Genderquake: socialist women and the Paris Commune
Women in our history
Monday 8 March 2021, by Judy Cox
On 11 April 1871, three weeks into the life of the Paris Commune, a poster appeared on the walls of France’s capital: Citizenesses, we know that the present social order bears within itself the seeds of poverty and of the death of all liberty and justice… At this hour, when danger is imminent and the enemy is at the gates of Paris, the entire population must unite to defend the Commune, which stands for the annihilation of all privilege and all inequality.
All women who were prepared to die for the Commune were urged to attend a meeting at 8pm at the Salle Larched, Grand Café des Nations, 74 Rue de Temple. Laundresses, seamstresses, bookbinders and milliners attended and there they established a new organisation, the Union of Women. This Union was a part of the socialist First International, which had been established by Karl Marx and other socialists and trade unioni
Camila Valle is an editor, translator, and writer. She is assistant editor of
Monthly Review.
Five Days, Five Nights (New York: International Publishers, 2020), $15.99, 70 pages, paperback.
June 15, 2005, was declared a national day of mourning in Portugal. Álvaro Cunhal, leader of Portugal’s Communist Party for half a century and central figure of the 1974 Carnation Revolution, was gone. As the government stated in its decree:
Álvaro Cunhal was one of the great Portuguese political figures of the twentieth century. His renown before, during, and after April 25, 1974, remains inseparably tied to the recent history of Portugal, particularly his role in the resistance to the dictatorship and the sacrifices he stoically endured in clandestinity, prison, and exile.
Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia by Alexander Bogdanov.
Aleksandra Djurasovic is an independent researcher with academic interests in urbanism, ecology, and post-socialist, neoliberal, and war-to-peace transitions in Southeast Europe, among other topics. Milan Djurasovic is a published author of two books of fiction and numerous articles on politics, psychology, literature, and art.
Alexander A. Bogdanov’s novel
Red Star was published in 1908 as an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolutionaries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.
Letters
Most readers of the
Weekly Worker agree that capitalism must be overthrown, that this should happen as a result of the actions of the working class majority taking power, and that all Marxists should unite in one party with a programme along the lines suggested by the CPGB.
However, the CPGB stubbornly persists in urging all Marxists/socialists to join the Labour Party and fight within it to win members to Marxism. It frowns upon the setting up of any other party of the working class, which it always derides as being a “Labour Party mark two” and therefore doomed to fail.
Britain’s Socialist Workers Party and Counterfire apply political chloroform over Trump’s coup
Pseudo-left groups all over the world have responded to the attempted coup led by Donald Trump with one voice. It is a position best summed up by Alex Callinicos, the theoretical leader of Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its sympathising groups in many countries: “No need to panic order will be restored in Washington.”
Alex Callinicos
Callinicos tweeted this at 5.51pm (EST) on January 6, just over three hours after hundreds of rioters including armed fascist thugs entered the Capitol building. In those three hours, millions throughout the world had witnessed historically unprecedented scenes of the evacuation of the Senate Chamber over fears for the safety and lives of members of Congress. But Callinicos was adamant that everyone must “Keep calm and carry on”. In another tweet he wrote: