Marilyn J. Boxer and John S. Partington, eds, Clara Zetkin: National and International Contexts (Socialist History Society, 2012) ISBN 9780955513879

 

 

 

Clara Zetkin was once a renowned figure in the international working class movement; as a Marxist activist and theoretician she became an inspiration for men and women in their struggle against the dual enemies of imperialist war and capitalist oppression. She was dedicated to the Socialist cause and active throughout her adult life in the German Social Democratic Party, the Spartacist League and the German Communist Party. Zetkin was the comrade and friend of Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin, but her memory has been eclipsed in recent decades. The founder of the Socialist Women's International but a fierce critic of what she saw as the shortcomings of bourgeois feminism, Zetkin interviewed Lenin on ‘The Woman Question’ and it was Zetkin who over a hundred years ago initiated the first ever International Women’s Day that continues to be celebrated to this day. So why is she now so little known in the English-speaking world? What is her abiding legacy and is there anything that can be learned from her career and example eighty years after her death? The contributors to this special SHS Occasional Publication devoted to Clara Zetkin seek to provide answers to these and other questions for a modern audience.

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Table of Contents

 



List of Abbreviations

 

'Clara Zetkin in Retrospect: An Introduction', by Marilyn J. Boxer

Chapter One: 'Clara Zetkin and France: Eight Year Exile, Eighty Year Influence', by Marilyn J. Boxer

 

Chapter Two: 'The International Socialist Women’s Secretary in Wartime: Clara Zetkin and Britain, 1912-1915', by John S. Partington

 

Chapter Three: 'Clara Zetkin and Russia, 1900s-1930s', by Natalia Novikova

 

Chapter Four: 'Defamed in the West, Idealised in the East? On the Reception of Clara Zetkin in Germany after 1945', by Florence Hervé

 

Chapter Five: 'Clara Zetkin Goes International: The Socialist Women’s International - an Unequal European and Global Order, 1907 to 1917', by Susan Zimmermann

 

'Afterword', by John S. Partington

Glossary of Persons

Notes on Contributors

Endnotes

John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (Ashgate 2003) ISBN 0754633837

Alongside his reputation as an author, H. G. Wells is also remembered as a leading political commentator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building Cosmopolis presents the worldview of Wells as developed between his student days at the Normal School of Science (1884-1887) and his death in 1946. During this time, Wells developed a unique political philosophy, grounded on the one hand in the theory of 'Ethical Evolution' as propounded by his professor, T. H. Huxley, and on the other in late Victorian socialism. From this basis Wells developed a worldview which rejected class struggle and nationalism and embraced global co-operation for the maintenance of peace and the advancement of the human species in a world society. Although committed to the idea of a world state, Wells became more antagonistic towards the nation state as a political unit during the carnage of the First World War. He began moving away from the position of an internationalist to one of a cosmopolitan in 1916, and throughout the inter-war period he advanced the notion of regional and, ultimately, functional world government to a greater and greater extent. Wells first demonstrated a functionalist society in Men Like Gods (1923) and further elaborated this system of government in most of his works, both fictional and non-fictional, throughout the rest of his life. Following an examination of the development of his political thought from inception to fruition, this study argues that Wells's political thoughts rank him alongside David Mitrany as one of the two founders of the functionalist school of international relations, an acknowledgement hitherto denied to Wells by scholars of world-government theory. https://www.ashgate.com/pdf/tis/9780754633839.pdf.

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Liberal Internationalism, 'Ethical Evolution' and Cosmopolitan Socialism
• The Death of the Static: H. G. Wells and the Kinetic Utopia
• From 'The Larger Synthesis' to the League of Free Nations
• Educational reform from The Outline of History to the 'Permanent World Encyclopaedia'
• From the League of Nations to the Functional World State
• Human Rights and Public Accountability in the Functional World State
• The Forgotten Cosmopolitan: H. G. Wells and Postwar Transnationalism
• Postscript: Mind at the End of its Tether?
• Bibliography
• Index