ers, but the unemployed both at the top and at the bottom of society will be got rid of.
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.
Abridged (from Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Vol 2, 1976)
Why I wrote the Rebel’s Guide
Eleanor Marx is someone who is often misrepresented. Many people — even socialists — know her as the partner of a cheating academic, as a tragic figure who committed suicide, or simply as the youngest daughter of Karl Marx.
She was much more than all those things. She was shaped by the times she lived and worked throughout. An early interest was the Irish republican movement. She had a close relationship with Friedrich Engels, her father’s closest collaborator, and his connections with the Irish community in Manchester were a source of great inspiration.
At 16, she visited France during the Paris Commune and was imprisoned and interrogated by the police. Back home she played an important role in organising Commune anniversary meetings and setting up organisations to support Communard refugees.
She translated Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune and helped bring the stories of the Commune to new audiences. Throughout her life she wrote on the workers’ movement and wider issues in society. Her pamphlet The Woman Question from a Socialist Point of View was an important contribution to a Marxist understanding of women’s oppression. She campaigned for reforms to benefit women but always linked these campaigns to the question of revolution.
Eleanor spent the 1880s in a whirl of activity. During the period of New Unionism hundreds of thousands of workers showed that strikes, the more militant the better, could effect real change in their lives. The period is one of great significance and inspiration.
The working class and its organisations had suffered a long downturn. Eleanor played a role in bringing them back to life. She organised solidarity, set up women’s branches in the new unions and jumped on pub tables to speak to workers in London’s East End.
In the book I wanted to bring this movement to life and show how Eleanor related to it. Although she had an interesting cultural and social life, I really wanted to place an emphasis on her political activity.
She would have recognised the world we live in today. An inspiring example that came up again and again in discussions while I was writing the book was that of fast food workers in the US. One of their slogans, “We can’t survive on $7.25”, is exactly the kind of cry the matchwomen, dockers and gas workers of the 1880s would have taken up.
In a society where anti-immigrant myths were constantly perpetuated, she recognised the importance of unity against the bosses and the state. In the 1880s the immigrants were Irish and Jewish. Today they are Bulgarian and Romanian.
At the centre of her arguments was always the emancipation of the working class as the act of the working class itself. Her life was shaped by the struggle for an alternative world.