At a time of a historic militarist shifts by imperialist powers, we propose in this article to re-appropriate some of the debates between Marxism and revolutionary feminism before the First World War. Although the situation is not the same, these theoretical and political struggles offer a valuable lesson for articulating a class-independent and revolutionary position today.
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In August 1910, the International Conference of Socialist Women, organized by Clara Zetkin, met in Copenhagen. During this conference, more than 100 delegates from 17 countries voted in favor of establishing an international day to celebrate women’s struggles. The congress debated various issues related to women workers’ rights, women’s education, and the fight against the impending war. On March 19, 1911, a demonstration for International Women’s Day was held for the first time in Berlin, with more than 30,000 demonstrators. A few years later, it was moved to March 8, a date we still commemorate today.
The next International Women’s Conference was scheduled for 1914, but it could not take place due to the war that shattered Europe. Clara Zetkin was at the forefront alongside Rosa Luxemburg in the fight against imperialist war. Both belonged to the left wing of German Social Democracy and rejected the SPD’s (Social Democratic Party of Germany) support for the war. When the SPD parliamentary bloc approved war credits on August 4, 1914, they formed the “Spartacus League” with others and published the magazine ” Die Internationale.” In the second vote in the German parliament in December of that year, Karl Liebknecht was the only Social Democratic MP to refuse to support the war machine with his vote.
In March 1915, despite enormous difficulties, Clara Zetkin and the Russian revolutionaries organized the first International Women’s Anti-War Conference, attended by 29 delegates from the belligerent countries. This meeting was of particular historical importance because it was the first international gathering where socialist women activists were able to come together against the world war. The Berne Conference adopted a manifesto, printed by the thousands for clandestine distribution in several countries. Upon her return to Germany, Clara Zetkin was accused of treason and imprisoned.
In September of that year, the Zimmerwald Conference (held in a small town in Switzerland) brought together 40 anti-war socialist delegates from 11 countries. At the meeting, a right-wing pacifist wing refused to break with the chauvinist leadership of their own parties. The revolutionary tendency, represented by Lenin, the Spartacists, and Trotsky (Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, then imprisoned in Germany, were unable to attend the conference), was riven by disagreements. Trotsky would later say 1Leon Trotsky, “Paris and Zimmerwald,” in My Life , 1929. that Lenin had the most radical position, proposing the slogan of “transforming the present imperialist war into a civil war.” A slogan that was not accepted as such by the Conference. A joint manifesto written by Trotsky was subsequently published, which was a step forward in the unification of the internationalists and laid the foundations for the future International. The manifesto states that “the war that has caused all this chaos is the product of imperialism. It is the product of the will of the capitalist classes of every nation to live by the exploitation of human labor and the natural resources of the planet.” 2The Zimmerwald Manifesto.
In the spring of 1916, anti-war discontent began to spread among working-class people. On May 1, large demonstrations were held in Berlin. Karl Liebknecht was one of the most anticipated speakers and delivered one of his most iconic speeches in which he stated that: “The main enemy is in our own country.” 3Ibid. The demonstrations were heavily repressed, and Liebknecht was eventually arrested. The next day, more than 50,000 metalworkers demanded his release. A few months later, the workers of Turin revolted against the war. In Spain, a general strike broke out in December 1916. Times were changing.
War and the International
In 1914, the illusion of a gradual and peaceful development of capitalism was shattered by the World War. The Social Democratic parties had argued at several congresses that in the event of a war between powers, workers would refuse to fight and would call for a general strike.
The resolution of the 7th Congress of the International in Stuttgart (1907) clearly stated:
“Wars between capitalist states are, as a rule, the result of competition on the world market, as each state seeks not only to secure its existing markets but also to conquer new ones. The subjugation of foreign peoples and countries plays an important role in this. These wars are also the result of the incessant arms race of militarism, one of the main instruments of domination by the bourgeoisie and the economic and political subjugation of the working class.”
The Congress stressed that in the event of a threat of war, “it is the duty of the working class and its parliamentary representatives in the countries concerned (…) to do everything possible to avoid the outbreak of war by the means they deem most effective, which will naturally vary according to the intensification of the class struggle and the general political situation.” And if war could not be avoided, “it is their duty to intervene to bring it to a speedy end and to use all means to exploit the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses and thus accelerate the fall of the rule of the capitalist class.” 4Ibid.
However, opportunist tendencies were developing within the social democratic parties. Rosa Luxemburg had signaled this very early on. First in her polemics with Bernstein’s revisionism, then in the debates on the general strike, which led her to oppose not only the right wing of social democracy, but also Kautsky, who led a “centrist” wing.
A long period of economic growth and a low level of class struggle since the defeat of the Paris Commune had gradually led the SPD leadership to adapt to the “routine of parliamentary and trade union tactics.” The quest for good electoral results increasingly pushed the party to moderate its rhetoric, so as not to lose the middle-class electorate. A powerful bureaucratic apparatus had consolidated within the party and the unions, and Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first socialists to oppose it.
On the issue of militarism, Luxemburg wrote two articles in May 1911 entitled “Pacifist Utopias.” In these articles, she not only polemicized with those who defended the escalation of militarism by European states, but also criticized sectors of the Social Democratic parliamentary bloc that had made ambiguous speeches in the German Bundestag, advocating a kind of “partial disarmament.” These positions were closer to bourgeois pacifism than to revolutionary internationalism. In these texts, Luxemburg asserted that the issue of militarism could not be separated from the struggle against imperialism, as it was linked to the colonial question, nor could it be separated from the struggle against capitalism. In this sense, she asserted that the idea of achieving “a little ‘peace and order’ in the capitalist world market is as impossible and petty-bourgeois a utopia as thinking about crisis restriction and arms limitation in international politics.” 5Ibid.
In November 1912, the 9th (Extraordinary) Congress of Basel reaffirmed the principles of socialist internationalism and launched the slogan of “war on war” against the “universal madness of the arms race.” But at the decisive moment, in August 1914, social democracy chose to align itself with the interests of the capitalists of each country.
While Luxemburg had denounced the emergence of an opportunist bureaucracy within the Second International very early on, it was Lenin who drew the most radical conclusions in 1914 regarding the need to break organizationally with opportunism and create independent revolutionary organizations. He emphasized this in his text “The War and Russian Social Democracy” from October 1914.
In the years that followed, Rosa Luxemburg focused her activities on propaganda against the First World War, which led to her being accused of being a “traitor” and serving several prison sentences. Between January 1915 and November 1918, she spent almost all of her time in prison in Germany. In 1916, she published “The Crisis of German Social Democracy,” known as the “Junius Pamphlet” because of the pseudonym under which she signed it. It was a heartbreaking denunciation of the catastrophe of the war and the disaster of the Second International.
“Shameful, dishonored, bathed in blood and dripping with mud: this is how we see capitalist society. Not as we always see it, playing roles of peace and righteousness, of order, philosophy, ethics, but as a howling beast, an orgy of anarchy, a pestilential vapor, devastating culture and humanity: this is how it appears to us in all its horror. And in the midst of this orgy, a world tragedy has occurred: German Social Democracy has capitulated.”
The slogan “socialism or barbarism” translated into reality into a war in which millions of people died. For Luxemburg, socialism is not a destiny predetermined by history; the only “inevitable” things are the calamities that would accompany the capitalist crisis if the working class failed to achieve a progressive outcome. “If the proletariat fails to fulfill its tasks as a class, if it fails to achieve socialism, we will all crash together in the catastrophe.“
Women Against War
With the advent of World War I, the women’s suffrage movement — like the socialist movement — divided between those who adopted the policies of their own imperialist states and those who defended an internationalist position. In England, the main suffrage organizations adopted patriotic positions and set aside the fight for women’s suffrage. The trade unions and the Labour Party joined the fever of national unity, suspending workers’ struggles until after the war and declaring a “social truce.” This was “social peace” that was offered to the bourgeoisie with the collaboration of labor bureaucracies, trade unions, and the main organizations of the women’s movement. Two leading figures in the suffragette movement, Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, led campaigns for military enlistment and encouraged women to collaborate with their own imperialist government. To illustrate this shift, the WSPU’s newspaper, The Suffragette, was renamed Britannia.
However, not all socialist activists followed this path. Silvia Pankhurst broke with her sister and mother to lead the fight against imperialist war. Her newspaper, “The Dreadnought,” had a circulation of 20,000. Its columns denounced poverty, prostitution, women’s health and housing problems, clandestine abortions, harassment, and labor exploitation during wartime.
From the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), they sought to organize women in one of the most densely populated working-class neighborhoods. Women workers were forced into industrial and transport jobs, with lower wages than men, or were condemned to poverty, unable to feed their children. From the ELFS, they opened low-cost community restaurants, a toy factory, a maternity clinic, and day care centers. But their work increasingly focused on organizing anti-war demonstrations, and they published numerous articles on this subject. Emmeline Pankhurst publicly disowned her daughter for this “unpatriotic” attitude and even expressed regret that she could not forbid her from using her surname.
One of the most important demands among working women was: “Equal pay for equal work.” With the war, the number of women employed in industry and transport had increased sharply. Sylvia and the Federation took up the slogan of equal pay, called on unions to organize women to integrate them into the workers’ struggle, and demanded emergency state food aid for families. On July 12, 1915, a demonstration set out for Parliament with the slogans: “Equal pay for equal work,” “Down with exploitation,” “Vote for women.” In August, the action was repeated, but this time the women had the support of socialist groups (ILP, BSP, Herald League), the Dockers’ Union, the Engineers’ Union, the Electrical Workers’ Union, and the National Union of Railwaymen.
Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Silvia Pankhurst 6At the end of the war, Pankhurst, like many socialist activists, joined the defense of the Russian Revolution and embraced communist ideas. Lenin polemicized with her in his famous pamphlet ” Communism’s Infantile Disease, Leftism ” about Pankhurst’s sectarian position after 1920. Later, she would eventually distance herself from the communist movement., Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand were pioneers of an internationalist socialist feminism fighting against war. When the revolution came to Russia in 1917, they all participated in the revolutionary struggle in each country and in the defense of the Russian Revolution as an integral part of the international revolution.
On March 8, 1917, the textile workers of the Viborg district began the strike. The workers took to the streets and marched through neighboring factories. At the gates of the metallurgical plants, they called on workers to join the movement, chanting “Down with the war!” and “Bread for the workers!” A few days later, the city was rocked by a general strike that led to the fall of tsarism. Bolshevik women activists had helped organize the workers, forming committees and spreading socialist ideas. The seed had germinated.
Reclaiming an Internationalist and Socialist Feminism
The situation we are experiencing today is not identical to that experienced by Luxemburg and Zetkin at the beginning of the First World War. But it is undeniable that tendencies toward imperialist rearmament have increased throughout history and are currently rekindling.
The reactionary war in Ukraine, a NATO proxy war against Russia, has brought the military conflict back to European territory. Since the beginning of this war, we have witnessed a strengthening of what we can define as a “pro-NATO left.” That is, sectors of the left that support the sending of arms and the financing of the Ukrainian army, as if it were a “war for Ukraine’s self-determination,” omitting nothing less than the fact that they have sided with the interests of the Western imperialist powers and NATO. Still others want to see the reactionary Putin as an anti-imperialist camp, as if he were playing a progressive role. For our part, from the beginning of the conflict, we have maintained an independent position, which we expressed with the slogan: “No to Putin, no to NATO, not a euro for war.” Today, we see the United States and Russia seeking a deal to divide up the spoils from war-torn Ukraine, while European states demand to be allowed to profit from this division.
The reactionary propaganda of European governments, according to which “we must prepare for war,” aims to normalize for the majority of the population a historic militaristic rearmament, cuts in social spending, and new attacks on democratic freedoms.
For their part, reformist parties like Podemos in Spain, or Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, say that NATO must be left to advance Europe’s “strategic autonomy,” or to achieve, as Mélenchon puts it, a “sovereign France.” In other words, a policy that, in the name of “peace,” seeks to strengthen the sovereignty of European imperialist states.
Historically, the 20th century has already demonstrated the catastrophes that the militaristic rearmament of the European powers leads to. Therefore, more than ever, it is time to reconnect with the enormous tradition of internationalist feminists we have discussed in this article, emphasizing the need to raise a strong voice against imperialist rearmament and militarism. Capitalism only leads us to new crises and new wars. Only social mobilization, driven by class struggle, can constitute a true emergency brake. Only in this way can we pave the way for the only fundamental perspective that will prevent us from a new barbarism: the struggle for workers’ governments and a United Socialist States of Europe.
Originally published in French on March 26 in Révolution Permanente