Clara Zetkin, born on this day in 1857, was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and feminist, active in the revolutionary Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Clara Zetkin was born in Wiederau, a peasant village in Saxony, now part of the municipality Königshain-Wiederau. Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zurich in 1882 then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator.

Zetkin was very interested in women's politics, including the fight for equal opportunities and women's suffrage, though always through a socialist paradigm. She helped to develop the social-democratic women's movement in Germany; from 1891 to 1917 she edited the Social Democratic Party (SPD) women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality). She also contributed to International Women's Day (IWD).

Around 1898, Zetkin formed a friendship with the younger Rosa Luxemburg that lasted 20 years. Despite Luxemburg's indifference to the women's movement, they became staunch political allies on the far left of the SPD. Luxemburg once suggested that their joint epitaph would be "Here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy."

In August 1932, despite having recently fallen gravely ill in Moscow, she returned to Berlin to preside over the opening of the newly elected Reichstag. There, she gave a speech urging Germany to reject fascism, stating "all those who feel themselves threatened, all those who suffer and all those who long for liberation must belong to the United Front against fascism and its representatives in government".

When Hitler seized power the following year, Zetkin once again fled Germany, dying in Moscow in 1933 at the age of 76.

"The working women, who aspire to social equality, expect nothing for their emancipation from the bourgeois women's movement, which allegedly fights for the rights of women. That edifice is built on sand and has no real basis. Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question."

  • Clara Zetkin

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  • Sinister [none/use name, comrade/them]B
    ·
    1 year ago

    It wasnt a genocide since it was mostly kazakh and russian peasants dying due to a natural drought exacerbated by the civil war, Ukrainians just used it to whine about how they should be allowed to kill jews, because they got killed as well.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      It wasn't a genocide because at no point was there any desire or intention on the part of the Soviet government of killing Ukrainians or anyone else. The famine arose from a number of complex causes. Primarily the severe drought of 1932, but also ongoing conflict with kulaks, mechanization, and serious government failures. The most sober analysis that aren't anti-communist madness agree that the Soviet government bears responsibility for much of the dead and starvation, but this was due to failures of governance and administration and was never intentional or deliberate.

      It's important to be clear on this - ~3 million people did die, the Soviet Government likely had the ability to significantly mitigate the famine and failed to do so. But the famine was not deliberate, the Soviet government did act to provide relief, albeit too late to prevent many of the deaths, there was a very severe drought. There were ongoing conflicts related to collectivization and sabotage from Kulaks. There were serious failures of administration, especially in communication between levels of government and in the distribution of relief supplies.

      The famine happened. It was very bad. The Soviet government bears a great deal of responsibility for the suffering. However it was not intentional and the "Holodomor" narrative is fascist propaganda to de-legitimize the Soviet government, minimize the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi murder of millions of non-Jewish people, and further fascist and anti-communist agendas.