(Part I of the annotated text of my presentation for the panel "Socialism is Feminist" at the Left Forum, June 8th, Pace University, New York)
The theme of
our panel is from Hugo Chavez’s 2009 declaration at the Via Campesina
conference in Brazil.
(Audience member said this was actually at the World Social Forum; I checked and it was but the event was sponsored
by the Via Campesina.) “True socialism,” he said,
“is feminist.” Three other Latin American
presidents stood beside him:
from
Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay.
It was
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador who amplified the Chavez declaration, by saying
that unlike traditional socialism, 21
st century socialism includes
gender justice, ethnic justice and inter-generational justice.
These issues are often considered “soft
issues” by those who perceive class as the main or predominant system of
oppression/exploitation in society.
Despite this
unequivocal declaration, those of us who work at the organizing of and advocacy
for women continue to be at the receiving end of catcalls, continue to
experience friction with other political groups and continue to be required to
defend the ideological and political position we have taken. These compel us to periodically examine the
issue of intersectionality and why this concept is so difficult to integrate
into the binary view of class conflict.
Several core or pivotal reasons come to the fore immediately:
1) the continued refusal to accept women’s
historical scholarship and its findings that the reification of women’s
knowledge, labor and bodies antedated the institutionalization of private
property; that in truth, such
reification was integral to the creation of private property and that indeed,
women comprised the first form of private property
2) the insistence – and we can only call it a
patriarchal insistence – on separating the category “women” from the category
“people,” such that women’s liberation is often juxtaposed, contrasted, counter-poised,
deemed secondary to people’s liberation.
In this view, women’s liberation is often reduced to a thin tissue of
gender relations, rather than viewed as a comprehensive resolution of a complex
set of contradictions affecting women, contradictions which, taken as a whole,
actually condemn class society and demand its transformation.
3) the dismissal or under-valuation of the
dynamic between production and re-production – the non-integration of the latter in the social structural analysis, following the separation, during
the Industrial Revolution, of home and workplace. Ironically, this is a capitalist narrative,
truly, that compartmentalizes human social existence, the better to inflict a
higher rate of exploitation upon an atomized labor force. In this narrative, only work is divorced and
separated as a special human activity done under the aegis of capital; only wage labor is recognized as work; hence the oft-repeated and rather ludicrous
prescription for women “to engage in production” in order to liberate
themselves – ignoring the historical truth that women have always been engaged
in production since the beginning of human history.
4)
the under-valuation of either or both generational
and daily replenishment of labor in the cycle of production and reproduction of
goods and services.
The cost of such
replenishment has been borne by women, largely;
it is estimated that the global unpaid household labor of women annually
amounts to $1 trillion – an unprecedented theft casually ignored in the Left’s
creation of its laundry lists of demands.
(Part II next week)
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