On International Women's Day - From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy
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. •
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. •
