I think it can be summed up by simply saying, "how capitalism uses..."
Once we realize that Capitalism uses, but never gives or replaces,
then we will understand the great threat Planet Earth is facing.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/7/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2017/11/06/how-capitalism-oppresses-women/
How capitalism uses gender oppression to rule
/ 1 day ago
Nov. 2017 Sex harassmentBy CHRISTINE MARIE
Following is the text of a talk delivered by the author on Nov. 4 at the
“The Solution is Socialism” educational conference in Connecticut. The
conference was hosted by the Youth for Socialist Action chapter at
Central Connecticut State University, where the sessions were held.
Usually, when I begin a talk about Marxism and feminism, I pick one of
the latest outrages to the dignity of women and gender non-conforming
people to stand in for all that capitalism has meant in the past and has
in store for us in the future. This time, I had a lot of trouble
choosing. In the last several weeks, we watched a strong 17-year-old
without papers, sequestered in a refugee center, forced to stand up to
the entire arsenal of the state of the most powerful capitalist nation
on earth in order to be allowed to buy an abortion for herself.
Her story was punctuated by Trump’s racist and sexist denunciation of
“welfare queens” stealing from the public, just as he was driving
forward on a tax bill designed to utterly demolish any survival of the
social pact made by the capitalist class in the wake of the rebellious
Thirties. Within days, his administration threatened transgender
soldiers with the kind of discharges that could condemn them to a life
of joblessness, ostracism, and poverty.
And each morning as we click onto our news feed, we read the names and
stories of the victims of sexual harassment that occupy the loftiest
positions in the realm of the arts, the corporate world, and the U.S.
Congress.
Faced with this overwhelming demonstration of the social subordination
of women and those who are gender non-conforming, one would expect an
uprising. Instead, the only leadership actually visible on the public
stage called a National Women’s Convention whose mission was to prepare
women to take up positions within this system and run for office, acting
as if the two-party shell game that got us to this place was really a
vehicle for change.
Why did this happen? Why is this the default response to the offensive
against our ability to survive with dignity? In part it is because,
despite a century and a half of betrayal on reproductive justice, child
care, education, and elder care, many feminist activists retain deep
illusions in the system, imagining that capitalism, with a bit more
reasoning, with a few more mobilizations, with a few more liberal
legislators, can actually be shaped into something that can emancipate us.
Socialists disagree. We believe that gender subordination is shown
historically to be so integral to the functioning of the capitalist
economy and the ability of big business to make profits, that lasting
and fundamental changes will be only be made once we can break apart the
most basic components of this system and create something entirely new.
Capitalism is a system in which all production is organized to make
profits. Profits come from what value is produced by workers in the
factory above and beyond what the boss gives in wages so that the worker
can sustain himself or herself, and those who are dependent, and those
who cannot yet work or can no longer work.
The boss, who is competing with other capitalists, needs to constantly
increase profits, and after all other measures have been taken, in the
end, can only do it by trying to lower wages. That is, capitalism is a
system that works well only by impoverishing those who create its wealth.
To retain privately as much of the surplus society produces as possible,
the capitalist class tries to put all the financial responsibility for
the care and maintenance and reproduction of the working class onto the
individual, usually using the vehicle of the nuclear family. Women’s,
and less frequently men’s, unpaid care and nurturing labor in the home
and community have been an essential way for the capitalist class to
keep the system humming. Having some section of the female working class
carry out unpaid labor in the home, in turn, by the logic of the system,
makes women’s waged labor cheap.
When it is useful to pull these women into the waged work force to make
profits, this sectoral, service, or care work is privatized. It becomes
feminized low-wage labor, and the fact of its existence is used to try
to lower the wages of the working class as a whole.
Unpaid, precarious, temporary, part-time, low-wage women workers who
leave and return episodically to the full-time labor pool at the
capitalists’ whim play an essential role in making the profit system
work for the bosses. There are mechanisms other than gender that help
the capitalists keep a pool of surplus labor around. National oppression
and immigration are just two others. Regimes to replace workers based
something other than gender—slavery and work camps—are sometimes
temporarily deployed to handle social reproduction. But it is gender
that is the backbone of the system of surplus labor and social
reproduction as a whole in the capitalist mode of production.
These two poles—a privatized realm of social production based on unpaid
work that keeps part of the working-class family educated, healthy, and
sane enough to keep punching the clock and big pools of warehoused
surplus workers that keep wages down—are integral to the production for
profit system. There are variations in implementation. And there are
divisions among capitalists about how, practically speaking, to organize
social reproduction at any specific time. But these contingencies do not
challenge the general workings of the system.
The current debate over taxation, for example, is really about just how
far the bosses want to go in terms of cutting the social wage. Just how
far can they go in terms of placing the burden for the maintenance of
daily life on the individual workers and their families before there is
a revolt? In truth, all the talk of deficits and taxation, all the
efforts of big business to lower its tax rate, are really about their
increasing unwillingness, in the face of new global competition and a
declining rate of profit, to continue social spending on education,
health care, housing, childcare, elder care, safe water, safe food, and
so on.
When Congress battles over taxation rates and budgets, a great deal of
what they are fighting really does have to do with how much they can
avoid paying the cost of providing these necessities to the working
class as a whole without provoking a really threatening response. The
wing of the capitalist class driving through the current tax reform is
pretty confident, given our level of fightback, that they can go lower
and still stay in power.
Capitalists steadily reduced the social wage
The amount of the social wage is determined by the class struggle. For
the last 40 years, unfortunately, this has been an almost one-sided war,
with capitalists in a global crisis consistently and successfully
chipping away at the social wage and conditions of working-class life
until, today, they feel that they should not have to pay to insure clean
water in Flint or an inspector in a meat-packing plant. It is this
relationship between social reproduction and production for profit,
alongside the ruling class’s constant calculation regarding how much the
working class will resist, that keeps us in the loop of progress and
retreat on issues such as reproductive justice, the disciplining of
sexuality and gender expression, and the use of sexual violence and
harassment.
None of this is determined in a completely predictable way by the
conjunctural circumstances of production and profit. But the connections
are demonstrable over time and space, and we ignore this fundamental
relationship at our own peril. I have seen the waxing and waning in my
own time, coming of age in the post-World War II boom amidst the
tremendous gains of second-wave feminism and living through the historic
defeats of the gendered neoliberal offensive of the last decades.
The ferocity of today’s attacks on women and gender non-conforming
people cannot be fully understood outside of the context of the current,
even more intense global capitalist crisis. These connections show us
that no victory is permanent or secure as long as this mode of
production is in place.
Let us remind ourselves of how neoliberal capitalism has been
functioning on a global scale for the last 40 years. The off-shoring of
a lot of low-wage industry was carried out only with a sophisticated
gendering of global labor and the use of hoary patriarchal setups to
keep those women vulnerable and unorganized.
Peter Custers, in his studies of women’s labor in Asian economies, has
documented how the development of the garment industry in Bangladesh and
Pakistan was accompanied by the recreation, the resuscitation and
reshaping, by urban elites of traditional rural conditions that kept
women coming to the city for jobs but tied to peasant family structures
that disciplined them.
Lourdes Arizepe described the same process in Mexican strawberry
agribusiness. Manipulating the circumstances of social reproduction to
assure profitable production is a generalized phenomenon. Within the
sweatshops—whether in South Asia, Africa, or the borderlands here—sexual
harassment is used systematically to keep workforces quiescent.
A range of studies from the last several decades confirms this. A study
of women in the export processing zones of the Dominican Republic found
that 40% were sexually harassed by their bosses. Another study in Kenya
found that 90% of women in the export zone were sexually harassed. And
in each of these countries, imperialist-mandated austerity programs cut
water, education, and health, and so dramatically increased the unpaid
labor load of women.
So, the neoliberal period has seen gender used brutally in both
production and social reproduction. The sheer number of women that began
work during this period for subsistence or less than subsistence wages
was cited by The Economist as the largest source of economic growth in
the world by 2006. The cuts in the social safety net lowered corporate
and elite taxes everywhere. Since the 2008 crash, we can only imagine
that this whole process has deepened.
These stories can be told about gendered labor in the United States as
well. In fast food operations in the U.S., a 2016 study reported, the
percentage of sexual harassment of women was 40%. And in 2014, the
Restaurant Opportunities Center found sexual harassment among restaurant
workers (women and men) registering at 90%. Had the kitchen workers been
employed further back on the food chain, they would have suffered
systematic sexual violence in the fields, as documented in a NPR special
in 2014.
My father-in-law’s cousin organized female Jewish jewelry workers in New
York City in the 1930s—and guess what? The union won the shop because it
promised to put an end to the morning lineup, in which the male foremen
would greet their employees by walking along the line and feeling up
each of them, just to let them know who was the boss.
“Jane Doe,” as an immigrant coming to work in the U.S. without papers,
likely to be subject to persistent wage theft and extreme exploitation,
all the while still sending funds home to help privately raise the next
generation of such workers, could be the embodiment of this global and
gendered process. The efforts to control her reproduction could be taken
from the annals of any colonial operation from history, as they all used
gender subordination as one tool of conquest.
Russian Revolution: radical measures to liberate women
When you think about it this way, you realize that gender subordination
is not an accident or something to be held over that could be cleared up
if we get some more enlightened people into the Congress. For the vast
majority of working-class women and gender non-conforming people, the
pain and fear associated with it is omnipresent. This is because it is
undeniably part of the way that the system functions.
It can seem overwhelming. It is so normalized. But history shows us that
it does not have to be this way. One hundred years ago, in 1917, a
women’s demonstration for bread in Petrograd, Russia, turned into the
first mobilization of a revolution that upended the entire social system
organized production for profit. This revolution had a leadership
determined to break women free from the drudgery of the compulsory and
repressive family mandated by the Orthodox Church, and immediately made
simple divorce available to all.
Children born outside of a religious marriage could no longer be
considered “illegitimate.” Abortion became free and legal. “Sodomy” was
decriminalized for only the second time in modern history. Community
kitchens and nurseries and laundries that could replace the unpaid labor
in the family were built despite tremendous economic stress.
In those years, for a brief time, the most far-reaching experimentation
and debate on the way to organize society to free women was on the
agenda. There is at least one same-sex marriage on the court dockets
from this period. Radical thinking about sexuality was generalized and
exhilarating—from Moscow to Berlin.
This amazing working-class effort to emancipate working women, according
to LGBTQI researchers into the period like Jason Yanowitz, would very
likely have led in time to even more far-reaching conceptions of gender
variability and rights. Sadly, it was cut short by imperialist
intervention in the Soviet Union, civil war, a period of scarcity, and a
bureaucratic counterrevolution. But it happened, and shows us what is
possible if we manage to take the reins of power and organize society on
the basis of fulfilling human needs, collective responsibility for
social reproduction, and individual dignity. Social revolution, though
never a guarantee, is a prerequisite for female and sexual liberation.
Clearly we are not now on the verge of a revolutionary upsurge. But
revolutions are not spontaneous. The ideas that they implemented in 1917
and 1918 had been debated in the factories and working-class women’s
organizations for decades. The women who led this transformation had
worked for decades to create a working-class political party that was
clear on these issues and capable of leading in the decisive moments.
This one brilliant moment when all of everyday life could be reorganized
was prepared, in truth, by generations of work. This is the broad task
before us today: Building our organizations. Struggling to achieve
clarity on the most advanced questions around sexuality and gender and,
with others, theorizing emancipatory solutions. Creating spaces where
regular people can learn of their potential power.
Socialists need to join up with forces like those who initiated the
International Women’s Day strike solidarity action on March 8 and to
begin to create nodes of a women’s movement for the 99%, a movement that
privileges the struggles of working-class women, including trans women,
and that recognizes the leadership of African American and immigrant
women. We need a movement that is independent of the Democratic Party
and full of spaces in which working women can find their radical
political voices. A movement where working women can learn, debate, and
build their confidence as leaders.
Such a movement, by the way, is also essential if we are to successfully
counter the right-wing ideological offensive that managed to draw in
working women alienated from “lean-in” feminism and the Hillary Clintons
of this world. Twentieth-century European history tells us in no
uncertain terms that failure on this score can lead to actions and
events that are unthinkable.
This movement has to exist on a community and campus level. But its
cadres must also be part of building a left wing in the unions that can
mobilize the most combative sections of our class in support of the
unorganized, in support of child care, elder care, health care,
housing—all the social services we need to free women and other care
givers for leadership.
And we must look for the moments when we can carry out exemplary
struggles that make a movement independent of the Democrats look viable
to the unorganized. Has such a movement existed? Yes, of course, it has
in many historical contexts. In fact, women’s movements with these
characteristics are in formation, and one of them in Argentina, Pan y
Rosas, is the topic of our next speaker, Tatiana Cozzarelli of Left Voice.
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November 6, 2017 in Marxist Theory & History, Women's Liberation.
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