To remember Eleanor Marx, fight for socialism in our times, not over the color of commemorative plaques

Over the past few months a discussion had arisen about the plan to honor famous women with pink plaques. A barrage of voices, from the Women’s Equality Party to Caroline Criado- Perez weighed in the debate. It caught my eye as one of my current interlocutors, Eleanor Marx, was mentioned as honoree of a plaque. That’s when I stopped to think and write this piece.I met Eleanor through Rachel Holmes’s extraordinary biography (Eleanor Marx: A Life), which I read completely by accident in 2015, and quite frankly, had changed my life. Holmes shows how Marx, a giant of the British left and giving us many organizing structures as well as an archive of critical thinking, both grossly under acknowledged. Marx was, Holmes argues, the practice to her father’s theory. Raised on the knees of Das Kapital, written by her father, Karl Marx, during her childhood and becoming the groundwork of her own economic thinking, she went to organize women and girls, the center of her life-long work. (Although, in her short life she also became a crucial force in creating her father’s archive and his first biographer, first translator of Madame Bovary into English, pioneer of Ibsen on the London stage, committed teacher and organizer in the Second International, to name a few of the things she had managed to do).

More than anything, Holmes shows, Marx brought The Woman Question (from a Socialist Point of View) to the center of her thinking and organizing work — always intertwined. In a text written in 1886 she wrote — also Holmes’s epigraph: “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.”

I’ve been teaching Marx’s The Woman Question for five years now, and it’s become the underpinning text of my own feminist thinking and work. It is a timely critique of discussions of our time. In a sentence that would serve an apt response to the plaque debate, she writes: “.The truth, not fully recognised even by those anxious to do good to woman, is that she, like the labour-classes, is in an oppressed condition; that her position, like theirs, is one of merciless degradation. Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers. “ And further, and most crucially, “The position of women rests, as everything in our complex modern society rests, on an economic basis”. The woman question cannot be resolved without thinking of broader economic oppressions.

The thing that really made me fall in love with Eleanor, or Tussy, as she was named all her life (Holmes tells us, to rhyme with Pussy, not fussy; cats she adored, fussy she was not), was her humanity. Her organizing work, involvement in pioneering strikes of the burgeoning new trade union movement, her ceaseless work to bring her father’s work to more people so they could see the way out of their oppression was all focused on the goal to bring socialism in her time. She knew that there was no way of approaching the Woman Question without acknowledging the insufferable economic exploitation that perpetrates sexism. “The truth, not fully recognised even by those anxious to do good to woman, is that she, like the labour-classes, is in an oppressed condition; that her position, like theirs, is one of merciless degradation. And yet her response was always to fight and to mobilize; to agitate, educate, organize; with what seems to me from my own position an extraordinary faith in humankind and a possibility of a future with no exploitation.

I think it’s crucial to remember Eleanor’s work. It is disheartening how much of the Victorian life Holmes’s sends the reader to — child poverty, homelessness, anti-migrant sentiment and rise of nationalism are now occupying our headlines again. Yet, agitating, educating and organizing is the way to remember her; not going towards material possessions, or, indeed, arguing over them. (I’m not sure what the first editor of Value, Price and Profit would say for the struggle to put a woman on a ten pounds note; sadly, we can’t ask her, but perhaps an inclination would be found in her own statement: “We disguise neither from ourselves nor from our antagonists that the first step to this is the expropriation of all private property in land and in all other means of production.” Personally, I don’t care who’s on my tenner until the entire country is paid a living wage ). Eleanor Marx is now part of my daily life. Her portrait hangs over my desk and I often refer back to the book to galvanize my thinking, for inspiration and for motivation when my own spirits are dwindling. Eleanor had taught me skills and importance of organizing with other women to topple patriarchal capitalism; the need to absolutely resist all racism, which only keeps capitalism in its place; but most importantly, to never give up. The brilliant writer and campaigner Amelia Horgan who recently critiqued the tokenism within contemporary feminism once said about her own relationship with Eleanor, it’s like a hand that reaches out to you from history, and indeed that hand which firmly motivates so many of us since reading the book sends us to never stop working against exploitation and oppression of all. The GMB, which she helped found as the historical Gas Workers Union, commemorates Eleanor’s memory with giving an annual Eleanor Marx award to outstanding women trade unionists. From organizing against exploitation of ASDA and Amazon, through the historical strike in Glasgow, Eleanor’s memory is alive and well; in the work of countless women and men who are fighting for a decent life for all.

We have, now, a viable possibility, a horizon that Eleanor spent her life working towards, for socialism in our times. We have the possibility to make this happen; making socialism a reality is my own way to remember and pay my debt to Eleanor Marx. I doubt she’d be interested in which color of plaque commemorates her name, or whose name is pushed to the forefront in remembering her legacy. The woman question is part of organization of society as a whole, and we have an opportunity to re-organize it, thus must not, out of respect to her, let it pass. In a speech that she wrote on the first May Day, (and should be familiar to British readers of 2019), she said: “This is not the end but only the beginning of the struggle;... 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.”

Notes: the debate around plaques

This piece is dedicated to all my trade union sisters and especially to Sarah James, winner of the GMB Eleanor Marx award, and to Jo Grady, General Secretary of UCU, who is leading a historical strike.