History

When an officer was killed in World War One, the British Army told his next of kin by telegram. Lower-ranked men’s deaths were reported on Form B104-82. ‘Calamity’ is a poem by E.H. Visiak. Private Ted was my great uncle.

Visiak’s Calamity once said
From heart to heart grief’s wireless sped
No officer, this Hoxton lad
No telegram to mum and dad
Grief’s letters only slowly plod
Five weeks through Flanders’ shell-churned sod
’Til death’s cold-morning cockerel crowed
Outside a house on Edgware Road
Five weeks false hope for Private Ted
At last they learned their son was dead

Published in Solidarity 345:

'From the Youth of All Nations' reads to me as a bitter complaint against the ruling classes on all sides of the First World War playing out their arguments with the sufferings and lives of soldiers.

Published in Solidarity 337, 24 September 2014

The Workers’ Dreadnought published this poem on its front page, heading an article entitled “Soldiers ask what they are fighting for” on 20 October 1917.

Published in Solidarity 335, 10 September 2014

From The Workers’ Dreadnought, 29 June 1918

A poem was found on the dead body of a German soldier. The British authorities reproduced it in facsimile and threw it from aeroplanes into the German lines.

Introducing a series of articles on the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, written in 2005, originally published here.

The second in a series of articles about the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, written in 2005, originally published here.

Education

The third in a series of articles about the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914 written in 2005 - originally published here.

What is often seen as one issue - referred to at the time as the ‘woman question’ - actually developed quite differently amongst women of different classes.

Bourgeois women

The fourth in a series of articles about the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, written in 2005, originally published here:

Laws against women’s organisation

The last in a series of five articles written in 2005 - originally published here:

Divided loyalties

Socialist feminists are continually accused of ‘divided loyalties’, challenged to declare which is our priority: class or sex. It makes a lot more sense to direct this challenge at feminists who defend capitalism, or at socialist men.

Written back in around 1993:

Constance Markievicz and the other women who fought in the Easter Rising struggled to be accepted on equal terms by the Irish labour movement and among nationalists. Their experience holds many lessons for today's socialists and feminists.

By Janine Booth.