THIS Thursday at 6pm, I’ll be talking about Eleanor Marx at the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School, to honour International Women’s Day (IWD) in the rolling MML and Islington Heritage Reds on the Green partnership programme launched last year. 

As MML director Meirian Jump says, “Clerkenwell Green has been at the heart of London’s radical politics for over 600 years.” 

Since its founding in 43CE when Roman armies occupied Britain under Emperor Claudius, London encompasses a global polyphony of cultures, languages, peoples and ideas. We’ll explore Londoner Eleanor’s contribution to feminism, trade unionism, socialism and internationalism and her enduring relevance.

In October 1889, during the Silvertown strike, Eleanor Marx formed the first women’s branch of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers. The all-male executive council formally admitted the Silvertown Women’s Branch. As it’s new branch secretary, Eleanor addressed a rally on Clerkenwell Green. The following year she became the first woman elected to the gas workers’ national executive.

When the MML opened in 1933, 50 years after Karl Marx’s death, his youngest daughter’s ashes were placed in a glass-fronted bookcase in the Lenin Room. In 1956 the ashes were interred in the new Marx family tomb in Highgate Cemetery, engraved with words from her father’s eleventh and final thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however is to change it.”

While Eleanor’s ashes have left the library, her legacy continues in its collections, with Clerkenwell Green the view from the reading room. A decade after the publication of my biography Eleanor Marx: A Life, I continue to witness the profound respect and inspiration she invokes for “changing the world.” 

Marx and the hundreds of thousands of women with whom she organised in Britain, Europe and America, persist in our understanding of feminist organisation today. Her socialist sisters founded the now traditional celebration as International Working Women’s Day in 1911 in the United States, 13 years after her death.  

America’s idealism, inequalities and contradictions were well-known to the “mother” of the gasworkers. In 1886 she first visited, invited by the Socialistic Labor Party of America, on a four-month political speaking tour of 15 states. As her ship sailed out of New York harbour on Christmas Day, Eleanor looked up at the resplendent new 151-foot copper statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, unveiled eight weeks previously by President Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to win the presidency after the civil war. Eleanor knew the sonnet inscribed on Lady Liberty’s pedestal, “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus, an American poet descended, like her, from migrant German Jews.

The same year, she co-published The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View. This was to the birth of socialist-feminism what The Communist Manifesto was to the class struggle and historical materialism. She demonstrated how feminism and socialism are integral necessities of each other.  

“Truly the working woman approves the demand of the middle-class women’s movement … But only as means to the end that she may be fully armed for entering into the working-class struggle along with the man of her class … Her end and aim are not the right of free competition with men.”

In September 1889 Eleanor Marx spoke alongside Clara Zetkin at the founding congress of the Second International. Clara, who for the following 25 years held the most prominent position in the German and international socialist women’s movement, was the original proposer and instigator of IWD. In 1932, tradition required that the oldest member of the Reichstag opened the parliamentary session. Zetkin did this with a 40-minute counterblast against fascism, the Nazi party and Hitler.

Nearly a century ago, women like Marx, Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg asserted an authority equal to men. How would these socialist revolutionaries, all German by descent or naturalisation, respond to the outcome of the German election last week? The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) came second overall, securing 20 per cent, the biggest result for a fascist party since World War II. A record-breaking 83.5 per cent of voters provided the highest turnout since German unification in 1990. Among the under-25s, a quarter of men voted AfD, compared with only 14 per cent of women. Young women voted decisively for Die Linke (The Left), which secured an unexpected 8.8 per cent.

Given Eleanor’s understanding of the failures of the 1848 revolutions and experience of America, we can imagine her perspective on the creeping coup in the US. She would have seen how Stalin bequeathed the rot in eastern Germany that now allows the latter-day Krupps, Elon Musk, to encourage the AfD.

Once again, she would have asked, “What is it that we as socialists desire?” and heard the woman question, addressed clearly by young female voters in Germany, from a socialist point of view. 

For more information about Rachel Holmes’s talk at the MML visit www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/events. Her book Eleanor Marx: A Life is published by Bloomsbury.