Socialist Feminists

"By syndicalism, we mean the economic union of manual and intellectual workers on the basis of a federal form of organization that is oriented both to practical everyday demands and to the achievement of a better future. With the strength of their economic and moral solidarity, syndicalist workers try to better their overall situation within today’s society in all directions, using all the means of direct-action struggle that the moment commands. The principal aim of the syndicalists, however, is to overcome the capitalist state and economic order and reorganize society on the basis of . — The syndicalists believe that the land, the instruments of production, and the products of labor belong to the whole, and must be managed by the producers themselves. For this reason, the preparation of the worker for this purpose appears to them as the most crucial task of socialist education."

"Unlike the so-called socialist workers’ parties of various tendencies, which stipulate that the conquest of political power is the goal, the syndicalists reject every form of the State and its various institutions, since they argue that the State was never and never can be anything other than the political apparatus of force of the propertied classes to ensure the economic exploitation of the broad masses of the working people."

"The syndicalists fight against every form of militarism, which they see as a terrible threat to the physical and mental well-being of the people, which is in reality only a weapon in the hands of the ruling classes to protect the power of the propertied classes against the working class, harnessing power of the great majority of the people against the rebellion of the oppressed. For the workers of all lands, there is no benefit to be had from slaughtering one another, and it is only their ignorance which arranges for them to go to the wars which are the result of conflicts of interests between the capitalists of different States. The syndicalists are opponents of the national lie; behind its dazzling raiment there is always hidden the naked egoism of the possessing classes. By principle, recognize the right of free development for every nation and for each group in the nation, as long as they are not passed to the welfare of all the damage that they are internationalists and representative of a general brotherhood of peoples."

"The syndicalists fight against the educational system sanctioned by State or Church, the only purpose of which is ultimately to reduce the minds of the young to stencils and to mold them into certain forms so that later, they can more willingly serve the system of political oppression and economic exploitation of the broad masses by a small privileged minority. We believe that the organized working class must provide the school for their own children on their own initiative, and we support any attempt aimed at wresting the monopoly of education from the State and the Church. Only in this way will it be possible to set up a truly free education for life, which not only opens up the collective treasures of human knowledge and provides them to the children, but also at the same time stirs them to their own meditations, promoting their independence and the development of their character in all directions."

"The family is no artificial creation, arbitrarily called into being and always wearing the same forms. It has assumed different forms in different times and places, and also its present form will not remain the same; they will continue to evolve and adopt new forms, keeping pace with economic and social changes and with the ethical and intellectual needs of the people. To this day, it has been the most significant and influential institution for the individual lives of human beings, and it will undoubtedly remain for a long time. It is probably within the circle of the family, especially in youth, that people receive the deepest impressions, impressions that very often give their later lives a decisive direction. It should therefore be done everything possible to give this narrow circle a character that is as pleasant as possible and mentally appealing, especially one in which the child can experience well-being."

"We must never forget that woman was ignored, seen and treated as intellectually inferior, for so long that we can hardly expect the sudden and surprising success of our activities for the time being. The inevitable consequences of a thousand years of slavery cannot be undone at once. Its repercussions are sure to be felt for a long time, felt at any rate more than we should like. Those who expect something different in this regard have failed to grasp the enormity of the problem; the great tragedy of woman has slipped past them without a trace."

"By no means you should work too hard, and thereby ruin your health. Your health is more important than any book in the world."

"We have to take things as they are, and we must already accept the need to seek out women in their hiding places, bringing the necessary enlightenment to them there. This work needs to be done and should be our most sacred task. This work needs to be done and should be our most sacred task. Certainly, the task is not easy and pleasant, but it must be embraced and pursued all the more energetically in so far as we have come to the conclusion that the need to win woman for our cause outweighs any concerns."

"As long as the woman is not experiencing a renaissance, cannot be dreamed of a renaissance of humanity."

"Well then, sisters, young or old, girls and women, manual or intellectual laborers, come to us and join our covenant, so that the great work of social liberation may reach its consummation. Unite with us to foster a brighter future for us and our children, in which the exploitation and domination of the broad masses by privileged minorities will be a thing of the past. Let no one tell you that you are not capable of contributing to this grandiose work. Each of you, but also everyone, without exception, can contribute their mite to the common goal. We only have to want it. Let us want it, then, so that our children will not to throw the accusation in our faces that we live as slaves and brought them into the world as slaves, so that they too can wander through life laden with the curse of bondage."

"Let us show that we are not only willing to feed on the harvests of the past, but that we also feel the courage and the excitement in ourselves to lend a hand, to push the wheel of time forward and to open the gates to a new becoming."

"She died on November 23rd, 1955 and was cremated on the 27th in accordance with her wishes. Once when we happened to touch on the subject she said, half in jest: “Perhaps it is all the same to the dead what happens to them but I find it beautiful to be consumed by flames, for fire is a pure element. To be eaten up by worms in the brave is ugly and repugnant to my feelings.” She was right. We went to life together for almost sixty years and my ashes will mingle with hers when my hour comes."

"It was inevitable that some day the hour should come when one of us would have to go. But this is sober logic which cannot lessen the pain of the bereaved. I only know that, with this wonderful woman, something was taken from me that no eternity can bring back. We have all lost her, for, with Milly, one of the last of the old guard has passed away, one who contributed sixty years of her life to a cause that will never die as long as men live on this earth."

"Early Christianity was able to release her soul by appealing to her humanity and presenting her as an equal at the side of men. And later, when Christian doctrine strangled in Church dogma and woman was branded as the mother of Original Sin, women fought for their human rights for many years to come. She took a prominent part in all movements against the Church and died as a heretic and witch on the countless pyres of the Inquisition after having endured all the agonies of the torture chamber. Only when all of these movements had bled to death and the Church remained as the victor on the battlefield did woman succumb to its enticements. In the mystical semi-darkness of the old Dome, her soul was weak and brittle. A weary resignation had taken hold of her, and she became the servant of the Church, which was most glad of this victory, for woman, who in her hopelessness was seized by its deceitful ideal, became one of its mightiest pillars and has remained so to this day."

"The claim that women cannot be won over to a great movement like socialism is just as groundless as the assertion that the proletariat generally has no sympathy for socialism."

"The revolutions in Russia and Central Europe, the inevitable results of the great genocide, also brought so-called suffrage women, which had long been the ideal of the bourgeois and social-democratic women’s movements."

"The proletariat has been kept in ignorance and slavery by the propertied classes for centuries, so that they have had little time for intellectual training, particularly for their own thinking, people who, though physically tough, are above all very often loaded malnourished and with all sorts of worries, have little opportunity to think seriously about social problems. In most cases it is not innate stupidity and inertia of thought that makes workers dull and indifferent, as is so often claimed, but the lack of the necessary opportunity and leisure."

"There was only one period in history in which women were addressed among the people. This happened in the time of the early Christian movement. The words that were spoken to her then deeply penetrated into woman’s soul, arousing what was most beautiful and precious in her. All the hidden feelings and sensations that had lain dormant in her for millennia suddenly came to the fore and found a wonderful expression in it. With a holy earnestness, she answered its call, proving that the slavery of centuries had not broken her spirit. Such a call is again needed from us today to seize woman’s heart with tongues of fire and to lead her into our ranks as a fighter."

"My friends Rudolf and Milly Rocker"

"The organization of women on the basis of anarcho-syndicalism is as necessary as the organization of male workers on the same basis. That’s why we have to support each other and go hand in hand in our work."

"From their parents’ home, young people ought to take the richest and most beautiful memories with them on the path of life, which should accompany them later in all struggles and perils like a warm ray of hope. So ought it to be, so must it be, so shall it be when men and women come together as free and equal people, dedicating themselves to one another in the spirit of real love and mutual respect. But such a state of coexistence is only possible if both sexes are equal in all their relations and woman is no longer regarded as an immature and inferior being. We demand not women’s rights but human rights, and we want to win them in all spheres of life."

"We have already realized today that the dreary bullying to which stupid pedagogues subject young people usually achiever just the opposite of what it should. By trampling on the human dignity of youth in this way, they have greatly harmed them spiritually and mentally, placing obstacles to their natural development. We believe that such a method must be rejected in every way, that one should not always emphasize people’s weaker side, but must appeal more to the good, the noble and the purely human, strengthening their will and reviving their courage."

"The bearers of the reaction will make use of women’s ignorance; they will constantly strive to exploit the material misery of the proletariat, which is palpable to woman to the highest degree, for their shady plans to exploit political capital. Thus, the political indifference of women will become a powerful factor of the nearest future, which will give all reactionary measures of parliament the sanction of the “popular will.”"

"We have to take things as they come, since we are not the masters over our own fate."

"The more the proletarians’ strength is exhausted and depleted in the daily struggle for existence, the less they are tempted to express outrage against the yoke that has been imposed on them, and the more they are forced to dully endure their misery. Big proletarian families mean cheap material for the entrepreneur to exploit and less risk in the inevitable economic battles between labor and management — and the State welcomes cannon fodder in case of a war."

"It is truly already high time that woman should stop playing the role of a mere breeding machine, the accidental victim of a multiplication of her family. A child should only see the light of day if it is wanted by the parents and it can be provided with the material conditions for healthy and humane development. As things stand today, however, the birth of every new child in a proletarian’s family means a greater austerity in the most necessary necessities of life and very often the destitution and slow languishing of all family members."

"That a woman whose life is only moving from one pregnancy to the next, is lost for any mental development, is all too understandable. And unfortunately there are millions of proletarian women in this terrible situation."

"It is a mistake to believe that the Webbs' basic idea was State Socialism. It was in fact nothing less than the application of scientific thinking to politics. About this I had many arguments with Beatrice. Like Bernard Shaw, she totally lacked the strain of dissenting morality which is so strong an element in the British character and especially in the Labour Party. ... They were interested in the economic and political structure of society; they were disinterestedly, and I would even say passionately, desirous of social improvement and greater human happiness. Their watchwords...were "measurement and publicity". That is to say, they wanted to substitute quantitative for qualitative arguments, to find a solution and to subject it to criticism instead of gassing about justice and liberty. To avoid the danger of tyranny they agreed that there must be freedom of criticism and "public accountability" for all State action. But they were never really interested in liberty – that is to say, they did not recognize the intractable complexity of individuals. People must be placed in categories for the purposes of government, and if they did not fit, so much the worse."

"The only woman who appears regularly in the New Statesman in the early months is its co-founder Beatrice Webb. She is represented in her partnership with Sidney Webb and their solid 22-part series “What is Socialism?”, which dominates the first months of the magazine. Just one instalment of this series is devoted to, as they call it, "freedom for the woman". In its dogged lines, I find both what must have been most attractive and what may have been most alienating about feminism 100 years ago. What is attractive is the insistence on material emancipation. After centuries of mystification of the angel of the house, the Webbs are fiercely sure that there is, quite simply, a "loss of personal dignity and personal freedom . . . inherent in dependence on the caprice of another . . . The childbearing woman, like the wage earner, must be set free from economic subjection." Fifty years before Betty Frie­dan told American housewives the same thing, Beatrice Webb suggested to British housewives that economic dependence was not romantic. Elsewhere in her life and writing, Webb was often conflicted about feminism and the woman’s role beyond the home. Yet this is a straightforward message of material independence. Even now, we often see Daily Mail columnists bridling at the idea that being financially dependent involves any loss of personal freedom. What a call to arms this must have been 100 years ago."

"Their first book, The Permanent Official, fills three plump volumes, and took them and their two secretaries upwards of four years to write. It is an amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history and the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all time."

"Their bureaucracy was never étatisme: it claimed much for the State, but much for the group also. Only the individual seemed somehow to get left out, or rather to be told to fit himself in, and not to fuss."

"We shall never understand the Awakening of Women until we realise that it is not mere feminism. It is one of three simultaneous world-movements towards a more equal partnership among human beings in human affairs. ... [T]he movement for woman's emancipation is paralleled, on the one hand, by the International Movement of Labour—the banding together of the manual working classes to obtain their place in the sun and, on the other, by the unrest among subject-peoples struggling for freedom to develop their own peculiar civilisations."

"Perhaps nothing illustrates better the diabolical character of the Stalinist regime than the 140-mile Belomor Canal, built at Stalin's instigation to link the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. Between September 1931 and August 1933, somewhere between 128,000 and 180,000 prisoners - most of them from Solovetsky, with Frenkel directing their efforts - hacked out a waterway, equipped only with the most primitive pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets. So harsh were the conditions and so inadequate the tools that tens of thousands of them died in the process. This was hardly unforeseeable; for six months of the year the ground was frozen solid, while in many places the prisoners had to cut through solid granite. And, as so often, the net result was next to worthless economically: far too narrow and shallow to be navigable by substantial vessels. Yet when Shaw's fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were given a tour of the finished canal they were oblivious to all this. As they put it in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), it was 'pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration'."

"The Webbs explicitly rejected the 'naive belief that. . . Soviet] penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue.' Such notions were simply 'incredible' to 'anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world'. Slavery always has its apologists, but seldom are they so ingenuous. The thirty-six Soviet writers who, under Gorky's direction, produced the hyperbolic book The Belomor-Baltic Canal Named for Stalin at least had the excuse that the alternative to lying might be dying. The Webbs wrote their rubbish in the safety of Bloomsbury."

"The world, they would say, was made up of "A's" and "B's" – anarchists and bureaucrats; and they were all on the side of the "B's"."

"Within a trade, in the absence of any Common Rule, competition between firms leads, as we have seen, to the adoption of practices by which the whole industry is deteriorated. The enforcement of a common minimum standard throughout the trade not only stops the degradation, but in every way conduces to industrial efficiency."

"Within a community, too, in the absence of regulation, the competition between trades tends to the creation and persistence in certain occupations of conditions of employment injurious to the nation as a whole. The remedy is to extend the conception of the Common Rule from the trade to the whole community, and by prescribing a National Minimum, absolutely to prevent any industry being carried on under conditions detrimental to the public welfare."

"How can the will of the people be undermined by a vote of the people?"

"The government is turning lives upside down by callously playing hard ball over Brexit and it needs to take its responsibilities far more seriously"

"Extinction Rebellion are carrying a message we all need to hear. They won’t be silenced by a police crackdown, nor should they be in a free democratic society."

"We will block what is nothing less than a coup."

"Ultimately, that speech was a dark moment in British politics. Democracy is indeed under threat from extremists. The problem is, they're running the government itself."

"The rainforest is being sacrificed on the altar of free trade with Europe"

"The Leave campaign claimed Brexit would save the NHS. But Home Office plans to end freedom of movement will do the opposite. 65,000 EU citizens work in our NHS. It couldn't cope without them."

"We would be kidding ourselves if we put our trust in Brazil’s right-wing, pro-business president Jair Bolsonaro to protect it."

"At a moment when we need a leader with courage and integrity, we get a pompous clown."

"In my experience, women tend to be less tribal, they tend to find it easier to establish trust more quickly"

"Hamid Dalwai, one rare liberal Indian Muslim who ironically had more followers among Hindus than his own co-religionists, was even more scathing in Muslim Politics in Secular India: “Indian Muslims are, as a rule, liberal only when liberal Hindus blame communalist Hindus.”"

"We have to insist on a common personal law for all citizens of India."

"“Hindu society has produced many communalists. Admitted. But it has also produced men like Mahatma Gandhi who went on a fast unto death to save the Muslims of Bihar from large-scale butchery. It has produced men like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who had the Bihari Hindus bombed from the air when they did not respond to the Mahatma’s call. These have not been isolated men in Hindu society, as Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and M.C. Chagla have been in Muslim society. The Mahatma was a leader whom the whole Hindu society honoured. Pandit Nehru has been kept as Prime Minister over all these years by a majority vote of the same Hindu society. “Now let me give you a sample of the leadership which Muslim society has produced so far, and in an ample measure. The foremost that comes to my mind is Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. Immediately after partition, there was a shooting in Sheikhupura in which many Hindus who were waiting for repatriation in a camp, were shot down. There was a great commotion in India, and Pandit Nehru had to take up the matter in his next weekly meeting with Liaqat Ali in Lahore. The Prime Minister of Pakistan had brought the Deputy Commissioner of Sheikhupura with him. The officer explained that the Hindus had broken out of the camp at night in the midst of a curfew, and the police had to open fire. Pandit Nehru asked as to why the Hindus had broken out of the camp. The officer told him that some miscreants had set the camp on fire. Pandit Nehru protested to Liaqat Ali that this was an amazing explanation. Liaqat Ali replied without batting an eye that they had to maintain law and order. This exemplifies the quality of leadership which Muslim society has produced so far. This…”"