SAN FRANCISCO - On the eve of the March 15 accreditation deadline for City College of San Francisco, a rally at City Hall brought together students and allies of the college, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 2121 and several social justice organizations under the umbrella of Save CCSF.

This year has been marked by draconian sanctions placed on City College by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) - 14 conditions that were to have been met by March 15, or risk having the college's accreditation yanked.

Students, teachers and community speakers listed the cuts that have occurred in the wake of these conditions: deep staff cuts in student counseling, wage concessions, and threats to close campuses and consolidate or end programs for at-risk, minority working class students who depend on City College to bring them into higher learning. AFT 2121 is facing even more cuts and loss of a democratic voice in the college.

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Hopes that passage of the city's Proposition A parcel tax and the state's Proposition 30 in November would bring revenue into CCSF have been frustrated by the lack of transparency of the CCSF Board of Trustees and interim Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman, who said they intended to use any surplus revenue to fund "accreditation purposes," rather than to replace programs and stave off cuts.

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CLARA ZETKIN (1857-1933) was a German communist, anti fascist and founder of International Women's Day. Here CP general secretary Robert Griffiths outlines her remarkable and exemplary life.

Clara Zetkin, who first proposed International Women's Day 100 years ago, was an outstanding figure in the socialist, Communist and women's movements. Her own commitment, vision and courage have left a legacy which deserves to be celebrated on March 8 every year.

Before the formation of Communist parties, she rose to prominence in the German Social-Democratic Party from a middle-class home in the local peasant community of Wiederau in Saxony, Germany. Her father Gottfried Eissner was a school teacher and Protestant, her mother Josephine the daughter of a bourgeois family in Leipzig. Inspired by the German Women's Association, Josephine was involved in educational activities.

The family moved to nearby Leipzig where Clara studied at a local teacher training institute founded by German feminist Auguste Schmidt. There she came into contact with socialist ideas and women's organisations. In 1878, at the age of 21, she met members of the German Socialist Workers Party (later renamed the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) and exiled Russian revolutionaries including Ossip Zetkin. A visit to Russia quickly followed.

When Chancellor Bismarck's new Anti-Socialist Law prompted Ossip to leave Germany, Clara also left soon afterwards. She went to Linz, Austria, where she became tutor to a group of factory workers. Then it was on to Zurich in 1882, writing clandestine propaganda for circulation in Germany, before travelling to Paris to be reunited with Ossip Zetkin. They had two sons but did not marry because Clara would lose her German citizenship. Instead, she took his surname.


Reconciled with her family, she delivered her first public speech in Leipzig calling for the liberation of women as an essential and integral part of the liberation of all workers through socialist revolution. For a period afterwards, she opposed separate measures for women, fearing that they would divide working class unity.

Ossip died of spinal tuberculosis in 1889. Clara Zetkin buried her grief in her work for the Socialist International, a new organisation of left-wing and workers' parties. At its founding congress in Paris in July, her arguments against special measures for women - for equal pay for equal work and the exclusion of women from hazardous occupations - were rejected, but she was given special responsibilities for SPD work in Berlin. From there she edited the party's paper for women Die Gleichheit (Equality), fulfilling that task for 25 years until 1917.

Her first editorial explained her standpoint that 'the final cause for the thousand-year-old inferior social position of the female sex is not to be sought in the statutory legislation "made by men", but rather in the property relations determined by economic conditions'. Accordingly, women's liberation could only be fully achieved once private ownership of economic property was abolished.

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