From The Marxist Archives-In Celebration of International Women’s Day

Workers Vanguard No. 932	13 March 2009

TROTSKY

LENIN

In Celebration of International Women’s Day

(Quote of the Week)

International Women’s Day originated in March 1908 when the mainly immigrant female needle trades workers marched in New York City to demand an eight-hour day and women’s suffrage. A mass outpouring of women on International Women’s Day in Petrograd in 1917 sparked the revolutionary upheaval that culminated in the Russian October Revolution—the greatest victory ever in the struggle for women’s emancipation. In 1920, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underscored the fact that the fight for women’s liberation is an integral part of the fight for proletarian revolution.

The Soviet government is the first and only government in the world to have completely abolished all the old, despicable bourgeois laws which placed women in a position of inferiority to men, which placed men in a privileged position, for example, in respect of marital rights and of children. The Soviet government, the government of the working people, is the first and only government in the world to have abolished all the privileges of men in property questions, privileges which the marriage laws of all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic, still preserve.

Wherever there are landowners, capitalists and merchants, women cannot be the equal of men even before the law.

Where there are no landowners, capitalists or merchants, and where the government of the working people is building a new life without these exploiters, men and women are equal before the law.

But that is not enough.

Equality before the law is not necessarily equality in fact.

We want the working woman to be the equal of the working man not only before the law but in actual fact. For this working women must take an increasing part in the administration of socialised enterprises and in the administration of the state....

The proletariat cannot achieve complete liberty until it has won complete liberty for women.

—V.I. Lenin, “To the Working Women” (21 February 1920)

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Leon Trotsky

Political Profiles

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Greetings to
Mehring and Luxemburg

(March 1916)

ON February 27 Franz Mehring was 70. The most outstanding publicist of German Social-Democracy and at the same time a brilliant historian of its ideological and political development enters his eighth decade in the epoch of the cruellest crisis of world socialism and above all of German Social-Democracy itself. And let us say at once if Mehring is dear and close to us now then it is not as a historian and an honoured publicist of German socialism. The ground is too warm under the feet of all of us to look back and evaluate people according to their historical merits; we have unhesitatingly broken with too many “honoured” figures not as from ideological opponents but as from political enemies. If the historian of the inner struggles of German Social-Democracy is so close to us now then it is because in the present struggle of today he courageously and without hesitation has taken up the position which we consider the post of socialist duty and revolutionary honour. From the very beginning of the war Mehring spoke out in numerous articles and speeches against that treachery, hastily reinforced by the reigning eunuchs in the party courts, which bears the exquisite title of “Civic Peace”. Together with Rosa Luxemburg he published one issue of the journal Internationale, whose very name was at once a programme and a challenge to the party policy of August 4. In the period of the threatening collapse, of the apostasy of some and the passive limpness of others, Mehring’s attack on the policy of the “party court of instance” provided invaluable support for the awakening opposition on the left wing which is now the genuine bearer of the honour of the German proletariat.

In this struggle together with Mehring there stood Rosa Luxemburg who now, after a year’s imprisonment has returned to freedom – to the new struggle. The trenches of militarism dug by the ruling classes have separated both of them, Mehring and Luxemburg, from us. But in this single struggle which we are waging against the class state covered in fresh blood and new condemnations and against its masters, its defenders and its fervent slaves, Mehring and Luxemburg are on one and the same side of the trench which cuts across the whole capitalist world.
In the persons of Franz Mehring and Rosa Luxemburg we greet the spiritual kernel of the revolutionary German opposition with which we are linked by an indissoluble brotherhood in arms.

Nashe Shlovo, No.53, March 3, 1916