The talk traces communist continuity in the fight for women’s emancipation from earliest days of the modern communist movement embodied in the Communist League of Germany led by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, to the Third International led by V.I. Lenin the central leader of the Bolshevik party that led the first successful socialist revolution in Russia in 1917, and through the struggle by revolutionary Marxists to defend that continuity in face of the Stalinist counterrevolution in the decades that followed. It is copyright © 1972 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

From 1917 through 1923, the Bolsheviks and many others saw that the struggle for state power was on the agenda not only in Russia but in Germany and other European countries as well. In this they were not wrong. But no leadership other than the Bolsheviks proved capable of meeting the challenge and grasping the historical opportunity to bring the insurgent working masses to the conquest of power.

As the first revolutionary wave subsided, many in the young international failed to understand the meaning of the new situation, the need to readjust the tactics and strategy of the international to accord with the new objective situation, the need to adopt a united-front strategy toward the Social Democracy and other working-class parties. They didn’t understand that repeated denunciations of the betrayals by Social Democracy would not by themselves convince those workers still loyal to the Second International. It was necessary to expose the reformist leaders in action.

Lenin and Trotsky together led the fight in the Third International against the ultraleft tendencies that sprang up. They recognized that ultraleftist errors could be just as disastrous for a revolutionary party as reformist ones.

It is in this general political context that Lenin’s opinions about the proposed work of the International Women’s Commission of the Comintern should be seen. Again, this was at a new turning point in the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement. Again, analysis of women’s oppression and the struggle against it figured in the divisions. However, unlike some of the earlier debates and differences, this time many of the opponents of revolutionary Marxism were ultraleft, not reformist.

Clara Zetkin’s book, Recollections of Lenin, contains the fullest presentation of Lenin’s views at this stage. Zetkin’s account is based on two meetings with Lenin in Moscow in 1920. These were preliminary discussions, part of the process of drafting the resolution on work among women for the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921.

First, Lenin urged that the document should stress “the unbreakable connection between woman’s human and social position and the private ownership of the means of production.” To change the age-old conditions that subjugate women within the family, communists should seek to link the women’s movement with “the proletarian class struggle and the revolution.” (Clara Zetkin’s book is not available in English. Her report of these interviews with Lenin is included in the pamphlet Lenin On the Emancipation of Women [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968].)

Lenin next took up the organizational questions I referred to earlier. “We derive our organizational ideas from our ideological conceptions,” he told Zetkin. “We want no separate organizations of communist women! She who is a Communist belongs as a member to the Party, just as he who is a Communist. They have the same rights and duties.”

“However,” he continued, “we must not shut our eyes to the facts. The Party must have organs—working groups, commissions, committees, sections or whatever else they may be called—with the specific purpose of rousing the broad masses of women.…”

Zetkin commented that many party members had been denouncing her for making similar proposals on the basis that such ideas were a return to Social Democratic traditions, and that “since the Communist Parties gave equality to women they should, consequently, carry on work without differentiation among all the working people in general.”

“How,” Lenin asked Zetkin, “do such guardians of the ‘purity of principles’ cope with the historical necessities of our revolutionary policy? All their talk collapses in the face of the inexorable necessities.”

“Why are there nowhere as many women in the Party as men,” he demanded, “not even in Soviet Russia? Why is the number of women in the trade unions so small?” In sharp terms he defended the need to put forward special demands for the benefit of all women, of working women and peasant women, and even women of the propertied classes who also suffer under bourgeois society.

Finally, Lenin was sharply critical of the national sections of the Comintern for not doing as much as they should. “They adopt a passive, wait-and-see attitude when it comes to creating a mass movement of working women under communist leadership.” He attributed the weakness of women’s work in the International to the persistence of male chauvinist ideas which led to an underestimation of the vital importance of building a mass women’s movement. For this reason he thought the resolution for the Third World Congress of the Comintern was especially important. The fact that it was on the agenda would itself give an impetus to the work of the sections.  
 
 
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