PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Which ones are the feminists?
by Janine Bandcroft Tuesday, Feb. 04, 2003 at 1:31 AM
peaceandjustice@acts.bc.ca

Women and the Hierarchy.

As far as I know, all the volunteer labour in the world is completely disregarded by Wall Street's economic indicators. Domestic labour is absolutely divorced from any calculations of the ubiquitous Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for heaven�s sake, except that if somebody didn't perform all the hearth and home duties those economists wouldn�t have the strength to lift their slide rules out of their shirt pockets.�

As Marie Mies explains, in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, "subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which �capitalist productive labour� can be built up and exploited� (Mies, 48).�

As global corporate capitalism creeps into this petty pace from day to day, as we experience increasing economic disruption along with its side effects of violence, theft, substance abuse, and prostitution, it can be helpful to consider the historical consequences that have led to the existence of a world society that continues to challenge feminists into the twenty-first century. If it is equality and justice that we seek, with an end to the commodification of women and women�s sexuality, then it is necessary that women, and men, understand the intricate connections between the damaging effects of the capitalist patriarchy and the conspiratorial ideology of greed which promotes and sustains it.�

In the latter part of the nineteenth century Karl Marx and Frederick Engels eloquently described the mechanics of capitalist economics, and its inherent inadequacies. Marx understood that capitalism promotes the "perpetuation of slavery" (Marx 20, 162), and he wrote at a time when attempts were being made to "eradicate the last arrogant remnants of feudal society" (Marx 11, 333). He was primarily concerned about the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, and the extent to which workers are alienated from their labour and ultimately from themselves:�

�The alienation of the worker is expressed thus: the more he [sic] produces, the less he can consume; the more value he creates, the less value he has... labour produces fabulous things for the rich, but misery for the poor. Machines replace labour, and jobs diminish, while other workers turn into machines" (Rius, 79).�

Marx proposed that society abandon "political or social restrictions, regulations, or monopolies" (Marx 11, 333) that are unfairly imposed upon the workers from an uncaring hierarchy, and challenged "the nation [to] produce and exchange without royalty; away with the crown" (Marx 11, 334). Marx believed in the power of education, and he had faith that people would make good decisions if they were provided with enough information to intellectually choose for themselves. "There are to be manufacturers of food as well as manufacturers of twist and cottons," he wrote "but no longer any lords of the land" (Marx 11, 333).�

Marx was attempting to help people understand the workings of capitalism so they could see how their relationship with their employers was fundamentally the same as the slave and owner relationship they experienced under the feudal system, and he offered a courageous re-visioning of that relationship. "The means of labour," he wrote, need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself" (Marx 20, 12). Marx understood that people will never be satisfied and fulfilled human beings until they engage willingly with their labour in complete understanding and acceptance of their purpose and their relationship with it. He suggested that "hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form," like slave labour or serf labour, "destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart" (Marx 20, 12). To this end he espoused the virtues of cooperative economic structures and told the International Working Men that

"there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold 'hands'. The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated" (Marx 20, 12).

While Marx, and Engels, realized the exploitative nature of the relationship between labourers and their employers, Marie Mies exposes the �superexploitation (italics hers) of non-slave labourers (women, colonies, peasants) upon which the wage labour exploitation then is possible� (Mies, 48). She calls unpaid labour superexploitation because �it is not based on appropriation (by the capitalist) of the time and labour over and above the �necessary� labour time, the surplus labour, but of the time and labour necessary� for people�s own survival or subsistence production� (Mies, 48).��

Maria makes a further connection between the birth of the capitalist patriarchy and the witch-hunts "which raged through Europe from the twelfth to the seventeenth century" (Mies, 81). During this era influential men, like Jean Brodin, constructed the foundational basis for an economic system based on, and rooted in, exploitation and theft. Brodin was "the French theoretician of the new mercantilist economic doctrine" (Mies, 84). He was also "a consultant of the French government in the persecution of the witches" (Mies, 84).�

The witch trials were "directly responsible for providing employment to a host of lawyers, advocates, judges, councils, etc." (Mies, 84). The success of the witch-hunt as "a lucrative source of money and wealth resulted in the implementation of "special commissions which had the task of denouncing ever more people as witches and sorcerers" (Mies, 84). The theft of land and personal property added insult to injury as the accused and their families were forced "to bear all the costs of the trial, beginning with the bills for alcohol and food for the witch commission, ... and ending with the costs for the firewood for the stake" (Mies, 85).�

The witch hunt was designed to control and subordinate peasants, artisans, and specifically women whose "economic and sexual independence constituted a threat for the emerging bourgeois order" (Mies, 81).�

Not only are "the slave trade and the destruction of subsistence economies in the colonies" (Mies, 77) connected to the rise of capitalism and the persecution of women as witches, but "the historical emergence of European science and technology, and its mastery over nature" (Mies, 77) are also founded in ideologies shaped during that era.�

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the rise of a European world economy which excludes women and nature from its consideration except where it found an opportunity to exploit them. The accumulation of capital was essential in order for "the capitalist mode of production [to] establish and maintain itself" (Mies, 88), and "most of this capital was not accumulated through 'honest' trade by merchant capitalists but largely by way of brigandage, piracy, forced and slave labour" (Mies, 89).�

The scientific revolution gave birth to technological inventions necessary for warfare and conquest, and violence became "the key word and key method by which the New Man established his domination over women and men" (Mies, 88).�

A "protestant, capitalist class of merchants, mining industrialists, clothier capitalists" emerged, and this necessitated a denial of autonomy for women who were forced to abandon their niches as craftspeople in favour of becoming the breeders of workers to fuel the capitalist economic machine (Mies, 88). Those women who were able to retain a degree of independence and autonomy outside of their homes were relegated to an inferior status inside their homes as men were expected to fill the role of primary breadwinner (Mies, 88).

Nature became a "vast reservoir of material resources to be exploited and turned into profit" (Mies, 88). Capitalism required an emotional and physical "separation and subordination" of humans from the natural world in order to accommodate this (Mies, 74).�

The philosophies of indigenous cultures, which celebrate the intrinsic connection between themselves and the planet, was appropriated and displaced by "the rise of modern science and technology" and that "was based on the violent attack and rape of Mother Earth" (Mies, 75). The methods of interrogation used to extract secrets from those accused of witchcraft provided a model for the mechanistic world-view of modern science, and science perceived the world as a "huge reservoir of 'natural resources' or 'matter'" to be analysed and controlled rather than appreciated for its intrinsic beauty and diversity (Mies, 75).�

Capitalism absolutely demands the philosophical and ideological transformation of the human potential. While European capitalists were perfecting the ideological takeover of the human psyche, domesticating proletarian European women to accommodate an economic structure that requires clearly defined gender roles, native peoples of the Americas lived in harmonious coexistence with the earth and were engaged in subsistence barter economies.�

It is interesting to ponder the significance of entire cultures of people who survived and prospered without the influence of a currency that is arbitrarily assigned and artificially maintained.��

Anthropologists have found significant evidence to support the success of pre-patriarchal European "partnership model" societies which were "more peaceful [and] less hierarchic and authoritarian" than capitalist society, and, not surprisingly perhaps, centred on a foundation of sexual equality (Eisler, xix). In Crete "the whole of life was pervaded by an ardent faith in the goddess Nature" - our ancient ancestors had successfully constructed a world based on equality and an equal distribution of wealth so that "the standard of living - even of peasants* - seems to have been high" (Eisler, 31-32).�

Today, indigenous peoples struggle "not only against the state and multinationals, but, as Winona LaDuke states, against a state of mind based on conquest, that believes the land and all peoples are expendable in the name of 'progress' and 'Western civilization'" (Goodleaf, 240).�

Many elders have personally felt the effects of the "colonial schools [which] functioned primarily to speed up the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into mainstream society" (Goodleaf, 228), and they know that the 1876 Indian Act was "the model for the apartheid regime later imposed by the colonizers in South Africa" (Goodleaf, 226).�

Although many band leaders are today criticized for re-creating a hierarchical system within reservation lands, many others recognize that the "strategies for and visions of liberation must include a worldview that challenges the colonial ideology of the earth as a commodity to be exploited and must also 'develop in people a consciousness that all life on the earth is sacred and that the sacredness of life is the key to human freedom and survival... that it is the renewable quality of earth's ecosystems which makes life possible for human beings on the planet'" (Goodleaf, 241).���

Vera Wabegijib recognizes that "the Canadian population has been conditioned to believe that Indians [sic] are a burden to the economic state" (Wabegijig, 98), and she wonders why Canadians haven't "looked more critically at how the government has been implementing this New World Order" (Wabegijig, 97).�Wabegijig understands that it is the "divide-and-conquer mechanism that the government favours the most" (Wabegijig, 100), and she acknowledges that the influential corporate media "is there to serve the purposes of the government and the government within governments" (Wabegijig, 100).�

We are also encouraged to assign blame to immigrants for the inadequacies inherent in the economic and political structures rather than looking directly at the inherent racism of the European colonialist government. Sonera Thobani points to public consultations which "gave the appearance of a democratic process" (Thobani, 76), but which actually pre-defined the "problems" that Canadians were to be concerned about - shaping our minds and the opinions we hold.�

Immigration documents, Thobani has discovered, consistently present immigrants as those "responsible for environmental deterioration, pollution, increased crime, overburdened social services, food and housing shortages," and they neglect to recognize "the reality that 'immigrant communities' - as taxpayers - fund 'our' national social programs" (Thobani, 88).��

The European capitalist model has given birth to housewifization, and the perception of women's labour as a "natural resource, freely available like air and water" (Mies, 110). For the accumulation of luxury goods capitalism has extended the tentacles of colonization throughout the world and for the proliferation of the working class required to maintain it capitalism has established "an 'internal colony', that is, a nuclear family and a woman maintained by a male 'breadwinner'" (Mies, 110).�

As Maria Mies explains, "our present concept of family is a bourgeois one" (Mies, 104) created "first among the propertied classes, later in the working class, and with it the housewife as a social category" (Mies, 105). "The creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption became a very important strategy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (Mies, 106), and "the sexual energies of the proletariat had to be channelled into the strait-jacket of the bourgeois family" (Mies, 105). Bourgoisie women were cultivated "as luxury creatures" (Mies, 101) and they provided the impetus for the creation of "luxury 'needs' which gave the decisive impetus" to the new economic order (Mies, 101).��

In addition to a distinct sexual division of labour, capitalism has created an International Division of Labour (IDL) in which "raw materials produced in the colonies [are] transported to the industrialized countries, transformed into industrial products, and marketed in the industrialized countries or exported" (Mies, 112).�

During the 1970's the OECD "moved labour-intensive production processes to the colonies and developing countries" and this has resulted in "rising unemployment in industrialized countries, a world divided into areas of production and areas of consumption, a market driven by the demand of rich countries rather than the needs of poor countries, the construction of luxury items, the promotion of mass consumption" (Mies 114).�

To facilitate this new global economy, many multinational corporations promote regional or global trade agreements which allow them to relocate their factories in Asia and Mexico. The IDL also paved the way for advances in the sexual division of labour. Men are increasingly able to access "money, new skills, technology, wage-labour, and productive property" while women are proportionately dependent, and often maintained as "housewives, irrespective of the fact that in many cases - as, for instance, in Africa - they still play the most crucial role in subsistence production" (Mies, 115). Women, in fact, are responsible for "two-thirds of all labour in the world" (Mies, 117) and much of that labour is "engaged in production of goods for the market in the rich countries" (Mies, 117).�

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) have contributed to the new global economy by encouraging an "ideological shift from a state-centred system focused internally on providing some social services, as well as local agricultural and industrial production, to a market-oriented economic system focused externally on foreign investments and non-traditional export production" (Thompson & Toro, 195).�

Some of the results of SAPs in the south have been the "destruction of women's own markets; the destruction of women's own economic systems; reduced or no land ownership; the loss of indigenous lands without compensation or restitution; the destruction of traditional farming practices and their subsequent replacement with cash crops; the underdevelopment of health, education and social-service systems; the disappearance of traditional social and cultural ways of community development; the disappearance of traditional diets and eating patterns; an increase in women's poverty; under- and unemployment; trafficking in women and girls; the phenomenon of the feminization of migration, when women leave their communities to seek work as domestics, migrant workers and so on, in the 'rich nations' of the North; increased civil-rights violations and a loss of democratic structures within societies; widespread abuses and inequities in workplaces; the phenomenon of the urban poor and the homeless, who were indigenous peoples displaced from their lands; the feminization of poverty" (Grant-Cummings, 3).

Third World women are marketed as commodities in the international market; "governments, like pimps, offer their young women to foreign capital" (Mies, 117). Their skills are promoted as natural extensions of their personality:

�The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl?" (Mies, 117).�

She, and her Mexican sisters, provide a supply of abundant unskilled labour, yet there is a certain irony in the fact that the left hand is completely unaware of what the right hand is doing. The average North American or European housewife/homemaker is "totally oblivious of the female labour, the working conditions, the wages, etc., under which the things which she buys are produced" (Mies, 121). At the same time "the women in South and South-East Asia hardly know what they produce or for whom they make the things they make" (Mies, 121).�

It is nothing new that the bulk of women's labour continues to go unnoticed. Women are expected to be the nurturers and caretakers of the family, grateful for the opportunity to have a roof over their heads, their rewards redeemable from the love and gratitude they allegedly receive. Women have "provided a lot of the subsistence basis on which male wage-labour could emerge" (Mies, 118), and the idea of women as a mere appendage to the 'real' providers "justifies low wages; prevents women from organizing; keeps them atomized; [and] gears their attention to a sexist and patriarchal image of women" (Mies, 120).

It is clear, then, that the "historical development of the division of labour in general, and the sexual division of labour in particular, was/is not an evolutionary and peaceful process, based on the ever-progressing development of productive forces (mainly technology) and specialization, but a violent one by which first certain categories of men, later certain peoples, were able mainly by virtue of arms and warfare to establish an exploitative relationship between themselves and women, and other people and classes" (Mies, 74).�

The capitalist patriarchy maintains its stronghold over the hearts and minds of the population though a systematic indoctrination program maintained in the form of a corporate inspired media. Those with eyes to see understand that "violence against women is endemic in Canadian society" (Jacobson-Hyde, 217), and that "we live in a society that minimizes, denies, and refuses to take seriously violence against women" (Jacobson-Hyde, 217).�

Many feminists recognize that the mainstream "media's representation of [women's] political struggles has been largely shallow and misleading" (Campbell, 119), and that "the mainstream media is still largely controlled by a small group of wealthy individuals" (Campbell, 121). The tendency of the mainstream media is to "focus primarily on political and economic elites, rendering invisible those who are [perceived as] less powerful, including many women" (Thompson & Toro, 199).

When women are presented in the mainstream, it is often as a commodity item designed and packaged for the male consumer. So-called women�s fashion magazines, for example, present a particular image and idea of women. The idea is that women are designed for pleasure, specifically for the pleasure of men. This highly paid - but voluntary - exploitation and commodification contributes to the denigration of women generally, and creates an atmosphere that condones violence and rape. Men internalize the message that women are alluring, seductive, and eternally available, and when a particular woman chooses not to consider herself a man's possession she may find herself a victim of the man's misguided anger. It's a case of the oppressed becoming the oppressors - women who objectify themselves and behave as submissive temptresses must be held accountable for the framework that all women, by association, whether they like it or not, are thereby judged within.�����

One creative response to this media genocide can be found in Costa Rica where the Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) gives "priority to individual women's lives and perspectives ... on a variety of issues and events" (Thompson & Toro, 199). This is the sort of alternative culture that can manifest dramatic changes in the ways that women view themselves, the world, and their place withinin it.�

In many instances the strength of the dominant culture to silence women is "enough to scare some women from pressing charges" in the event of physical or emotional abuse (Chatelaine, 78). In Canada, for example, five of nine Supreme Court judges recently "agreed that the women's [personal] records should be handed over to the judge, if the defence showed they might contain information useful in formulating a defence" (Chatelaine, 77). Options like FIRE provide a more understanding and caring place for women who choose to voice their personal concerns about the daily injustices they endure.�

The patriarchal capitalist order further perpetuates violence against women, men, and children by insisting on maintaining an economic order which demands that a percentage of the population remain unemployed. Where employment does exist, it is often under-paid, under-appreciated, and destructive to the local or global environment. The care of children, which is among the most important work a person can involve themselves with, is characterized by low wages, "poor working conditions and the absence of work-related benefits" (Teghtsoonian, 116).�

"Many child care providers", in fact, indicate that they love their chosen profession but cannot afford to pursue it, which reflects a tremendous waste of their training, talent, and commitment to the next generation" (Teghtsoonian, 117).�

Joan Grant Cummings wants us to ask a fundamental question: "What kind of society are we building?" (Grant-Cummings, 10).���

"Capitalism is not a sustainable economic or development policy. It exploits, rather than protects, the guaranteed human rights of the population. It guarantees the wealth of only 20 percent of the population. It is rooted in racism, white supremacy, sexism, and other oppressions. Why do we continue to support a system that is biased towards and exploitive of, at least 80 percent of the world's population?" (Grant-Cummings, 10).�

The current welfare system is "premised on a human-resources model that sees joblessness as an individual rather than structural problem" (Brodie, 133) and in the same way that "women are un paid in the domestic sphere, women are starkly under paid for the caring and nurturing work they do in the public sphere" (Teghtsoonian, 124).�

Feminists, then, must acknowledge the connections between the gendered and the international divisions of labour, resist "pressures to split forms of oppression off from each other, and instead maintain analyses that see violence against women as emerging out of historically and culturally specific practices, values, and social relationships (of which sexism, heterosexism, racism, ableism, colonialism, imperialism and classism are integral ingredients)" (Morrow, 242).�

Maria Mies suggests that "a feminist strategy for liberation ... [must] aim at an end of all exploitation of women by men, of nature by man, of colonies by colonizers, of one class by the other" (Mies, 77). I would add that we must also encourage women to stop exploiting themselves, each other, children and, in some instances, men. �

Twenty-first century feminists must resist the temptation of "beating men at their own game" (schraefel, 149) and invent a new game. We must "transform relationship[s] among people and between people and the nonhuman world so there is the possibility that our children's children will inherit a healthier planet and will be able to live in more human ways" (Kirk, 362).�

* Since writing this essay, I�ve pondered the significance of the phrase "the standard of living - even of peasants - seems to have been high" (italics mine). Wouldn�t it be impossible, in egalitarian societies (which I believe did actually exist) to identify a peasant class?�

Works Cited

Brodie, Janine. "Restructuring and the New Citizenship" in Rethinking Restructuring. University of Toronto Press, 1996.�

Campbell, Kate. "How Chic Are We? Lesbian Chic in Mainstream Print Media" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.�

Eisler, Riane.� The Chalice and the Blade. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1987.

Goodleaf, Donna Kahenrakwas. "'Under Military Occupation': Indigenous Women, State Violence and Community Resistance" in Linda Carty (ed.)� And Still We Rise: Feminist Political Mobilizing in Contemporary Canada. Toronto: Women's Press, 1993.

Grant-Cummings, Joan. "Feminism: The Antidote to the Global Capitalist Economic Agenda" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.�

Kirk, Gwyn. "Standing on Solid Ground: A Materialist Ecological Feminism" in Materialist Feminism

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick.� Collected Works: Volume 11, 1851-53. New York: International Publishers, 1978.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick.� Collected Works: Volume 20, 1864-68. New York: International Publishers, 1984.

Mies, Maria.� Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986.

Morrow, Marina. "Feminist Anti-Violence Activism: Organizing for Change" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.��

Pittaway, Kim. "Sex Assault: Would You Press Charges?"� Chatelaine. October, 1997.

Rius, and Appignanesi, Richard, ed.� Marx for Beginners. Cambridge, Icon Books, 1976.���

schraefel, m.c. "Jacking In to the Virtual Self" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.�

Teghtsoonian, Kathy. "Who Pays for Caring for Children? Public Policy and the Devaluation of Women's Work" in Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law and Public Policy. University of Toronto Press, 1997.�

Thobani, Sunera. "Closing the Nation's Ranks: Canadian Immigration Policy in the 21st Century" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.�

Thompson, Margaret and Toro, Maria Suarez. "Giving Women a Voice in the Face of Globalization: A Case Study of Alternative Feminist Media in Costa Rica" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.�

Wabegijig, Vera. "An Anishnawbwekwe perspective on New World Order" in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century. Charlottetown: gynergy books, 1999.�

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