and ain't I a woman...: The struggles are interlinked
"They are eight, we are six billion!", proclaimed the masses of demonstrators outside the July G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa, Italy.
We are living in exciting times — the growth of the anti-corporate globalisation movement is truly inspiring.
The protests in Seattle, Melbourne, Prague, Genoa — anywhere that representatives of imperialism meet — are testament to the spreading awareness that US-style capitalism is not a "shining light", as George Bush seems to actually believe. Rather it is a yoke around the collective neck of humanity, slowing our progression as a world society.
As much as institutions like the International Monetary Fund insist that they act on behalf of people in the Third World, the current imbalance in wealth distribution and the severity of environmental degradation are beyond dispute. Any attempt to disguise their policies as beneficial serves only to emphasise their hypocrisy.
Women, who make up around half of the six billion people on the planet, are the worst affected by globalisation. As South Korean feminist Min Ju explained to me, women are the first to lose their jobs when mass sackings occur in her country. Women are the first to lose access to education and the withdrawal of funding from childcare and women's reproductive and health services combine to make women less able to work and fulfil their potential in society.
Women in the Third World make up a large percentage of the refugees who flee their homelands in desperation, only to be turned around by inhumane governments of the wealthy nations.
Yet feminism is facing a backlash. We are told that it's irrelevant, we've won our struggle, we need to go back to our kitchens and clerical desks and stop scaring or disadvantaging the men.
The fatal July shooting of a security guard outside a Melbourne abortion clinic has highlighted the fact that we women still have not won our freedoms. We still do not have full control over our own bodies (abortion is still illegal and/or inaccessible), women are still expected to shoulder the bulk of domestic work, and women's necessities like tampons are classed as luxuries and taxed as such.
Corporations make billions out of perpetuating the beauty myth. Together with the advertising and media industries, they profit from convincing women that they can never be pretty enough or skinny enough or smell nice enough or look young enough. Women spend copious amounts of money and time on products that promise everything yet deliver nothing.
With the growth of the movement against corporate globalisation, and in the face of this backlash, feminism is more important than ever. We need a strong and independent women's liberation movement that recognises the intrinsic sexism of the current system — capitalism.
We need a movement that is capable of fighting for women everywhere, linking up with the struggles of women in the third world. One that links up with the movement against corporate globalisation and engages in the debates about what sort of society we want.
I want a society based on human need and environmental sustainability, a society that operates on the basis of real participatory democracy, where decisions can be made in the interests of the mass of the population instead of in the interests of the privileged few, a system that does not rely on women's oppression but that creates the material basis for women to participate fully as equals in every aspect of society. This would be a socialist society.
We need to be both feminists and socialists. We need to be up there at the front of the anti-corporate movement, making sure that the role of women is addressed explicitly. We need to be building support for the idea that a different world, one where all of humanity, including women, are liberated, is both necessary and possible.
As the saying goes: "no women's liberation without socialism, no socialism without women's liberation".
BY SUSAN AUSTIN
[Susan Austin is co-organiser of the Brisbane branch of Resistance.]