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
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Monthly queer thread
- 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- ⭐️ October Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes struggle sessions over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
- 💙Comprehensive list of resources for those in need of an abortion -- reddit link
- 💙Resources for Palestine
Theory:
First, I'd like to discuss their genetics. Their genetics are like ours, based on DNA. This fact was very puzzling for me when I first learned about it. We imagine that beings from an alternate biosphere would have genetics based on a completely foreign biochemical system and surprisingly, this is not the case. Several conclusions can be drawn from this surprising revelation. The one that immediately comes to mind is that our biosphere and theirs share a common ancestry. They're eukaryotes, which means their cells have nuclei containing genetic material. Which suggests that their biosphere would have been separated from ours sometime after the appearance of this type of organism. The term Exo-Biospheric-Organism is actually a misnomer, but as it's a historical term, it's still used. Their genetics are not only based on the same genetic system, but they’re also even compatible with our own cellular machinery. This means that you can take a human gene and insert it into an EBO cell, and that gene will be translated into protein, and this of course works in reverse with a human gene inserted into an EBO cell. There are important differences in post-translational modifications that will make the final protein non-functional, but I'll discuss these later. Their genome consists of 16 circular chromosomes.
... following sequencing of their genomes, we noticed a troubling and universal characteristic in the 5' of the regulatory sequence of each gene which we call the Tri-Palindromic Region. The TPR are 134bp sequences containing, as its name suggests, 3 palindromes. In genetics, a palindrome is a DNA sequence that when read in the same direction, gives the same sequence on both DNA strands. They serve both as a flag and as a binding site for proteins. The three palindromes in the TPR are distinct from one another and have been poetically named "5'P TPR", "M TPR" and "3' TPR". The TPR is composed (in 5' - 3' order) of 5'P TPR, 12bp spacer, Chromosomal address, 12bp spacer, M TPR, 12bp spacer, Gene address, 12pb spacer and 3' TPR. The chromosomal address is composed of 4 bp and is identical in each TPR of the same chromosome, but distinct between each of the 16 chromosomes of the genome. The Gene address is a 64bp sequence that is unique for each gene in the whole genome. It's therefore understandable that the TPR serves as a unique address not only for numerically identifying a gene, but also for identifying its chromosomal location. For those with only a basic knowledge of genetics, this is completely unheard of. No living thing in our biosphere has this kind of precise address in its genome. Once again, the presence of TPR cannot be explained by evolutionary pressure but only by genetic engineering on a genomic scale.