Everywhere at train stations and other public spaces for advertisement one can find posters with slogans like “100 years women‘s suffrage and what are you fighting for?”. Because on 12th of November the German bourgeois state is celebrating the 100th anniversary of women‘s suffrage. Surely, when women were not allowed to vote it was justified to struggle for the demand of women’s suffrage. What the bourgeoisie is doing now is to take the women’s suffrage which was conquered in Germany by communists like Clara Zetkin – but also by liberal women from the petty-bourgeoisie – as an occasion to propagate the bourgeois democracy and the ruling system and to keep proletarian women from organizing themselves properly for their own interests.
The whole thing is a big-scaled propaganda campaign to tell the women which are oppressed by patriarchy and imperialism that all of their problems could be solved inside this system. What they are now celebrating as successes are things like that women are now being oppressed by women like Angela Merkel. They celebrate that women are send to war for the interests of German monopolies. They celebrate that proletarian women are exploited by women from the bourgeoisie. This is what bourgeois feminism gave to women. Formal equality before the law. The outcome is the well-known double suppression and the connected demand that women have to work and also have to do the household and the parenting for the children.
The initiators are saying the campaign “100 years women’s suffrage” is “on one side remembering old successes but also aims at today's challenges regarding the equality and also political and social participation for women”. They accept that “there is much to improve” and that means implicit that the problems of women can be solved inside this system. But this should not surprise us. Although they try to nurture illusions in the women’s masses but for the women of the (petty-) bourgeoisie those solutions the campaign suggests can work in a way. They have an interest to secure easier possibilities to get good positions. Patriarchy oppresses all women but not every woman has the same problem because class is dividing humans more than their sex. The masses of women that work in cleaning services, nurses, slaughterhouses or as so-called subcontracted workers do not care about the share of female parliamentarians in the Bundestag (German federal parliament) or the share of women in supervisory boards. There is in no way decided something that is in their interest. They are supposed to get the idea that their problems are heard by the rulers, they are supposed to gain trust in this system. But the ongoing downward trend in polls in the FRG , especially in the so-called “new states” (those states that were taken over from the former GDR) and also in the proletarian neighborhoods shows the little trust the most exploited and oppressed parts of the proletariat have in the old state and its elections. Therefore the whole campaign is just a helpless attempt of the bourgeois to prevent the women to fight.
