, laid the basis for the work of the SPD on the woman question at the turn of the twentieth century and stood as models for the rest of the world socialist movement.

Special Organization for Women

The German party was particularly admired for its unique resolution of the organization question which reconciled the need for special work among women with the overriding importance of a unified proletarian party. It developed the conception of an internal division of labor in the party, consisting of a Woman's Commission or Bureau to oversee the work, combined with a separate organiza¬tion or "section" led and organized by the'party. Through special work directed at women, the section could extend the influence of the party to layers of proletarian women who might otherwise not join the movement. This form of organization had been developed after much discussion and was instituted only after much heated debate within the party. Because of the Laws of Association, which severely restricted the political activity of women and youth until 1908, separate socialist women's organizations, usually under the guise of "women's self-education societies," had been established; but leaders of this work insisted that special attention to work among women was necessary even in the absence of such oppressive legislation.

"If they [the women comrades] wanted to bring socialism to the mass of proletarian women, they had to take into account these women's political backwardness, their emotional peculiarities, their two-fold burden at home and in the factory, in short, all the special features of their existence, actions, feelings and thoughts. Accordingly, they had in part to adopt different ways and means in their work, and seek other points of contact, than the male comrades did in their educational and organizational work among the male proletariat."

—O. Baader, Report for the First International Conference of Socialist Women, Stuttgart, 1909

Later, members of the Russian Bolshevik tendency and socialist parties of other countries argued within their groups for special work on the German model consisting of a Women's Bureau, Committee or Commission to direct research, agitation and propaganda and produce special publications directed at women like the SPD newspaper Die Gleichheit.

"However, in all countries the vital victory in this argument .<>oes to the defenders of the German way of working —the fusion of the male and female halves of the working class in the party organisation, while retaining the separation and autonomy of agitation among the women of the working class."

—Kollantai, Women Workers Struggle for their Right*

The entire party organization was in the process of being strengthened and centralized during the late I890's and early I900's as the SPD became transformed from a small, illegal organization to a mass party. Partly as an expression of the growing preoccupation with electoral work, the loosely federated local groupings were urged to consolidate into regional organizations, generally contiguous with voting districts; however this was also a healthy attempt to construct a national party capable of united action. Representatives, known as Vertrauensmanner, had the task of linking the local groups to the Central Executive, and, as part of the organization of the female proletariat, provision was made in 1892 for specially elected female representatives in each area and a central representative to direct the work nationally and sit on the Central Executive. Because, in German, the word Vertrauensmann grammatically can refer only to a male representative, the party officially changed the word to Vertrauensperson.

Debate Over Bernstein's Revisionism

During this period of relative prosperity and social peace in Germany, debate in the party centered on Eduard Bernstein's revisionist theory of evolutionary socialism. Abandoning a materialist view, Bernstein regarded the democratic capitalist state not as an organ of class oppression to be overthrown but as an instrument to be mastered and utilized for the realization of socialism. According to this theory the need for the organization of the working class in particular disappeared, since members of all classes were deemed equally capable of developing their finer ethical instincts toward the achievement of socialism. In Bernstein's view, revolution was simply a disruption to flourishing, prosperous, democratic capitalism which, left undisturbed, could provide the proper environment for the development of man. Though Bernsteinism was voted down at the party congresses of 1899 and 1901, a tendency within the party continued to support his theoretical framework. Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht were in the vanguard of the fight against the revisionists, and they were joined at this point by the main party leadership, including even the members of the Reichstag fraction.

At the first of a series of bi-annual SPD women's conferences held in 1900, the revisionist minority again attempted to "popularize" Die Gleichheit and generally de-politicize the party's work among women, advocating emphasis on agitation around issues such as protection, the eight-hour day and social welfare legislation. These efforts were vigorously and successfully fought by Die Gleichheit editors and other leaders of the work among women, who advocated, not the exclusion of this type of agitational activity, but its combination with general political education and the continuation of Die Gleichheit as a highly political journal for the development of party cadre.

Since the party's efforts were totally mobilized for the 1903 Reichstag elections women, who were still denied suffrage, were specially organized for door-to-door and factory electioneering under the slogan "If we can't vote we can still stir." This work was viewed by the revisionist minority as the main task of the women's movement, especially after the resounding success achieved by the party in the elections that year. Eighty-one seats were gained with over three million voters, or 32 percent of the electorate, casting votes for the Social Democracy. The revisionist wing fought hard for a policy of reconciliation with the Liberal Party in the Reichstag but was opposed by the majority of the party, including the executive, at the party conference that year.

The Rift Widens

The impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the concurrent downturn in the economy brought strikes of unheard-of breadth, with half a million workers engaged in work stoppages during the year 1905 alone—more strikes than for the previous five years taken together and greater than the total for the I890's. In this context issues dividing the lefts from the revisionists, such as the use of the mass strike tactic, were debated as life-and-death questions. The trade unions, breaking with their former neutral stance,reacted openly against the spectre of "red revolution" and its advocates in the SPD, even to the point of urging those advocates to seek an outlet for their revolutionary energies in Russia! But still the anti-revisionists maintained a majority and the party passed a resolution at the 1905 congress at Jena declaring itself ready "under certain conditions" to resort to the use of general strike action. This conference was to be the last at which the anti-revisionist left wing included most of the party executive and was therefore able to win a majority on an important issue. One year later, the executive betrayed its own membership by concluding a secret pact with the trade-union leaders which not only denied any intention of fomenting a mass strike but further promised to try actively to prevent one to the best of its abilities.

Following a year of massive political strikes throughout Germany centering on suffrage reform, the executive pulled back in fear of the mass movement and maneuvered the passage of a motion at the 1906 Mannheim Congress which profoundly altered the relationship of the trade unions to the party. The resolution, declaring "parity" between the trade unions and the party on "matters of mutual interest," in fact gave the trade unions veto power over the party's actions and represented a decisive capitulation of the executive to the pressures of trade-union conservatism. As Luxemburg observed, the arrangement was reminiscent of that by which one spouse would seek to regulate life with the other: "On matters of question between us, when we agree, you will decide; when we disagree, I shall decide." Thus the tension between the party's leftist heritage and the pressures of trade unionism was officially resolved in favor of the trade unions, bringing the debate over reform or revolution back into the party— with a vengeance.

The Right Wing and the Woman Question

Not surprisingly, coincident with this rightward consolidation, debate on the woman question was renewed in the revisionist publication Sozialisiische Monatshefte.
Edmund Fischer, spokesman for the revisionists, innocently posed the question "... is it unnatural, socially unhealthy and harmful for women generally to work, a capitalist evil which will and must disappear with the abolition of capitalism?" In the guise of a new theoretical contribution, he answers: "The so-called emancipation of women goes
against the nature of women and of mankind as a whole. It is unnatural and hence impossible to achieve." Fischer,resurrecting the old, worn-out arguments from the I860's
as if the debate had never taken place, concluded: "Men's dependence on women must thus be at least as great as vice versa women's primary and highest aim in life, which is
deeply embedded in their nature as women, is: to be mothers, and to live for the care and raising of children, while as a rule only unmarried women want to have economic independence." This regressive, reactionary drivel was a clear reflection of the ascendency of the reformist, conciliationist right wing of the party and, although these positions were ruthlessly excoriated in the party press and particularly by Zetkin in the pages of Die Gleichheit, they served as the theoretical justification for the party's inevitable official reversal on the woman question which took place gradually in the years after the split.

Other conciliationist tendencies, connected with leaders who sided with Bernstein's revisionism or, later with Kautsky's center position, manifested themselves on the woman question. Luise Kautsky, for example, considered the matter of protection for women workers important primarily because the demand would act as "a battering ram for the protection of men."

Lily Braun, though a supporter of the revisionist wing, was the author of a fairly orthodox book, Die Frauenfrage (The Woman Question), published in 1901. Her rightward bent, however, went hand in hand with her actual approach to the work among women where she stressed collaboration with bourgeois women in the establishment of household cooperatives. A hostile relationship existed for years between her and Zetkin who, after 1906, refused to print her articles in Die Gleichheit.

The Battle Full Blown

But the right wing had little time for theoretical discussion on the woman question since the main battlefield, in its eyes, was the electoral arena where the party had recently achieved marvelous results. The left, in contrast, looked to the model of the Russian revolution and its reflections in the upswing of proletarian combativeness in Germany. For the left, the real success of the suffrage fight lay "not in the positive result but rather in the ever greater unification of the laboring masses, a unification which prepares the ultimate victory" (Zetkin quoted in Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism).

In the following years the factions debated methods of opposition to militarism and nationalism and the organization of the youth who, under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht, represented another intractable section of the party. Behind the right wing stood the trade-union leaderships who used as a club their manifest ability to win significant gains for (and thus lead large sections of) the working class. They played a decisive, conservative role not only in the mass strike debate and later in the party's abandonment of the anti-militarist struggle, but also in its suppression of the radical youth movement.

The Women's Work and the Radicals

The left maintained posts on the leading party bodies: Zetkin was a member of the powerful Control Commission; Luise Zietz was the representative of the women's organization on the executive and was the sole spokesman for the radical left in that important body; Karl Liebknecht was a member of the Reichstag fraction. Die Gleichheit was one of the major weapons of the left in these battles, as the radical grouping which later became the Spartacists crystallized within the heterogeneous anti-revisionist wing. The journal and the women's organization, firmly under the control of the radicals, were in the main responsible for the recruitment, education and development of female party cadres, and thus served as effective factional organizers. In fact, it was only the radical wing that devoted any energy to the special work among women although the importance of the work was still officially recognized by the SPD.
The years following the Mannheim "parity" resolution, 1905-1910, were politically stagnant for the proletarian movement as a whole, but for the women's movement they were years of dynamic growth. Female membership in the SPD grew from 4,000 in 1905 to almost 11,000 in 1907, although in these years official membership was still illegal for women and was therefore defined as participation in a study group or support group led by the SPD. After the modification of the laws in 1908 female membership spurted from around 25,500 to 82,700 in two years, while male membership almost doubled between 1905 and 1910. During the same period the circulation of Die Gleichheit rose from 23,000to 82,000 subscribers. These dramatic successes were due in good part to the rapid increase in the number of women in the workforce, providing a fruitful arena for the energetic work of the Woman's Section, which recruited through agitation around such questions as militarism and war, the growth of the military budget, rising food prices and suffrage, combined with revolutionary propaganda.

When the first International Women's Conference was held in Stuttgart in 1907, the German form of organization was extended internationally with the establishment of an International Bureau of Socialist Women of All Countries and the recognition of Die Gleichheit as the official organ of the international women's movement. While most of the debate was over war and militarism, a heated discussion also took place on the question of suffrage, indicating that the political polarization of the SPD was also becoming manifest in social-democratic parties of other countries. The Austrian representatives advocated delaying a struggle for female suffrage until universal manhood suffrage had been achieved. The German comrades led the fight against this conservative position, which was defeated at the Women's Conference and also at the International Socialist Congress held at the same time. Lenin, who followed the discussion carefully, commented on debate and quoted from Luise Zietz's speech:

"'In principle we must demand all that we consider to be correct,' said Zietz, 'and only when our strength is inadequate for more, do we accept what we are able to get. That has always been the tactics of Social Democracy. The more modest our demands the more modest will the government be in its concessions ' This controversy between the Austrian and German women Social Democrats will enable the reader to see how severely the best Marxists treat the slightest deviation from the principles of consistent revolutionary tactics."

—V.I. Lenin, "The International Socialist Congress In Stuttgart," Collected Works, Volume 13

At the Stuttgart International Congress there were sharp lines of demarcation between the left, represented notably by Luxemburg and Lenin, and the right wing, led mainly by Bebel of the SPD. Through a process of a compromising amendment, a resolution on war, containing the following memorable points, was passed:

"...first, that militarism was the chief weapon of class oppression; second, the task of agitation among the youth was pointed out; and, third, it was emphasized that the task of the Social Democrats was not only to struggle against the outbreak of war or for an early termination of a war which had already broken out but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie."

—Lenin, Proletarii, No. 17, 2 November 1907

Enormous suffrage demonstrations once again rocked Germany in 1910 and were met with aggressive agitation by the SPD. As before, the upheaval posed most strikingly the question of whether the SPD would attempt to lead the mass movement beyond the suffrage issue through general strikes and possibly insurrection or would pull back. This was the breaking point of Karl Kautsky, formerly a left ally, albeit to the right of the future Spartacists. The political geography of the SPD was now further complicated by the emergence of a center tendency led by Kautsky.

Die Gleichheit raised strong objection in 1912 when the SPD leaders effected an underhanded, opportunist electoral bloc with a bourgeois party that blurred "the clear lines of the principal struggle." Such open criticism of the party leadership's activity also appeared in Luxemburg's Lelpziger Volkszeitung. But these dissonant voices were drowned by the enthusiasm generated in the wake of the successful 1912 elections which gained the SPD 112 Reichstag seats.

Directly following this wave of enthusiasm, the party went into a slump from which it did not emerge until after the split of the broad left wing. Demoralization swept over the party rapidly since the ranks had learned to understand success in terms of votes, Reichstag seats and trade-union bureaucratic support. Party membership had increased from about 400,000 in 1906 to almost one million in 1912 with 34.8 percent of the electorate supporting the party at the polls that year. The comrades were shocked when the executive reported that the party had grown by only 1.3 percent in the year 1912-1913. Furthermore, the growth that did occur was due largely to the work of the women's organization (10,000 of the 12,000 recruits that year were women) and thus also represented a numerical strengthening of the left wing. The party press also suffered in the downturn, losing 12,830 subscribers that year. The only official party newspaper to show a circulation increase was Die Gleichheit, which had attained a circulation of 112,000 by 1912. In 1913-1914 there were 23,000 new subscribers to the official press of which 13,000 were new subscribers to Die Gleichheit.

1913 marked the de facto end of a unified SPD; it was the last year a unified party congress was held; it was the year the broad left wing established its own newspaper, Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz.

But this by no means ended the hegemony of the SPD over the advanced proletarian layers of Germany. The SPD was a mass party with 4,000 paid functionaries and 11,000 salaried employees publishing over 4,000 periodicals. The confidence of the working masses in "their" party could be threatened only by a felt betrayal of historic import; the reformist grip of the SPD could have been challenged only by an organized force of demonstrated leadership capacity. The betrayal came with the first gunshots of World War I; the challenge was the building of the Communist Party of Germany, part of the new Third International.

The Historic Betrayal

The outbreak of the First World War internationalized the political divisions in the Second International by posing before the sections of all countries an identical problem of overriding importance: how will the social democrats respond to the call for military defense of "their own" countries?

The decision of the SPD Reichstag fraction—supported by the executive and opposed within the fraction by only Liebknecht and one other delegate—to vote for war credits on 4 August 1917, was therefore a decision which deeply affected the response of the world proletarian movement to the war. The International majority, betraying its own speeches and proclamations (such as that of the 1907 Stuttgart congress) chose the path of "national defense." A minority of the Second International, however, maintained a proletarian internationalist stance, though the pressures of world events soon revealed the fissures within this minority. It was, above all, Lenin and the Bolsheviks who fought to organize the radical, antiwar social democrats of all countries under the slogan "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!"

As the struggle developed, the centrists' positions were less and less appreciated, especially by Lenin, who wrote in 1914:

"At present I hate and scorn Kautsky more than anyone else. What vile, cheap, self-conceited hypocrisy; nothing has happened, he says, principles have not been violated, everyone has a right to defend his fatherland; internationalism, don't you see. consists in having the workers of all countries shoot at each other'in the name of the defense of the fatherland.'"

-Letter of Lenin to Shliapnikov, 27 October 1914

Socialist Women Oppose the War

The women's movement played an important role in the faction fight. A majority of Die Gleichheit readers in Germany and a large proportion of women from other sections of the social democracy were sympathetic to the antiwar left. With this in mind, the Bolshevik Central Committee, through the editorial board of the women's paper Rabotnitsa. proposed to Zetkin in November of 1914 the calling of an unofficial socialist women's conference with the purpose of "draw[ing] the working women into the struggle against every kind of civil peace and in favor of a war against war, a war closely connected with civil war and socialist revolution." In January Zetkin replied, favoring a conference but protesting:

"First of all, it will be difficult to draw a line between the Lefts and the Rights, among the women. Many of them do not know themselves on which side they are; others will hesitate to make a decision: whereas still others will definitely refuse to take part in a conference of 'Left' women only [original emphasis].

Zetkin, Secretary of the Women's International, did call the conference and, along the lines suggested by the Bolsheviks, invited only those groups known to be antiwar. The conference took place in Berne, Switzerland in'March 1915, three weeks after a conference of Bolshevik exile groups held in the same place.

Berne Women's Conference

It was at the Berne conference that the political differences among the antiwar social democrats became clarified, particularly the divergence between the "goody-goody pacifism of the English and Dutch" (as Krupskaya put it) and the revolutionary militancy of the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership. But even more striking was the intense battle that was led by Zetkin, recognized leader of the socialist women's movement, on one side, and Krupskaya, behind whom stood the authority of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, on the other side. Zetkin, assuming the role Kautsky played in the SPD dispute, acted as mediator between right and left and thus came under the heaviest fire of all.

"The English delegation, with an obvious feministic tinge, asserted that all women in England, even bourgeois women and suffragettes, were against the war and wished for peace."

—Report of the Berne conference by Olga Ravich, member of the Bolshevik delegation

Clearly it was impossible to "mediate" between this position and that of the Bolsheviks which called for class war! It was therefore Zetkin, acting as the compromiser, who assured the defeat of the Bolshevik positions at the conference while, as Krupskaya reports, "everyone criticized our [the Bolshevik delegation's] 'splitting' policy."
The Bolshevik resolution (written by Lenin who closely followed the proceedings from nearby) included a call for legal and illegal revolutionary activity by the masses, exposing the lies of the national chauvinists and an open break with the official social-democratic leaders. But the mainfesto which was adopted declared in part:

"In these difficult days the socialist women of Germany, England, France and Russia have assembled. Your miseries and your sufferings have touched their hearts. For the sake of the future of your loved ones they call upon you to act for peace. As the will of the socialist women is united across the battle fields, so you in all countries must close your ranks in order to sound the call: peace, peace!"

— Manifesto of the International Conference of Socialist Women, Berne, 1915

Naturally the Bolsheviks were disappointed with the outcome of the conference though, as the first truly international meeting of antiwar socialists to take place since the war's beginning, it was also recognized as an historic event. The Bolsheviks evaluated the conference as "only a timid, irresolute step, but life will push them ahead and will take what is due it." This proved to be prophetic.

The State and the SPD Move Against the Left

During the year 1916 most of the leaders of the left, including the 70-year-old Franz Mehring, were jailed on various charges. The same year, Liebknecht was expelled from the Reichstag fraction for breaking discipline by voting against war credits; Zietz was expelled from the executive; Zetkin was forced to resign her post as Die Gleichheit editor. The last was an enormous victory for the right wing which for years had tried to silence this powerful mouthpiece of the opposition. A letter was published in issue No. 16 which gloatingly related:

"In our area Die Gleichheit has lost almost all its subscribers. Our women don't want it at all. Even before the war, the articles were unpalatable for the great majority of women workers. We need a popular women's magazine."

Later the new style of the publication was defended in the
following manner:

"Generally speaking, the magazine was also eagerly read, but it became increasingly evident as time passed that the majority of women, especially the new ones streaming in, did not understand it, since the style of Die Gleichheit presupposed great intellectual experience on the part of the reader. Corhrade Zetkin, who is owed a great deal by the women's movement, wrote the magazine in a manner that did not do justice to the needs of the masses who had no intellectual or political background. Only a relatively small number of women comrades could entirely follow Comrade Zetkin's style and thought processes. U Itimately, however, a large number also came to disapprove of her political views. The result was a decline in women's interest in Die Gleichheit, and a simultaneous drop in the circulation of the magazine."

— Die Gleichheit No. 20, 1919

The "popularization" of Die Gleichheit did not go unnoticed by the Women's International movement. At the Informal Socialist Women's Conference at Stockholm in September 1917

"A strong protest was raised against the shameful suppression of Gleichheit, a blow against the Women's Socialist International. That this was not a Platonic protest could be seen from the fact that according to reports from various countries the women comrades have begun to raise money for a new Gleichheit.'"

-Official Report of the Sessions, 14-15 September

On New Year's Day 1916, the first national conference of the Spartacus group was held. Its program drew sharp lines between its policies and those of the official SPD.

"Not unity, but rather clarity on every point. No gentle tolerance —not even in the'opposition.' rather the sharpest criticism, an accounting down to the last penny. Through merciless disclosure and discussion of differences, to unanimity on principles and tactics, and therewith to capacity for action and to unity."

After the second congress of the lefts, the SPD expelled its entire left wing in January 1917. Having abandoned the struggle against capital, the social democracy also necessarily abandoned the struggle for the liberation of women and all the oppressed. It was left to the inheritors of revolutionary Marxism to carry forward the battle in the Third (Communist) International, 1919-1923. •

*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Early Communist International

Click on the headline to link to "Workers Vanguard", dated August 3, 2007, for the article on the subject noted above.

This March marks the 91st anniversary of the founding of the Communist International, a world historic event from which in its early days we can still learn many lessons. Forward!

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"People Get Ready, There's A Train A-Coming"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Bob Dylan performing the classic Curtis Mayfield song, "People Get Ready".

Markin comment:

I could not find a Chambers Brothers version on "YouTube". That groups's version is where I first hear the song.

February Is Black History Month

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

"People Get Ready" Lyrics

People get ready
There's a train a-coming
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don't need no ticket
You just thank the Lord

People get ready
For the train to Jordan
Picking up passengers
From coast to coast
Faith is the key
Open the doors and board them
There's room for all
among the loved the most

There ain't no room
for the hopeless sinner
Who would hurt all mankind just
To save his own
Have pity on those
whose chances are thinner
Cause there's no hiding place
From the Kingdom's Throne

So people get ready
for the train a-comin'
You don't need no baggage
you just get on board !
All you need is faith
to hear the diesels humming
Don't need no ticket
you just thank, you just thank the Lord

Yeah
Ooh

Yeah
Ooh

I'm getting ready
I'm getting ready
this time I'm ready
this time I'm ready

*From "The Rag Blog"- 'Afghanistan:Telling The Wolves FromThe Sheep- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry for a little off-beat, but on point, way of looking at Afghanistan.

Markin comment:

Of course, the best way to resolve all of this to fight, and fight hard around our slogan- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan! And do so in Washington on March 20th, for starters.

*From The "Green Left Global News" Blog- Black Agenda's Glen Ford Kicks Obama's Shins

Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left Global News" video entry of Black Agenda's Glen Ford at MIT earlier in February.

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- On American Genocide And Haiti- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry, "American Genocides:Is Haiti Next?"

*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- The Shay Rebellion In American History

Click on the headline to link to a "Renegade Eye" entry for the Shay Rebellion in American history.


Markin comment:

The Shay Rebellion, like all those other inconvenient events down at the base of society in American history that are under-reported or not reported on at all, got short shrift in my American history classes back in the day. And this is an event that occurred right here in Massachusetts. As I mentioned recently in reviewing the late radical historian Professor Howard Zinn's little book, "A People's History Of The United States", it took much time, effort and trolling through many sources for me to put together the American plebeian and working class story in my youth. The Shay Rebellion, by the way, is one of the stories that the good professor wrote about, as well.

*From "The Rag Blog"- " History Of Relations With Iran- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry concerning the history of Western, mainly American, relations with Iran.

Markin comment:

At the end of the day, as the war clouds thicken in Washington and in other NATO capitals over Iran, it seems almost certain that we will be defending that benighted country against some form of overt American-led imperialist action. For now though- No To Sanctions! Hands Off Iran!

*From The "Rise!Resist!Revolt!" Blog- A Budding Working Class Poet?

Click on the headline to link to a "Rise!Resist!Revolt!" blog entry that contains two poems.

Markin comment:

I am always, always, always a sucker for any kind of poetic expression coming from the working class quarters, or from their allies. Now I take Leon Trotsky's position on the weight of "proletarian culture" in the historic process but, for now, keep on putting your words together and sing your song out there.

*The Boston Anti-Authoritarian Movement (BAAM)Newsletter #31 Is Out

Click on the title to link to the latest Boston Anti-Authoritarian Movement (BAAM) "Newsletter". (#31)

Markin comment:

As always, I disclaim any political kinship with this newsletter. However, I have many times found interesting articles there. This issue has a good article on the struggle in Greece. And, in any case, it is always good to see what the younger militants are up to.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Fight Around "No Platform For Fascists" In Britain- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard", Number 952, dated February 12, 2010,article,"Britain: Fascists Feed On Labor Party Racism".

Markin comment:

It is always important for communist militants to get the position being polemicized in favor of here, "No Platform For Fascists", right. On some issues there is, even within our narrower communist perspective of driving the class struggle forward, more than one possible right way to look at the situation. This is not one of them. We have nothing to "debate" with the para-military thugs, or rather we will "debate" them in the streets when, and if, the time comes. One of the most painful, and dearly bought, lessons that we have learned from the communist struggles of the 20th century is that this rabble has to be stopped in the egg. While almost everyone, including communists, prefers to work in a democratic environment we are are under no obligation to defend the rights of fascists to do anything. One of the problems in the United States, and this comment extends to Britain as well, is that we have lived in a relatively democratic society for so long that we have gotten "soft" around some of these issues of who our enemies are, and what they will do to us if they ever get a chance. We must not give the fascists that chance.

I will invoke a little personal history here to make a point. I do not know if it was some working class instinct, or just growing up in a place in society where the working poor and the lumpen elements from whom the fascists recruits their "shock troops" intersected but I have always had a visceral hatred for the fascists. Even when I was nothing but an up-and-coming young liberal politico on the make I always disagreed with the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) so-called absolute defense of free speech that also encompassed the rights of fascists to that privilege. The most graphic example of that in my youth was their defense of George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazis, to spew his garbage. Later, during the 1970s the ACLU went on to disgrace themselves further by defending the right of fascists to march through heavily Jewish, heavily Holocaust survivor Skokie, Illinois. My blood still runs cold just thinking of that even today. And if anyone needs any further reminder of what we are are up against- Remember Germany 1933(and 1923, for that matter, when Hitler first raised his head and the German revolution that could have changed things around failed to materialize paving his way forward), Remember Greensboro, North Carolina 1979, and Remember our slogan-Never Again! "No Platform For Fascists"!

*Notes From The Old Home Town- On "Now" Photos From Classmates-Ouch!

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Iris Dement performing "Our Town".

Markin comment:

Okay, okay I know this is not related to the song mentioned at the top of the story but I just wanted an excuse to listen to my "Arkie Angel".

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Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying, drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?

******

This comment was provoked by viewing a number of "now" photos of fellow old geezer classmates. As I noted in the headline-Ouch!

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On “Now” Photos- For Robert F.

“’Cause I’ve memorized each line in your face and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me”-a line from the folksinger/songwriter Iris DeMent’s hauntingly beautiful song, “After You’re Gone”. (You can Google for the rest of the lyrics. Some of her music is on “YouTube but I could not find this one.)

Well, of course, those lyrics only apply to our male classmates. After all Iris is singing about her gone man. I do not, age of sexual equality or not, want to extend their application to our sister classmates because I do not need to have every cyber-stone in the universe thrown at me. But those same lyrics do bring me to the purpose of today’s entry. As part of getting a 'feel’ for writing about the old high school I peruse the class profiles and a number of you have placed your current photos there, although a number of people, including myself, are apparently camera-shy. Some, however, like the, to be polite, bleary-eyed Chase brothers are not at all shy. (By the way, Jimmie and John, and others as well, what is up with the hats? We are Kennedy-era boys and hats were not part of our uniform.) Or like the born-again "muscle man", Bill Cady, formerly mentioned in this space as the slender, silky-strided, gracefully-gaited class star runner. That little fact forms the basis for my comment.

I have to admit that I have been startled by some of the photos. Many of them seem to have been taken by your grandchildren just before their naps. Isn’t the digital age supposed to have made the camera instantly user-friendly? Why all the soft-focus, looking through a fish tank kind of shots. And why does everyone seem to be have been photographed down the far end of some dark corridor or by someone about six miles away? Nobody expects Bachrach-quality photos but something is amiss here.

In contrast, a new arrival on this photo scene, Robert Flame, has found just the right approach. Initially, Robert placed a recent shot of himself on his profile page. Frankly, the old codger looked like he was wanted in about six states for “kiting” checks, and maybe had done a little “time”. More recently, however, his page has been graced with a stock photo provided by the site, a tastefully-shot, resplendent, wide old tree. Wise choice. Automatically I now associate Robert with the tree of life, with oneness with the universe, with solidity, with the root of matter in him, and with bending but not breaking. Moreover, I do not have to suppress a need to dial 911, but rather can think of Robert as one who walks with kings, as a sage for the ages. And nothing can ever erase the story that tells to me.

*Notes From The Old Home Town- The "Long March"

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Jerry Lee Lewis performing his classic, "High School Confidential". Wow! And why not.

Markin comment:

Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer.
Go figure?

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This little number is a "tribute" to the fact that this year is the 50th anniversary of our graduation from middle school (then called junior high school) Ouch!

On “The Long March” From The Old High School

No, this will not be one of those everlasting screeds about the meaning of existent, the plight of modern humankind or our trials and tribulations since leaving the friendly confines of the old high school those many years ago. We have been down that road before in this space and, moreover, this is a lite-user site and cannot stand that kind of weighty matter. Nor is it to be an exegesis on the heroic “long march” of the Chinese Red Army in the 1930s, although that is an interesting story. For that you can turn to the old time journalist Edgar Snow’s eye-witness account, “Red Star Over China”. Today’s entry is much more mundane, although come to think it, in its own way it may have historic significance. The “long march" in question is the one that some members of the class took from the old high school over to the new junior high(now Middle School) in the 7th grade.

Recently I have sent out a blizzard of e-mails to virtually anyone on the class lists that I could by any stretch of the imagination call upon to help me out with a problem that I am having. So some of you already know the gist of this entry and can move on. For the rest, here is the ‘skinny’:

"... I will get right to the point, although I feel a little awkward writing to classmates that I did not know at school or have not seen for a long time. I, moreover, do not want to get tough with senior citizens, particularly those grandmothers and grandfathers out there, but I need your help. And I intend to get it by any means necessary. As you may, or may not, know over the past couple of years I have, episodically, placed entries about the old days at the old high school on any class-related Internet site that I could find. Some of the entries have come from a perusal of the 1964 “Manet", but, mainly from memory, my memory, and that is the problem. I need to hear other voices, other takes on our experience. Recently I have been reduced to dragging out elementary school daydreams and writing in the third person just to keep things moving. So there is our dilemma.

The question of the “inner demons” that have driven me to this work we will leave aside for now. What I need is ideas, and that is where you come in. This year, as you are painfully aware, those of us who went to the Junior High (now Middle School) are marking our 50th anniversary since graduation. Ouch! So what I am looking for is junior high memories, especially of the “long march” from the old high school over to the then new junior high when we were in 7th grade that I remember hearing much about at the time. I was not at the school at that time, having moved back to the old town in the spring of 1959 so I need to be filled in again. However any story will do. If this is too painful then tell me your hopes and dreams. Hell, I will listen to your frustrations. From back then. I already ‘know’ your nicks and bruises since graduation; we will leave that for another day. Better still write them up and place them on the message boards on your own.

And what if you decide not to cooperate. Well, then we will go back to that “any means necessary” statement above. Do you really want it broadcast all over the Internet about what you did, or did not do, at the beach, Squaw Rock, or wherever I decide to place you, and with whom, on that hot, sultry July night in the summer of 1963? No, I thought not. So come on, let us show future generations of cyberspace-fixated old high school graduates that the Class of 1964 knew the stuff of dreams, and how to write about them. And seek immortality. Friendly regards, Markin"

*On The Question Of The Occupation Of Haiti- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "WBUR" NPR entry concerning the role of the American military in the dire humanitarian situation in Haiti.


Markin comment:

This situation requires almost daily monitoring in order to evaluate (or rather, reevaluate) the question of the call for American troops withdrawal from Haiti.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bob Dylan's "Only A Pawn In Their Game"-In Honor Of Slain Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Bob Dylan performing "Only A Pawn In Their Game" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963.

February Is Black History Month

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Only A Pawn In Their Game

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.

A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music