Women

Women && Revolution

Revolution
Renewing
Renewing Socialist
Socialist
Feminism
Feminism Today
Today
Socialist Dialogue
March, 2010
 Talking about Revolution
• The women’s movement, the leadership,
needs to start to talk about revolution and
socialism again.
• The movement subsumed by ‘advocacies.
• Issues of system-change and anti-capitalist
alternatives not addressed today.
 Has the system
delivered?
• For a minority, yes. For a majority of women,
No!
• We have formal equality (anti-discrimination
legislation, etc) but not real social and
economic equality.
• The gap between women in the North and
South widening.
• The class gap amongst women increased and
increasing.
 Why?
• Why does the women’s movement need to start
talking about revolution/system change? Because
of the economic and social conjuncture we face
today.
– System in deep crisis:
• economically (Greece, Portugal show the deep cracks, poverty
increasing),
• socially (health, education, environment and human survival
under threat).
– Renewal of socialism. Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba continues.
 Philippines context
• Poor children die at three times the rate of the
children of the rich,
• Under-five mortality rates are 66 child deaths to
every 1000 live births amongst the poor,
compared to 21 child deaths to every 1000 births
amongst the rich.
• The largest wealth disparity for under-five
mortality rates is in the Philippines, compared to
any other country in the Asia-Pacific region.
 Need for modern RH
program
• Child mortality is linked to the health and
welfare of the mothers. Maternal mortality rates
in the Philippines show little or no improvement.
• We need a comprehensive, modern reproductive
health program meeting international best
standards and practice.
• Free and accessible to poor women, which gives
mothers a range of choices and educates them
about these choices, saves poor children’s lives.
 Gender responsive
governance
• We have supposedly progressed on gender and
governance issues:
• women presidents and have one of the highest proportions
of women in Congress,
– And yet this has not translated into concrete gains for a
majority of working and poor women.
• The system of elite rule that exploits and oppresses
working and poor women is still in place.
– the issue is not one of women’s participation, but one of
genuine representation – in whose political social and
economic interests, do these women govern?
 All issues are women’s
issues
• No artificial divide between women’s issues and other issues.
– Poverty, economic crisis, job losses, contractualization, health care and
reproductive health, education, oil prices, corruption, governance, the
illegitimate debt, war, militarism, violence, climate change and the
environmental crisis, are all women’s issues.

• Women are the ones who are the hardest hit by these issues
– economic crisis, during which a majority of workers laid off in industries
such as electronics are women,
– climate-change induced disasters such as flooding, where the casualty rates
tend to be higher for women and children.

• How society is organized and in whose interests?

• Who controls the political system? Who runs the economy? These are
life and death issues for women.
 Renewal of Socialist
Feminism
• Puts the question of the alternative to capitalism, the need
for socialism, back on the agenda.
• Socialist feminism is an inclusive project.
– All socialist feminists would see class as central to women’s
lives and women’s oppression.
• some of us would see class as fundamental from the point of view
of explaining the historical origins of women’s oppression,
• others refuse to give primacy to any one factor over the other.
– Women’s oppression, however, is not simply reduced to
economic exploitation, i.e. the extraction of surplus value. This
also applies to national/ethnic or racial oppression.
– All these aspects of society are inextricably linked, i.e. class is
always gendered and ‘raced’.
 Reproductive Labor, Wage
Labor & Capital – the Links
• Capital, wants the lowest possible necessary labor. But capital
would like to expand -- unpaid necessary labor or reproductive
labor.
• As the purchaser of labor power, capital is in a position to
gain from the unpaid labor of women within the household.
The more intense and lengthy that work in the household, the
more capital can gain.
• The more capital drives down wages and intensifies the
workday for both male and female wage-laborers, the greater
the burden placed on the household to maintain workers.
• How could we deny that the logic of capital is contrary to the
need for development of women?
 Make a breach in the
system
• Women need to make a breach in the system of
elite/capitalist rule.
• We need to link our immediate demands to system
change and an end to elite rule.
• We need to have the perspective of mobilizing
masses of women, not just our own base, but
hundreds of thousands, to make a breach in the
system.
• Latin America shows us that this can be done.