Feminist Alternatives Confronting Capitalism

Feminist alternatives are everything that patriarchy and capitalism are not, and much more.  While my sisters earlier discussed how capitalism is organized based on women’s oppression, it is important to also underscore -- anti-colonialism and anti-racism perspectives and introduce concrete strategies.
 
Capitalist countries historically made their wealth by invading poorer nations, they colonized them and controlled them using slaves.  Racism is one of the methods of control in colonized countries that ensure that white power is dominant. Asia underwent and continues to suffer from such colonization whether from Britain, the US, or the Dutch.
 
As I was discussing yesterday with our young women translators, Asian women’s minds were similarly colonized in trying their best to look like their colonizers – whitening their skin, changing the shape of their noses, and their bodies.  Manufacturers capitalized on this colonization of our bodies and the patriarchal idea that women should live to gratify men – their idea of beauty and womanhood.
 
Colonialism continued to make merchandise out of women’s bodies. As colonizers militarized our countries to contain rebellion and to expand their conquest in the region, military bases and nuclear weapons were stationed in our lands, the colonizing men prostituted and raped our women. Sex trafficking continues to grow as the demand for exotic women became normalized not only among men who come to Asia but also among men in the global North who continue to purchase so-called exotic or docile women as brides or sex slaves in bars, massage parlors and other so-called entertainment places.  Rape and prostitution are systems of colonization of women’s bodies.  In prostitution, profiteers capitalize on such colonization.
 
As we continue to unfold feminist alternatives, I would like to revisit Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies.  She identifies the paradigm of Man-the-Hunter as the origin of the paradigm of the Patriarchal Growth Model of Development. She also delves into the political economy of housewifisa-tion. She shows how the whole process of pushing women out to the margins, and out of the sphere of "productive labour" actually served the whole international process of capital accumulation and perpetuated violence against women in the light of the capitalist accumulation process. ^[1]

According to Mies: "A look at the brief history of the feminist movement can teach us that the rejection of all dualistic and hierarchical divisions, created by capitalist patriarchy, viz., between public and private, political and economic, body and mind, head and heart, etc., was a correct and successful strategy. This was not a preplanned program of action, but the issues raised were of such nature that feminists could expect success only by radically transcending these colonising divisions… for it became increasingly clear that the capitalist mode of production was not identical with the famous capital-wage labour relation, but that it needed different categories of colonies, particularly women, other peoples and nature, to uphold the model of ever-expanding growth…"
 
"Today, it is more than evident that the accumulation process itself destroys the core of human essence everywhere because it is based on the destruction of women's autonomy over their lives and bodies. As women have nothing to gain in their humanity from the continuation of the growth model, they are able to develop a perspective of society which is not based on the exploitation of nature, women and other people."
 
Marxist theory focused on wage-labour relations as the key arena of exploitation and oppression in the capitalist mode of production. It has traditionally looked at other economic relations as backward forms of social relations and therefore will be superseded or negated by the more advanced mode of production. For this reason, the socialist utopia is also built on the transcendence of this mode in the all too familiar linear view of economic development. It has denied the fact that the continued existence of "nonfree" labour of women, nature and the colonies had been the bases for the persistence of the capitalist growth model.
 
Socialism as practiced also fell into the same trap and started on an accumulation process fed by the surplus production of peasants, women and other nonproletarian classes. The utopia was to be experienced with the height of technological progress when all the technological gadgets would free humans from the burden of work. Socialists focus on wage-labour-capital relations as the principal contradiction and therefore the sphere around which the fulcrum of systemic change will occur. In this context, women can achieve liberation only if they are freed from domestic labour and participate in socially productive labour. This view, according to Mies, "puts in the shadows" the intrinsic value of women's work-the production of life.
 
A feminist conception of an alternative economy will place the transformation of the existing sexual division of labour at the center of the restructuring process.
 
Feminists do not start with external ecology, economy and politics, but with social ecology, the center of which is the relation between men and women. Autonomy over our bodies, our lives, is therefore the first demand of the international feminist movement. The search for an alternative economy therefore starts with the respect for the autonomy of women's bodies – which includes self-definition and rejection of their commodification and sexual objectification. This would require the abolition of the violence that characterizes the patriarchal man-woman relationship worldwide. It also demands the rejection of state control over women's fertility. Women have to be freed of being a natural resource for individual men as well as for the state being the “total patriarch.”
 
In an alternative economy, Mies contends that men have to share the responsibility for the immediate production of life, for children, for housework and for caring for the sick and the aging. The liberation of men and women are interrelated. It is not possible for women in our societies to totally break out of the cages of patriarchal relations unless men began a movement in this direction. Men’s mobilization in the fight against patriarchy should not be motivated by benevolent paternalism but by the desire to restore unto themselves a sense of dignity and respect.  In the Philippines, we have started training young men to question the traditional notions of masculinity, reflect on its impact on themselves, not only to women and to society, and to start redefining their sexuality or manhood.  They campaign, along with us, against sexual violence and wears shirts that say “real men perform housework.”
 
At the end, Mies presents a new economic alternative and the intermediate steps to achieve the main goals. She clarifies, however, that concepts are important as "struggle concepts" and not based on theoretical definitions worked out by any "theoretical mastermind" of the movement. She thinks that it has not been helpful for feminists to confine groups or trends in thinking into different "isms"-liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism or socialist transformation.
 
Specific women-oriented elements in the full employment program includes strengthening and expanding public services including child care and care for the elderly.  There is a continuing need to create equal opportunities for women in relation to men, to establish equal pay for equal work.^[2]

Care work is an indispensable element not only for human reproduction but for the functioning of the economy as a whole. Although care work cannot be measured against the same efficiency criteria as market-based economic activities, it is an essential factor in analyzing both national and global economy. We must pay attention to the social and ecological processes which evolve within national economies, but are excluded from the markets and kept invisible by logics of growth and profit.
 
From a capitalist “care-less” economy, we move towards a solidarity-based “care-full” or caring economy.
 
Democratization of economic relations would reconnect the economy with social relations as well as with the environment.
 
Before I summarize the elements of the alternative, it is critical to take inspiration from resistances to the patriarchal and capitalist model of ‘development’, and the concomitant violence:
 
Women who have exited prostitution are starting to build cooperatives for alternative livelihood and full employment.  Such cooperatives promote feminist and socialist values of shared earnings, in contrast to competition; to cooperation and sisterhood, in contrast to women’s competition in prostitution.  We practice fair trade in food production cooperatives, and promote organically grown produce.
Earlier this morning, Judite from Portugal was sharing with me how they as women in the Azores come together and exchange clothes, instead of buying them.  This practice, to me, subverts consumerism and the patriarchal values of competition on physical looks among women.  Instead, they think of beauty as intrinsic in each, and so when Judite looks at some of her clothes, she can see how it could be more fitting to a sister, transcending the selfish values of capitalism and patriarchy.

In defending ancestral domains occupied by conflict in the Philippines, indigenous women perform rituals to push away the military.
Even cyberspace is defended by our young people whose call for reproductive rights is attempted to be silenced by conservative lawmakers.  Young women such as Malala in Pakistan asserted to democratize information and protest by blogging about the right of school girls to education.

We continue to march not only at daytime but at night, to take back the night from perpetrators of sexual violence who try to limit the spaces for movement of women.

Young people in the Philippines perform flashmob inside big malls that are earthballing trees with words on their shirts that spell out songs as “they paved paradise to put up a parking lot.”  They insist, trees and forests are more important than shopping.

In the context of the fight against transnational corporations, a proposal is currently being developed for the International Peoples' Treaty, which will include binding obligations, and move towards a proposal for an international mechanism to judge the crimes of TNCs and impose sanctions and demand justice for the Peoples; and to start the debate on the illegitimacy and need for control of transnational corporations (to raise awareness on the architecture of impunity, International Trade and Investment Agreements / economic and ecological Crimes of TNCs etc.).
 
PEOPLE-centred SOLIDARISTIC DEVELOPMENT 
THROUGH SUSTAINABLE FULL EMPLOYMENT
 
Clearly, there is something structurally and morally wrong about the present model of development in the country.An alternative development model should have as its main goal the full development of human potential and not unabated accumulation.

Such model underscores “the development of democratic capacities for control of the transformation of economic structures towards egalitarian, ecologically sustainable reproduction.”

It is people-centred because production of goods and services is focused on the needs of people and not on the dictates of the market.

It is solidaristic because it fosters workers’ control and economic relationships based on cooperation, communication and shared-power, instead of market competition and hierarchies.
 
Sustainable Full Employment
•       Full employment here is defined as “the maximization of voluntary participation of the adult population in a socially-useful paid work at full-time hours for solidaristic wages”
•       It emphasizes that “the quest for more jobs has to occur as part of a wider realization of social rights”.  In this regard, a sustainable full employment strategy would need to be contributing “toward significant redistribution of power, time and liberty”
•       It calls for livelihood with dignity, not the commodification of women’s bodies.
 
 
Pillars of Sustainable Employment

1. Linking growth with rights and equitable income distribution.

• Upholds dignity of work*.
• Dismantles gender division of labor.
• Full respect for workers’ and trade union rights.
• Labour market reforms to dismantle income inequalities among wage earners and to address informality and precariousness.
• Fair wage share.
• Progressive taxation system and further regulations which ensure that incomes from capital are adequately taxed.
• Guaranteed incomes.

 
2. Linking economic growth and ecological sustainability.

• Government has to undertake comprehensive and long-term oriented infrastructure projects which allow and enforce more ecologically-friendly production and consumption (e.g. in energy production, public and private transport, public utilities, urban planning)
• Promote and generate climate jobs

3. Inward-oriented economic strategies that allow a diversity of development paths and employment stability

• Refocus production for domestic needs rather than exports
• Linking exports to local economy
• The promotion of various forms of solidarity economy, such as worker-run factories, workers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, barter economies, community currencies, fair trade organizations and arrangements, mutual aid collectives, etc.
• Development of critical consciousness and capacities for economic and social relations where workers can exercise more autonomy over their working lives.

4. Socially-useful public spending

• Increase in public spending to provide public goods such as education, health care and public transport
• A universal income grant that is neither conditional, nor targeted or means-tested, and which is available to adult citizens has the potential to improve the wages and terms of employment for low-skilled workers.

5. Democratic participation and controls

• Workers’ control and self-management
• Financial controls including people’s representation in monetary banks and central banks
• Institutions that would exact accountabilities for multinational enterprises (people-centred investment policies, treaty exacting accountabilities to multinational enterprises)

6. Promotion of decentralized popular planning to develop local planning and managing capacities of community services

7. Full employment as centerpiece of policy-making (trade, investment, industry policy, fiscal, monetary, etc.)

8. Re-qualification of work 

To achieve and maintain full employment, it is necessary to establish:
•       An activist state
•       A fully functioning universal welfare program
•       A strong social movement unionism
•       Industrialization premised on the completion of agrarian reform
•       Alternative regional arrangements
•       Controls over corporate profits or even the “surplus” of enterprises.
 
Notes
[1] “Towards a Feminist Alternative Economy”, Patricia Fe Gonzales, Women in Action, 1998.
[2] “Full Employment,” Josua Mata, 2009.

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*Jean Enriquez is the current Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women - Asia Pacific (CATW-AP) and the immediate past International Committee Member for Asia Oceania in the World March of Women.