https://socialistaction.org/2017/01/23/can-capitalism-liberate-women/
Can capitalism liberate women?
/ 13 hours ago
jan-2017-rosieBy DAVID KIELY and CHRISTINE MARIE
With the advent of the Trump administration and a conservative Congress,
women and their allies marched in Washington and in hundreds of other
cities on Jan. 21. The fact that the Washington march blossomed from a
little seed into a huge national undertaking almost overnight is a sign
that millions of people are ready to fight for the defense of women’s
rights and the advancement of the women’s movement.
Any long-term strategy needs to start with a clear view of the root
causes and fundamental bases of sexism and gender discrimination.
One of the most pressing questions facing our movement has to do with
the relationship of women’s oppression to the capitalist economic system
as a whole. Is it possible to complete the project of women’s liberation
within our current social and economic system? How one responds to this
question will determine, to a great degree, the kind of movement we set
off to build. It will determine our effectiveness and ultimate success.
Women’s liberation groups have discussed strategy based on this question
in every stage of the struggle over decades. Looking at the
anthropological, historical, and theoretical elements that undergirded
those previous debates is a prerequisite for our own deliberations.
Together, these elements can give us a fundamental understanding of the
inner workings of a gendered class society and how class and gender
reinforce each other.
Women in indigenous society
Women’s subordination did not always exist. In fact, they played a role
of leadership in early societies, before the development of distinct
social classes.
Women’s social position, far from being biologically determined, is
specific to the ways in which different class societies are organized
economically. Women’s status has not gradually improved as society
“evolved” from “primitive” to “civilized” but, on the contrary, has
shifted, often negatively, with the development of new property
relations and the kinds of social organization that accompany these
relations.
Anthropologists such as Eleanor Leacock and Silvia Federici have
established a significant body of research documenting pre-capitalist
gender relations. Federici shows in her writings that indigenous society
in the Americas was far more egalitarian for women than in Europe after
the transition to capitalism. Many indigenous societies were based
mainly on consensus, lacking most of the formal authority we find in
later civilization, and women often controlled economic life.
According to Leacock in her book, “Myths of Male Dominance” (1981),
pre-Columbian Iroquois women had a great deal of control over society,
including the “the de facto power to veto declarations of war and to
intervene to bring about peace.” These native women managed “the
household,” but that had little in common with “household management” in
patriarchal society.feb-2017-sa-wom-banner
In Iroquois society preceding the colonizers, management of the
household meant control of all food stocks, treasury, and fur. This was
everything they needed to survive and to trade amongst neighboring
tribes. Women could exercise control over society because they were at
the center of the public economic life of their society. The arrangement
of production for sustenance and development did not itself lead to
patriarchy. It was only the colonial introduction of new property
relations into band society that began to tie production to patriarchal
norms.
In fact, the European interlopers were often shocked at the kinds of
gender equality they found in indigenous tribes in the Americas. Leacock
described one account from a Jesuit priest regarding relationships of
17th-century Montagnais-Naskapi life: “Noting that women had ‘great
power,’ he expressed his disapproval of the fact that men had no
apparent inclination to make their wives ‘obey’ them or enjoin sexual
fidelity upon them. He lectured the Indians of this failing, reporting
in one instance, ‘I told him then that he was the master and that in
France women do no rule their husbands.’”
The Jesuits who first encountered the Montagnais-Naskapi in the 17th
century in Canada had attitudes that themselves were products of a
dramatic transformation of property relations and the status of women in
Europe. Silvia Federici, author of “Caliban and the Witch,” describes
the way that the enclosures of communal land and the devaluation of
peasant women’s “home work” were accompanied by a devastating reduction
in women’s rights. From the 15th to the 17th century, Federici claims,
women were stripped of their right to perform abortions, as well as
their right to professions such as midwives and medical practitioners,
and rape stopped being a punishable crime.
By the end of this social transformation, women had lost significant
social power. The transition from feudalism to capitalism sharpened,
rather than decreased, the use of patriarchal principles to organize
society.
Women under capitalism
Capitalism is a system that runs on profit making and the continuous
production of commodities. If the system stopped facilitating the
production of all of the commodities we consume, the economy would
collapse. In addition to boosting the production of commodities, the
capitalist system must reproduce the class conditions that make profit
possible. In part, this means the reproduction of a class of workers who
must labor for wages because we do not own any means to produce
commodities ourselves.
To keep the working class producing, workers must replace themselves
with children, and these children must be raised, educated into the
workforce, and maintained as part of the workforce. Each worker has to
find or create social mechanisms to help deal with occupational
illnesses, the stress and physical wear and tear of work, and to tend to
them when they are old or disabled.
Marxist–feminist Cinzia Arruzza, in her paper, “Functionalist,
Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and its
Critics,” described some of the conditions of work under capitalism. One
of the main features of wage labor, she states, is to keep the worker in
a condition of “dispossession.” This is done through paying the worker
less than the amount they produce in sales for the boss, but also by
appropriating their skills into machinery. Thus, the worker is “not just
reproducing herself as a generic human being with needs and desires; she
is also reproducing herself … as a member of a specific class
characterized by dispossession and exploitation.”
Ideally, capitalists would always keep workers working, while providing
meager wages to cover costs of living. However, we need some amount of
time to rest, eat, and take care of ourselves and our families. We can
call the labor used in maintaining living conditions, necessary labor.
In capitalism, the bulk of necessary labor is done by women, but can
also be done by men, children, or even service workers.
Capitalists want to continue to increase profitability, and thus there
is an incentive to reduce necessary labor by employing those doing
domestic labor. Yet, it must allow for necessary labor; otherwise, the
labor supply would ultimately be reduced, or even decimated. This is a
contradiction. Necessary labor should be reduced to increase
profitability, but it should also be increased to increase labor supply
and create the condition of dispossession for the worker. During World
War II when women were critical to production in the United States, the
elites rushed to set up child-care centers, but after the war used all
the means at their disposal to push women out of full-time work.
The World War II experience shows that social reproduction can be
arranged in many ways. Within the last 100 years, domestic life for
working people has generally been the result of women’s unpaid labor,
but occasionally, portions have been taken up by the state, and most
recently, relatively privatized. These variations are not unusual, and
change has been a permanent feature of the capitalist mode of
production. Education, for example, was the private responsibility of
families. Once, cooking and cleaning were assigned to children. But
whatever the setup, under capitalism, women have remained subordinate.
The shift of some necessary labor from inside the home to outside has
not produced women’s liberation. Rather than women performing all the
necessary labor at home, working women pay a substantial amount of their
wages to privatized firms. In these firms, because of their seemingly
“natural” place in the home, women can be paid deliberately meager
wages. Because the economy is set up so that all family members need to
work, women are forced to become part of a low-wage workforce that the
employers can use to drive down the wages of all.
Because capitalism cannot allow for women to be completely liberated
from the necessary labor of social reproduction, they continue to
maintain a discriminatory wage system. Overall, women function as what
socialists call a “reserve army of labor,” buffeted to and fro as the
capitalists negotiate competition and the swings of the business cycle.
As long as society is organized to maximize the production of profit
rather than to fulfill human needs, full women’s liberation and an end
to gender discrimination are impossible. To end this kind of oppression
once and for all, we must base the organization of human society on the
needs of the majority and make all the elements of social
reproduction—nurturing, education, health, child care, elder care, and
all that is needed for a satisfying life—the responsibility of society
as a whole. This kind of system is called socialism.
How do we get there?
Overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a socialist system that
puts human needs before profits is a gigantic task that can only be
accomplished when the majority of the working people in the country are
convinced of its necessity. That majority will have tremendous power at
its disposal, and if unified and politically engaged, can use its
position in production, transportation, and communications to put
themselves at the head of a government capable of reorganizing everything.
History (i.e., the 1917 Russian Revolution) tells us that this kind of
reorganization can provide the material basis for a radical
transformation of the status of women. Once they have freed themselves
of the burden of filling the coffers of Wall Street, Exxon, and the
Pentagon, working people could immediately use the surplus from
production to provide each other 24-7 child care and elder care,
universal health care, full reproductive justice, enriching public
education, food sovereignty, mitigation of environmental threats, and
housing and mass transportation for all.
A new women’s movement, visible through massive marches like the one on
Jan. 21, independent of the corporate parties, and committed to
strengthening and interacting with the movements of labor, immigrant
rights, and for Black Lives, must shape the agenda of that majority so
that the material potential will become social reality. The most direct
way to become part of the process is to join a socialist group.
Socialist Action welcomes your participation.
Top photo: To make up for the World War II labor shortage, women in
North America were recruited into the factories, but pushed out after
the war.
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January 23, 2017 in Marxist Theory & History, Women's Liberation.
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