International Women's Day 2016 March 8th - The Red Women's Day Speaker's Notes Protocol: Greetings to SADTU members and guests Comrades, It will be fitting to look at some of the origins, and the history, of the observance of this important day, and to explore, as we go along, the meaning that it has for us today. Comrades and Friends, International Women's day, founded in 1910, is the working women's day. Before 1910, there was feminism, and there was a campaign for the women's vote in democratic politics. It was called women's suffrage movement, or "suffragettes" for short. This was a movement for the gaining of equal rights within the national ruling class, by female members of the ruling class of the nation. On the other hand, the foundation, and the on-going basis, of the international movement of women, is the international solidarity of working-class women with each other - and also with the working-class men. The slogan, "Workers of the World Unite", applies to women as much as it applies to men. Before 1910 there were the First and Second Workers' International Associations. These were the real origin and source of the International Women's Day founded by Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai in Copenhagen in 1910. These two women, Zetkin and Kollontai, were very important in the history of working womens' organisation - as distinct from what we can call bourgeois feminism. To repeat, and to emphasise: We are stressing the distinction between the two historical kinds of women's movement, then and now. The efforts of women of the privileged classes to acquire rights that had been gained by the males of their class, notably the right to own property, and the right to vote, are called feminism. Feminism has a long history, and it continues to exist. Feminism has considerable power, even here in South Africa today, as we shall see. The origin of International Women's Day is not found in feminism. The origin of International Women's Day is instead found in the working-class organisations that grew up in the 19th century, beginning with the founding of the First Workers' International, under the leadership of Karl Marx, in 1865. This was two years before the publication of Volume 1 of Marx's masterpiece, "Capital," in 1867. ~ * ~ Comrades, some few dates will certainly help us here. Clara Zetkin was born in 1857. She was already active in the German labour movement by 1874, the year that the great South African leader of women, Charlotte Maxeke, was born. Having been politically active from the age of 17, Clara Zetkin eventually died, a working-class hero, at the age of 75, in 1933, in the Soviet Union, exiled there from Germany by the Nazi fascists. ~ * ~ The German Social Democratic (i.e. Communist) Party came together at a unity congress at Gotha, in 1875. It was a combination of two earlier parties that had been founded in 1863 and 1869. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were involved. Clara Zetkin joined the new party in 1878. In 1879, still in the earliest years of the party, the German Social Democratic leader August Bebel published his book "Women and Socialism". Of this work, Clara Zetkin later wrote: "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." Bebel's book was not perfect, but what Clara Zetkin - later the initiator of International Women's Day - points out is that it made a clear statement of the connection between working women and history in general, that is to say the history of the world. These socialists by this stage were sure that the working class is the standard-bearer of history, and the gravedigger of capitalism. This proletarian-internationalist historical combination of people and events, and not individualist bourgeois feminism, is the true source of International Women's Day. ~ * ~ Comrades, In 1884 another book, which was another "great deed" and event, was published. This was "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", written by Frederick Engels, using research left by Karl Marx on his death in 1883. Engels' still-unsurpassed book describes women's place in society in the complete context of the origin of property, class struggle, and the instrument that defends property and dominates class struggle: The State. Engel's book does this in the complete context of world history in all of its stages of development. Feminism produced nothing like this work, and could not and would not have done, for the reason that "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" prophesies the end of the class to which the feminists belong - the bourgeois capitalist ruling class. Engels' work was an immediate success. It remains one of the great classics. It is completely international in character. It addresses humanity as a whole, in its past, present and future. The 20th-century writer Evelyn Reed points out in her work "Woman's Evolution", based on Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", that all, or nearly all, of the basic technologies upon which productive progress was based, and upon which we still rely, were initiated and managed by women. These included fire, pottery, cords, weaving, leatherwork, agriculture, animal husbandry and house-building. Reading these works, it becomes clear that the fall of the women to their present worldwide condition of subordination was occasioned by class forces, and nothing else. Therefore, the full, global emancipation of women will require the institution, or re-institution, of classless society: communism. Communism - the sharing of property and of the fruits of production, and hence the true basic equality of human beings, is what existed before class society came about. In South Africa class division arrived, for the most part, in the ready-made form of capitalism. Class politics and proletarian internationalism, and not bourgeois feminism, form the essence of International Women's Day. ~ * ~ Comrades, On 16 October 1896, at the Congress of the Social Democratic Party (equivalent to a communist party of today) Clara Zetkin made a ground-breaking speech. It was later published under the title "Only in Conjunction with the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism be Victorious". Among other things, Zetkin said: "The granting of political equality to women does not change the actual balance of power. "The proletarian woman ends up in the proletarian, the bourgeois woman in the bourgeois camp. "We must not let ourselves be fooled by Socialist trends in the bourgeois women's movement which last only as long as bourgeois women feel oppressed." Later in her 1896 speech Zetkin said: "The proletariat will be able to attain its liberation only if it fights together without the difference of nationality and profession. "In the same way it can attain its liberation only if it stands together without the distinction of sex. "The incorporation of the great masses of proletarian women in the liberation struggle of the proletariat is one of the prerequisites for the victory of the Socialist idea and for the construction of a Socialist society." These words are as true today as they were then. ~ * ~ Comrades, In 1909 the Russian communist Alexandra Kollontai wrote a pamphlet called "The Social Basis of the Woman Question". In it, among other things, she said: "However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental transformation of the contemporary economic and social structure of society without which the liberation of women cannot be complete. "If in certain circumstances the short-term tasks of women of all classes coincide, the final aims of the two camps, which in the long term determine the direction of the movement and the tactics to be used, differ sharply. "While for the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men in the framework of the contemporary capitalist world represents a sufficiently concrete end in itself, equal rights at the present time are, for the proletarian women, only a means of advancing the struggle against the economic slavery of the working class. "The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the 'fair sex'. "Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future. "The woman and her male comrade are enslaved by the same social conditions; the same hated chains of capitalism oppress their will and deprive them of the joys and charms of life. "The working woman is first and foremost a member of the working class." Here, oOne year before she supported Clara Zetkin in her motion for the establishment of International Women's Day, Alexandra Kollontai's magnificent approach is international, and proletarian. In this writing, as in the writings of the ANC, the national, class and gender questions are understood together. The resolution of each is a condition for the resolution of the others. All must be solved together, before any of them can be fully solved. Shortly before the first observation of International Women's Day in Russia, in 1913, Kollontai wrote: "For the woman worker it is a matter of indifference who is the 'master,' a man or a woman." ~ * ~ Comrades, Rosa Luxemburg said: "Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against 'male prerogatives' would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class." Further on in the same 1912 speech, Luxemburg says: "We do not depend on the justice of the ruling classes, but solely on the revolutionary power of the working masses and on the course of social development which prepares the ground for this power. "The current mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat's general struggle for liberation." Rosa Luxemburg, also the author of "Reform or Revolution?" and "The Mass Strike", was tortured and murdered on 15 January 1919 by the forerunners of German fascism. These three women, Zetkin, a German; Luxemburg, a Pole and a Jew, and Kollontai, a Russian, knew each other very well. As comrades they stood together for organisation and for women's proletarian internationalism. They had nothing to say about "patriarchy" or "gender". "Rights," for them, were not an end, but only a means to an end. The International Women's Day that they founded was a Red Women's Day. ~ * ~ Comrades, The founding motion of International Women's Day was proposed by Clara Zetkin and others at the Second International Women's Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on 27 August 1910. The motion says: In agreement with the class-conscious, political and trade union organizations of the proletariat of their respective countries, the Socialist women of all countries will hold each year a Women's Day, whose foremost purpose it must be to aid the attainment of women's suffrage. This demand must be handled in conjunction with the entire women's question according to Socialist precepts. The Women's Day must have an international character and is to be prepared carefully. Clara Zetkin, Rathe Duncker and Comrades, August 27, 1910. The following year, 1911, a million women in many locations demonstrated on various dates in February and March. After 1921 the date was fixed as 8 March. ~ * ~ Comrades, This year, being 2016, will see the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Women's March in Pretoria that took place on 9 August 1956. Lest we forget, please let us note that the Women's March was organised by the Federation of South African Women, an organisation founded in 1954 on the initiative of communist women including, Dora Tamana, Josie Mphama, Hettie September, and Ray Alexander. ~ * ~ Comrades, Next year, 2017, will be the Centenary of what we used to call the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution, i.e. the Russian Revolution of October-November 1917, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Before we return to the South African dimension of this story, let us take time to recall some of the outstanding words that Comrade Lenin had to say on today's topic. Just before he returned to Russia from exile in April of 1917, Lenin wrote the following: "If we do not draw women into public activity, into the militia, into political life; if we do not tear women away from the deadening atmosphere of household and kitchen; then it is impossible to secure real freedom, it is impossible even to build democracy, let alone socialism. Lenin, Third Letter from Afar, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/third.htm#v23pp64h- 320> Zurich, March 1917 In 1919 Lenin wrote: "Let the liars and hypocrites, the dull-witted and blind, the bourgeois and their supporters hoodwink the people with talk about freedom in general, about equality in general, about democracy in general. "We say to the workers and peasants: Tear the masks from the faces of these liars, open the eyes of these blind ones. Ask them: "Equality between what sex and what other sex? "Between what nation and what other nation? "Between what class and what other class? "Freedom from what yoke, or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class? "Down with the liars who are talking of freedom and equality for all, while there is an oppressed sex, while there are oppressor classes, while there is private ownership of capital, of shares, while there are the well-fed with their surplus of bread who keep the hungry in bondage. "Not freedom for all, not equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters, the abolition of every possibility of oppression and exploitation - that is our slogan! "Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex! "Freedom and equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants! "A fight against the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists, a fight against the profiteering kulaks! "That is our fighting slogan, that is our proletarian truth, the truth of the struggle against capital, the truth which we flung in the face of the world of capital with its honeyed, hypocritical, pompous phrases about freedom and equality in general, about freedom and equality for all." Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women, November 1919 And then in 1920 he said briefly: "The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women." Lenin, To the Working Women, February 1920 ~ * ~ Comrades, The Women's Charter, passed at the founding conference of the Federation of South African Women, on 17 April 1954, says: "We women do not form a society separate from the men. There is only one society, and it is made up of both women and men. As women we share the problems and anxieties of our men, and join hands with them to remove social evils and obstacles to progress." In the following year, on 26 June 1955, the Freedom Charter said: . Only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief; . Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws; . The rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex; . Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work; ~ * ~ Comrades, in conclusion, By no means can we say that South African Working Women have the organisational instruments that they need in order to come out from under the domination of the elite of women, as was the intention of the founders of the red International Women's Day. The Federation of South African Women was not sustained. Today, it is hardly even mentioned when its legacy, National Women's Day (August 9th) comes around. Terry Bell was correct, for once in his life, when he wrote in the City Press last Sunday that: "International Women's Day is the province of affluent middle class women who tend to enjoy the patronage of the still male-dominated corporate world. Their aspirations are not liberty and equality for all, but free competition against men; they want only to remove the 'glass ceiling' that prevents many of them from becoming corporate tycoons." Working women are supposed to rejoice when another rich sister gets a place in the corporate boardroom, whereas we know that the exploited proletariat is where by far the larger part of womankind will have to remain and serve the men and the women in the upper levels of capitalism. Instead of the revolutionary Federation of South African Women that made such an impact in the 1950s, we now have something called "Progressive Women's Movement", which is no better than a deployment committee and a corporate dating service for the favoured few. The African National Congress Women's League is not a women's movement, as such, but it is an ANC for women. In its behaviour it has unfortunately been far too similar to the "Progressive Women's Movement" until recently. Working women still have their trade unions, and SADTU in particular is a union of working women, as much as it is anything else. As SADTU we are still here to say, let us reclaim International Women's Day for the working women, and say: International Women's Day is a Workers' Day! "Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex!" Forward to socialism, forward! -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. 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