The emergence of anti-capitalist sentiment in the First World, following the protests against the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999, represents a significant crack in the politics of quiescence. It follows years of opposition movements and campaigns in the Third World against the economic dictates imposed by the major imperialist powers through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO.
The national May 1 (M1) protests present feminists with an opportunity to take their rightful place at the head of this new global movement.
Neoliberal globalisation has had a disastrous impact on the lives of women: 70% of the 1.2 billion people who live in poverty across the globe are women.
In Third World countries, women are bearing the brunt of IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs. Women make up the overwhelming majority of the work forces in export processing and free trade zones set up by multinational companies to ensure that maximum profits can be extracted.
In these zones women are subject to inhuman living and working conditions, and sexual harassment by employers and supervisors. Long hours of overtime are common and unions are discouraged or, more often, outlawed.
Servicing debts is crippling Third World government's ability to fund services, resulting in minimal budgets for health, education and welfare services. Bill Gates' Microsoft makes US$34 million at day in profit, which is the amount spent on debt servicing each day in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Women's continuing second-class status within the family and society in general has means that they are vulnerable to being sold for sex slavery and prostitution.
In the First World, women are also bearing the brunt of neoliberal policies as more and more of the burden of welfare is being placed on the family unit. The gains of earlier struggles for women's rights are slipping: the gap between average male and female wages is widening; abortion access is under attack; governments such as Australia's are again floating the idea that women be financially encouraged to have more babies in response to declining birth rates (and the resulting labour shortages).
These attacks have been backed by a ruling-class ideological attack to discredit feminism and to promote the family as the basic unit of welfare in society.
The reformist view, which was popular and had more ideological weight in the 1980s and 1990s, that more women in the boardrooms, parliament or at the top of non-government organisations would liberate women has been superceded by a crisis of legitimacy for parliamentary reformism.
The failure of even the most successful "welfare states" to avoid rolling back women's social gains means that women need to again take atters into their hands, take to the streets and build the new movement against capitalist globalisation. Women must fight to ensure the movement takes up serious demands for women's rights.
The result of the next round of WTO negotiations set for Qatar in November will determine the extent to which women's status in the Third World is further eroded. It is incumbent on women in the rich capitalist countries to take up the campaign against the trade dictates of the WTO.
But it is not just as workers that women are oppressed. In both the First and Third World, women are expected to carry the overwhelming responsibility for the care and well-being of children, the sick, the elderly and people with disabilities. Women are expected to perform hours of unpaid work in the home. In 1993, women contributed US$11 trillion in unpaid domestic household work — the equivalent of 33% of the world's GDP.
Until women are able to exercise free will and control over all aspects of their lives, women will not be truly liberated. Until the profit-driven capitalist system, along with its international financial institutions, is dismantled and replaced with a socialist system based on the priority on meeting peoples' needs, women's liberation will remain outside our grasp.
The fate of women in the First World and Third World are interlinked. Championing the demand for the cancellation of Third World debt must be part of rebuilding a truly internationalist women's movement. The M1 protests present an opportunity to do just that.
BY SUSAN PRICE
[Susan Price is the national coordinator of the Democratic Socialist Party's women's liberation work.]