“THE MAN who could not hear a tale of distress without attempting to relieve it can now brag of abetting acts that endanger the lives of innocent women and children,” Eleanor Marx, self-proclaimed “Fenian Sister” wrote in her text the Irish Dynamiters in 1884. 

The context was specific: her writing, as part of her activism, on the imprisonment and oppression of those fighting for Irish freedom. And yet this quotation, as Eleanor Marx’s work broadly, resonates with our moment in a poignant way. 

Eleanor Marx, Karl and Jenny Marx’s youngest daughter (1855-98) was brought back into our intellectual and political landscapes by Rachel Holmes’s extraordinary biography, Eleanor Marx, A Life (Bloomsbury, 2015). Holmes’s re-reading of her life and times returned to us Eleanor Marx as the foremother of socialism — feminism. Internationalist, trade unionist, editor and multilingual translator of her father’s archive, she co-founded Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first organised socialist party, alongside William Morris, and HM Hyndman. 

She loved Shakespeare, both Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, good poetry and bad puns. A failed actress, she became one of the most sought-after public orators in radical Victorian Britain. White was her favourite colour, and German Sekt her idea of happiness — making her one of the first champagne socialists. 

Eleanor Marx was one of the most important political forces in a uniquely revolutionary moment of the 19th century. She was political from top to toe, her mother Jenny remarked. Alert and attentive to the interconnections of political events around the globe, she spent her life acting for justice in the foremost socialist organisation of her time, the Second International, in which she was a leader alongside Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Edward Bernstein and others. In Britain, she was a significant founding force of the fledgling trade union movement, giving special attention to unionising women, most vulnerable to exploitation under patriarchal-capitalism. 

Eleanor Marx was the only Marx to reclaim the Jewish roots of her family. In 1890 she accepted a speaking invitation in London to a group of socialist workers: “Dear Comrades: I shall be very glad to speak at the meeting of Nov.; the more glad, that my father was a Jew.” In a climate of anti-semitism and oppression experienced by Jewish workers at her time, she decided to learn Yiddish and was known to exclaim “I am a Jewess!” while addressing Jewish workers’ unions. 

Reflecting back on this act of solidarity on Eleanor Marx’s 170th birthday feels both timely and startling. Marx’s sharp analysis of structural oppression, as elucidated in such texts as “the Woman Question” (from a Socialist Point of View, 1886), showed that she knew that inequality and repression could not be tolerated for long. 

“And first, a general idea that has to do with all women. The life of woman does not coincide with that of man. Their lives do not intersect; in many cases do not even touch. Hence the life of the race is stunted.” 

We all lose in our humanity when some of us are silenced and abused. In the Irish Dynamiters she wrote further, “No doubt if all human beings were capable of developing equally, force would never be needed.” 

Fourteen months after the onset of the genocide against Gaza, the manifold avenues through which Marx acted for equality and against oppression and her acts of solidarity in writing and in practice are more necessary than ever. She said “I am a Jewess” when noting the effects of structural subjugation on Jewish people in her time. In turn, this act of solidarity forces us to adopt the phrase “I am a Gazan.” 

The death toll of the genocide has now exceeded 46,000 people, including more than 8,000 children. The infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed to its core, with Israeli military attacks targeting cultural, academic, and community life in Gaza, ensuring nothing will remain intact when ceasefire finally comes. 

Israeli attacks continue while abandoning its own hostages, including elderly people, women and children, forcing us to reckon with the quotation with which this essay started. This Israeli attack is of course not out of context and is part and parcel of an ongoing Nakba, an attempt to destroy cultural, political and social Palestinian life and instating permanent repression and subjugation. 

In the words of Marx, in a letter, “sometimes I am inclined to wonder how one can go on living  with all this suffering around one” it feels that the violence and misery is so overwhelming that there are no courses of action left for us to resist. Yet Marx was ever-resilient and had never lapsed into inaction in the face of cruelty and inhumanity. It is not only her ability to identify those at the crux of structural oppression and avenues to stand in solidarity with them that make Eleanor Marx relevant for our times. Her unwavering humanity and her insistence to continue fighting for freedom and equality for all resonate powerfully at this moment. 

To end on one of her most famous speeches, from the First May Day in 1890, when the goals for which she was fighting had seemed very distant: “This is not the end but only the beginning of the struggle; it is not enough to come here to demonstrate in favour of an eight hours’ day. We must not be like some Christians who sin for six days and go to church on the seventh, but we must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women that we meet, come into the ranks to help us.”

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many–they are few.

Dr Dana Mills, an Israeli peace activist and author, wrote this piece for the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School (MML) in honour of Eleanor Marx’s 170th birthday. The MML, a leading centre for Marxist and socialist history research and education, takes pride in its historical connection to Eleanor Marx. The Social Democratic Federation’s offices and publishing house were located at 37a Clerkenwell Green, where Marx also spoke at the 1890 May Day rally. The library’s extensive collections include writings by Marx, along with original correspondence. On March 6 at 6pm, MML will host biographer Rachel Holmes for a special, free drop-in event about Eleanor Marx on Clerkenwell Green. More details can be found at www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.