Klara Zı HIG FOR

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The fascist takeover was not vitable. It could have been pped by a policy of united F-defence from the working is, which had shown itself the strikes and factory cupations of 1919 and 1920 be immensely strong and termined.

A lead for such a policy could I have been expected from the brmist leaders of the Socialist ty.

But such a policy was presented : the Third International under leadership of Lenin and isky.

Their words, however, did not ch the mass of the rking class.

And that was because of the Icy of the main leaders of the Italian Communist Ber Bordiga.

The Bordighists opposed the national's assessment of cism. Their ultra-left position in ways foreshadowed the Ed period" policy of Stalin in 28 which was to have such Tous consequences in many.

REJECTED Bordiga rejected the analysis of • International that fascism was , offensive strategy of the bourHe regarded it as a reaction to a olutionary situation.

Inis failed to see that it was ty when the working class moveat went into retreat that the urgeoisie turned decisively onto b offensive encouraging fascism : elminate all the organisational • Material gains made by the stes I The halian representatives at the Plenum of the International tod against the united front As Id refused to implement it haiy All efforts at rapprochement in Serrati's left socialists were by Bordiga until he lost •trol of the party in 1924.

The CP refused to join the bour Alliance which called the ZOS 1922 strike. And more sportant, although armed CP units battles of exemplary marge with the fascists, CP embers were forbidden to join ith the "Arditi del popolo". These are the armed untied front fence groups which developed rywhere in 1921 and 1922 and dich fought most of the battles ith ihe fascists. мес.т.. RISKED EXPULSION • Gramsy. who until 1924 was * on the Political Bureau of the argued strongly that CP mabers stould fight alongside the Arditi: and a messes asked expulsion Dy This, the second re continuation of : eneral title 'How Fa German Communist Party was later to argue, that before the fascists could be defeated, the reformist socialists must be politically annihilated.

As a result, no demands were placed on socialist leaders except the implicit demand of self-annihilation.

The CP election manifesto of 1921 said that:

"Every worker. •. must from now on be persuaded that his class will only be able to advance in Italy over the dead body of the Socialist Party, and that it is not possible to defeat the bourgeoisie without first clearing its putrefying corpse from the field of class LEAD In these ways the leadership of the Italian Communist Party, the one force which could have given a clear lead against the fascists, unwittingly contributed to their success.

The battle was not over when Mussolini became Prime Minister. Though the most important ministries were in his own hands or those of other fascists he was still only the leader of a parliamentary coalition.

Opposition parties, elections and trade unions still existed. Major crises were still to be faced before the fascist dictatorship was finally established.

The most important crisis came in 1924 when Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the reformist Socialist Party (which had split in 1922 from Serrati's "Maximalists'), was kidnapped and murdered by fascist thugs.

Mussolini, still pretending to play the constitutional game, was momentarily weakened. A decisive lead might have toppled him; but again, none came.

ABOLISHED

From then on the establishment of the full dictatorship came rapidly. Parliamentary, democracy were illegal and their leaders dead, in jail or in exile.

Only the Communist Party managed to maintain a clandestine organisation. In 1927 the Labour Charter abolished the right to strike and eliminated free trade unions, though the Socialist General Confederation of Labour had actually dissolved itself before this.

A year later the fascist "unions"

were also effectively dissolved.

This was part of Mussolini's general aim to destroy fascism as a mass movement and substitute for it a state dictatorship.

There had been several purges of the party but its elimination was only possible after 1928 when the independent workers' organisations had been smashed.

In that year ice "my a saty and state" 23 200e 205e article on ›ur series ( scists Took Mussolini with fascism in Italy, is farticles under the State Power' A start was made on the construction of 'corporations' in which workers' and employers" "representatives" would form organisations which were part of the state.

The slogan was: "Everything in the State; nothing against the State; nothing outside the State"

These corporations never attained in practice what they were supposed to represent in theory.

The major organisation of the capitalists, Confindustria, remained in existence and grew tenaciously in strength with Mussolini's pro-big business policies.

And the workers' organisations were destroyed. That was the reality of Mussolini's dictatorship.

The regime was held together through terror, repression and censorship even if these never reached quite the extremes of Nazi Germany.

Mussolini's ubiquitous secret political police, the OCRA under Bocchini was a more amateurish version of the Gestapo.

As the alliance with Hitler grew in the late 1930's then the Italian dictatorship began to imitate Hitler's regime even more closely.

From 1938, at Hitler's behest, Mussolini declared Italians Aryan and launched a campaign against Italy's 45,000 Jews.

Fourth International:Problems and Tasks Significance of the Transition Programme The Fight for Revolutionary Leadership.

Perspectives for Work Among Women...

All available from Folrose Books. 31 1 UD the advance of the British and American armies from Sicily prompted the fascist Grand Council to censure him and the King, to have him arrested and replaced with a government of non-fascist but extreme right wing politicians and military officers.

The German army staged a dramatic rescue of Mussolini from his mountain top hotel prison and Hitler installed him for a further 18 months as a puppet dictator in Nazi-occupied Northern Italy.

By this time Italy was once again in a state of virtual civil war which intensified with the growth of armed resistance under the leadership of the Communist Party.

When trying to escape to Germany in 1945 Mussolini was captured and shot by the resistance and along with his mistress and entourage strung up by the feet in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

A revolutionary situation once more existed in Italy. The leadership of the working class was now in the hands of the Communist But Palermo Togliatti, its leader, returned from exile in Moscow in 1944 to implement Stalin's order that no revolution was to be made in Italy.

Once again the Italian working class was handed over to the bourgeoisie as the CP joined an antifascist popular front government with the bourgeois Christain Democrats.

MINIMISED

When the fascists had been strong the CP leaders had minimised the counter-revolutionary threat and held to a sectarian aloofness from the workers united Now that fascism was on the point of destruction the CP leaders exaggerated its dangers to justify an intimate collaboration with the bourgeoisie which foreshadowed today's "historic compromise"

Although we cannot actually equate Bordiga's ultra-left refusal to follow the correct line of the Communist International on the united front with the craven subservience of Togliatti to Stalin's line of "peaceful coexistence" , the end result was the same in both cases.

The task today is to construct a leadership capable of falling neither into ultra-leftism nor into right wing opportunism. The theoretical groundwork for such a leadership is to be found in the struggle to found the Fourth International in 1938 and summed up in the method of the Transitional Programme.

Partisans fight fascists in 1944.

plus plus plus plus mou Irk Hill There are many heroes of our revolutionary history, but fewer heroines. Not that our history is about individuals, but about movements, movements of the working class and other oppressed peoples, in the struggle for socialism.

Individuals are important in far as they aid the development these movements.

Klara Zetkin (1857-1934) was born in Germany and her life spanned enormously important periods of struggle both there and internationally. She was a leading figure in both the Second and the Third Internationals.

Having joined the German Socialist Party whilst it was still illegal, she had to flee into exile to Paris in 1878.

There, in 1889, she attended the Founding Congress of the Second International. She spoke on the question of women's oppression and her position on women became her most important contribution to the Marxist movement.

OPPRESSION She was indeed one of the first to give the question of women's oppression and involvement in political action a fully Marxist interpretation.

Her view was that women would continue to be oppressed so long as they were cut off from the world of work.

The fight for women's right to work, to. not be treated as "priestess of the hearth" was very important. And the direction of them into unions was a question socialists had not come to easilyand indeed many left wing currents fight shy of struggling for it even today.

"Above all, the Socialist ought to know that economic dependence or independence is the basis for social slavery or liberty ... Just as the male worker is subjugated by the capitalists, so is the woman by the man, and she will always remain in subjugation until she is economically independent. Work is the indispensable condition economic independence."

She was able to see beyond those who saw the solution to women's problems through reforms of capitalism, such as special protection for women at work, "The unwholesome conseqquences of female labour ..- will only disappear along with the capitalist process of production."

Klara Zetkin's arguments are the bedrock of today's Marxist view on women.

EMANCIPATION

She saw that the emancipation of women would only occur with a fundamental change in the economic structure of society and women's place in the economy. The full socialisation of production, including : domestic labour is the only solution.

Klara Zetkin argued this position in the women's paper Die Gleicheit

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Clara Zetkin (right) taking the salute on Lenin's Mausoleum, 1924, with (left to right) Voroshilov, Trotsky, Kalinin and Frunze RT ONE AI ITICI VO LUTI AN OCCASIOT ON LEADING ON ARIES.

BY PARKIN Germany from 1 892. This paper retained a high theoretical and political level.

Zetkin waged a constant struggle against the revisionist leadership of the mass-based German Social Democratic Party.

Along with all their other attempts to turn the party from a revolutionary path, these leaders tried to depoliticise the paper and make it more popular in carrying through this fight to maintain the theoretical level of the paper, Zetkin was providing reinforcement for Lenin's struggles against the attempts by SPD leader Bernstein to revise basic Marxist principles.

LENIN

At the same time Zetkin, along with other leading German Social Democrats, provided considerable material assistance in the launching of the paper of Lenin's supporters, Iskra. They helped provide and organised secret printing presses, Russian type, and other essential resources.

Zetkin carried the struggle against Bernstein's reformist positions into her analysis of the road to women's rights. She adhered firmly to the perspective that only class struggle could win these rights.

And she argued for universal suffrage on the grounds that the working class would never win its political and economic battles without the help of women.

The maintenance of a high political level in Die Gleicheit paid off when the majority of its NICHIN readers sided with the radical minority split of INTERNATIONALISM For, allied with a position which connected the struggle of women with the independent struggle of the working class, Klara Zetkin took a position of internationalism on the 1914-18 war.

The opening of hostilities also opened hostilities in the international socialist movement and led to the majority of the Second International betraying Marxist principle.

The Social Democrats of France and Germany betrayed the working class and voted war credits for their ruling class.

The Second International was dead as a force for revolution. Klara Zetkin, along with Karl Liebknecht and her great friend Rosa Luxembourg, left the SPD and joined the independent centrist grouping USPD which agitated against the war. Liebknecht said: "We joined the USPD in order to drive them [the centrists] forward in reach of our whip."

YOUTH

Zetkin also saw the importance of organising youth in the fight against war. Youth was:

"the most reliable force to keep us in a continuous intellectual and moral development, to prevent (us from) resting or wasting. At the side of the adult fighters... there must be younger elements who have the will to risk and to dare."

She wrote volumes arguing against the war from an internationalist position. And even during this difficult period her fight on the womens question was not abandoned.

In 1915 she organised an International Womens Congress in Berne. This provided the first occasion on which internationalists from England, Germany and France could meet one another, and was the small forerunner of what was to become the Third International.

For this endeavour Klara Zetkin was arrested and spent the rest of the war in bad health in prison.

COMMUNIST PARTY

In 191?, Zetkin welcomed the revolution in Russia enthusiastically and in 1918 joined the newly formed German Communist Party (KPD).

She was in the Reichstag (German parliament) from 1919 and edited the party paper Kommunisten. The revolution in Russia had an enormous impact on political struggle in Germany.

Working class internationalism demanded that the revolution in Russia be followed and defended elsewhere, especially in Germany. But the defeats of the German working class in the 1920s brought defeats for revolutionary interWe reprint below the text of a towards discussions with the 'Uniter nationalism in that period.

Klara Zetkin had to suffer in this period not only the deteat of the German working Class but the murder by counter-revolutionaries of both Liebknecht and her friend Rosa Luxembourg who had joined with her in the fight against revisionism.

Zetkin's final letter to Rosa Luxembourg expresses their closeness rooted in struggle.

"Will this letter, will my love still be able to reach you? O Rosa early aye historic greatess and SHIC meanings of all your actions, but my knowledge of these things cannot still the urgent demands of my heart. I cannot overcome my terrible worry and fear for you personally.

Following this first period of defeat, the KPD took an ultraleft turn in 1921 and attempted a putsch-a premature and disastrous bid for power.

Zetkin was one of the first to oppose this in terms similar to Trotsky.

"Because of revolutionary impatience this most revolutionary section of the working class came into collision with the rest and tried mechanically as it were to draw them into struggle"

"We must say that this attempt was completely unsuccessful in this sense-that were it repeated it might actually ruin this splendid etter from the Greek Communist • Secretariat of the Fourth Interni discussions, if approached serior rege This party was in fact to become not only the biggest and broadest based, but also perhaps the most Stalinised and impotent Communist Its bankrupt leadership left it powerless against the growth of fascism, which Zetkin had sharply seen as a profound danger to the working class.

Zetkin spent her last years in Russia-an old Bolshevik, ill at ease with Stalinism.

Her statement in presenting the Women's Theses to •the Third Congress of the Communist International is perhaps a good epitaph for this key fighter for women's rights and socialist revolution:

"Whenever the question of the taking of power arises, the Communist Parties must consider the great danger to the revolution represented by the inert, uninformed masses of women workers, housewives, employees, peasant women, not liberated from the influence of the bourgeois church and bourgeois superstitions and not connected in some way or other with the great liberating movement of communism. Unless the masses of women in the east and west are drawn into this movement they inevitably become the stronghold of the bourgeoisie and the object of counter-revolutionary propaganda."

Internationalist League, clarifying their attitude itional (USFI) and its national sections e nd symfight to

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was formally abolished in January 1925. By 1928 the workers' parties