https://socialistaction.org/2018/03/08/16964/
Our feminism must be anti-capitalist
/ 2 days ago
March 2018 Women Argentina 2By CELESTE MURILLO and ANDREA D’ATRI
The authors are members of Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses), a feminist
organization in Argentina. This article was written in 2017 and first
appeared in Left Voice. We are re-printing it on March 8, 2018, as a
contribution to the discussion on the goals and strategy of the women’s
movement.
“The socialist who is not a feminist lacks breadth. The feminist who is
not a socialist lacks strategy.” — Louise Kneeland
On March 8, 2017, women around the world marched through the largest
metropolitan centers. The call for a global strike revived International
Women’s Day—long relegated to a largely symbolic, celebratory formality
for a small group of feminists and leftists. This year [2017], millions
claimed the day as their own. They organized actions in workplaces and
schools and attended massive demonstrations. Protests large and small
took place in 50 countries around the world—from the U.S. to Nigeria to
Indonesia.
Madrid’s Gran Via was entirely shut down hours before the marches began,
and almost all of the capital cities in Europe participated in these
international mobilizations. In Montevideo, Uruguay, thousands took to
the streets, and there was a six-hour work stoppage called for by the
trade union confederation PIT-CNT.
In the U.S., after the record-breaking women’s marches on Jan. 21 that
mobilized an estimated three million people across the country, there
was an upsurge of protests on March 8, reviving a tradition that had
long been lost in the heart of imperialism.
Even without having read the declarations of feminist organizations,
trade unions, and political parties, women around the world expressed
their rage against sexist violence, the precarious labor conditions that
condemn them to misery, the irrational inequality that keeps women
subordinate, and the constant fear that molds women’s existence.
In Argentina, this rage fed into large-scale participation in
strikes—far greater participation than the union bureaucracy had
intended. At the PepsiCo factory, work stoppages began at 5 a.m., based
on a vote by a workers’ assembly called for by the shop council, which
stands in opposition to the current union leadership. At the Buenos
Aires airport, LATAM airlines workers stopped check-in services, once
again bolstered by assemblies organized by the opposition to the union
leadership. omen from the socialist women’s organization Pan y Rosas
(Bread and Roses) formed part of the oppositional caucuses in both of
these work stoppages, and along with other male and female coworkers,
were integral in the fight for a strike on March 8.
In addition, there were countless partial work stoppages and protests in
hospitals. Teachers also played an important role, forcing several
unions to engage in strikes in the midst of a struggle between the
teachers and the national and state governments.
Equality in Law is Not Equality in Life
What is the explanation for the renewal of mass demonstrations and
protests on March 8? There are many who criticized the marches, saying
women have already achieved equality. The reality is that, with the
capitalist crisis underway, there are deepening contradictions between
the rights that have been won (at least in the imperialist countries and
some semi-colonies like Uruguay, which has legalized abortion and
same-sex marriage) and the material conditions of the majority of women,
as austerity measures and cuts affect large sectors of the population.
These economic realities are compounded by interminable sexist violence,
in which the state and its institutions are complicit.
However, the expansion of rights has opened the eyes of millions of
women and elevated their aspirations for a better life. The harsh
realities that hold women back have kindled a sense of rage. After
decades of neoliberalism, the economic crisis and all of its social
consequences demonstrate more and more clearly that “equality in law is
not equality in life.”
These enormous March 8 demonstrations didn’t appear overnight. They were
preceded by recent actions around the world, including the massive Ni
Una Menos (Not One Less) mobilizations against femicide in Argentina
demanding that the state allocate money and take other measures to
prevent femicides; the strikes in Iceland and France against the gender
pay gap; the protest under torrential rain where hundreds of thousands
of women stopped the further criminalization of abortion in Poland; and
the massive women’s protests against Trump in the United States.
The widespread support that these protests generate among ordinary
citizens is evidence that they express not only the demand for women’s
rights but also the discontent of millions of workers and students with
austerity, cuts, and precarious working conditions caused by the
capitalist class and the governments that forced workers to pay for the
crisis in order to maintain their profits. This unity between workers
and students is the seed of an alliance that will be essential for
defeating capitalist patriarchy
Nothing is achieved without struggle
This new wave of women’s mobilizations is international and more radical
in character, breaking with decades of liberal feminist hegemony. In
previous years, it became common sense to think of individual free
choice as the horizon of emancipation, without challenging capitalist
democracies—without questioning the fact that the rights that were won
were only available to a small number of women.
According to this de-politicized and de-politicizing framework, women’s
emancipation is simply a question of gradually gaining rights within the
existing political regime. Once these rights have been written into law,
each woman will individually be responsible for the life she “chooses”
to live.
The flaw in this reformist logic is the separation between the fight for
democratic rights and the struggle against the social and economic
system. By fighting for rights within bourgeois democracy without
questioning the capitalist structure that maintains and profits from
sexism, reformist feminism implicitly or explicitly approves of the
system that signifies, legitimizes and reproduces women’s subordination.
This “feminism” does not take into account that these rights are
inscribed in a limited, circumstantial and temporal way in the social
system. It does not take into account that many of these rights were won
in a moment when capitalism in imperialist countries was not in crisis.
What the capitalist governments give with one hand, when there is
prosperity, they take with the other when there is a crisis.
What gives women’s demands a political character is not lobbying
Congress, which is a path to co-optation for many sectors of the
movement. Rather, their political character comes from uncovering the
intrinsic relation between basic rights that are still denied to us
(like the right to not be murdered for being women) and the social
system that is based on exploitation by a parasitic class of capitalists.
The liberal discourse transformed feminism, like other social movements
of the oppressed, into something so harmless that it could be easily
appropriated by the right. This liberal feminism stripped the women’s
movement of deeper social criticism and opened the doors to right-wing
women. The fact that Ivanka Trump can be presented as a representative
of “conservative feminism” shows what a quagmire liberal feminism is
trapped in. Sectors of the ruling classes do not have any problem
arguing that women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT people should have
positions of power in capitalist society. This is how Hillary Clinton
presented herself in the elections, the clearest example of imperialist
or neoliberal feminism.
But Clinton failed to convince enough women to vote for her in order to
break the glass ceiling and be an effective alternative to the
Republican candidate, who epitomized modern misogyny. Her corporate
feminism fell flat in the face of the problems affecting millions of
wage laborers, unemployed workers, Black people, and immigrants.
Today, the Democratic Party hopes to use the reemergence of the women’s
movement throughout the world to rebuild itself after the defeat at the
hands of the right. It is no coincidence that many of the women who
organized the International Women’s Strike in the U.S. warned of the
danger of the Democratic Party attempting to capitalize on this enormous
movement. Democrats hope to rebuild themselves after their enormous
electoral defeat and at the same time are attempting to control the most
radical aspects of the women’s movement.
Neoliberal feminism in crisis
The USA, as the most important imperialist power, exported liberal
feminism to the rest of the globe by imposing a neoliberal world order
and corresponding policies towards women in health, education, and
social welfare using the IMF and the World Bank. This means that in many
semi-colonies, these international organisms demanded that countries
create gender and sexuality ministries. They even promoted laws to end
sexist violence.
This allowed the capitalist state to wash its hands of responsibility
for the precarious conditions that most women face. One of the most
emblematic examples is in Mexico. Although many laws to prevent sexist
violence have been passed, the state continues to be complicit in
violence against women, especially workers on the border and Central
American immigrants making their way to the U.S. The United States also
disseminated liberal feminist ideology through global non-profits and
the export of American academic works in colleges and universities.
Ella Mahony of Jacobin explains: “It’s become axiomatic in left
feminist spaces that there’s a ‘neoliberal’ feminism against which all
new forms of feminism must develop. What’s less often articulated is the
political character and origins of this corporate feminism. The key
catalyst for neoliberal feminism’s rise was the slow asphyxiation of
left political alternatives from the 1980s onwards.”
Liberal feminism began to show its weakness in its inability to combat
Trump. As we saw in the recent mobilizations of women around the world
who contest the myth that we have already achieved equality, as well as
in the discussions brought about by Clinton’s loss, neoliberal feminism
is being increasingly questioned.
In this sense, the call to build a “Feminism of the 99%” is symptomatic
of a changing consciousness that sees the connection between capitalism
and patriarchy as the source of many of the problems affecting the
majority of women. The urge to revive an alliance between the women’s
movement and the working class in a country like the U.S. speaks to the
possibilities of strengthening an anti-capitalist wing inside the new
women’s movement. Similarly, in Argentina, Chile, and other countries,
the language of anti-capitalism is heard at the meetings of the women’s
movement, in their manifestos, and in their mobilizations.
For socialist revolutionaries, the discussion of anti-capitalism opens
the doors to a fruitful debate about what strategy and political program
should be implemented against patriarchal capitalism. It forces us to
think of the alliances we must build to fight for our own emancipation
and how we could try to mobilize the working class to take up these demands.
Imagining an anti-capitalist feminism forces us to consider the question
of the political subject: without working women, who make up half of the
class that is the immense majority of society, there is no future. We
fight for a movement of the working class—a movement of the majority,
which is antagonistic to the rights of the few capitalists who control
our lives. Furthermore, if it is not the working class (both women and
men) who fly the banners of emancipation of the most oppressed sectors,
then anti-capitalism becomes mere wishful thinking.
This alliance between the working class and women fighting for their
rights goes back to the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, when
women were able to win the right to vote and to fight against
imperialist wars. The Bolsheviks were able to achieve hitherto
unimaginable rights for women by bringing the working class to power.
Many of the rights that existed in the USSR in the early 20th century
have not yet been won in many capitalist countries.
Since then, this alliance between the working class and women has been
perversely annihilated by the ruling classes, by the betrayal of union
leaders who immerse the working class in pro-business unionism, and by
the co-optation of social movements into the state and their
de-politicized fragmentation in nonprofits.
Rebuilding the historic alliance between the working class and the
women’s movement is a central task in the rebuilding of a truly
anti-capitalist feminism. Only when there is a real stoppage of the
production and circulation of goods, of the service sector and of
communications can the more precarious and marginalized people—the
housewives being hidden away in individual homes, the women in
prostitution, and all of those who are worthless to this ignominious
system—make their voices echo in the silence. This alliance is not a
given. We must build it.
Building this alliance does not mean overlooking sexism within the
working class. Some sectors of the left refuse to confront workers’
prejudices—ideologies fomented by the ruling classes using the
institutions under their control, such as the media and schools. These
sectors also refuse to put themselves on the front lines of fighting for
the most basic democratic rights, arguing that the problem of women’s
oppression is only an expression of capitalist exploitation. At the same
time, this kind of class reductionism absolves the most conscious
members of the working class and even their own militants from
responsibility for the reproduction of sexism.
When female workers take the front lines of the struggle, like the women
at PepsiCo and LATAM, this creates better conditions to both fight
against sexism within the working class, but also to fight against the
sexism of the bosses. The struggle against class reductionism cannot
take the socialist women’s movement to the opposite extreme, taking up
individualistic notions of sexism that equate verbal harassment on the
street with state sponsored terrorism against women.
The massive mobilization of women around the world gives a new relevance
to the debate about the course that the women’s movement should take in
order to avoid ending up like the women’s movement of the 1970s. In a
contradictory manner, the movement brought about partial triumphs and
the expansion of rights. On the other hand, the movement was
domesticated and the idea of a radical transformation of the capitalist
system was buried. The current movement puts this debate on the table:
Is the ultimate goal going to be occasional resistance to right-wing
attacks, or are we going to finally build a strategy to win?
The international women’s organization Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses), of
which the authors of this piece are members, exists in Argentina,
Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, México, Venezuela, the Spanish State,
France, and Germany. The organization actively intervenes in and builds
this new women’s movement in workplaces, schools, and universities with
a socialist perspective. We fight for the women’s movement to build
roots in the working class and give examples of the revolutionary
potential of this alliance.
Our ideas, program, and strategy are based on the accumulated lessons
learned from previous generations of revolutionary Marxists. We believe
in a feminism that seeks to be a political movement of the masses, where
the struggle for democratic rights and liberties is connected to a
denunciation of this regime of exploitation and misery for the majority.
Only a movement that seeks to defeat this system can be truly emancipatory.
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March 8, 2018 in Latin America, Marxist Politics and Philosophy, Women's
Liberation.
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