Clara Zetkin and International Women's Day March 8th

Clara Zetkin (orig. Clara Eissner, 1857 - 1933) already looked back on a lifetime of struggle on behalf of working women. 

She had grown up in a peasant village in Saxony and studied to become a teacher.  

As a student in Leipzig, she became active in the women's, labor, and socialist movements and met the Russian revolutionary, Ossip Zetkin, whom she followed into exile in Zurich and Paris after he was banned in Germany.  

She had two sons with Ossip, who died in 1889. 

That same year she played a key role in the founding of the Socialist International in Paris.  

In 1890, Clara returned to Germany and settled in Stuttgart, working as a translator.  From 1891 until 1917, she was the editor of "Equality," the women's newspaper of the German Social Democratic Party. 

Clara broke with the Social Democratic Party after it supported Germany's entry into World War I.  She was arrested several times during World War I because of her anti-war activities.  

In 1916, she joined with dissident Social Democrats, including her good friend, Rosa Luxembourg, in forming the Spartacist group, a precursor of the German Communist Party. 

From 1920 to 1933, during the Weimar Republic, she was an elected representative of the Communist Party to the German Reichstag. 

When Hitler took power, she was again forced into exile.  

She died in the Soviet Union in 1933 and was buried there. 

The Nazis banned International Women's Day and instead promoted Mother's Day each May. 

After the Nazis were defeated, International Women's Day was again celebrated in Germany as it is throughout the world.

READINGS - TOWARDS PROLETARIAN FEMINISM

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2018/06/proletarian-feminism-and-anuradha-ghandy.html


https://rsmtoronto.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/brave-new-world-philosophical-trends-in-the-feminist-movement-by-avanti.pdf

MFPR Italy . a new big women's strike on 8th March

We women irreducibly against!

"SHOT FOR SHOT" AGAINST THE RACIST-SEXIST-FASCIST GOVERNMENT, WHICH TRIES TO IMPOSE A MODERN MIDDLE AGE ON US!

UNLEASH THE REVOLUTIONARY FURY OF WOMEN AGAINST THE ENTIRE CAPITAL SYSTEM! THE WHOLE LIFE MUST CHANGE!

The Salvini/Di Maio government, the fascism-populism in power, changes the substance of things for women too and calls us to equip and organize properly, to fight it, to overthrow it.

It is a government that tries to regiment us, according to the concept "God, counrty, family" and the nexus "family, defense of private property, State".

It is government that gives a legitimization to the sexist humus and inevitably will lead to more sexual violence, femicides, homophobic aggression, on which the repressive law and order solutions are worse than evil (see the "security package"), because they are mainly repression of the freedom, rights, struggles of women.

An inhumane government, against the Constitution that has as main cement the war on migrants that leads to death hundreds of them, our sisters, children, and push them beck to the concentration camps of torture and rape in Libya. Salvini now exploits as a jackall the rapes and feminicides -as he did with the Desiree's case- in order to promote himself, to increase the persecution against migrants, to occupy the cities with the cops, who are often responsible of "authorized" rapes, for controls, prohibitions, desertification of social spaces, places of socialization, etc. - all things that facilitate the sexual violence on women.

A government that has as Minister of Family the clerical-fascist anti-abortionist Fontana who says: "Italian Women do not have enough children, it is time they make babies, enough with the children of migrants who have invaded Italy"; while in the Parliament the miserable Pillon (Lega) tries to cancel the divorce to tie even more women to the chains of a family where too often they find death and where the children are like luggage.

A government that changes nothing for women in terms of jobs and wages, continuing being at the service, as always, of masters. With the "dignity act" not even the precarious, temporary jobs, often the only jobs for women, remain now: for the companies it is easier dismiss and take others; while for permanent women workers the layoffs, the CIG (Ordinary Wages Guarantee Fund) continue to increase, along with the heaviness of working conditions and the hateful, sexual, racist discrimination on maternity, along with the usual sexual harassment at work. 

Even the hypothetical "pensions reform" will not change anything for us, we will not be able to retire before, our double work will not be recognized. In the same way, the "basic income", if and when it will be implemented, will be given to very few of us, who, moreover, will have to work for free and be subjected to an outrageous control on how they spend that poor money. At the same time, the load of the care increases, an unbearable boulder for women chained to a degrading domestic work.

All this does nothing but increases the economic dependence, which means more subordination, oppression, violence in the family. So many living intellectuals energies, of girls students are humiliated by a mortifying future.

But the strong movement of women/NUDM (no one less) has been in fact the first opposition to the formation of the Lega/M5S government and it is at the forefront of anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist mobilizations.

We all have the responsibility that the rebellion, the struggle of women will become more and more one the main "dangers" for this government, for the bourgeois State, for the masters, for "men who hate women".

Let us organize to unleash the revolutionary fury of women!

Organize, expand the proletarian revolutionary feminist wing of the women's movement, opposing the reformist influence of petty and middle bourgeois feminism, but also the opportunist trade-unionism, existing in some revolutionary groups or base unions, which overshadows, suffocates the great potential of struggle of women who raise 'with no ifs or buts' a central issue of revolution: "the whole life must change".

We are "the plus" that enriches the general struggles, the revolutionary battle of the proletarians and people’s masses to overthrow this rotten capitalist system, from earth to heaven, for a new society.

Revolutionary Proletarian Feminist Movement