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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  • Tachanka [comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    it's just double genocide theory. natural famines must be painted as manmade famines in order to make the soviets "just as bad as the nazis." It's part of the "totalitarian" pillar of liberal ideology that says fascism and communism are both the same thing because they're illiberal and authoritarian. It's very convincing to people with a shallow knowledge of history, but every bourgeois accusation is a confession. While Stalin was exporting soviet grain to Bengal, Churchill was deliberately starving them. While all of Europe was signing non-aggression pacts with Hitler, Stalin was suggesting an anti-fascist alliance. When this failed, only then did he sign the molotov ribbentrop pact to buy time and move critical infrastructure further away from where the nazis were going to eventually invade. So liberal ideology relies on deliberately misinterpreting these events by omitting key facts (ukrainian famine was natural drought, not manmade, MR pact was strategic, not ideological).

    Also Stalin exported more grain back to ukraine during that famine than Ukraine had recently exported to russia. so there was food aid. and that food aid was a net surplus compared to exports, so it wasn't purely symbolic.

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