Explaining gender violence in the neoliberal era [View all]

[BainsBane]

This is a fascinating, lengthy article that connects exploitation of labor and gender violence with neoliberalism. Four paragraphs can't get at what this is about, and it is well worth going to the website of the International Socialist Review to read the entire piece.

http://isreview.org/issue/91/explaining-gender-violence-neoliberal-era

By Tithi Bhattacharya

Let us begin with an image: a naked white man pursuing a low-wage Black female asylum seeker down the corridors of an expensive Manhattan hotel in order to force her to have sex with him. The man, of course, is the then-director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the woman, thirty-three-year-old Nafissatou Diallo, a housekeeper at Strauss-Kahn’s hotel who was also at the time seeking asylum in the United States from her native Guinea, a former colony of France. Although all criminal charges of rape and assault were dropped against the IMF chief, he had to pay a somewhat heavy price that included, among other things, his resignation and a hefty financial settlement to Ms. Diallo. Was justice, then, served? The answer should be of interest to all revolutionary Marxists. This is because a veritable cartography of dispossession extends between these two figures, and it is the purpose of this essay to outline that map.

This image ought to be considered an icon for our times. It is iconic in the sense that the scene captures a moment when the distinction between the individual and societal vanishes, and the individuals—the naked wealthy white man and the Black low-waged woman—emerge as pure embodiments of the societal. . . .

First, the last four decades of neoliberalism have created a marked escalation in gender crimes in most countries. The financial crisis of 2008 exacerbated what was already a serious problem; this is no longer a situation of “business as usual” and it requires socialists to critically engage with the problem.

Second, as Marxists it is not enough for us to describe the effects of this current intensification of violence, we need to also provide an explanation for it.

Third, capitalism, faced with a crisis, is seeking a resolution in two connected ways: (a) through an attempt to restructure production, as manifest in the drive for austerity and (b) by trying to reorder social reproduction, as evidenced in its efforts to recraft gender identities and recirculate certain ideologies regarding the working-class family. In order to understand this simultaneity and unity in capitalist restructuring, we need to revisit the Marxist analysis of women’s oppression that is best approached through the analytical framework of social reproduction theory.