Can capitalism liberate women?

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Anticipating a Trump administration and a conser­ vative Congress, women and their allies are marching in Washington and in scores of other cities on Jan. 21. The fact that the Washington march blossomed from a little seed into a huge national undertaking almost overnight is a sign that millions of people are ready to fight for the defense of women’s rights and the ad­ vancement of the women’s movement.

Any long-term strategy needs to start with a clear view of the root causes and fundamental bases of sex­ ism and gender discrimination.

One of the most pressing questions facing our move­ ment has to do with the relationship of women’s op­ pression to the capitalist economic system as a whole. Is it possible to complete the project of women’s lib­ eration within our current social and economic sys­ tem? How one responds to this question will deter­ mine, to a great degree, the kind of movement we set off to build. It will determine our effectiveness and ultimate success.

Women’s liberation groups have discussed strategy based on this question in every stage of the struggle over decades. Looking at the anthropological, histori­ cal, and theoretical elements that undergirded those previous debates is a prerequisite for our own delib­ erations. Together, these elements can give us a fun­ damental understanding of the inner workings of a gendered class society and how class and gender re­ inforce each other.

Women in indigenous society Women’s subordination did not always exist. In fact, they played a role of leadership in early societies, be­ fore the development of distinct social classes.

Women’s social position, far from being biologi­ cally determined, is specific to the ways in which different class societies are organized economically. Women’s status has not gradually improved as soci­ ety “evolved” from “primitive” to “civilized” but, on the contrary, has shifted, often negatively, with the development of new property relations and the kinds of social organization that accompany these relations.

Anthropologists such as Eleanor Leacock and Sil­ via Federici have established a significant body of research documenting pre-capitalist gender rela­ tions. Federici shows in her writings that indigenous society in the Americas was far more egalitarian for women than in Europe after the transition to capital­ ism. Many indigenous societies were based mainly on consensus, lacking most of the formal authority we find in later civilization, and women often controlled economic life.

According to Leacock in her book, “Myths of Male Dominance” (1981), pre-Columbian Iroquois women had a great deal of control over society, including the 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2017 “the de facto power to veto declarations of war and to intervene to bring about peace.” These native women managed “the household,” but that had little in com­ mon with “household management” in patriarchal society.

In Iroquois society preceding the colonizers, man­ agement of the household meant control of all food stocks, treasury, and fur. This was everything they needed to survive and to trade amongst neighboring tribes. Women could exercise control over society be­ cause they were at the center of the public economic life of their society. The arrangement of production for sustenance and development did not itself lead to patriarchy. It was only the colonial introduction of new property relations into band society that began to tie production to patriarchal norms.

In fact, the European interlopers were often shocked at the kinds of gender equality they found in indigenous tribes in the Americas. Leacock described one account from a Jesuit priest regarding relation­ ships of 17th-century Montagnais-Naskapi life: “Not­ ing that women had ‘great power,’ he expressed his disapproval of the fact that men had no apparent in­ clination to make their wives ‘obey’ them or enjoin sexual fidelity upon them. He lectured the Indians of this failing, reporting in one instance, ‘I told him then that he was the master and that in France women do no rule their husbands.’”

The Jesuits who first encountered the MontagnaisNaskapi in the 17th century in Canada had attitudes that themselves were products of a dramatic transfor­ mation of property relations and the status of women in Europe. Silvia Federici, author of “Caliban and the Witch,” describes the way that the enclosures of com­ munal land and the devaluation of peasant women’s “home work” were accompanied by a devastating re­ duction in women’s rights. From the 15th to the 17th century, Federici claims, women were stripped of their right to perform abortions, as well as their right to professions such as midwives and medical practi­ tioners, and rape stopped being a punishable crime.

By the end of this social transformation, women had lost significant social power. The transition from feudalism to capitalism sharpened, rather than de­ creased, the use of patriarchal principles to organize society.

Women under capitalism Capitalism is a system that runs on profit making and the continuous production of commodities. If the system stopped facilitating the production of all of the commodities we consume, the economy would collapse. In addition to boosting the production of commodities, the capitalist system must reproduce the class conditions that make profit possible. In part, this means the reproduction of a class of workers who must labor for wages because we do not own any (Above) To make up for the World War II labor shortage, women in North America were recruited into the factories, but pushed out after the war.

means to produce commodities ourselves.

To keep the working class producing, workers must replace themselves with children, and these children must be raised, educated into the workforce, and maintained as part of the workforce. Each worker has to find or create social mechanisms to help deal with occupational illnesses, the stress and physical wear and tear of work, and to tend to them when they are old or disabled.

Marxist–feminist Cinzia Arruzza, in her paper, “Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Re­ production Feminism and its Critics,” described some of the conditions of work under capitalism. One of the main features of wage labor, she states, is to keep the worker in a condition of “dispossession.” This is done through paying the worker less than the amount they produce in sales for the boss, but also by appropri­ ating their skills into machinery. Thus, the worker is “not just reproducing herself as a generic human be­ ing with needs and desires; she is also reproducing herself … as a member of a specific class character­ ized by dispossession and exploitation.”

Ideally, capitalists would always keep workers working, while providing meager wages to cover costs of living. However, we need some amount of time to rest, eat, and take care of ourselves and our families. We can call the labor used in maintaining liv­ ing conditions, necessary labor. In capitalism, the bulk of necessary labor is done by women, but can also be done by men, children, or even service workers.

Capitalists want to continue to increase profitabil­ ity, and thus there is an incentive to reduce neces­ sary labor by employing those doing domestic labor. Yet, it must allow for necessary labor; otherwise, the labor supply would ultimately be reduced, or even decimated. This is a contradiction. Necessary labor should be reduced to increase profitability, but it should also be increased to increase labor supply and create the condition of dispossession for the worker. During World War II when women were critical to production in the United States, the elites rushed to set up child-care centers, but after the war used all the means at their disposal to push women out of full-time work.

The World War II experience shows that social re­ production can be arranged in many ways. Within the last 100 years, domestic life for working people has generally been the result of women’s unpaid labor, but occasionally, portions have been taken up by the state, and most recently, relatively privatized. These variations are not unusual, and change has been a permanent feature of the capitalist mode of produc­ (continued on page 7, in “Mariela Castro and Cuba’s LGBT revolution”)