How capitalism uses gender oppression to rule

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Following is the text of a talk delivered by the author on Nov. 4 at the “The Solution is Socialism” educational conference in Con­ necticut. The conference was hosted by the Youth for Socialist Action chapter at Central Connecticut State University, where the ses­ sions were held. U ism and feminism, I pick one of the lat­ sually, when I begin a talk about Marx­ est outrages to the dignity of women and gender non-conforming people to stand in for all that capitalism has meant in the past and has in store for us in the future. This time, I had a lot of trouble choosing. In the last several weeks, we watched a strong 17-year-old without papers, sequestered in a refugee center, forced to stand up to the entire arsenal of the state of the most pow­ erful capitalist nation on earth in order to be allowed to buy an abortion for herself.

Her story was punctuated by Trump’s racist and sexist denunciation of “welfare queens” stealing from the public, just as he was driving forward on a tax bill designed to utterly demolish any survival of the so­ cial pact made by the capitalist class in the wake of the rebellious Thirties. Within days, his administration threatened transgender soldiers with the kind of discharges that could condemn them to a life of joblessness, ostracism, and poverty.

And each morning as we click onto our news feed, we read the names and stories of the victims of sexual harassment that oc­ cupy the loftiest positions in the realm of the arts, the corporate world, and the U.S. Congress.

Faced with this overwhelming demonstra­ tion of the social subordination of women and those who are gender non-conforming, one would expect an uprising. Instead, the only leadership actually visible on the pub­ lic stage called a National Women’s Conven­ tion whose mission was to prepare women to take up positions within this system and run for office, acting as if the two-party shell game that got us to this place was really a vehicle for change.

Why did this happen? Why is this the default re­ sponse to the offensive against our ability to survive with dignity? In part it is because, despite a century and a half of betrayal on reproductive justice, child care, education, and elder care, many feminist activ­ ists retain deep illusions in the system, imagining that capitalism, with a bit more reasoning, with a few more mobilizations, with a few more liberal legisla­ tors, can actually be shaped into something that can emancipate us.

Socialists disagree. We believe that gender subor­ dination is shown historically to be so integral to the functioning of the capitalist economy and the ability of big business to make profits, that lasting and fun­ damental changes will be only be made once we can break apart the most basic components of this sys­ tem and create something entirely new.

Capitalism is a system in which all production is organized to make profits. Profits come from what value is produced by workers in the factory above and beyond what the boss gives in wages so that the worker can sustain himself or herself, and those who are dependent, and those who cannot yet work or can no longer work.

The boss, who is competing with other capitalists, needs to constantly increase profits, and after all other measures have been taken, in the end, can only do it by trying to lower wages. That is, capitalism is a system that works well only by impoverishing those who create its wealth.

To retain privately as much of the surplus society produces as possible, the capitalist class tries to put all the financial responsibility for the care and main­ tenance and reproduction of the working class onto the individual, usually using the vehicle of the nucle­ ar family.

Women’s, and less frequently men’s, unpaid care and nurturing labor in the home and community have been an essential way for the capitalist class to keep the system humming. Having some section of 6 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2017 the female working class carry out unpaid labor in the home, in turn, by the logic of the system, makes women’s waged labor cheap.

When it is useful to pull these women into the waged work force to make profits, this sectoral, ser­ vice, or care work is privatized. It becomes feminized low-wage labor, and the fact of its existence is used to try to lower the wages of the working class as a whole.

Unpaid, precarious, temporary, part-time, low-wage women workers who leave and return episodically to the full-time labor pool at the capitalists’ whim play an essential role in making the profit system work for the bosses.

There are mechanisms other than gender that help the capitalists keep a pool of surplus labor around. National oppression and immigration are just two others. Regimes to replace workers based something other than gender—slavery and work camps—are sometimes ����������������������������������������� production. But it is gender that is the backbone of the system of surplus labor and social reproduction as a whole in the capitalist mode of production.

These two poles—a privatized realm of social pro­ duction based on unpaid work that keeps part of the working-class family educated, healthy, and sane enough to keep punching the clock and big pools of warehoused surplus workers that keep wages down—are integral to the production for profit sys­ tem.

There are variations in implementation. And there are divisions among capitalists about how, practi­ cally speaking, to organize social reproduction at any specific time. But these contingencies do not chal­ lenge the general workings of the system.

The current debate over taxation, for example, is re­ ally about just how far the bosses want to go in terms of cutting the social wage. Just how far can they go in terms of placing the burden for the maintenance of daily life on the individual workers and their families before there is a revolt?

In truth, all the talk of deficits and taxation, all the efforts of big business to lower its tax rate, are really about their increasing unwillingness, in the face of (Both pages) Posters from the Russian Revolution: The socialist revolution of 1917 initiated far reaching measures and debate aimed at the liberation of women and gender non-conforming people.

new global competition and a declining rate of prof­ it, to continue social spending on education, health care, housing, child care, elder care, safe water, safe food, and so on.

When Congress battles over taxation rates and budgets, a great deal of what they are fighting over really does have to do with how much they can avoid paying the cost of providing these necessities to the working class as a whole without provoking a really threatening response. The wing of the capitalist class driving through the current tax reform is pretty con­ fident, given our level of fightback, that they can go lower and still stay in power.

Capitalists steadily reduce the social wage The amount of the social wage is determined by the class struggle. For the last 40 years, unfortunately, this has been an almost one-sided war, with capital­ ists in a global crisis consistently and successfully chipping away at the social wage and conditions of working-class life until, today, they feel that they should not have to pay to insure clean water in Flint or an inspector in a meat-packing plant.

It is this relationship between social reproduction and production for profit, alongside the ruling class’s constant calculation regarding how much the work­ ing class will resist, that keeps us in the loop of prog­ ress and retreat on issues such as reproductive jus­ tice, the disciplining of sexuality and gender expres­ sion, and the use of sexual violence and harassment.

None of this is determined in a completely pre­ dictable way by the conjunctural circumstances of production and profit. But the connections are de­ monstrable over time and space, and we ignore this fundamental relationship at our own peril. I have seen the waxing and waning in my own time, coming (continued on page 7)

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... Gender oppression (continued from page 6) of age in the post-World War II boom amidst the tre­ mendous gains of second-wave feminism and living through the historic defeats of the gendered neolib­ eral offensive of the last decades.

The ferocity of today’s attacks on women and gen­ der non-conforming people cannot be fully under­ stood outside of the context of the current, even more intense global capitalist crisis. These connections show us that no victory is permanent or secure as long as this mode of production is in place.

Let us remind ourselves of how neoliberal capital­ ism has been functioning on a global s cale for the last 40 years. The off-shoring of a lot of low-wage industry was carried out only with a sophisticated gendering of global labor and the use of hoary patri­ archal setups to keep those women vulnerable and unorganized.

Peter Custers, in his studies of women’s labor in Asian economies, has documented how the develop­ ment of the garment industry in Bangladesh and Pak­ istan was accompanied by the recreation, the resus­ citation and reshaping, by urban elites of traditional rural conditions that kept women coming to the city for jobs but tied to peasant family structures that dis­ ciplined them.

Lourdes Arizepe described the same process in Mexican strawberry agribusiness. Manipulating the circumstances of social reproduction to assure profitable production is a generalized phenomenon. Within the sweatshops—whether in South Asia, Af­ rica, or the borderlands here—sexual harassment is used systematically to keep workforces quiescent.

A range of studies from the last several decades confirms this. A study of women in the export pro­ cessing zones of the Dominican Republic found that 40% were sexually harassed by their bosses. Anoth­ er study in Kenya found that 90% of women in the export zone were sexually harassed. And in each of these countries, imperialist-mandated austerity pro­ grams cut water, education, and health, and so dra­ matically increased the unpaid labor load of women.

So, the neoliberal period has seen gender used bru­ tally in both production and social reproduction. The sheer number of women that began work during this period for subsistence or less than subsistence wag­ es was cited by The Economist as the largest source of economic growth in the world by 2006. The cuts in the social safety net lowered corporate and elite taxes everywhere. Since the 2008 crash, we can only imagine that this whole process has deepened.

These stories can be told about gendered labor in the United States as well. In fast food operations in the U.S., a 2016 study reported, the percentage of sexual harassment of women was 40%. And in 2014, the Restaurant Opportunities Center found sexual harassment among restaurant workers (women and men) registering at 90%. Had the kitchen workers been employed further back on the food chain, they would have suffered systematic sexual violence in the fields, as documented in a NPR special in 2014.

My father-in-law’s cousin organized female Jewish jewelry workers in New York City in the 1930s— and guess what? The union won the shop because it promised to put an end to the morning lineup, in which the male foremen would greet their employees by walking along the line and feeling up each of them, just to let them know who was the boss.

“Jane Doe,” as an immigrant coming to work in the U.S. without papers, likely to be subject to persistent wage theft and extreme exploitation, all the while still sending funds home to help privately raise the next generation of such workers, could be the em­ bodiment of this global and gendered process. The ef­ forts to control her reproduction could be taken from the annals of any colonial operation from history, as they all used gender subordination as one tool of con­ quest.

Russian Revolution: steps to liberate women When you think about it this way, you realize that gender subordination is not an accident or some­ thing to be held over that could be cleared up if we get some more enlightened people into the Congress. For the vast majority of working-class women and gender non-conforming people, the pain and fear as­ sociated with it is omnipresent. This is because it is undeniably part of the way that the system functions.

It can seem overwhelming. It is so normalized. But history shows us that it does not have to be this way. One hundred years ago, in 1917, a women’s demon­ stration for bread in Petrograd, Russia, turned into the first mobilization of a revolution that upended the entire social system organized production for profit. This revolution had a leadership determined to break women free from the drudgery of the compulsory and repressive family mandated by the Orthodox Church, and immediately made simple divorce available to all.

Children born outside of a religious marriage could no longer be considered “illegitimate.” Abortion be­ came free and legal. “Sodomy” was decriminalized for only the second time in modern history. Commu­ nity kitchens and nurseries and laundries that could replace the unpaid labor in the family were built de­ spite tremendous economic stress.

In those years, for a brief time, the most far-reach­ ing experimentation and debate on the way to orga­ nize society to free women was on the agenda. There is at least one same-sex marriage on the court dock­ ets from this period. Radical thinking about sexuality was generalized and exhilarating. Russia’s advances were discussed in international conferences in the Berlin of Magnus Herschfeld, a pioneer advocate for LGBTQI rights.

This amazing working-class effort to emancipate working women, according to LGBTQI researchers into the period like Jason Yanowitz, would very likely have led in time to even more far-reach­ ing conceptions of gender variability and rights. Sadly, it was cut short by imperialist interven­ tion in the Soviet Union, civil war, a period of scarcity, and a bureaucratic counterrevolution. But it happened, and shows us what is possible if we manage to take the reins of power and or­ ganize society on the basis of fulfilling human needs, collective responsibility for social repro­ duction, and individual dignity. Social revolu­ tion, though never a guarantee, is a prerequisite for female and sexual liberation.

The tasks for today Clearly we are not now on the verge of a revolution­ ary upsurge. But revolutions are not spontaneous. The ideas that they implemented in 1917 and 1918 had been debated in the factories and working-class women’s organizations for decades. The women who led this transformation had worked for decades to create a working-class political party that was clear on these issues and capable of leading in the decisive moments.

This one brilliant moment when all of everyday life could be reorganized was prepared, in truth, by gen­ erations of work. This is the broad task before us to­ day: Building our organizations. Struggling to achieve clarity on the most advanced questions around sexu­ ality and gender and, with others, theorizing eman­ cipatory solutions. Creating spaces where regular people can learn of their potential power.

Socialists need to join up with forces like those who initiated the International Women’s Day strike soli­ darity action on March 8 and to begin to create nodes of a women’s movement for the 99%, a movement that privileges the struggles of working-class wom­ en, including trans women, and that recognizes the leadership of African American and immigrant wom­ en. We need a movement that is independent of the Democratic Party and full of spaces in which working women can find their radical political voices. A move­ ment where working women can learn, debate, and build their confidence as leaders.

Such a movement, by the way, is also essential if we are to successfully counter the right-wing ideological offensive that managed to draw in working women alienated from “lean-in” feminism and the Hillary Clintons of this world. Twentieth-century European history tells us in no uncertain terms that failure on this score can lead to actions and events that are un­ thinkable.

This movement has to exist on a community and campus level. But its cadres must also be part of building a left wing in the unions that can mobilize the most combative sections of our class in support of the unorganized, in support of child care, elder care, health care, housing—all the social services we need to free women and other care givers for leadership.

And we must look for the moments when we can carry out exemplary struggles that make a move­ ment independent of the Democrats look viable to the unorganized. Has such a movement existed? Yes, of course, it has in many historical contexts. In fact, women’s movements with these characteristics are in formation, and one of them in Argentina, Pan y Ro­ sas, is the topic of our next speaker, Tatiana Cozzarelli of Left Voice. n SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2017 7

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‘Social revolution, though never a guarantee, is a prerequisite for female and sexual liberation.’