Please talk to me about feminism and capitalism!

[QuentinSummers]

On the "what kind of feminist are you?" quiz that's been shared here a couple of times there are a couple of questions suggesting women can't become equal under capitalism.
Then the other day I read about non earners (who are predominantly women) having no value in a capitalist system.
I don't know about political theory but sure someone here will. Could someone explain how feminism and capitalism could or couldn't work together?
Intuitively I feel like our economic/political system does need to change to take into account the unpaid work needed to run a household/raise children/look after people in society who can't support themselves. What political systems would support this and how?
Thanks everyone!

The exchange rate in Venezuela, that Socialist paradise, has reached 10,000 Bolivars to the Dollar.
There are daily food riots and women are searching bins for vegetable peelings and scraps of left over pizza crust to try to feed their children as they have given up any hope in the food queues.
People are literally hunting down and eating stray dogs.
Venezuela has some of the richest material resources in the Western hemisphere and has oil wealth comparable to Saudi Arabia.
I know people like to say " That's not Socialism or the wrong type of socialism" but I think I'll stick with Capitalism for now.

Indeed. I see Corbyn is being as useless as ever over this.

I think regarding Venezuela - if you look at other developing, resource-rich nations, they often have a tough time of it.

I was reading about the Boer Wars - within just a year or so of discovering the SA diamond strike, the British were marching in. West Africa too has been a nightmare. Saudi Arabia is no model, nor Libya.

Even if you look at the Forties, what went wrong there? Louisiana? It has one of the highest poverty rates of in the US.

I am no expert on South America it is usually considered a Spanish / US sphere of influence so I have not studied it.

However, most post colonial countries have systematic weakness caused by Empire and Capitalism so to look at the past 40 years point the finger and go "ha that doesn't work" is a little simplistic.

I just did a quick count, and out of 130 posts (prior to this one), 50 of the posts on this thread are by user, a man who wants us to talk about white working class men's exploitation and refuses to let us talk about the actual topic of the thread, the relationship (if any) between feminism and capitalism. And who thinks that a young man on a zero hours contract in sports direct is more exploited than a female sex-worker.

Sigh. It could have been an interesting discussion.

PricklyBall

You've read the thread and think there wasn't a discussion about feminism in relation to capitalism?

user1498662042

I accept that for six months women are out of the picture, and have to be supported. But from then on, what difference would it make to the capitalist system if men stayed at home with the children and women went out to work? None as far as I can see. The capitalist system needs people to perform what little labour remains in a post-industrial economy, and that could be man, woman or monkey

The whole point is capitalism consumes people irrespective of race, sex or gender. So can feminists hope for real improvements in the lives of women without first addressing the structural oppression of capitalism?

However, most post colonial countries have systematic weakness caused by Empire and Capitalism so to look at the past 40 years point the finger and go "ha that doesn't work" is a little simplistic.

Yes.

I think this idea that if say Bhutan suddenly hit a mega dome of pure crude...that all of its problems would be over is simplistic. Someone would make an awful lot of money. Joe/Janet Villager would probably not see a lot. War may come. Civil unrest.

And I think that in regards to feminist issues - war and civil unrest are very much feminist issues.

User and moose, I don't have a lot of time to contribute here but wanted to say how much I agree with much of what you've written.

I do have one point I'd like to make though. User your critique of capitalism is very well thought through but you stop short. Capitalism can only be reformed in ways that recreate it. Neoliberalism is a return to unfettered capitalist accumulation, and not a new phenomenon. The progressive social movements from the enlightenment to the 1960s could mostly be said to be reformist in that they lay the foundations for the possessive individual. The neoliberal subject. The only movement which is radical is one that overturns the means of production.

The reason I use the term means over mode is because as others have touched upon here, the means of production are shifting. There is a shift away from the production of commodities to value being created through, complex globalised webs of information, digitised commodities, value creation through virtuosity and communication. Capital has a tendency to reduce labour, but labour is the source of all value. Marx sets this out in the fragment on machines in the Grundrisse. It leads eventually to a new mode of production because capitalism is based entirely upon exploited labour to create value.

I was just reading an article in The Scotsman about Venezuela and Corbyn.

I was struck by this, with which I agree.

There will be many apologists for Venezuela’s collapsing collectivism, who will say that real socialism has still to be tried. This is both a historical lie and a conscious deflection. It ignores the record of Marxist socialism in any country unfortunate enough to become the next utopian experiment being cheered on from the rooftops by external sympathisers but abandoned when it goes wrong – as it always does

It is an inexcusable distraction that is rather like saying Fascism is not bad in theory but that Germany’s Nazism, Italy’s Fascism, Spain’s Falangism and Argentina’s Peronism were not intrinsically evil and could be improved upon

user149
I am just reading the article you linked to about the sexual liberation in the 1960s being about neoliberalism.

It seems to me fundamentally flawed because it equates the pill with sexual liberation rather than freedom from pregnancy, or rather, combined with abortion, reproductive freedom, which is a different thing.

In my opinion, the idea of sexual liberation has been used by men to mean that women are freely available for sex without consequence. The author seems to argue that 'sexual deregulation' was driven by women because women had the pill. How does that account for the dark underbelly of the (male) left which also saw children as legitimate targets for free sexual expression? You just need to look at some 1970s left magazines which objectify women and hold arguments about children's 'sexuality'. There is a massive dark underside to the way some men on the left understood sexual liberation. It was anti-authoritarian, yes, but it was not driven by women.

The author has his arguments the wrong way around. Second wave feminism grew out of the realisation that men on the left STILL saw their women as in their service (making the tea, being their for sex). Firestone argued that inequality extended into the bedroom (the personal is political). Second wave feminists recognised that 'sexual' liberation did not make women men's equals, whilst fighting for reproductive freedom.

Second wave feminism gave birth to women's refuges and rape support - NOT women desperate to fuck any man about because they had the pill...

Inequality extended into the bedroom because of the wider hierarchies of gender based power which existed.

For as long as you have wider inequalities of power based on gender, then there is no amount of equality.

And I am using gender here to mean the social roles which are constructed around biological sex. It is an interesting point that men have co-opted a term originally used to illustrate oppression to perpetuate it, but that is a separate argument. Not being able to use gender in its original meaning takes away the ability to describe socially constructed phenomena which oppress women.

Very interesting discussion.

For me, one of the biggest issues with the view that socialism/the demise of capitalism is where feminism will find its best base is the assumption that all disadvantage stems from a worker's position in the labour market.

This is a very malecentric view.

Of course women are concerned about their disadvantaged position in the labour market, but of more urgent importance is their safety at the hands of men.

Will rearranging the means of production answer this most basic problem?

For example, if we look at the current move to the left in Labour and particularly Momentum, I don't see any shift that will offer any solutions to make violence. Indeed both arenas are now considered a difficult space for women.

For example, if we look at the current move to the left in Labour and particularly Momentum, I don't see any shift that will offer any solutions to make violence. Indeed both arenas are now considered a difficult space for women.

See I see a very clear link between socialism and feminism.

For instance social housing. If a poor woman is being abused, along with everything else she faces, she may have no place to go. Charitable shelters are wonderful, but are not permanent solutions. This woman needs a safe, permanent house.

Income support....medical care...all of these things are the bedrock of socialist philosophy. Conservative philosophy is based on sink or swim. On the ground it means nowhere for a poor woman to live if she wants to leave an abusive situation. And no food.

And it is amazing to me, that with all of the terrible cuts happening now by the Conservative Government, right now - cuts that have fallen hardest on women - there seems to always be someone wanting to rip into the left.

I just did a quick count, and out of 130 posts (prior to this one), 50 of the posts on this thread are by user, a man who wants us to talk about white working class men's exploitation and refuses to let us talk about the actual topic of the thread, the relationship (if any) between feminism and capitalism

Ok, thanks. I had intended to read the thread, but now won't. Won't waste any time with that sort of shit.

So perhaps it has been said but I'll say it again, the oppression of women is the core and basis of capitalism, it couldn't exist without it.

Not only are women expendable workforce, women under patriarchy are forced to give birth to yet more expendable workers.

To get rid of capitalism, we should focus on abolishing patriarchy. Any attempt to abolish capitalism while maintaining patriarchy is doomed to fail.

makeourfuture and it's amazing to me, after all that has happened to women, that the left still want to rip into women.

@VestalVirgin - don't be totally put off. There is interesting stuff on here - you just have to mentally "hide poster" and sift through the thread to get to it (when I posted the bit you've quoted, I was feeling really pissed off at having to do the mental "hide poster" thing).

Getahaircut and make's posts just above yours get to the nub of the problem - right wing politics screws all of the poor, but screws working class women even more than it screws working class men. But the left's hagiography of the working man down the pit and its airbrushing out of women in the home also screws poor women. On balance, as a working class woman, you will do better out of a left wing government and its policies, but it would be naive to assume that leftist politics automatically align with feminism.

VestalVirgin

I felt that comment was a little unfair the discussion was a little more complex than that.

However, to claim the oppression of women is the core of capitalism is, in my opinion being to generous to capitalists.

Capitalism cares for no one, ALL workers are expendable. Women matter less than men and women of colour are least prized workers. In the UK however, a well educated middle class women is of more use to the economy that an uneducated, white working class man.

PP have pointed out that the left fails women and it does. There is a great deal of oppression on the left, historically the TU movement has not supported women. However, moving forward it is the only place where more than lip service is given to actually supporting poor women.

I understand the points about women's physical safety but it seems to me the systematic exploitation of workers means that the scramble for survival puts women's issues on the backburner for many. The worst excesses of consumerism are directed at women and lead to a false consciousness where women oppress other women.

It is not either or, it is a matter of degrees, but I am becoming more convinced that when the left splits women vs men, black vs white, trans vs terf we are just playing into the hands of the capitalist system. It is only through a commitment to improve the rights of all that we can truley move forward.

Splits and divisions are the curse of the left.

Moussemoose, I am not going to respond to anything you wrote. You disqualified yourself by using the slur "terf".
Shows quite clearly reasonable debate isn't possible here.

@Prickly: I am sure some regulars wrote quite interesting things, but I don't have the mental energy to deal with a load of male centred bollocks inbetween right now. So, thanks for the info, perhaps I'll read it someday.

Mousse "It is not either or, it is a matter of degrees, but I am becoming more convinced that when the left splits women vs men, black vs white, trans vs terf we are just playing into the hands of the capitalist system. It is only through a commitment to improve the rights of all that we can truley move forward."

I think that's spot on. One of the cleverest tricks of the right has been to replace collectivism (which is not without severe problems, but on the plus side, is one of the most obvious ways people on low incomes can band together to exert any sort of pressure on the rich and powerful) with neo-liberal individualism, and persuade the left that individualism is compatible with socialism by repackaging it as identity politics.

So you replace "the personal is the political" (a call to share experiences from the private realm and by then being in a position to recognise repeated experiences of say, domestic violence, as a systematic and gendered phenomenon) with "every person's lived experience is equally valid" (which instead fragments people and stops them picking out common patterns of experience and oppression which they can then fight against).

Vestal - I think Mousse's use of "terf versus trans" was intended not as an endorsement of the the word terf but as a kind of quotational use of how words get used in this discourse of neo-liberal individualism to divide and conquer - that what the liberal left thinks is its own invention, a word (a very offensive one) which signals certain (to my mind ill-thught-out) tribal allegiances, instead plays into the hands of the capitalist divide-and-conquer strategy.

It's the Monty Python "spitters" People's Popular Front joke, but played out for real, unfortunately.

PricklyBall rather sadly it would seem I am The People's Front of Judea and not the The Judean People's Front.

That's it. I'm off to the other side of the forum. (STOMPS)

Not convinced, Prickly, if one was using slurs as quotations, one could have used "tranny", too ...

Besides, I am fed up with people telling women that we have to be on men's side as to not "split".

Women prioritized the fight against capitalism over the fight against patriarchy in every single communist revolution. What good did it bring? Those countries aren't feminist utopias now.

If men want to be on women's side, fine. If trans want to be on feminists' side, fine. If white people want to be on black people's side, fine.

But I am fed up with people demanding that the oppressed side with their oppressors for "the greater good".