No Woman,
No Revolution, Part 1b
Working-class Women’s Political History
The general form of this
course, like all of the Communist University courses, is that it is a selected
set of original texts by revolutionary writers. The writer of this (attached
and downloadable) text is not otherwise known to us. Her name is Janine Booth
and the article was found on the plainly Trotskyist web site of a British
publication called “Workers’ Liberty”. We must thank Janine Booth for her public
scholarship.
Booth’s work assists us with
a narrative of the years from the founding of the German Social Democratic
Party in 1875, when Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were both still alive,
alert, active and writing, up until the time, thirty to forty years later, when
the major initiative began to pass from the German Party to Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
The revolutionary activities
of the communists were prominent at different times in Britain, France,
Belgium, Germany, Italy and Russia, among many other countries. In the last quarter
of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, these
revolutionary activities were much more massive in Germany than anywhere else;
and it was in the German language, and in the revolutionary practice of the
German communists, that the organised movement for the advancement of
proletarian women, as part of the revolutionary struggle for communism, got
under way and first reached a high stage of explicit development.
In our course we represent
this period with singular texts from Engels, Zetkin, Kollontai, Luxemburg and
Lenin. Some of the history of the period can be seen in these texts through the
eyes of these revolutionary participants. Booth’s text can help us to step back
and think about some of the other participants, like August Bebel and Emma
Ihrer, on the forms of organisation that the German Party used, and on the
means of propaganda that were employed, such as the periodical founded by Ihrer
and mainly edited by Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (“Equality”).
We have to take Booth’s word
for it on the numbers that she gives, and on most of the detail that she
relates. We do not have an Internet archive of Die Gleichheit, or even a single
article from it. Booth’s article as reproduced here has no references or
bibliography. These are some of the kinds of reasons why, in general, we have normally
preferred to use original writings for the Communist University.
In the case of this article,
some of it has been removed for the sake of brevity, and where the points made
are covered by our other material. Remarks about Rosa Luxemburg’s alleged
indifference towards women’s particular position in society are less useful
than Luxemburg’s own text, for example, which we give in the next part.
Comrades can go to the web site to read Booth’s full article, if they wish.
Part of what our course is
asserting is that the proletarian women’s cause has been the occasion of major
historical events, and it also comprises a substantial body of thought. In the
process we are overturning the tacit and sometimes explicit historiography of
the bourgeois feminists.
We are identifying our own
struggles against bourgeois feminism with the struggles that took place in this
earlier time, between the days of Marx and Lenin, and the days of Luxemburg and
Lenin.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: German Socialism
and the ‘woman question’, Booth, 2005.
