Zetkin with Volga German workers at “Sarpintrest” in Krasnoarmeysk. 1925.
A substantial essay by Clara Zetkin tracing the historic successes and failures of the Socialist International in support of women’s emancipation in an effort contextualize the then differences that existed between the Communist International and the Second in the post-war period. From one who was there.
‘The Surrender of the Second International in the Emancipation of Women’ by Clara Zetkin from Communist International.
Vol. 6 Nos. 9-10. April, 1929.
THE inaugural congress of the Communist International in March, 1919, in Moscow, proclaimed to the world proletariat the historical role of proletarian women as a revolutionary force without whose conscious participation in the class struggle capitalism cannot be overthrown, Communism cannot be realised. The congress declared: “This congress of the Communist International maintains that the success of all the tasks which it has set itself, the final victory of the world proletariat and the complete abolition of the capitalist order of society can only be assured by the united struggles of the men and women of the working class. The dictatorship of the proletariat can only be realised and maintained with the active and willing assistance of working women.”
This declaration implies the recognition of complete equality between man and woman, and the duty of all national sections of the C.I. to draw all women workers into the fighting proletarian front and to train them for their great historical struggle with the bourgeoisie. It was put forward by the Russian women comrades who took part in the congress. Because of the tremendous difficulties in the way of traveling to the Soviet State at that time, the number of delegates was small, and no women delegates from the west were present. But apart from that it was no accident that it was the Russian women comrades who took the initiative in this matter.
Russian social democracy, led at first by Plekhanov and Axelrod, took up a revolutionary Marxist attitude on the question of women. It supported the efforts of the parties and organisations of the Second International to remain true to these principles, to lead the proletarian women in a united fight with men workers, to take up a clear and vigorous attitude towards those problems and tasks of women’s emancipation which were of importance to the working class movement. The Russian social democrats were not daunted by the obstacles and dangers of Tsarism, and tried as far as possible, in spite of that cruel regime, to carry out their principles. Unselfishly and not unsuccessfully—strikes prove this—they worked to carry on propaganda among and organise working women, particularly those in the factories, and to make them trained workers in the moment. This is particularly true of Lenin and his associates. It is significant that the first pamphlet in the Russian language for working women was written by Krupskaya in Siberia, when she was sharing Lenin’s exile. The pamphlet “Woman and the Woman Worker,” appeared anonymously in February, 1901 and was given such a wide circulation by the illegal organisations that a second edition was issued in August.
THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE ORGANISATION OF WOMEN
After the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the Bolshevik Party energetically continued the work of revolutionising and organising working women. Thanks to Lenin, their work was carried on with a very close observation of events and developments within the Second International, and in the capitalist countries generally, and educated the Russian women who were drawn into the movement in the spirit of international solidarity. Here is one example. In contrast to the Mensheviks, the Bolshevik Party organised International Women’s Day, decided on by the International Socialist Women’s Conference at Copenhagen in I910, as a united demonstration of men and women. The Bolsheviks demanded the convening of the International Socialist Women’s Conference at Berne in March, 1915, the first international action taken against the imperialist war and in favour of compelling peace by the international class struggle of the proletariat, directed always to its principal object, the overthrow of capitalism.
As in the pre-war years, so during the war the Bolshevik Party organisations worked to enroll proletarian women in their ranks. Their efforts in this direction were intensified after the February-March revolution, when Lenin had returned to Russia; and, with an increasingly strict examination of the realities of the situation, the activity of the Party was consciously and energetically directed towards the revolutionising of the masses and the seizure of State power. Lenin was profoundly and passionately convinced that the class struggle of the proletariat could only succeed if its battles were fought by men and women together. For him, the readiness of the revolutionary women workers of Petrograd was one of the signs which indicated that the armed struggle for the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship could be attempted, indeed, in the given circumstances, had to be attempted.
It is an undisputed fact that the women of Russia have brilliantly justified Lenin’s appreciation of their historical importance. Their heroic activity in the storm-swept weeks of Red October, and in the period of sacrifice and privation which the young Soviet State experienced, fighting the native and foreign counter-revolutionaries, adorns a page of imperishable glory in the history of revolutions and in the history of their sex. They merited and achieved what the Soviet State, in accordance with the principles of its Bolshevik creators, brought to them: the legal recognition of their complete freedom and equality.
These well-known facts throw a bright light on the nature of the Communist International, in so far as that body is the protagonist of complete emancipation for women, in which respect it is sharply differentiated from the Second International. In this struggle for emancipation through the revolution, the C.I is moving forwards. It is led with the clear and conscious desire to rally the Communist women’s movement in all countries into one organisation, united in principles and objects. This does not mean their dissociation from the revolution, which alone can bring freedom. It means rather the enrollment of women as equals, with equal duties, in the fighting proletarian ranks. In its attitude to the woman question, in its support for women’s rights and interests, the Second International shows a reactionary development. After the first years of hopeful development of the struggle came the retreat from social revolution to reformism, and hopes for an extension of the rights and diminution of the handicaps of women were dashed to the ground. Claims put forward for women’s rights showed lack of principle, lack of unity, confusion, cowardly submission to the power of the bourgeoisie, collaboration with them to maintain and strengthen capitalist society, in which women have as little opportunity for full human development and social freedom as the proletariat.
THE DECLARATION OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
The inaugural congress at Paris in 1889 of the Second International, like the Communist International at Moscow in 1919, proclaimed the necessity of drawing proletarian women, as equals, into the emancipation struggle of their class. The resolution was put forward by one of the two women delegates from the German social-democrats, after a lively discussion by the German delegation. The initiative, therefore, came from that party in the Second International which was at that time fighting hard against bourgeois society, against the bourgeois state of the “fatherland.” This Seht had drilled into the German social-democrats, with pitiless logic, a Marxist recognition of the importance attaching to the convinced participation of women in the proletarian class struggle. Similarly, the declaration at the inaugural congress of the Communist International came from a party which bore the honour and burden of the revolutionary vanguard of the world proletariat, from the Bolshevik Party. But what a difference between the nature and objects of the struggle in 1889 and 1919! What a difference in their historical significance! In 1889, the German social-democrats on the eve of their victory with regard to the anti-Socialist laws, were the champions of the international working class. The struggle raged around the freedom of action and movement of the proletariat, the Bolshevik Party in 1919 had won the first great victory of the world revolution, had overthrown and crushed capitalism in the largest European State, had established the class dictatorship of the worker. It often seems to our passionate, impatient hearts, that historical development creeps along, lazily, sleepily, in felt slippers as it were. In the short space of the 80 years between the Paris and Moscow Congresses, it hurried forward with gigantic strides, and at last with a daring leap. The historic task of the proletariat is no longer the struggle for the political preliminaries to the fight for the overthrow of capitalism, but the overthrow of capitalism itself, the proletarian world revolution. The very places where the Congresses were held indicated a changed historical situation which had shifted the central point of the workers’ fight from Western to Eastern Europe, and had placed the young Russian proletariat instead of the working classes of the most highly developed industrial countries, at the most difficult, most exposed posts.
It was obvious that this development must find expression in the work of the Second and Third Internationals for the emancipation of women. At the Paris Congress the demand for the complete equality of women with men was put forward, while at the same time the exclusive right of men to the “professions” was energetically defended, a principle which still claimed many adherents in capitalist countries. The winning over of working women to the industrial and political struggles of their class was demanded in a declaration which also contained the assurance that these women would steadily and joyfully do their part in these struggles and win their equality as fighters for socialism. The inaugural congress of the Second International greeted the declaration with stormy applause, but it did not support the declaration with any decisions which would have obliged the political and industrial organisations to work vigorously along these lines. It was left to the socialist parties and trade unions of the separate countries to turn this undisputed principle into practice, to whatever extent they liked.
This was typical of the attitude of the Second International to the problems of the women’s movement, which faced the workers in all capitalist countries. It took no initiative in the theoretical clarification of the problems or practical carrying out of the work. It did nothing towards promoting unity in principle or unity in action. In general, the parties and organisations affiliated to the international considered that the fight to win women to the working class struggle, and for their emancipation, was purely a woman’s affair.
This work in almost all countries, was accompanied by an obstinate struggle with the most trivial philistine prejudices against the emancipation of women; in many instances— as at times in Germany—this struggle was aggravated by laws and administrative measures prohibiting the political activity of women. Many socialist leaders were strongly in favour of a united fight of men and women workers in the rank and file of the organisations; for example Bebel in Germany, the great champion of women’s rights and women’s emancipation, Guesde in France, Turati in Italy, Keir Hardie in England and Viktor Adler in Austria. Others observed the growing struggle and its results with a gentlemanly calm, while still others tried to hinder its development on principle, or for other reasons.
WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
As things were, it can be imagined that the proletarian women’s movement in the socialist parties and trade unions, was more or less permeated by bourgeois ideas of women’s rights. Capitalism’s great progress forced the Second International to differentiate between the proletarian and bourgeois women’s movements. It urged women workers to fight for comprehensive legislation covering labour protection, and included in this the question of special legal protection for women workers. The strongly feminist women’s organisations in the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain, and leading women socialists in Belgium, Holland and Germany combated special labour protection for women as an attack on the equality of women, as a slight cast upon women’s rights to economic independence and social emancipation. Their resistance, based upon a misconception of the importance of class contradictions in the world of women, placed them, against their will, in the same camp as the capitalists, and made the fight of the organised workers more difficult. At the suggestion of the German and Austrian women comrades, the 1893 Congress of the Second International at Zurich took a decision on this disputed question. It declared in favour of comprehensive special legislation for women workers and drew a sharp distinction of principle between the proletarian and bourgeois women’s movements.
The following Congress of the Second International held in London in 1896 defined this most urgent distinction between the two movements. This step, too, was taken on the initiative of women comrades. German, Austrian and English women socialists convened a conference of women delegates present at the Congress, which resulted in a proposal in favour of the principle of the common organisation of men and women of the working class. It demanded the organisation of women with their men fellow workers, in the appropriate trade unions, the winning of politically active women workers to the socialist parties, which were called upon to conduct a vigorous struggle for the abolition of these laws prohibiting women from joining political organisations and taking part in their activities. It expressly rejected the adherence of proletarian women to feminist organisations. The proposal was accepted. This followed from the position of the class struggle, for the splitting of forces, made itself felt injuriously at times in industrial disputes, and the organisational mix-up of bourgeois ladies and working women prevented a clear class consciousness and kept the exploited in moral and political dependence upon some of the exploiters. The rallying of proletarian women to their class, their training in its industrial and political struggles was having its effects in the various countries. This determined the attitude of women comrades from the different countries to the questions dealt with by the Congresses of the Second International at Paris in 1900 and at Amsterdam in 1904.
THE FIGHT FOR ENFRANCHISEMENT
A decisive step forward was taken by the Stuttgart World Congress in 1907. For most of the parties in the Second International, the struggle for a democratic franchise was extremely urgent. At various times since the Russian revolution of 1905, the workers had urged their parties to use new and sharper fighting methods, such as the mass strike. In such a situation it was natural for the women too, to put forward their claim to full political rights. The position of the socialist parties on this question was neither clear in principle, nor unified. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark and England—apart from the S.D.F.—and partly in Holland, the Socialists flirted with the feminist franchise movement. In Catholic countries they avoided as far as possible, from fear of the powerful priesthood, the working women’s demand for political rights, or, as in Belgium, rejected it because of their alliance with the liberals. The strong Austrian social-democratic party was in favour of women’s enfranchisement on principle, but had entirely excluded this demand from their splendid election programme, which reflected some of the fire of the Russian revolution. This exclusion was justified on opportunist grounds, as promising an easier victory by its omission, and many leading women socialists agreed to this.
Again it was the socialist women who forced the Second International to take a decision in this matter. The German social-democratic women insisted upon the Stuttgart Congress discussing the question of women’s franchise thoroughly. After detailed and often very stormy debates in the Commission which had been set up, and at the full meeting, a resolution was agreed to, which proposed the calling of the first international socialist women’s conference. It also called upon the socialist parties to include the fight for the enfranchisement of women in their franchise struggles, making them the fight for universal adult suffrage without distinction of sex. Any limited form of franchise for women was to be rejected. The resolution expressly pointed out that women’s enfranchisement was only one element in the struggle for the complete equality of the two sexes, which could be won, not by a struggle between the sexes, but in the proletarian class struggle against the bourgeoisie, for only through socialism could that objective be realised. The Second International, by this decision, dissociated itself utterly from bourgeois feminism, for political equality is the main basis of feminism. At the same time illusions as to the value of the vote, of formal political democracy, were discarded. The discussion on this question aroused passionate dispute between the Marxists and opportunists. On this Lenin wrote: “In the question of women’s franchise, revolutionary Marxism scored a victory over Austrian empiricism.”
PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE FAMILY
The Second International did not define its attitude towards the far-reaching, involved complex of questions dealing with the civil rights of women, particularly family rights. But the socialist parties, in parliament and publicly, fought strenuously against male privileges in the family, and for the full liberty and equality of women in family matters, as they did when the question arose of the reform of the marriage and divorce laws of the legislation of the unmarried mother and illegitimate child. There was, however, no thorough discussion of these questions—including sexual relationships—although a clear understanding of the inter-dependence of the form of the family, the system of production and private property, the interdependence of economy and morals, is essential to an understanding of the nature of bourgeois society. However much these questions may influence the lives of individual workers, however great may be the importance—both theoretical and practical—to the working woman of the legal equality of the sexes in family matters, for the proletariat as a class the main question is that of the public, the political rights of women, which will directly affect the struggle against the capitalists and against bourgeois society. But apart from this, it is certain that a large dose of philistinism helped to determine the attitude of the parties of the Second International towards these questions, which thus failed to receive a thorough and comprehensive Marxist discussion. They feared all the chatter about “free love” and “women’s societies.” And so the analysis of these questions was left as the private affair of individual socialists rather than as a Party matter. It was characteristic of the parties of the Second International that they also failed to discuss thoroughly the questions of birth control. Sharply opposed by the Marxists, they allowed the indisputable right of the working woman to limit her offspring, like the wealthy woman, to be used for the revisionist preaching of a sort of neo-Malthusianism, which recommended the proletariat to keep their families small as one means of waging the class war and improving their conditions.
THE FIRST SOCIALIST WOMEN’S CONFERENCE AND THE FUTURE OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
In such circumstances the women’s movement grew up alongside the socialist parties and trade unions in the various countries. And, naturally enough, that movement bore the traces of its early environment. Apart from the general enthusiasm for socialism, it was, considered as an international whole, a mixture of theoretical uncertainties and organisational varieties, strongly influenced by feminist ideas. Unity in idea and action was at times lacking nationally, as well as internationally. But out of the disputes and conflicting opinions about the woman question, and the enrollment of women workers in the ranks of their class comrades, a process of clarification and unification arose, the leader in this development being the socialist women’s movement of Germany with their paper, “Equality.” These socialist women also took the initiative in calling the first Socialist Women’s Conference at Stuttgart in 1907, which was joyfully welcomed by the socialist women of the countries represented at the second International. Apart from the resolution on women’s franchise, its most important result was the decision to set up regular contact between the socialist women’s movement of the different countries through the columns of “Equality,” which was to become an international organ, and to have an international secretary. International relations stimulated the growth of the movement. The Second International Socialist Women’s Conference at Copenhagen in 1910 decided on unified international action—the celebration of International Women’s Day. The Second International displayed benevolent tolerance towards the efforts of women socialists to establish, on an international scale, and on a unified basis, the participation of proletarian women in the class struggle. The progress achieved was essentially the work of women themselves.
Thus the Second International called into being a mass movement and mass organisation of women workers. It roused large numbers of them to class consciousness, and so to a recognition of their importance; courageous and confident, sharing as equals in the organisation and struggles of their class. But, having accomplished this, it failed to give them a sound theoretical and organisational basis on which they could carry out united international action. Its incompetence to carry out this historical work was due to its own looseness of organisation and lack of a clear and determined will to united action, based on definite principles. In the end in the world war, it betrayed, besides its general historical duty, its special duty to the working women of the world, by fighting for imperialism instead of for socialism. This betrayal had cast the shadow of death on the Second International at the Congresses at Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Basle. At the decisive moment it did not stand at the head of the proletarian masses, but like them, allowed itself to be carried along by economic events, instead of advancing beyond them mentally, and guiding the will of the working class in a clear, international, revolutionary fight against capitalism. The betrayal of international proletarian solidarity meant that the Second International had ceased to be the champion of women’s emancipation and equality. From being a power which menaced capitalism, it became one which supported it, and only by the annihilation of the capitalist order can working women cease to be slaves. In the post-war years, particularly during the revolutionary period, the Second International continued its shameful work of treachery.
THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL AND THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN
From its very inception, the Third International continued the work for the emancipation of working women which the Second had begun, but which it had finally betrayed. This was carried on with a full realisation of the higher stage of historical development reached in objective social conditions and in the conscious activity of the proletariat in the Russian revolution. The stage which had been reached determined the aims put forward.
It is the duty of the Communist International to hammer into the consciousness of the proletarian women of all countries that the material social conditions for their emancipation are in existence, and that it is their work to carry out, in close unity with their class comrades, the changes in society which will bring freedom. In other words, the C.I. must concentrate the knowledge, the will and the activities of the women masses on the proletarian revolution, must draw them in to the fighting ranks of the world proletarian vanguard which, sure of its road and of its goal, is pressing forward irresistibly against bourgeois society. To prepare for and ensure international unity of action on the part of men and women for the overthrow of capitalist society is the international working out of the idea, the knowledge that bourgeois society is one of slavery, that Communism will bring freedom, that there exists the historical possibility, the historical necessity of abolishing capitalism and realising Communism. The “Directions for the International Communist Women’s Movement” should help to establish unification in idea and action. They are guides on tactics and principles, for active, leading women militants and Communists, not agitation material for working women who have still to be roused and mobilised. They deal with principles and programmes. Their starting-point and central theme is the contention that the basic cause of the social and personal enslavement of the female sex is private property in the means of production, and that consequently women will only be able to attain full freedom and equality when the means of production become social property. The contradiction between the Haves and the Have-nots, arising from private property in the means of production has, under the capitalist system of production, reached its last and highest form in the class contradictions of bourgeoisie and proletariat, which also have their inexorable effect in regard to women.
In the fifteen years which have passed since the outbreak of the imperialist world war, consistent and thorough reaction has characterised the attitude of the Second International, patched up and thoroughly renovated, towards the women’s movement. The great external, numerical progress in the organisation of socialist women emphasises the decline in the objectives and content of the movement, in its position with regard to the most important problems which crop up. The internal decay is inevitable, irresistible. It is the historical complement of the treachery to the revolution and the proletariat by the parties and organisations of the Second International. This treachery began on the outbreak of war, continued throughout the early post-war years, when the objective situation was ripe for the revolution and conditions favourable to proletarian victory, and lasted through the period of coalition governments.
The Socialist Parties of the new Second International, by renouncing the Marxist theory of social development, by putting reform in the place of revolution, bourgeois democracy in the place of proletarian dictatorship, class collaboration in the place of irreconcilable class struggle, support and maintenance of the bourgeois order of society in the place of its overthrow, had put off the social and personal emancipation of women to the Greek Kalends.
It should be noted, however, that the most advanced social-democratic women in many countries resisted this development longer than the working masses. In Berlin 1915 a delegation of organised social-democratic women forced an entry into the Party committee in order to bring before its notice a resolution which sharply condemned the social-patriotic attitude of the Party Committee and Reichstag fraction as a surrender of their principles, and demanded an immediate return to the principles of the class struggle and international socialism, and a fight for peace. The present Chancellor, Hermann Müller, now so warmly extolled by the democrats, was at that time the Party secretary, and tried, by most undemocratic methods, to prevent the women comrades from gaining access to the “Party fathers.” He learnt then that even working women have fists, which they didn’t keep in their pockets. Intense indignation of socialist women against the betrayal of socialism was expressed internationally, and was eager to be translated into action.
The Socialist International Women’s Conference at Berne was attended by women from Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Russia, Poland and Switzerland, and declarations of solidarity were sent from other countries, including Bulgaria and Serbia. The delegates from Germany and France had, by coming, committed a breach of Party discipline, and the action of the German women delegates was not only “outlawed” by the Social Democratic Party Committee, but reported to the Government. In all countries socialist women were in the vanguard of the struggle against the war; here and there, despite the difficulties and dangers, combating unflinchingly the social-patriotism of the Social Democratic Parties. In Germany the Spartakus Bund counted a large number of energetic and willing women among its adherents, many of them quite young.
Many of these women who, during the war, stood bravely by their socialist principles, are now working in the rank and file of the Communist International. Others have learnt nothing from the experience of 1914 and onward, and have forgotten what they knew of revolutionary Marxism in the pre-war years. As a whole, the women’s movement in the Second International to-day shows strongly marked tendencies of becoming more and more bourgeois. In sharp contrast to its most promising and glorious advance in the pre-war years, it has now ceased to be an organ of the revolutionary proletarian class struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and capitalist society. It has given up the work of leading the working women masses, in the foremost ranks and the thick of the fight, in the political and economic struggles of the proletariat; it has given up the work of examining, eagerly and thoroughly, the problems arising from the woman question, which are problems of the working class and their emancipation as a whole. It has degenerated into an organ of the corrupted socialist parties and trade unions which, under the deceptive slogans of “Democracy in State and Economy,” “Industrial — Peace,” “Realisation of the State Idea,” are serving the class rule of the bourgeois, thus maintaining, and even intensifying, the exploitation and oppression of working women by monopoly capitalism and rationalisation. It has degenerated into being the tool of the chauvinist, social-imperialist, reformist Labour parties which, while chanting gently of peace, League of Nations and disarmament, are furthering preparations for a new world murder, a new war against the only Workers’ State. This is shown in the women’s newspapers of the Second International, and reflected in the Women’s International Conferences.
THE HAMBURG CONFERENCE, 1923
The character and course of the first of these conferences was symptomatic of the surrender. It took place in Hamburg at Whitsuntide, 1923, in the light shed by the Unity Congress of the Second and Second-and-a-Half Internationals, from which the old Second International emerged with the new superscription, “Labour and Socialist International.” Between the last Women’s Conference of the Second International at Copenhagen in 1910 and this Congress of women socialists at Hamburg, violent, historical, world-shattering events had occurred: the struggle for power among the imperialist States, then still being fought out in the Ruhr occupation, the revolution in Russia, the five years’ existence and activity of the first proletarian State, among whose very first acts were the call to peace and the legal recognition of the complete liberty and quality of women. No word in review of the past, no examination of the present, no glance towards the future. Only two incidents indicated that, outside the Congress, the world was moving in stormy times, in which the old was fighting the new. Despite the abjuration to deal with “political questions,” which should have been the real subject of the conference, these women, a Menshevik, a social-revolutionary and an Ukrainian, reported, with as much falsehood as sentimentality, on the “shocking situation of women in Russia.”
Nor was the temperamental appeal of the German delegate Lore Agnes, that the conference should decide its attitude to urgent political questions, particularly to the Ruhr occupation, which affected the lives of working women so deeply, granted. The following questions were on the agenda: The political franchise for women, mother and child protection, the re-establishment of international women’s day, education in the idea of peace. These problems were decided on resolutions brought forward without any thorough discussion, and like the reports and discussions they lacked any trace of principle, of the materialist conception of history corresponding to scientific socialism. The words and ideas of “struggle” and “fighting” had practically disappeared from the Conference, the word “revolution” sullied no lip, “socialism” was mentioned vaguely in the resolutions, in the style of the old fairy tales, “Once upon a time…”
What was germinating at the Hamburg Conference, although quite obvious there, appeared more openly at the following Women’s Conferences of the L.S.I. The international socialist movement had no longer as its aim the participation by the working women masses in the seizure of power by the proletariat, in the transformation of bourgeois into socialist society by means of the revolutions. It dreamt of a peaceful “development” into socialism, and tried to install the exploited and enslaved as comfortably as possible in present day society. By betraying the basic ideas of revolutionary Marxism, the Second International lost its correct attitude towards reforms within capitalist society, and also lost the will—after it had lost the power—even to force their modest demands for the equality of women by putting up a fight for them.
The Hamburg Conference and its successor at Marseilles in 1925 ignored the hotly contested decision of the Stuttgart Congress concerning women’s franchise. They compromised the character and object of the franchise, its sharp distinction from bourgeois democracy and feminism. According to the Hamburg resolution the importance of women’s franchise consisted wholly in this, that it enabled “reforms to be carried out and the class struggle to be waged successfully.” With what object, their courtesy to bourgeois society and coalition policy prevented them from saying. The franchise was considered as the only means of political activity. “Women cannot do the share of the work falling to them, so long as they are denied active and passive suffrage.” Before the war the German social-democratic women had declared with pride and fighting spirit, “We don’t need to vote, but we know how to fight, and we are fighting, fighting for the speedy overthrow of capitalist society.”
At Marseilles, political equality for women, particularly female enfranchisement, was hailed in true feminist fashion as equivalent to the complete social emancipation of women. Frau Juchacz, that great admirer of bourgeois democracy, demanded votes for women “constitutionally, as the men have the vote.” That is, limited in those countries where the bourgeois constitution limits the votes of workers according to their money-bags or social privileges, or withholds it entirely from them. The crowning contradiction and betrayal of principle occurs in the surrender of the omnipotent women’s franchise when this demand exceeds the capacity, when in office, of socialist parties, or endangers their alliance with the liberals. The British delegation requested the Conference to define its attitude towards the infamous treachery of the Belgian socialists who had voted against the Bill for women’s suffrage put forward by the clericals. This attack was avoided by the Conference determining to keep rigidly to the agenda.
THE QUESTION OF THE LEGAL PROTECTION OF WOMEN
The rationalisation of capitalist industry makes thorough and comprehensive legal protection for women workers a matter of the utmost urgency for the working class as a whole. The effects of rationalisation and the Stabilisation of the rule of monopoly capitalism make legal protection of, and social provision for, mother and child absolutely essential. The effects of the imperialist war and the Strengthening of capitalism greatly increase the workers’ need of social help, the need of the war victims, the unemployed, the smallholders, the cripples, the aged. This, too, concerns women and women’s rights. The women’s conferences of the Second International at Hamburg, Marseilles and Brussels (August, 1928) dealt with these questions as they arose under various headings, and the main result was tearful, sniveling gossip about hunger, suffering, “humanitarian” principles and reformist rejection of the working-class struggle.
The Hamburg Conference set the tone for the social policy of the Second International. It limited its demands with regard to the protection of woman worker, mother and child to the wretched extent of the wretched decisions of the Washington Conference, and even these have never been put into execution by capitalist governments. The Marseilles Conference did not step beyond this magic circle, and declared with unrestrained joy that, thanks to the rule of democracy, necessary reforms, based on “humane” principles, would be carried out. The Brussels Conference obediently took up the same position, and unanimously agreed, that the question of legal protection and employment of working women must be considered from “the point of view of production and society.” What was meant by that phrase is expressed somewhat less bombastically and mystically in the report of the Economic Commission of the L.S.I., which condemns the ruthlessness of rationalisation, but is of the opinion that in the future, since it will of necessity be carried out further, it will favourably affect the working class. The report does not deny that “rationalisation condemns the worker to premature incapacity for work, resulting from the extreme strain of work,” nor that it leads to “terrible unemployment.” The report also refers to the approaching danger of war, and finally holds out the hope of a socialist future, for which rationalisation, trusts and monopolies are creating, at an accelerated rate, the foundations. On the example of the Christian slave morality—be patient and suffer, you will be well repaid in heaven.
The Brussels women’s conference declared that “detailed demands, far-reaching demands cannot be put forward to-day in view of the technical progress and other causes which limit the production and distribution of goods.” The working woman must be satisfied if economic and parliamentary democracy bestows upon her the blessing of an eight-hour day or 46-hour week. They abstained, with difficulty, from expressing the sinful opinion that working women must fight together with working men for the most necessary demands, and for more than that. They were obviously convinced, as the Amsterdam International Trade Union Women’s Conference at Paris in July, 1927, declared, that the dangers and evils of women’s work to-day “can only be overcome by the organisation of women in trade unions,” that is, without any fight against the capitalist bosses in the factories, etc.
A great abundance of words and wishes at the Brussels Conference served to hide the inactivity of the Second International on the question of mother and child protection. Even the long list of wishes only contained the demands put forward at the Washington Conference, and did not mention the necessity for subsidising nursing mothers, or for establishing, at the employer’s cost, creches attached to the factories. In the opinion of the conference, the poor employer should be guarded against expense, without reference to the fact that he is squeezing surplus value out of the labour of men and women. All the costs arising from the institutions and measures taken for the social care of mother and child are to be met by “public means.” The Brussels Conference obviously had not been told of the secret that the masses, exploited as producers, are, as citizens in a democratic State, the largest taxpayers; and was equally unaware of the obstinate truth that every reform must be fought for by the proletariat, and that the parties of the Second International “professionally” drop the demands for social provision and care of mother and child in the period of “socialist” ministries. The reformist women at Brussels lived by the wisdom preached at Marseilles, that reforms in favour of the working woman will fall into her lap as the gift of humanity and parliamentary legislation.
Formerly, the characteristic phenomenon of capitalist exploitation of industrial women workers was the flight of workers’ children from this best of all possible worlds, the huge infant mortality rate in the working class. In the age of rationalisation and stabilisation, with its increasing burdens for the working woman, this is accompanied by a rapidly falling birth rate, which is apparent in all capitalist countries. The question of birth control, of legal abortion and contraception, is of extreme urgency. At the meeting of the women’s committee of the Second International Secretariat at Cologne in December, 1927 a strong desire was evident to have these questions discussed as a separate item on the agenda of the Brussels Conference. This was resisted by the women representatives of the British Labour Party, whose leaders are opposed “to making this matter a Party matter, for that would wound the deeply religious feelings of a large number of people.”
Obedient to MacDonald’s piety, the Portsmouth National Women’s Conference of the Labour Party decided not to declare its attitude to birth control.
The Brussels Conference was not so virtuous. It had to do something about it. But in order to prevent any too sharp manifestation of the contradictory opinions in the women’s movement of the L.S.I. to appear, it avoided a discussion of the question, and contented itself with a resolution on birth control, signed by representatives of twelve parties and some individual delegates, including those from the I.L.P. Just as the resolution indicated the lack of unity of opinion on this question, so its content betrayed the lack of a thorough discussion of the problem from the standpoint of historical materialism. It did not state clearly the necessary connection of the problem with the order of society based on private property, it made no sharp distinction between its own ideas and neo-Malthusianism. In fact, a Czecho-Slovakian delegate prefaced the resolution with a purely neo-Malthusian statement. The Conference betrayed its cowardice and insincerity by maintaining silence, in dealing with the protection of women workers and of mother and child, about the exemplary institutions and measures in the Soviet Union.
“THE PEACE IDEA”
In its attitude to the war danger, the women’s movement of the Second International —just like all its organisations—showed indubitably that it is standing solidly with the class enemy, whose rule makes full emancipation for women impossible. With the humanitarian coat of many colours— “Education in the peace idea”—the Hamburg Conference withdrew from the proletarian class struggle against imperialist war on to the less dangerous ground of squabbles with nationalist schoolmasters and protests against chauvinist textbooks. Marseilles followed with an illuminating step—backwards. One item on the agenda was “the fight against war.” It was the time of French imperialism’s atrocious war on the Riffs in Morocco. A deputation of working women wished to find out the attitude of the Conference towards that war. The Conference refused to see the delegations or to give it an answer. The delegation “smelt of revolution,” of Communism. It had been formed on the initiative of Communist women.
But the British delegates, too, lacked the intelligence to refrain from requiring a statement of the Conference concerning the Moroccan war; regardless of the fact that the international unity of the reformist sisterhood would thereby suffer a great shock. The French Socialist Party had voted the credits for the war and dissociated itself from any mass protest. The expert tacticians of the Conference steered clear of this second, and graver cross-examination of their verbose pacifism. They maneuvered the British suggestion into the dark room of a commission, which brought forth a high-falutin and inoffensive resolution against any war “from whatever side it may arise.” Stripped of its pacifist phraseology, this means rejection of civil war and of revolution, and war against so-called “red imperialism,” against the Soviet Union.
The Brussels Conference also dealt with the fight against war dangers and war. The military laws drawn up by the socialist, Paul Boncour, included the “mobilisation of women.” Like a young lady in love for the first time, the delegates reveled in hopes of the League of Nations, the disarmament conferences, the pacifists’ prayers for peace, and, chiefly, in the power of the “mothers’ ballot box,” to stop the armament-mad imperialists. With pacifist platitudes, they condemned the mobilisation of women for war purposes as prescribed in Boncour’s law. The French delegate, Saumoneau—once a convinced opponent of imperialist war—upset this pacifist jubilation. She justified the mobilisation of women, national defence being the duty of all, and extolled the progress made in the establishment of equality for women, although she comes from a capitalist State which denies the franchise to women. In opposition to Saumoneau, the conference held out pacifist illusions: for along with the Second International as a whole, it believed in “defence of the fatherland.” How, then, could the Conference reply: mobilisation of women—why yes, indeed— but never on behalf of the capitalist State. Mobilisation against the capitalist State, and for the civil war, for the revolution. The conference uttered no word of sympathy for the national freedom movements of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples, for revolutionary China, no word of sympathy for the awakening women of the East. It kept silent about the peace policy of the Soviet Union, expressed in Litvinov’s proposals at the farcical Geneva Conference, proposals which were warmly welcomed even by bourgeois pacifists. The women’s conference shared in the ignominy of the Brussels world conference of the Second International which, in an appeal to all nations, declared the readiness of the L.S.I. “to defend the Soviet republic against the hostilities of capitalist governments,” but at the same time called upon the workers of the Soviet Union to protect democracy against “political despotism.”
After its resurrection as the Labour and Socialist International, the Second International still remained a confused structure organisationally, and this applied too, to the women’s movement, both nationally and internationally. In comparison with the pre-war period, there is better contact between it and the executive of the International, as also with the national organisations. The Hamburg inaugural congress rejected the proposal of previous conferences that a woman should sit on the executive bureau, but it agreed to establish a women’s committee to maintain contact. This committee was first regularly constituted in 1927, and consists of fifteen representatives from different countries, with a presidium of five at the head. The women’s committee meets at least once annually. Its work is to unite the women’s movement in the different countries, to supply information to the executive secretariat, and to arrange the international women’s conferences. International co-operation is, therefore, not very strong. This is true, too, of international action on the part of the national women’s movements, as in the celebration of International Women’s Day, which was decided upon at Hamburg. It was found to be impossible to keep that day the same for all the affiliated countries. The parties in the Second International were hostile to this. In Austria and England, in the last few years, International Women’s Day has been very well kept by the reformists. But how changed is its character! It is no longer an advance of united revolutionary forces against the capitalist order, it is reformist window dressing, in which socialist gestures are used to hide from the exploited and enslaved women the pious bourgeois reality.
Although the Second International has betrayed, not only the claims of peasant and working women to full social emancipation, but also their most elementary immediate demands for bread, justice and liberty, it still deceives and befools large numbers of them. The International Women’s Socialist movement is undoubtedly a strong and rapidly growing power, helping to protect capitalism against revolution. At the Brussels Conference 915,000 politically organised women were represented, while the reformist trade unions have 1,6870,000 women members. In every report, the German and Austrian parties show an increasing female membership. “Armoured cruiser” Chancellor Muller’s party, at the end of 1928, counted 198,771 women among its almost a million members.
These imposing figures suggest clearly advantageous external circumstances. In those countries where the socialist parties and trade unions are friendly and obedient assistants of the exploiting and ruling bourgeoisie, their leaders and active adherents sit on legislative and administrative bodies; they help to decide on the distribution of posts and on the administration of social insurance, welfare institutions, etc. Where women have political rights, their reformist leaders have their share of these privileges. The organisations in the Second International consequently have at their disposal, for work among the women masses, a large staff of active women, who are not, as at one time, persecuted by the authorities and outlawed by bourgeois opinion, but envied and socially influential. This assures to the social democratic parties and trade unions a large access of women members and adherents, as well from proletarian as from middle class circles.
But besides these facts there exist others which must not be overlooked in the effort to overcome the paralysing, deceptive influence of the Second International on working women. These are women among the leading and active reformists who, through many years of activity, have gained wide experience, great ability and knowledge; who have an intimate acquaintance with the conditions of life, the needs and the psychology of the masses, and who enjoy personal confidence. The majority of the women members of the reformist organisations are not petty bourgeois, but proletarian, although in any case we must not forget that at the present stage of the class struggle, not only working and peasant women, but also the lower middle class women must be drawn into the struggle against capitalism, under whose exploiting and enslaving system they live.
But above all, the working women—and not only the labour aristocracy—are in their feelings and ideas, reformist and not revolutionary. That is the real reason why they are led by the Second International, which daily sacrifices their interests, which helps to protect and maintain bourgeois society, which denies and destroys their humanity. To lengthen the life of such a society, the Second International has given up its earlier struggle for the complete emancipation of women in favour of a despicable sham fight. Only under the banner of the Communist International can, and will, that emancipation be realized.
The ECCI published the magazine ‘Communist International’ edited by Zinoviev and Karl Radek from 1919 until 1926 irregularly in German, French, Russian, and English. Unlike, Inprecorr, CI contained long-form articles by the leading figures of the International as well as proceedings, statements, and notices of the Comintern. No complete run of Communist International is available in English. Both were largely published outside of Soviet territory, with Communist International printed in London, to facilitate distribution and both were major contributors to the Communist press in the U.S. Communist International and Inprecorr are an invaluable English-language source on the history of the Communist International and its sections.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/ci/vol-6/v06-n09-n10-apr-1929-CI-riaz-orig.pdf
