International Women’s Day.

Clara Zetkin, leader of the ‘Women’s Office’ for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, first proposed the idea in 1910. Zetkin believed that women’s issues were relevant to all human beings – and that the early socialist movement needed guidance on women’s issues.

Karl Marx believed that work is fundamental to human nature. The way a group manages work and money can determine the entire structure of their society. Society is complex, and every economic form will have tensions. A capitalist society generates tensions between bourgeois capitalists, who own the means of production, and workers, who don’t own the results of their labor. Eventually, Marx wrote, these tensions would become so extreme that the workers would rise up in revolution against the capitalists. After the revolution, all real property would be communally owned.

With property abolished, Marx and Engels wrote, institutions that support the transmission of property would vanish. Marriage, a legal structure for binding families, currently exists only for the sake of inheritance. Come the revolution, heterosexual love relationships would not be about economics. Both women and men would freely choose their partners, staying together only as long as is convenient. Real emotion would replace legal fictions.

Serial monogamy without any strings attached may have sounded great to Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels, but to early socialist women it sounded like the Deadbeat Dad social theory. In their revolutionary fervor, male thinkers had forgotten that heterosexual relationships produce children who should not be abandoned. Their heady theory of freedom for adults left children of all genders unprotected.

Clara Zetkin’s analysis of gender inequality in marriage focused on equal wages for working women. She saw the family as a mini-society, shaped by the same dynamics as the larger capitalist society. Husbands make more money, so they are the bosses of the family. Women become the family’s private servants. Capitalists benefit most from this wage inequality, because it keeps all wages down. If a man asks for fair wages, he can be told, “Look, I could hire a woman for half your pay. Be glad for what you have.” But after the revolution, women would earn equal pay for equal work, and “both spouses would face each other as equals.”

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew who became a German citizen, was Clara Zetkin’s close friend and fellow socialist activist. Luxemburg also challenged mainstream Marxist leaders. Lenin, for example, thought all workers should focus on one unified movement for armed revolution. Luxemburg thought this misrepresented the interests of workers. Workers are not a unified class. Workers include women, men, professionals, laborers, urbanites, farmers, Jews, Catholics, Russians, Germans and more. No single theory of revolution could fit everyone.

A famous story, perhaps apocryphal, illustrates the risks of not understanding difference. Luxemburg had a cat named Mimi. Lenin came to visit Luxemburg and met Mimi. Lenin, who liked cats, made a terrible faux pas. Mimi rolled over on her back. Lenin assumed he could treat this cat just like a dog, so he reached over to pet Mimi’s belly. She savagely attacked him. Some might say this is symbolic of his political blind spots: his ideologically driven revolution led to bloody terrors and a failed state.

Luxemburg and Zetkin held nonviolent theories of socialist revolution. Zetkin advocated for mass workers’ strikes, accepting armed struggle only as a last resort. Luxemburg understood revolution culturally, as simultaneous grassroots movements by workers all over Europe. Both women broke from the Socialist Democratic Party to oppose World War I. Zetkin said that only arms manufacturers would benefit from the war and that the expanded army would eventually be used against workers. Luxemburg said that colonial expansionism would lead to torture and oppression.

Both their predictions came true. Luxemburg died in 1919 when government troops were deployed against political demonstrators. Zetkin lived until 1933, long enough to criticize the Nazi party’s emerging plan to colonize Europe. In 1932, she opened the Reichstag’s parliamentary session with a speech denouncing Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party.

One of my facebook friends, Julie Silver, wrote: “In my opinion, celebrating days like International Women’s Day serve to perpetuate our ‘otherness’ as women and continue to relegate us to the margins.”

Some of our mutual friends responded, “That may be easy to say in North America, where women have equal legal rights. But in many countries around the world, women are regarded as a marginal kind of human being in terrible, hurtful ways.”

I imagine that Zetkin might also say, “We must speak from the margins. How else will those blinded by habitual mainstream thinking learn to see themselves?” And that Luxemburg might say, “The world is a kaleidoscope of overlapping lives and perceptions. Everyone is at the margin of something. Bring forward your unique wisdom and co-create the world.”

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Images: Zetkin (l) and Luxemburg (r), kidscreativearts.com; Lenin and cat, theartnewspaper.com

An earlier version (2013) of this essay about International Women’s Day connects is with Parshat Vayakhel-Pekuedei. It’s published at Rabbis Without Borders at My Jewish Learning