2003 opens to impending war and $3 trillion in tax cuts for the richest people in the world. We are living in extreme times, terrorised even here in Australia by a $15 million government advertising campaign for free-floating anxiety and nameless dread.
Meanwhile, most women in the world continue to labour to feed and shelter their families and communities as best they can. Even when the bombs begin to fall, the Iraqi women who survive will continue to struggle to keep their children alive amongst the rubble.
The only adequate feminist response to the murderous agenda of US President George Bush and his miniature poodles and terriers is to organise both women and men to defeat it.
In times like these, the "feminism of the Condoleezza Rices (Rice is the US national security advisor) rings especially hollow. There is no celebration because a woman can now deliver an Orwellian White House press briefing better than her male colleagues.
Feminists cannot stand with Rice or the women on the boards of Texaco or Boeing. We have to stand against them. We have to take a committed stand on the side of the ordinary people of the Middle East and the rest of the world. Only from this standpoint can we begin to understand the global reality of 2003 and act to shape it for the benefit of the worlds women.
In 2003, posmodernist theories of "multiple realities have lost their appeal. It is obvious that we share a common material reality. The economic and political agenda of the US ruling class and its allies is increasingly oppressive of the vast majority of the worlds population especially women. We can also organise a common resistance.
Women will inevitably be in the leadership of this resistance. We already are. But weve got a long way to go before we pose a real threat to the Bush agenda.
During the last decade, women in Australia have been hurt by the US-led neoliberal agenda. Our wages are falling, our costs are rising, our social services are shrinking and we are increasingly expected to provide, unaided, the needs of children and aged, ill or disabled family members. Indigenous, immigrant and refugee women have endured a massive escalation of government-sanctioned racism and discrimination. We are scapegoated for every social ill from drug addiction to child poverty.
There has been resistance. Women are leading community-based campaigns to defend schools, hospitals and childcare centres, to improve aged-care services, treatment for drug addiction and mental illness and to oppose the privatisation of public utilities. Nurses and teachers have struck for decent wages and conditions and textile workers have campaigned against sweatshops. Aboriginal women have demanded an apology for the destruction of their families and refugee women have fought for the right to asylum.
The task for feminist activists is to build and strengthen this resistance and to draw in the thousands of women who are thinking "right on, sister.
It is true that the "feminist movement in Australia has been somewhat dormant since its heyday in the 1970s. The co-option of many leading feminists into reformist dead ends and the stultifying effect of postmodern "identity politics have both contributed to the taming of some feminist activists. But feminism has not gone away. Women in Australia still aspire to liberation from drudgery, exploitation and oppression.
This aspiration is what potentially links women in Australia to others struggling for liberation. We need to support and build our existing pockets of struggle and link them to broader struggles, in Australia and worldwide.
The movement against neoliberalism has now also become a movement against war neoliberalism by other means. The woman fighting to keep her local hospital open is potentially a powerful ally for ordinary Iraqi people. Both are struggling to save their communities from destruction their best chance of winning is to stand together.
BY KAREN FLETCHER
[The author is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 15, 2003.
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