01/06/2026
Today marks the centenary of the birth of Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman the world knew as Marilyn Monroe.
While the bourgeois press continues to gape at the ghost of a manufactured icon, the Communist Party of Britain reclaims the intellectual and the comrade.
Her politics were born of the assembly line. From the foster homes of Los Angeles to the Radioplane munitions factory, Monroe’s class consciousness was forged in the heat of proletarian survival. She was a woman of fierce intelligence, possessing an IQ that dwarfed the men who sought to manage her, yet she was reduced to a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded by the parasitic studio system.
The FBI files, which tracked her until her final breath, confirm what the establishment feared - a s*x symbol who read Marx and admired the Chinese Revolution. She was a militant anti-racist who used her platform to shatter the colour bar for Ella Fitzgerald, and she stood firm against the cowardice of the McCarthyite witch hunts when she married the blacklisted playwright Arthur Miller.
We must recognise that Monroe’s struggle was the intersection of class exploitation and patriarchal violence. She was a worker whose labour was her own body, super-exploited by a system that demanded she be beautiful and silent. Her life was a constant act of rebellion against the male gaze of capital. On her 100th birthday, we do not celebrate a "bombshell". We honour a clear-minded socialist who understood that the liberation of her class was inseparable from the liberation of her s*x.
Happy Centenary, Comrade Marilyn. The struggle continues.
