Clara Zetkin, born on this day in 1857, was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and feminist, active in the revolutionary Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
Clara Zetkin was born in Wiederau, a peasant village in Saxony, now part of the municipality Königshain-Wiederau. Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zurich in 1882 then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator.
Zetkin was very interested in women’s politics, including the fight for equal opportunities and women’s suffrage, though always through a socialist paradigm. She helped to develop the social-democratic women’s movement in Germany; from 1891 to 1917 she edited the Social Democratic Party (SPD) women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality). She also contributed to International Women’s Day (IWD).
Around 1898, Zetkin formed a friendship with the younger Rosa Luxemburg that lasted 20 years. Despite Luxemburg’s indifference to the women’s movement, they became staunch political allies on the far left of the SPD. Luxemburg once suggested that their joint epitaph would be “Here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy.”
In August 1932, despite having recently fallen gravely ill in Moscow, she returned to Berlin to preside over the opening of the newly elected Reichstag. There, she gave a speech urging Germany to reject fascism, stating “all those who feel themselves threatened, all those who suffer and all those who long for liberation must belong to the United Front against fascism and its representatives in government”.
When Hitler seized power the following year, Zetkin once again fled Germany, dying in Moscow in 1933 at the age of 76.
“The working women, who aspire to social equality, expect nothing for their emancipation from the bourgeois women’s movement, which allegedly fights for the rights of women. That edifice is built on sand and has no real basis. Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question.”
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break in threads for a few days yeah ok
also not feeling well mentally ok love yall
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I :rat-salute: y’all again you smartypants.
Previous answer
1/5 and 1/7
:100-com:
Express :100-com: with five 1s. Express 100 three ways with five 5s. You can use brackets, parentheses, and these sings: +, -, ×, ÷, =.
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The very idea of a distinction between work and leisure is socially constructed and brings about untold misery.
The realm of necessity could be colonized by the realm of freedom, that play could be born into work. And I had many dramatic examples of that. My mother who came was born in Russia had seen peasants harvesting and the way they did that was with a sense of joy. They brought vodka with them, they brought food with them and they turned harvesting into a picnic. This was an a pre-industrial Society and I wondered why couldn’t we extend this whole phenomenon: … the whole work experience! In other words turn work into something that is much more playful, much more joyous.
–Murray Bookchin
S. Diamond observed other free human beings who survived into our age, also in Africa. He could see that they did no work, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it in English. Instead, he said they made no distinction between work and play. Does Diamond mean that the activity of the free people can be seen as work one moment, as play another, depending on how the anthropologist feels? Does he mean that they didn’t know if their activity was work or play? Does he mean we, you and I, Diamond’s armored contemporaries, cannot distinguish their work from their play?
If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we’re playing. Why else would we be there?
I think Diamond meant to say something more profound. A time-and-motion engineer watching a bear near a berry patch would not know when to punch his clock. Does the bear start working when he walks to the berry patch, when he picks the berry, when he opens his jaws? If the engineer has half a brain he might say the bear makes no distinction between work and play. If the engineer has an imagination he might say that the bear experiences joy from the moment the berries turn deep red, and that none of the bear’s motions are work.
–Fredy Perlman, Against History, Against Leviathan
The conflation of work and labour too. labour is done for a wage, work is just expending effort. Leisure requires work too, learning to play a guitar for ex you suck before you can play music. So the issue with labour is again that you do the work but aren’t getting the fruits of it.
Wild that we’ve gone the other way and instead of abolishing work we’ve commodified play
