Women's Issues - A gender and class approach

[TBF]

In light of international women's day and the comments of a certain Republican commentator this week, this is a fine time to look at women's issues. As I pointed out when I provided you all with a copy of the USSR's constitution of 1977, the Soviets had codified equal rights for women. We have not done that here - and is there an argument to be made that it must go along with changing the political/economic system? Consider KKE's words on the matter -

International Women’s Day: Significant Activity of the KKE and the class oriented movement

The 8th March, the International Women’s Day was celebrated with a series of events and interventions of the KKE.

The KKE organized two central political events on this issue with the GS of the CC of the KKE, comrade Aleka Papariga. The subject was: “the consequences of the capitalist crisis on the life of the working woman and the proposal of the party for the way-out”. At the events the GS of the CC discussed with working women in industry and students at the University of Social Studies, in Panteion University. Aleka Papariga mentioned in her speeches amongst other things:

“the question for the vanguard is that struggle for the problems of equality, for the emancipation of women becomes an integral part of the struggle of the labour movement, an integral part of the struggle of all the organizations of the workers, the self employed, the poor farmers because we do not reproduce the discrimination between men and women -which we had never supported and continue not to support- and because the question of the women’s emancipation is a clear class and gender issue which in the final analysis concerns the workers family in its entirety, 100% (…)

We will not be able to understand this and above all we will not be able to repel this assault with a mass labour movement, if we do not understand the women’s question as a class and gender issue. Our propaganda will be incomplete. Of course, when we say class and gender we clarify that this is opposed to the view that holds the position that the women’s question, the inequality of women, is caused by men’s dominance, by the patriarchal views, by the male dominated society and that the issue will be solved through the conflict of the two genders. This must be clear”.

“According to the development of the class struggle capitalism made certain concessions reluctantly. This period is over. And you know that because today they take everything back. And this will not last for the next couple of years, until the PSI is concluded; they officially admit that our life has been mortgaged for 30 years, note it officially. So objectively, since the attack is unified and does not concern a single sector or a single aspect of life, the political choice on the agenda is the struggle for the overthrow of the political system, the struggle for the overthrow of the dictatorship of the monopolies, the struggle for the workers’ and people’s power...

Much more here: http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2012/2012-03-09-gynaikes

[Starry Messenger]

1. I've spent all morning trying to find some digitized writing from female Communists

from history to add to this thread. The fact that it's pretty tough to find good pieces means that we still have our work cut out for us. Communists have very progressive views of women's rights, but we left-wing women still need to make sure that we aren't sidelined and erased by neglect and chauvinism when we speak and write. Someone like Claudia Jones should be available online to all of us to read and quote, she was very important to left-wing anti-sexist and anti-racist work. I'm surprised that Marxists.org hasn't put up any pieces from her.

We do have this piece by wonderful Angela Davis, who was influenced by Claudia Jones:

As industrial capitalism approached consolidation, the cleavage between the new economic sphere and the old home economy became ever more rigorous. The physical relocation of economic production caused by the spread of the factory system was undoubtedly a drastic transformation. But even more radical was the generalised revaluation of production necessitated by the new economic system. While home-manufactured goods were valuable primarily because they fulfilled basic family needs, the importance of factory-produced commodities resided overwhelmingly in their exchange value – in their ability to fulfill employers’ demands for profit. This revaluation of economic production revealed – beyond the physical separation of home and factory – a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labour was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labour.

An important ideological by-product of this radical economic transformation was the birth of the “housewife.” Women began to be ideologically redefined as the guardians of a devalued domestic life. As ideology, however, this redefinition of women’s place was boldly contradicted by the vast numbers of immigrant women flooding the ranks of the working class in the Northeast. These white immigrant women were wage earners first and only secondarily housewives. And there were other women – millions of women – who toiled away from home as the unwilling producers of the slave economy in the South. The reality of women’s place in nineteenth-century U.S. society involved white women, whose days were spent operating factory machines for wages that were a pittance, as surely as it involved Black women, who laboured under the coercion of slavery. The “housewife” reflected a partial reality, for she was really a symbol of the economic prosperity enjoyed by the emerging middle classes.

Although the “housewife” was rooted in the social conditions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, nineteenth-century ideology established the housewife and the mother as universal models of womanhood. Since popular propaganda represented the vocation of all women as a function of their roles in the home, women compelled to work for wages came to be treated as alien visitors within the masculine world of the public economy. Having stepped outside their “natural” sphere, women were not to be treated as full-fledged wage workers. The price they paid involved long hours, substandard working conditions and grossly inadequate wages. Their exploitation was even more intense than the exploitation suffered by their male counterparts. Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of outrageous super-profits for the capitalists.

Here's a good piece by Barbara Ehrenreich:

1. The Marxist/feminist understanding that class and sex domination rest ultimately on force is correct, and this remains the most devastating critique of sexist/capitalist society. But there is a lot to that “ultimately.” In a day to day sense, most people acquiesce to sex and class domination without being held in line by the threat of violence, and often without even the threat of material deprivation.

2. It is very important, then, to figure out what it is, if not the direct application of force, that keeps things going. In the case of class, a great deal has been written already about why the US working class lacks militant class consciousness. Certainly ethnic divisions, especially the black/white division, are a key part of the answer. But I would argue, in addition to being divided, the working class has been socially atomized. Working class neighborhoods have been destroyed and are allowed to decay; life has become increasingly privatized and inward-looking; skills once possessed by the working class have been expropriated by the capitalist class; and capitalist controlled “mass culture” has edged out almost all indigenous working class culture and institutions. Instead of collectivity and self-reliance as a class, there is mutual isolation and collective dependency on the capitalist class.

3. The subjugation of women, in the ways which are characteristic of late capitalist society, has been key to this process of class atomization. To put it another way, the forces which have atomized working class life and promoted cultural/material dependence on the capitalist class are the same forces which have served to perpetuate the subjugation of women. It is women who are most isolated in what has become an increasingly privatized family existence (even when they work outside the home too). It is, in many key instances, women’s skills (productive skills, healing, midwifery, etc.) which have been discredited or banned to make way for commodities. It is, above all, women who are encouraged to be utterly passive/uncritical/dependent (i.e. “feminine&quot in the face of the pervasive capitalist penetration of private life. Historically, late capitalist penetration of working class life has singled out women as prime targets of pacification/"feminization” – because women are the culture-bearers of their class.

4. It follows that there is a fundamental interconnection between women’s struggle and what is traditionally conceived as class struggle. Not all women’s struggles have an inherently anti-capitalist thrust (particularly not those which seek only to advance the power and wealth of special groups of women), but all those which build collectivity and collective confidence among women are vitally important to the building of class consciousness. Conversely, not all class struggles have an inherently anti-sexist thrust (especially not those that cling to pre-industrial patriarchal values) but all those which seek to build the social and cultural autonomy of the working class are necessarily linked to the struggle for women’s liberation.

A piece by Evelyn Reed, who writes from a Marxist anthropological viewpoint:

The capitalists have ample reason for glorifying the nuclear family. Its petty household is a gold mine for all sorts of hucksters from real estate agents to the manufacturers of detergents and cosmetics. Just as automobiles are produced for individual use instead of developing adequate mass transportation, so the big corporations can make more money by selling small homes on private lots to be equipped with individual washing machines, refrigerators, and other such items. They find this more profitable than building large-scale housing at low rentals or developing community services and child-care centers.

In the second place, the isolation of women, each enclosed in a private home and tied to the same kitchen and nursery chores, hinders them from banding together and becoming a strong social force or a serious political threat to the Establishment.

What is the most instructive lesson to be drawn from this highly condensed survey of the long imprisonment of womankind in the home and family of class society -which stands in such marked contrast to their stronger, more independent position in pre-class society? It shows that the inferior status of the female sex is not the result of their biological makeup or the fact that they are the child-bearers. Child-bearing was no handicap in the primitive commune; it became a handicap, above all, in the nuclear family of our times. Poor women are torn apart by the conflicting obligations of taking care of their children at home while at the same time working outside to help sustain the family.

Women, then, have been condemned to their oppressed status by the same social forces and relations which have brought about the oppression of one class by another, one race by another, and one nation by another. It is the capitalist system - the ultimate stage in the development of class society - which is the fundamental source of the degradation and oppression of women.

[TBF]

2. Hopefully with women like Aleka Papariga leading in Greece that will change -

and I know you're absolutely correct.

I can't read it (I had very minimal Spanish in high school - one year) but this is Camila Vallejo's blog, I bet there is some good stuff in here: http://camilavallejodowling.blogspot.com/

Martha Gimenez, retired @UColorado-Boulder, has done some writing on materialist feminism: http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/index.html


Some work done @Stanford - I found after a bit of searching (list of resources at the end of the article looks interesting):

A good place to situate the start of theoretical debates about women, class and work is in the intersection with Marxism and feminism. Such debates were shaped not only by academic inquiries but as questions about the relation between women's oppression and liberation and the class politics of the left, trade union and feminist movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the U.S., Britain and Europe. It will also be necessary to consider various philosophical approaches to the concept of work, the way that women's work and household activities are subsumed or not under this category, how the specific features of this work may or may not connect to different “ways of knowing” and different approaches to ethics, and the debate between essentialist and social constructionist approaches to differences between the sexes as a base for the sexual division of labor in most known human societies.

The relation of women as a social group to the analysis of economic class has spurred political debates within both Marxist and feminist circles as to whether women's movements challenging male domination can assume a common set of women's interests across race, ethnicity, and class. If there are no such interests, on what can a viable women's movement be based, and how can it evade promoting primarily the interests of white middle class and wealthy women? To the extent to which women do organize themselves as a political group cutting across traditional class lines, under what conditions are they a conservative influence as opposed to a progressive force for social change? If poor and working class women's issues are different than middle and upper class women's issues, how can middle class women's movements be trusted to address them? In addition to these questions, there is a set of issues related to cross-cultural comparative studies of women, work and relative power in different societies, as well as analyses of how women's work is connected to processes of globalization.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-class/

[Starry Messenger]

3. I agree, it is key, having women in Party leadership roles.

Aleka is great, I also enjoy the Youtube videos of her speeches.

And Camila blog love! \o/ I'll put the link into Google translate and read it. My Spanish is tragic.

And Gimenez kicks ass! I'm going to be at those links all day. (Though first I have to get my Marxist Feminist butt out to the grocery store, lol)

I agree with the importance of learning from the experience of all groups, especially those who have been silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the effects of ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -- real or illusory -- of (our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994: 111), because "social existence determines consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick, "Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow, Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC and feminist research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973: 37- 49). Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor. This would require, however, a) a rethinking and modification of the postulated relationships between race, class and gender, and b) a reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located at the intersection of these structures, all social relations and interactions are "raced," "classed," and "gendered."

In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class are presented as equivalent systems of oppression with extremely negative consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization of the connections between these systems require "a working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997 4). Whether or not it is possible to view class as just another system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within the traditional sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population aggregates ranked on the basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference between gradational and relational concepts of class, see Ossowski, 1963). Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being more fundamental than gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place individuals within an aggregate or strata arbitrarily defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be identified).

From the standpoint of Marxist theory, however, class is qualitatively different from gender and race and cannot be considered just another system of oppression. As Eagleton points out, whereas racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even though socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was instrumental in ushering a new era in historical development, one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Today, however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and deepens the rule of capital over the entire globe. The working class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against capital and, consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996: 57). While racism and sexism have no redeeming feature, class relations are, dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a site where the potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class is the fundamental agent of change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The working class is of course composed of women and men who belong to different races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and racial/ethnic struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members of the working class, people who need to work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class exploitation matter. But this vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not subsumed but are nevertheless related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC remains a neutral concept, open to any and all theoretical meanings, just one oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary potential.

Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for my argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves, so that while one person might think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class," highlight the basic issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power relations underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not to obfuscate the fact that some power relations are more important and consequential than others. For example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In my view, the flattening or erasure of the qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with "basic relations of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the RGC perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) -- are of paramount importance, for most people's economic survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used is through their choosing the identity they impute their workers. Whatever identity workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and "read" their "doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both, rather than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and the class nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless" power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in "intersectionality" is class power.

From an action standpoint, working on working-class feminist issues is a class-struggle issue, because it is working against the power of the ruling class, but it is interesting to see her put it into a theoretical framework. Her work there on the "flattening" of class in academic analysis of oppression is really good. Although I really like intersectional theory, the inclusion of class as an "equal" oppression source bothered me, and now I have some words for why. It is a special category because it has a different and progressive role to play in history.

[TBF]

4. Gimenez on Globalization -

Here is one that is really good - and ties into some of the thoughts we've been having about fighting capital on a global level in other threads. It's an easy read -


Connecting Marx and Feminism in the Era of Globalization: A Preliminary Investigation

Author: Martha E. Gimenez

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of some of Marx’s methodological insights for thinking about feminist issues and politics in the context of globalization. In the short space available here, I want to set down some general observations.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the socialist bloc, “globalization” has become the lens through which everything has to be experienced, examined, and understood. Against the view that everything we knew or thought we knew-including Marx and feminism-has to be re-theorized through the lens of globalization, I will argue instead that it is through the lens of Marx’s work and the work of those who followed in his footsteps that we can fully grasp the nature of globalization. Further, it is through the lens of Marxist-feminism that we can fully comprehend, not only the effects of globalization on women, but also the material conditions determining the ideological forms in which women understand their changing conditions of existence. Finally, to go beyond those ideological forms, I will argue, a new kind of feminism is needed, one which is fully aware of its ideological assumptions and of its historical specificity and conditions of possibility and, consequently, of the capital­ist limits of gender politics ...

Remainder of the article here: http://sdonline.org/35/connecting-marx-and-feminism-in-the-era-of-globalization-a-preliminary-investigation/

[Starry Messenger]

5. This is totally cheesy, but I think you'll appreciate it.

It just popped up in my Youtube feed:

[TBF]

6. Love it! Camila's the bomb -

the thing is that she is giving them courage. We could use someone like her on our side here