This text was prepared to be published on International Women’s Day 2022. Today, when a bourgeois war rages in Europe, we are reminded an army of Ukrainian women who, for decades, have left their families to work as housekeepers in the richest countries of the West. They have been forced by a capitalist regime of misery and oppression no better for proletarians in their host countries than those of the Ukraine. No bourgeois has ever denounced the sacrifice of these women and their children. It is that same bourgeois propaganda that today pretends to weep over the trials and tribulations of war refugees, but is actually used only for war propaganda, setting workers of different countries to fight against each other.

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It was not the bourgeois feminist movement but the Socialist International, then Communist that proclaimed the International Women’s Day (IWD).

So what remains of of the original IWD today?

The Oppression of Women Originates with the Class Society

The goals of the bourgeois feminist movement, compatible with capitalist relations of production, diverge radically from those propagated by socialist women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These women asserted that without class struggle, and without proletarian revolution, the struggle for all oppressed peoples, including women is illusory.

The oppression of women of all nations has its origins within the development of class society, where this abuse has taken the form of the family, and the patriarchy. This oppression of women made manifest by class society can only end with the destruction of our social system based on private property, wage labor and exploitation of man by man and woman by man. Only the communist revolution will be able to pull down the monstrous edifice of the capitalist mode of production and its infinite forms of division and oppression: on workers, on women, as well as on every group identifiable by religious, ethnic, sexual, traits.

Marxist classics point communists in the correct direction

Class society is not natural and eternal. There was a before capitalism, there will be an after capitalism as well.

In primitive communism, reproduction was essential for the survival of human groupings. Hence, families were structured by mothers and there was a worship of mother-goddesses. But there was no oppression of women over men, there was no “matriarchy”, and societies were without the private accumulation of goods.

Towards the end of the Neolithic era, the development of productive forces, agriculture and animal husbandry, gradually allowed the transition to a mode of production based on class division and private ownership of goods. It was structured around the family and patrilineal descent. The condition of women was reversed. Formerly the procreator, the woman was now reduced to the custodian of the temple of patriarchal property.

Capitalism, with its disruptive development of productive forces, which also lays the material foundations of a future classless society, although now dragging on like a rotting corpse, sowing death and despair while waiting for its gravedigger, the revolutionary proletariat. The communism of the future will rise on the ruins of the capitalist mode of production and its system of exploitation, leading humanity to find itself again.

Clara Zetkin, socialist and later communist (in 1918 she collaborated in the foundation of the German Communist Party), paid tribute to the book “Woman and Socialism” published in 1879 by the social-democrat August Bebel: “It was more than a book, it was an event – a great deed. The book pointed out for the first time the connection between the women’s question and historical development. For the first time, there sounded from this book the appeal: We will only conquer the future if we persuade the women to become our co-fighters”.

At the end of the book Bebel summarizes the position that would later be taken by the proletarian women’s movement: “Woman, too, and especially the proletarian woman, has been called upon, not to lag behind in this struggle that is being fought for her liberation and redemption also. It is up to her to prove that she has recognized her true position in the movement, in the struggle of the present for a better future, and that she is determined to participate. It is the duty of the men to help her to cast aside all prejudices and to take part in the great struggle. Let no one underestimate his strength, and think that his help is of no consequence”. By 1913, the book had been reprinted 50 times.

Similarly, Engels’ 1884 book “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” gives an illuminating explanation of the causes of women’s oppression and that the employment of women’s labor on a large scale, made possible by capitalist economic development was an essential step on the road to their emancipation.

Engels in “Anti-Dühring”, congratulating Charles Fourier for being the first to realize this, argues that “The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation”, and therefore also of the male. Marx in the “Holy Family” quotes Fourier: “The humiliation of the female sex is an essential feature of civilization as well as of barbarism. The only difference is that the civilized system raises every vice that barbarism practices in a simple form to a compound, equivocal, ambiguous, hypocritical mode of existence.... No one is punished more severely for keeping woman in slavery than man himself”.

The Socialist and communist Origin of International Women’s Day

As capital developed and needed more and more female labor, demands for more equal social recognition between men and women took hold. However, the so-called “feminist” movement soon took two paths: the bourgeois one, which did not question the exploitative relationship of wage labor, and the social democratic and marxist one.

Within the German Social Democratic predominated Second International, it was Clara Zetkin who dealt with the problem of women’s oppression. Zetkind denounced the feminist movement as “bourgeois”, as it did not question capitalism and especially did not bring women to the class struggle. At the founding congress of the Second International in 1889, Zetkin recalled that «the question of women’s emancipation is ultimately the question of female labor», and called for legislation that would respect the principle of «equal pay for equal work». Even today, this call remains a pious hope, even in the most “developed” countries!

It was a matter, then, for socialists at the beginning of the 20th century to involve working women in the political movement of the class struggle. At the 1896 Congress of the German Social Democratic Party, held in Gotha, Germany, Zetkin ardently argued for a separation between the proletarian women’s movement and a bourgeois “women’s rights” movement. These two movements have no more in common with each other than social democracy has with bourgeois society, Zetkin argued. Zetkin saw proletarian women as fighters in the class struggle and their emancipation could not come from cross class women’s struggles. Only the entire proletariat, without distinction of gender, could bring about the emancipation of the proletarian woman.

And, we add the emancipation of all women will only come from a successful communist revolution!

A tireless propagandist for a socialist women’s movement, Zetkin was began a proletarian women’s movement in opposition to the bourgeois women’s movement. German women were not allowed to join the Social Democratic Party until 1908, due to a ban on female participation in politics passed in 1850. Zetkin therefore organized a parallel and autonomous structure within the SPD and from 1900 a women’s conference was held before each party congress. When women were finally allowed to participate in politics, the Social Democratic Party proposed to abolish the women’s section, Zetkin objected as the time was not ripe.

The first international congress of socialist women took place in Stuttgart, bringing together the women’s movements of the various parties of the Second International, forming the Socialist International Women, SID. The conference rejected any cross class alliances. It demanded universal suffrage for working women. In fact, the bourgeois movement of the “suffragettes” demanded the right to vote under the same conditions as men: that is, on the basis of census and property ownership, which excluded workers in many countries. But, unlike the bourgeois feminists, this democratic claim was not an end in itself; for the socialists it had a clear class connotation.

The first National Women’s Day was held on February 28, 1909, called by the Socialist Party of America, and was held until 1913. The “feminist” movement there had been highly developed since the mid-nineteenth century and aimed, among other things, at women’s electoral suffrage, which it achieved in 1920.

The second international conference, which brought together women from 17 countries took place in August 1910 in Copenhagen. It established International Women’s Day. The date of March 19 was proposed as a tribute to the success of the 1848 insurrection in Prussia, Berlin, and considered inseparable from the struggle of all workers regardless of their gender. The anniversary was successful for the first time on March 19, 1911: more than a million women, not just those organized by the Social Democratic parties, demonstrated for women’s suffrage in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland, and countless meetings were organized on that occasion.

In 1913, on the last Sunday of February, Russian women celebrated the first International Women’s Rights Day, as part of a broader anti-war movement.

The propaganda work was extremely effective. In the SPD the number of women activists increased from 4,000 in 1905 to 174,754 (out of 1,085,905 members) in 1914, most of them were sympathizers of the left wing of the party. The newspaper founded by Zetkin, "Die Gleichheit" ("Equality") whose subtitle ran "a newspaper in the interests of working women", published from 1892 to 1923 (Zetkin was removed from the editorial staff in 1917), became the main publication of the women’s organization of the German Social Democratic Party. Circulation grew from 4,000 copies an issue in 1902 to 124,000 in 1914.

In German trade unions in 1914 there were 216,000 women out of a total membership of 2.5 million.

A conference of the International Congress of Socialist Women was held in Switzerland, in 1915, during the first World War.

It was the demonstrations of women workers in Petrograd on March 8, 1917 (February 23 in the Russian calendar of the time), who demanded bread and the end of the war, that started the revolutionary insurrection in Russia. Since then it was to move to this date the mobilization of women by communist parties. The Russian revolutionary torch would light up the rest of the proletarian world for a few years, giving a glimpse of the light of the future communist society.

It must be remembered that despite these efforts, within the socialist political organization itself, the situation for women was not always easy. While the SPD became increasingly reformist, with the support of the unions led by Legien, the work of female militants within the party was increasingly hampered, especially in the years leading up to World War I. Zetkin encountered opposition in her party from women and men who blamed her, including Bebel, for her intransigence toward the bourgeois feminist movement. As early as 1908 Karl Legien threatened to found a women’s trade union newspaper to compete with "Die Gleichheit" because of its support for the mass strike, which was opposed by trade unionists and social democratic reformists. In 1910 the party headquarters refused to convene the socialist women’s conference before the congress, citing financial difficulties as a pretext. The women’s section of the SPD was disbanded in 1912, and Zetkin was increasingly marginalized, along with the entire left wing around Rosa Luxemburg.

Women’s Right to Vote

One of the key demands, in addition to wage labor rights, was the right to vote. The German Social Democratic Party already in 1891 included in its program the right to vote for all citizens, men and women, the only one to do so. Beginning in 1891, the first women’s socialist newspaper, "Die Arbeiterin" ("The [Woman] Worker"), was published. Universal suffrage for men had existed since the founding of the Reich in 1871, but in Prussia the census system remained at three levels, with votes having different weights depending on tax revenue, which obviously excluded workers.

In April 1917, the emperor announced, as a reward for the war effort, the abolition of class suffrage in Prussia, but he did not grant it to women, even though they had been heavily involved in the war sacrifices in the national body. On October 2, 1918, with Germany in the grip of revolutionary fever, parliament approved equal voting rights, but only for men!

At the beginning of November 1918 large rallies of bourgeois and social democratic women were organized in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The insurrection of November 9 brought to power the government of “people’s commissars”, an alliance of right-wing and “left-wing” social democrats, who were reaping the benefits of a mass movement that they would soon suppress. They promised democratic freedoms, the 8-hour day, collective agreements, unemployment benefits, etc., which the bosses would have to ratify on November 15-16. On November 12, the government of the “people’s commissars” proclaimed universal suffrage for men and women. In reality this government was already planning to take back power from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils by means of elections to a national assembly whose date was decided in December for January 19, 1919. The assembly took place, but over the dead bodies of the Berlin insurrectionaries! This is a dramatically significant example of the use of elections by the ruling classes.

Germany was then one of the first European countries, after Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913 and Russia with the revolution of February 1917, to introduce women’s suffrage. This was hailed in an article in the Spartacist organ, "Die Rote Fahne" No. 7, of November 22, 1918, an article commissioned by Rosa Luxemburg, written by Clara Zetkin, entitled “Women and the National Assembly” with a paragraph entitled “Thanks to the Women”. Working women were reminded of the importance of their participation in politics, denouncing the nonsense that had deemed them “immature” to be able to vote. But it was clear that this advancement of women could only be important within the framework of the proletarian movement and not outside it, as was the case in later years in all countries that granted it. From then on it was only one means among others to entice women into the democratic illusion in favor of the ruling classes.

In spite of the unrest caused by the events in Berlin, with the arrival in power of the traitorous social democrats, on November 9 there was the failure of the councils of workers and soldiers, who the next day handed over to the government all their powers gloriously acquired in the struggles of the previous weeks throughout Germany. The Spartacists with their newspaper and in meetings denounced the misdeeds of the Social Democrats, despite the increasingly vile attacks by the bourgeois and Social Democratic press against the "Spartacist bandits".

Luxemburg and Zetkin paid great attention to the question of women in the revolution. Rosa always stressed even in the revolutionary period of November-December 1918 in Germany the importance of women’s agitation, their crucial role in the revolution. On November 24, she proposed to Clara the writing of a daily supplement to Die Rote Fahne focusing on women’s issues, or even a separate newspaper. But the events of January 1919 and the terrible repression against the Communists frustrated their joint efforts.

In April 1920, the Women’s Communist International (ICF) was created, associated with the Communist International. Its secretariat, chaired by Zetkin, included eight women, six of whom were Russian, one Dutch, and one Swiss. In August 1920, a conference with 82 delegates from 28 countries was held in Moscow in parallel with the 2nd CI congress. At the 3rd CI congress in 1921, the Kollontai report on propaganda among women was approved. The ICF also published a magazine called Women’s CI, a bimonthly, which appeared from 1921 to 1925. Other Communist parties also published women’s magazines such as the Communist Party of Italy’s “Compagna”, the Netherlands’ “La Messagère”, three magazines in Czechoslovakia, and three in Russia. But if the propaganda work organized by Kollontai was enormously successful in Russia, the ICF had more difficulty in other countries.

Zetkin gave prominence to International Women’s Day on March 8 and became involved in organizing women in the communist movement.

But already in 1925 the degenerating executive committee of the CI decided to reorganize the communist women’s movement: the International Women’s Secretariat became a women’s section of the executive committee, the publication of the ICF was suspended “for financial reasons”. The autonomy of the communist women’s movement thus ended with the end of a specific women’s organization in the Communist International, which had become counter-revolutionary. The ICF was officially disbanded in 1930!

Alexandra Kollontai’s "New Woman"

In fact, Communist Alexandra Kollontai, who represented the textile workers of St. Petersburg at the 1910 congress of the ICF, joined Zetkin’s struggles. As early as 1900 in the Russian Social Democratic Party she had called for a special commission for women in the party. She had to flee Russia in 1908 only to return in 1917. She joined the Bolsheviks in 1915, served as people’s commissar for social affairs and women’s issues in the Communist government of 1917, then as ambassador to Norway in 1923. She was the first woman minister and ambassador in history!

She was an incredible propagandist for women’s emancipation, advocating for right of divorce, for free unions/relationships, the legal recognition of children born out of wedlock, the right to abortion and contraception, equal pay, etc., with Lenin’s full support.

Her conception of “free love”, where sexuality was dissociated from love – notions that Lenin and Zetkin were very skeptical of – earned her some challenges. She was head of the department in charge of women’s work created in 1919 and dissolved in 1930.

In her 1913 book “The New Woman”, she wrote:

«Who, then, are these new women? They are not the pure, "nice" girls whose romance culminates in a highly successful marriage, they are not wives who suffer from the infidelities of their husbands, or who themselves have committed adultery. Nor are they old maids who bemoan the unhappy love of their youth, just as little as they are "priestesses of love", the victims of wretched living conditions or of their own depraved natures. No, it is a wholly new "fifth" type of heroine, hitherto unknown, heroines with independent demands on life, heroines who assert their personality, heroines who protest against the universal servitude of woman in the State, the family, society, who fight for their rights as representatives of their sex. Single women are the ones who more and more determine this type».

But for Kollontai, the struggle of women was inextricably linked to the class struggle. Her agitation among working women was carried out through meetings, women’s sections in neighborhoods, businesses, and workshops, with branches scattered throughout the Soviet territory.

At the 3rd Congress of the CI in June 1921 the theses for propaganda among women, presented by Kollontai, supported by Zetkin, stated:

«In order to accomplish the main mission in the sections, namely, the communist education of the great female masses of the proletariat and the strengthening of the cadres of the champions of communism, it is indispensable that all communist parties of the East and West assimilate the basic principle of work among women, which is this: ’Agitation and propaganda by action.’

«Agitation by action means above all action to awaken the initiative of the working woman, to destroy her lack of confidence in her own strength by training her in practical work in the field of organization and struggle, to teach her to understand from reality that every achievement of the Communist Party, every action against capitalist exploitation, is an advance which alleviates the situation of women (...) The propaganda of the communist idea with facts consists, in Soviet Russia, in bringing the worker, the peasant, the housewife into all Soviet organizations, beginning with the army and the militia and ending with all works aimed at the emancipation of women».

It is worth noting that in the various German insurrections of the 1920s, in the formation of the revolutionary armed troops, historians never mention the existence of women’s battalions, while in the Russian revolution, after the revolution of February 1917, fifteen women’s combat formations were formed, two of which were employed at the front, and many others in cities throughout Russia. These women’s battalions were gradually disbanded due to the hostility of Bolshevik soldiers and officials as early as 1918.

In 1926 the executive committee of the Russian party opposed the establishment of separate proletarian women’s organizations. And with the degeneration of the CI, the Stalinist counterrevolution imposed a return to the traditional family model.

The Sad Dissolution of International Women’s Day in Democratic Illusions

After 1945, the communist origin of March 8th was forgotten, drowned in the “national solidarity” supported by the counter-revolutionary Stalinist parties.

For many years the 8th of March was celebrated only by the so-called “communist” countries and parties. Since the 1960s and the 1968 movement, with its “feminist” wave March 8 demonstrations have multiplied and have thus been adopted by democratic parties of all kinds! In 1975, the United Nations declared the International Year of Women and in 1977 made March 8 its own as “International Woman’s Day”, becoming “International Women’s Day” in 2016. In short, this day has become an opportunity for many bourgeois and petit-bourgeois movements to denounce the wrongdoings suffered by women, whatever their class, often exploiting their status as victims to deny their ability to fight.

The day of March 8 is now a “popular” holiday, led by a jumble of movements, from left-wing groupings to right-wing parties, nullifying any revolutionary message. A democratic ritual that extinguishes the slightest spark of class struggle. It perpetuates the illusion of a struggle of women, with their list of demands, subdued within democracy. In the meantime, aggression’s against women are perpetuated, inside and outside families, unjust dismissals, sad testimony of the patriarchal system, which the current economic crisis is accentuating.

This is the lesson of the great activists of the women’s communist movement: without class struggle and without the leadership of the communist party and class union organizations there is no real struggle of women. Without communist revolution there is no way out to end women’s oppression!

The path of women’s struggle against their oppression can only be against all oppression. As Zetkin stated, “The proletarian woman does not obtain her emancipation like the bourgeois woman, by fighting against the man of her own social class; on the contrary, she conquers it alongside the man of her social class by fighting against bourgeois society and even against the bulk of the ladies of the bourgeoisie”.

Women, in order to free themselves definitively from the oppression they suffer, have no choice but to join their fellow workers in the struggle to destroy the present society and build a new society, a society without classes and without oppression!

There will have to be a revolution in which proletarians of both sexes take to the struggle together and without a distinct gender role.