Autor: FIR | 25. 6. 2023
The FIR remembers this time an important representative of the German workers’ movement, who presented 100 years ago for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the fascist threat and who died on June 20, 1933, after she had experienced the transfer of power to Hitler’s fascism in Germany. End of August 1932, despite her illness, she had traveled to Berlin to open the German Reichstag as its senior president. She gave a blazing speech against fascism and its supporters. “The order of the day is the united front of all working people in order to repel fascism, and thus to preserve for the enslaved and exploited the strength and power of their organization, and even their physical life. From this compelling historical necessity all captivating and dividing political, trade union, religious and ideological attitudes must recede.”
This appeal for a united front against the fascist danger was in line with her attitude, which she had already politically justified on June 20, 1923, in her political report to the Extended Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International under the title “The Struggle against Fascism.”
Clara Josephine Zetkin, née Eißner (* July 5, 1857; † June 20, 1933) was an outstanding figure in the German workers’ movement. She became a member of the SPD as early as the time of the Socialist Law (1878); in 1917, she joined the USPD and later the Spartacus group, and was one of the founders of the KPD. Because of her great popularity, Zetkin was a Reichstag deputy for the KPD from 1920 to 1933.
She was a committed women’s rights activist who linked gender equality with socialist revolution. She resolutely advocated the inclusion of women in the class struggle and criticized the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement reducing of women’s suffrage, free choice of occupation and special labor protection laws for women, as the bourgeois women wanted to implement these within the framework of the ruling system. On the international level, Zetkin participated in the International Workers’ Congress in Paris in 1889 and the founding of the Second International. She advocated an International Women’s Day at the “International Socialist Congress” in Stuttgart in 1907.
As a member of the leadership of the KPD, she was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) from 1921 to 1933. It was within this framework that, 100 years ago, she first analyzed the fascist threat posed by Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy and the emergence of comparable political movements in various European states. There was still little experience of fascism in power, so Clara Zetkin referred mainly to Italian fascism. She particularly emphasized its social dimension, to which the workers’ movement had to respond: “We must remain aware that … fascism is a movement of the hungry, the needy, the destitute and the disappointed. We must strive to either incorporate the social strata that are now falling for fascism into our struggle or at least neutralize them for the struggle. With all clarity and strength, we must prevent them from providing teams for the counter-revolution of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as we cannot win these strata for our party, our ideals, cannot draw them into the ranks of the revolutionary proletarian fighting armies, we must succeed in neutralizing them … They must no longer become dangerous to us as bourgeoisie landslaves.”
Clara Zetkin thus understood anti-fascist action orientation as a political influence on those social forces that either are affected by the politics of fascism or threaten to fall for fascist ideology. Some of them have to be won over as comrades-in-arms; others have to be neutralized so that they do not allow themselves to be abused as “landslaves” of the rulers. Already at that time it was a matter of expanding the front of struggle against the fascist threat on the one hand by taking up the interests and needs of non-proletarian groups, on the other hand of hindering fascist propaganda and mobilization so that it is not able to draw insecure sections of society to its side.
In 1923, Clara Zetkin demanded in a speech to works councils: “Men and women of all professions, of all political and trade union tendencies, of all social and religious confessions, unite to fight against fascism and the danger of war!”
This demand is still very relevant 100 years later!
