Feminist Rebellion Today

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The following presentation was given by Christine Marie, representing Socialist Action at a Nov. 10 forum in Philadelphia called Feminist Rebellion Today. The other panelists were Preeti Pathak, Co-Chair of Promot­ ing Awareness, Victim Empowerment (PAVE), a new group that uses education and action to shatter the si­ lence of sexual violence; Rebecca Katherine Hirsch from Permanent Wave, a network of feminist artists and ac­ tivists; and Nuala Cabral, co-founder of FAAN Mail, a media literacy and activist project formed by women of I for inviting me to participate on this wonderful color in Philadelphia.

want to thank Socialist Action of Philadelphia panel of activists and leaders from the movement against sexual violence. By all accounts the Sept. 28 demonstration here in Philly was a more than suc­ cessful part of the growing movement against rape culture—the movement against sexual violence, rape, street harassment, and every other attack on our abil­ ity to function fully and productively in this society, to function unimpeded by any kind of subordination by gender.

I am an admirer of the role that PAVE has played in bringing the issue of sexual violence on campuses to the attention of the whole nation. I was delighted to view the videos of FANN’s educational forays onto the street around sexual harassment. In short, I am very happy to be part of this discussion with those leading on the ground here in Philadelphia today.

I want to focus my remarks on two aspects of the is­ sue of violence and the way that it relates to the whole fight for an end to gender oppression. First, I want to talk about the context in which sexual violence is on the rise, here and globally. Secondly, I want to ad­ dress the elephant in the room: what is the root cause of gender oppression and what does that mean about the fight to end it once and for all?

I want to situate my remarks by referring to three news items/publications from this year: (1) This week’s NPR story about the fight of female farm work­ ers fighting rape on the job. (2) The death in April of over 1000 sisters in a garment factory in Bangladesh. (3) The publication of Beth Ritchie’s new book, “Ar­ rested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America Prison Nation.”

I choose these three events to highlight the deliber­ ate and systematic character of sexual violence in a capitalist world, its relationship to the global austerity drive against working people as a whole, and the way that an acknowledgement of this relationship prob­ lematizes one of the strategies behind current efforts to tackle sexual violence. My hope is that my presenta­ tion will encourage all of us to nurture our most radi­ cal hopes. My goal is to stimulate all of us to raise our political goals to a place that is truly commensurate with the degree of oppression that women and gender non-conforming people really face under this system.

What is the system really like for women? Let’s take a look at my chosen recent events:

First, the NPR broadcast this week told the stories of Guadalupe Chavez, singlehandedly raising three kids, who was denied her paycheck of $245 unless she submitted to the sexual advances of the grower’s 10 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2013 supervisor, and Maricruz Ladino, who was raped by a farm supervisor with the power to hire and promote employees—or fire, blacklist, and deport her if she protested.

Such employer power, enforced by the threat of sex­ ual violence and terror is part of the way that grow­ ers prevent workers from organizing and fighting back against the most horrific conditions, conditions that include pesticide poisoning, other severe occupa­ tional diseases, and a dramatically shortened lifespan. Sexual violence, viewed as a social phenomenon, is a tool of the powerful against the subordinate and used to maintain those hierarchies.

My second example is the Bangladesh garment fire. In April, we all remember, over 1000 women were killed in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh. What we might not have focused on at the time was how the bosses used patriarchy and sexual violence to prevent those workers from organizing against the dangers before their deaths. But we can do that now.

Research by feminists and Marxists explain a lot about the way that gender subordination and sexual violence contributed to those deaths. First, all these women ended up in that factory because neoliberal reforms have transformed the countryside, forcing them to leave villages to earn the dowries that their families can no longer afford. This system of marriage was not some hoary hangover from a backward past but, as Peter Custers and others document, a patriar­ chal system that urban corporate elites enforce be­ cause it fills their sweatshops.

Once in the factories, these young women face a sys­ tem of sexual violence that is used to weaken their ability to organize and that thwarts any genuine in­ dependence that could flow from work outside the home.

In 2003, Lourdes Pantaleon published a ground­ breaking study of women workers in export process­ ing zones in the Dominican Republic and found that 40 percent endured sexual harassment from bosses eager to keep a workforce quiescent. In a 2008 survey of female Export Processing Zone workers in Kenya, 90% reported that they had experienced some form of sexual harassment on the job or been forced to pro­ vide sexual favors in order to get hired and stay hired. And this kind of exploitation is not a small part of the effort of the ruling rich to generate profit.

Here is how the Economist business magazine de­ scribed the economic role of these women in 2006: “The increase in female employment has also account­ ed for a big chunk of global growth in recent decades. GDP growth can come from three sources: employing more people; using more capital per worker; or an increase in the productivity of labour and capital due to new technology, say. Since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. Back-ofthe-envelope calculations suggest that the employ­ ment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased produc­ tivity. Carve up the world’s economic growth a differ­ ent way and another surprising conclusion emerges: over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.

So the big point here is that we make a mistake if we women, as it was reshaped in the neoliberal 1990s, has ill-served poor African American women.

One of her sample cases is that of a com­ munity organizer named Mrs. B, who upon failing to move out of Chicago public housing targeted for destruction and gentrification in time to suit the powers that be, became the victim of repeated rapes by a group of young policemen assigned 24-7 to regu­ late life in the project. Mrs. B. was vulnerable to the state because she lived in a neighborhood consciously depopulated by the banks and developers. Despite re­ peated efforts to get help from rape crisis centers and social services, the fact that she was asking them to confront rape by agents of the state that funded them, meant that they could not fit her victimization into their system. After years of struggle, Mrs. B. finally found an advocate and won a settlement from the Chi­ cago Police Department, but she lives each day fearful of retaliation by the cops, the social service system, or some other arm of the Chicago governmental ap­ paratus.

So those are my three examples. I am telling you these stories to make the point that outside of the vio­ lence in the home, in nuclear family units of one kind or another, from domestic partners or lovers—and, of course, the home remains the main site of violence against women—violence on the job and from agents of the state is a central issue for working women and poor women.

Violence comes in the nuclear family, in the work­ place, in prison, and from agents of the state. It is this material reality—the enforcement of gender subor­ dination to keep the system running—that fuels rape culture, that makes rape culture fundamentally ac­ ceptable, and that keeps rape culture deeply woven into our lives. Gender-based violence flows from a system that is maintained by our economic subordi­ nation.

Why is gender violence and rape culture on the rise today? I contend that the rise of rape culture cannot be separated from the fact that the corporate powers in this world are facing the most serious crisis of their system since 1929. Socialists believe that the employ­ ers are determined to recover the level of profitability they need by any means necessary.

At the moment, they are hoarding trillions of dollars that they refuse to invest in industries globally. In­ stead of providing jobs, they are sitting on those tril­ lions until they can invest them in a manner that will give them a rate of return close to that of the 1950s. When they do invest, they invest in ways that yield primarily low-wage jobs of the kind justified ideologi­ cally by the myth that they are for young people just entering the job market or women who are partnered with someone making the real household wage. The whole pattern of current investment relies on our im­ poverishment.

Secondly, the corporate elites are demanding that governments here and all over the world dramatically cut social spending of any kind. Marxists call this cut­ ting the social wage. In the U.S. they just cut $85 bil­ lion under “sequestration.” They are getting ready to cut more. If you drive down the social wage—that is if you get rid of government pre-school programs, and health care for poor children, and cut social security for the seniors, and so on and so on—who takes up the slack? Well, women, of course, and it is work for which they are not paid.

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(continued from page 10) Justin Zhuang