« The Spark!

Marxist Theory & Discussion

CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM & WOMEN

By Jeanne McGuire | 

For the International Women’s Day in 2017

The struggle for a new world will be stunted and debilitated if women are not part of the struggle to build it.

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I WOULD like to begin by discussing ideas – ideas about the other – other race, ethnicity, nationality, class or caste, sometimes religion, and of course gender.  Those others who are designated as less – less intelligent, less capable, less rational, less responsible, less controlled – having less of those qualities adds up to being inferior. Being less able to cope with certain jobs, stresses, and decision making. They are also designated as being more – more emotional, more intuitive, more natural (less civilized), more child-like, more manipulative.  

However, these descriptions are equally false when applied to women.  I won’t drown you in historical or cross-cultural data to prove my point – you are here, you know it isn’t true.  I’ll refer to one myth – women belong in the home not in the workplace. The reality is that women have always worked – poor women, peasant women, working-class women.  The rice paddies of China were planted by women, the fields of Ukraine were plowed by women who, when the family could not afford horses or oxen, pulled the plow themselves. In the early days of Canadian colonization it was understood that indigenous women were the ones with the necessary stamina and knowledge to be guides over long distances.  All over the world, the houses of the rich, the children of the rich were tended by women – poor women who cooked, cleaned, fed, laundered, and scrubbed for the rich.

In Canada today, 82% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 work and women make up 47% of the workforce. In 1953, only 24% of women worked.

But if this idea isn’t based on reality, what is it based on, why is it believed?  As is the case with many ideas, it is based on social structure not on nature. During the age of slavery, most people believed slavery was natural.  When there is a monarchy, most people believe in the rightness of having a king.  If you look at the world and see that women occupy a position of inferiority within society, it is easy to assume that the inferiority is within the woman herself, not a reflection of social structure.  These ideas also reflect the values, behavior, affectations of those who hold power and position in the society, the rich, the owners, the rulers.  The rich always want to distinguish themselves from the masses – whether it is long fingernails in China, or wives who didn’t work.  How can such useless, counterproductive ideas continue in the face of today’s reality?  Religion, the press, the educational system, movies, and other forms of popular culture like music transmit and reinforce the ideas of a social system.   But ideas take on a life of their own, they have substance and consequence. And they need to be confronted and defeated – they may die on their own, but we cannot wait for that, we must make it happen.

Who loses from the ideas about women’s role in society? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives issued a report this year – women earn 80% of the male wage packet and they earn less even if they do the same job.

45% of Canadian women work in one of 20 low-paying positions – so, for instance, in 2011 a truck driver, usually male, earned on average $45, 417 and an Early Childhood Educator, usually female, earned $25, 252.  And women make up 47% of the workforce but make up 70% of the part-time workforce.   The rest is due to wage discrimination.

Even being a university graduate doesn’t level the playing field – the majority of university graduates are in fact women, but they earn almost $30,000 a year less than their male counterparts.

Who benefits from this discrimination?  Men?  Well, some men – those who reap the super profits from paying women less than they would have had to pay a man.  Those who benefit from the tensions and conflicts within the workforce created by ideas about women’s role and place.  

Do other men benefit?  In some ways; they have higher status, greater self-regard, they are released from much of the petty drudgery done by the females in the household.  BUT they also suffer. Family income is less, so they know greater insecurity, and their children’s future may be restricted as a result.   And when these ideas about the inferiority of others combine, when prejudice with respect to women is added to prejudice based on race, class, ethnicity, or religion, the result is truly ugly – violence, sexual abuse, discrimination. Witness the outrageous treatment of immigrant women, women of colour, and women workers in foreign subsidiaries of Canadian companies.  One of the most horrendous examples of this coming-together of a number of variables is the situation confronting indigenous women in Canada.   The problem of sexism is multiplied by the issue of racism and again by poverty and isolation.  It is multiplied again by the legacy of colonial occupation and subjugation, in some cases genocide (as in the case of the Beothuk in Newfoundland). It is multiplied again by subsequent government policies of exclusion, followed by policies of assimilation, which included the horrors of the residential school system. The violence and sexual abuse, the prejudice and discrimination that all indigenous peoples in Canada, but particularly indigenous women, face goes beyond shameful. There is no greater stain on Canada’s history than the treatment of its original inhabitants.

And, as to the violence visited on women, let me make this point.  Men in prison live in fear and apprehension of the possibility of physical and sexual violence by other inmates.   Women spend their entire lives in that prison.  They are always aware, they always know, not that they will, but that they can be violated, not that every man is a rapist, but that they are vulnerable should he be.  They spend their entire lives in a prison of apprehension, the prison of awareness of vulnerability.  And we cannot fail to notice that, when there is a war; one of the battlefields always seems to be the bodies of women.

But people have tried to bring about change; women have tried to bring about change.  

And since the Soviet Union is gone, we need to assess whether that effort to change the world, to make it a better place, was misplaced or foolishly expended.  Did it offer any positive alternative to capitalism?

So I think we should compare. The Soviet Union, as described by its most determined detractors, invaded two countries in its 70 year history, three if you consider its support for the fledgling socialist-oriented regime in Afghanistan an invasion.  

Compare that to the first 70 years of capitalism and the record of invasion by capitalist countries. In fact, capitalism was built on the backs of those it invaded, conquered, enslaved, colonized, stole from. The biggest imperial power of the nineteenth century was of course Britain – and it was rapacious in its reach.  In Canada, by 1857, the Hudson’s Bay Company had extracted 20 million pounds sterling from the fur trade alone.  Timber, grain, meat and other produce, and the sale of land to which they had no right garnered many millions more. And the products they sold to those they had dispossessed and those to whom they had sold the land were priced from 100 to 400 times their cost.

And of course, Canada was nothing compared to the wealth drained from the jewel in the Crown – India.  The estimates of the pillaging differ only in the magnitude of millions plundered. Without question, it exceeded one million pounds sterling per year in direct transfer for which nothing was returned.  If you include the fact that the country had to pay taxes to cover the entire cost of its own subjugation – administrative and military subjugation – the theft of valuables and historical treasure (one ship that sank on the way to Britain and was later found contained 150-million-pounds-sterling-worth of silver); along with other charges – for the period 1757 to 1815, the estimates range from 15.9 million pounds to 17.2 million pounds per year.  That’s one billion pounds sterling during that period alone.  And it went on for 190 years.  And then you have to calculate what it would mean in today’s dollars – the numbers are mind-numbing and incomprehensible.

Another feature of early capitalism was the slave trade.  The trans-Atlantic trade alone saw 12.8 million Africans loaded on to boats, at least 1 million of whom died en route.  And once again, the convergence of sex and race produced unconscionable brutality and violence, with rape and torture commonplace.

And we haven’t even touched on the role of France in Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and Indochina; Belgium, which was one of the worst in Africa, the Netherlands in Indonesia.  It is a picture of brutality beyond comprehension – and always against THE OTHER.

And is it different in the modern era?  Let’s look at what has happened since the end of WWII.  No, step back to the end of the war.  In Hiroshima 100,000 were incinerated instantly and 50,000 died from radiation poisoning.  And even if one accepts the doubtful argument that Hiroshima was necessary, Nagasaki – three days later – certainly wasn’t.  Another 70,000 were killed instantly.  The women of Japan died, their children died and continued to die or be born deformed and mutilated by the unnecessary use of a weapon that is truly one of mass destruction.  

And since then, the list of countries where the Western world has intervened is a long one. The West, primarily the US but including Britain, France, Canada and others, have manipulated elections, financed the overthrow of governments, assassinated or tried to assassinate the leaders of many sovereign nations. The author William Blum in his book Rogue State identifies 71 occasions in which the US alone has interfered in one of those ways.  They have meddled in the elections of allies and enemies alike. They have organized or condoned the killing of leaders when they feared their influence – from Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to Salvador Allende in Chile. They have orchestrated the overthrow of governments from Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala and Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, Sukharno in Indonesia, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Cheddi Jagan in Guyana, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, directing and supporting the military coup in Greece, funding the Contras in Nicaragua.  They invaded Cuba, napalmed women and children in Vietnam, used depleted uranium weapons in the first invasion of Iraq, funded the Mujāhidīn in Afghanistan against the only government that had ever offered any rights to women, defeating that government – one million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees – half the total population of that time.  And of course, 10 years later, invading again – this time using the plight of women to bolster their claim to legitimacy – to rescue the women they had put in fundamentalist prison.

And since then – they sent drones to Yemen, unleashed on the people of the Arab world a blight of reactionary fundamentalism – all the while pretending to abhor that fundamentalism, while they attack and destroy every state that was secular, progressive in its attitudes to women, developed in its educational and health policies, protective of its cultural and historical legacy, etc.

Is it different today?   Have they stopped the looting?  In 2012 – the developing world received $1.3 trillion in aid, investment and income from abroad. In that same year the developing world sent $3.3 trillion to the developed world. The bleeding continues.  Compared to the carnage of Western behavior, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union looks like a birthday party with gifts all around.  

On the other hand, who described ANC as a terrorist organization and aided the South African regime in its efforts to defeat the aspirations of the majority population?  Who funded Jonas Savimbi and delayed the capacity of the new Angolan Government to address issues of the health and welfare of its people?  Who supported the state of Israel against the Palestinians, condoning Israel’s illegal settlements and occupation of the Golan Heights?

And Canada has been a part of that Western policy, supporting the state of Israel in its war against the Palestinian people, leading in the bombing of Libya, joining the war against Afghanistan, endorsing the overthrow of the elected government of Haiti, of Honduras, of the Ukraine by recognizing the regime which overthrew the democratically elected one.   Even with its new leader, who aspires to be the poster boy for progressive policies and women’s rights, Canada has acceded to these policies – condemning thousands to continued conflict, misery, death and destruction. And in Canada we have not seen any concrete action being taken to alleviate the problems facing indigenous women – the issues of clean water, mercury poisoning, inadequate housing, inferior education, and continued racial and sexual violence.

The people of the world, the women of the world have not been the beneficiaries of US foreign policy, no matter the rhetoric – the oil companies, the mining companies, the manufacturers, the fruit companies – they have benefitted. I remember the slogan of the Chilean Solidarity movement in speaking to the role of Canadian mining companies in Chile – the companies got the copper, Chile got the shaft.  And it is still true today. The poor countries of the world continue to get the shaft.

The Soviet Union did support the attempts by many people to throw off the yoke of colonialism, to improve their lives and living standards.  

And the ideas of the October Revolution, when it came to women, broke the mold of the day – challenged the very foundation of sexist ideas.  

 “The degree of the emancipation of women can be used as a standard by which to measure general emancipation,” wrote Marx and Engels.

In speaking of the demands for women’s rights, Lenin said, 

“We demonstrate thereby that we recognize these needs and are aware of the humiliation of the woman, the privileges of the man.  That we hate, yes hate, everything and we will abolish everything which tortures and oppresses the woman worker, the housewife, the peasant woman, the wife of the petty trader, and yes, in many cases the women of possessing classes”. 

And 

“The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom unless it achieves complete freedom for women.”

Did they succeed in addressing the shameful humiliation of women?  Certainly there were advances.   And not only did the women in the Soviet Union and in many developing countries benefit from the role of the Soviet Union.  Women in the West used the advances of the women in the Soviet Union to batter down the doors of opposition to women’s rights in Canada and elsewhere.   Maternity leave, daycare, equal pay – if they could have all of that in the Soviet Union, why not here?  

The working class as a whole used the same argument to open the door to publicly funded health care, to compensation for injured workers, to Old Age Security and a government-funded pension plan. If they could have it there, why not here?

But the Soviet Union failed – it exists no longer. And we can ascribe the blame to the fact that it was the first attempt and errors were made, or to the fact that they bore the brunt of Nazi aggression in World War II, or to the fact that they were forced into an arms race that depleted their coffers and distorted their economy, or to the fact that the West meddled in their affairs just as they meddled in so many others. To whatever we ascribe the blame – we now live in a world where there is no Soviet Union.  

Was it a failure? Only if one thinks that trying to alter the world to make it better is a worthless endeavour.  

Will we try again? The idea of making the world better will not go away.  How can it when we were told this year that eight people now have as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the world’s population.  How can we not try again?

Will we make errors again? We’re human – how can we not make errors?

Will it be better than what we have? Given the ecological disasters, the climate change, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the growing arrogance and power of the corporations, the threat of war, the racism at home and abroad, the sexism, people’s insecurity, the debt, the fear, the cynical use of people’s aspirations to defeat their goals – how can it not be better than what we have?

Will women be equal when we try again to build a world based on different values? We don’t know. What we do know is that the struggle for a new world order will be stunted and debilitated if women are not part of the struggle to build it. We do know that it is not necessary for women to achieve equality before they join the struggle for a new world.  We know also, it is not necessary to wait for the new world in order to struggle for, and to achieve some of the goals in the struggle for, the equality of women – in our workplaces, our homes, our organizations, including the organizations dedicated to changing the world. 

But, as to whether women will be fully equal – know this – it isn’t over until they are!

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Jeanne McGuire is a progressive educator and past president of the Congress of Canadian Women, living in Toronto.