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It
has by now become routine to use "violence against women" and
the "liberation" of all women from this violence as a means to
justify the wars in Central Asia and the Middle East. After September
11, the right-wing First Lady of the United States, Laura Bush, emerged
"overnight" as a progressive "feminist" concerned
with the brutal treatment of the women of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
In order to bolster support for a "pre-emptive" strike on
Iraq, President Bush has declared the treatment of women in Iraq as a
reason for the need to bomb Iraq and further destroy its civilian
infrastructure. But the public relations ploy to represent imperialist
warfare as a defense of democracy for women has turned the
"liberation" of women into a cruel joke. It erases the fact
that the United States financed mujahedin forces, which led to the
overthrow of a government that allowed women access to education and
employment and the rise of the Taliban dictatorship, in which the
beating and murdering of women by their husbands was state sanctioned.
Moreover, it also erases the devastating effects that the prolonged
military and economic war in Central Asia and the Middle East is having
on the economic and social well being of women worldwide. In Iraq, for
example, as the result of prolonged economic sanctions, a 1995 United
Nations Food and Agricultural Organization study states that one-fifth
of the population is starving to death, the health care system (which
prior to the sanctions was one of the most universal in the region) has
been severely deteriorated, and the standing of women has decreased
dramatically as many have lost their jobs and abandoned their education
in the struggle for daily survival (Masri 1).
Perhaps
most striking of recent evidence that current wars have not engendered
equality for women, even in the North, are the murders of four women in
six weeks this past summer at the hands of their military husbands
stationed at Fort Bragg, three of whom had recently returned from combat
duties in Afghanistan. Domestic violence against women, in fact,
continues to be a persistent problem in the United States where on
average four women are killed each day by their male partners (Women's
Action Coalition 1-64). Moreover, studies show that the U.S. military
exhibits domestic violence rates that are 3-5 times higher than in the
"civilian population".
Sue
Davis points out that the continued existence of domestic violence
within the United States, and its practices abroad, not only reveal that
the current wars are not being fought on behalf of women, but they also
reveal that the common underlying basis of both war and domestic
violence is private property relations:
Certainly the severe restrictions imposed on Afghan
women by the Taliban were an extreme example of women being treated as
private property. But women are viewed as private property in all
existing class-divided societies ("U.S. No Model of Women's
Liberation").
War
and domestic violence, to be clear, are matters of class: the social
relations of production based on private ownership of the means of
production. The wars in Central Asia and the Middle East are imperialist
wars on behalf of U.S. capital, which is trying to gain a monopoly over
the production of the total, global surplus-labor. In order to stave off
declining rates of profit brought on by overproduction, U.S. monopoly
capital—specifically oil cartels and their financiers—are compelled
to seek out new conditions of production (a concentration of ownership
of means of production, raw materials, and access to cheap labor)
through the building of a Central Asian oil pipeline, gaining access to
Iraqi oilfields, and access to new reserves of labor-power in Central
Asia and the Middle East from which to extract surplus-labor. War, in
short, has become historically necessary for U.S. capital if it is going
to stave off a decline in profit. As Lenin argued, war is a historical
necessity under capitalism in its imperialist phase. It is the outcome
of the intense concentration of production (of multiple industries) into
the hands of a few, the domination of monopolies over global production,
a resulting crisis of overproduction, and the subsequent need under
capitalism for competing imperialist interests to re-divide ownership of
production in the world, often requiring violent force (war), in an
attempt to raise the rate of profit (Imperialism: The Highest Stage
of Capitalism).
Far from helping to "liberate
women" the imperialist wars sharpen class antagonisms, preserve
private property relations, and intensify the violent effects of private
property on women "abroad" and "at home", including
domestic violence. The crisis of profit that develops as a result of the
concentration of capital into fewer hands, requires the increased
exploitation of workers in production (through access to new reserves of
cheap labor and increased appropriation of their surplus-labor).
Moreover, this, in turn, requires the use of existing capital to put the
conditions in place to make this possible (e.g., through shifting
capital into the military and warfare). The concentration of wealth into
fewer hands and the resulting crisis of profit leads to increased
impoverishment of workers, which sharpens workers' dependence on the
privatized family of capitalism as an economic unit of survival. At the
same time, the family—the relations of reproduction—cannot
themselves stave off the crisis of profit in production, which requires
seeking out new sources of production and surplus-labor extraction. Both
the economic contradictions of the privatized family (that is, that the
family cannot resolve the crisis of profitability in production and the
increased impoverishment of workers) and the ideology of the privatized
family of capitalism, which puts forward a possessive individualism,
especially an ideology of "ownership" of women by men, support
conditions of domestic violence against women.
But
in the wake of the onset of the current imperialist wars and the Fort
Bragg murders, there has been a massive public relations campaign—from
the Bush Administration to the cultural "left"—to disconnect
the material conditions of violence against women and war from
wage-labor/capital and their conflict in the social relations of
production (exploitation) and to use the cause of "women" to
defend the interests of transnational capitalism.
The
dominant discourses—from the Bush Administration and the corporate
press, to the cultural "left" and transnational
feminism—represent the root issue of freedom for women from economic
inequality, social injustice, and violence to rest on matters of the
"state" and whether women's relationship to it should be
viewed from the standpoint of "national security" or
"civil rights". Contemporary feminism has itself been consumed
by these issues and feminists have become deeply divided over whether
the state should be understood as a sight of "recuperation" or
"resistance" for women. As evidenced in such books as Cynthia
Daniels' Feminists Negotiate the State: The Politics of Domestic
Violence, domestic violence in contemporary feminism is largely
considered to be an issue of "state power" grounded in
"protection" of individuals by the state from the conditions
that enable domestic violence versus "civil citizenship"
defined as "the right to bodily integrity" and a woman's right
to choose (Daniels 3). The "core issues" for contemporary
feminism have thus been: whether the "state" should intervene
on behalf of women to protect them from domestic violence or whether
this further "victimizes" women by denying them their civil
rights to "individual" freedom from "state
regulation". Another symptom of this logic is the current
reduction, in contemporary feminism, of global violence against women to
a question of the "veil" and whether, as right-wing advocates
and liberal feminists alike argue, the United States has an
"obligation" to free the women of Afghanistan and the Islamic
diaspora from the veil or whether, as transnational feminists have
argued, this denies the "resistant agency" of the women who
wear the veil. What feminism has largely turned toward as a way out of
this impasse is the eclectic position that Daniels offers: that is, that
women must "negotiate" between "state power" and
"civil citizenship" to resolve the problem of domestic
violence. In short, the "state" must be read simultaneously as
a site of "recuperation" and "resistant agency".
However, this eclectic approach to
violence against women is founded upon an increasingly problematic
understanding of "rights"
and the "state" which abstracts them from private ownership of
the means of production. By explaining the "root problem" of
violence against women, from war to domestic violence, as a matter of
"state power" and not "exploitation" in private
property relations, these theories serve as a most effective ally of
transnational capitalism. They quietly support the existing social
relations of production by seeking "solutions" in the social
relations of reproduction, to the class contradictions that stem from private property in
production. Moreover, by putting forward "civil
citizenship" as the basis of "agency" for women against
the limits of the "state", contemporary feminists suppress the
need for social citizenship founded on collective ownership and
control of the means of production. What an analysis of both approaches
reveals, however, is that "war", "domestic
violence", and their relation to each other are not, at root, a
matter of "rights" and "reproduction" but of class
and labor, and as such they are the effect of the social relations of
production.
For
liberal feminists, who argue that the state should (and can) be a
"neutral arbiter" of contradictions in civil society,
inequality for women is a product of attitudes of inequality and a
resulting unequal application of laws and rights to protect women. For instance, from the standpoint of
"Liberal" feminists such as the "Feminist Majority",
the domestic homicides of women at Fort Bragg, and the high levels of
domestic violence in the military, are read as primarily a problem with
a "masculine culture" in the military, which they contend
results in inadequate psychological debriefing for soldiers returning
from combat into civilian life and the fear on the part of soldiers to
admit that they have a "problem". As a response to the
Fort Bragg murders and the persistence of domestic violence in the
military, liberal feminism therefore supports such measures as equal
application of the Domestic Violence Offenders Gun Ban for military and
police personnel, Fort Bragg's new mandatory 48-72 hour spouse
separation policy after domestic violence has been reported, and Senate
Amendment 4447 to the final version of the Defense Appropriations Bill
introduced by Sens. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to allocate $10 million to domestic violence
programs on military bases.
This
"liberal" position is not, in short, opposed to but rather
takes as its fundamental presupposition the right-wing position of
"U.S. national security", which presents the imperialist wars
in Central Asia and the Middle East as a necessary means to liberate the
women of the world from violence, currently articulated as freedom from
the "veil". Feminist Majority leader Eleanor Smeal has argued
that "we must finish what we started in Afghanistan", which,
she points out, involves expanding "peacekeeping" troops
beyond the capital (Feminist Daily News Wire, 9/26/2002). This
position is also evident in the corporate feminism of such celebrities
as Oprah Winfrey who, in an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show
dedicated to an examination of the Fort Bragg murders, argued that the
military, in order to "defend democracy", must be trained in a
highly undemocratic and authoritarian environment that is conducive to
the promotion of domestic violence at home. This, in turn, is considered
to be all the more reason to provide increased state spending on
behavioral health services in the military for soldiers and their
families: so that they are more effective in their task of fighting the
current wars (The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 2002).
However,
these measures actually reveal the class interests of liberal—that is
"corporate"—feminism, which caters to the economic interests
of upper-middle class women in imperialist nations. These women largely
support imperialist war in Central Asia and the Middle East because it
is helping to put in place economic conditions for U.S. capital (such as
an oil pipeline running through Central Asia) to extract a larger
portion of surplus-labor from the international proletariat, of which
these women can then vie for a greater portion. It is no surprise that
massive public attention was given to the "need" to allocate
greater resources to the military to "help" it combat the
problem of domestic violence at the same time that Congress was passing
the largest Defense Appropriations Bill in history (now signed into law
as of October 23, 2002), which allocates $354.8 billion for national
security programs administered by the Department of Defense. The
hollowness of these measures as a means for ending domestic violence and
inequality for women is made even more obvious by the fact that the
Defense Appropriations Bill also requires shifting billions of dollars
away from social security, health benefits, as well as social and
economic resources to improve conditions of life for women in society at
large. At the same time the Bush Administration has been bombing the
citizens of Afghanistan in the name of "women", it has cut
social resources for working class women and proposed welfare reforms
that emphasize marriage over employment as a solution to the
impoverishment of working class mothers in the U.S. As a consequence,
women will have fewer resources at their disposal to leave abusive
marriages and will be economically compelled to tolerate them. Moreover,
as a New York Times report indicates, the current administration
has either eliminated women's agencies of the Labor Department,
military, and social services or demonstrated negligence toward renewing
charters and leadership of these agencies, thus stalling the work they
are set up to do and undermining years of work to put these conditions
in place ("Cloudy Future for U.S. Women's agencies", December
19, 2001). The actions of the current administration, moreover, follow
on the tails of a widening gap in income between men and women since
1995 ("Male-Female Salary Gap Growing, Study Says", The
Washington Post, January 24, 2002). This demonstrates the
deterioration of what little resources are reserved for women under
capitalism to improve their social and economic conditions of life, when
these resources are no longer necessary to maintain profitable
conditions of production.
In
short, the subordination of "domestic violence" to the project
of "national security", the "military", and family
values, is actually an effort in defense of monopoly capitalists who
will invest in "behavioral health services" so long as it is
"cost effective" in helping to reproduce those sectors of the
workforce (in this case, the military and defense industry) that are
currently most useful in securing international conditions favorable to
production for profit.
Moreover,
the class interests behind the "national security" project and
the military's interest in "family values" reveal that the
"family", and domestic violence, are not at root a matter of
"reproduction" and "intimate relations" but of labor
and, hence, of production. Capitalism, which is founded on the
private appropriation of the majority's surplus labor for profit by
those who own the means of production, subordinates "reproductive
relations" to the interests of production for profit. That is,
capitalism reproduces the privatized family—where the economic
burden for the social reproduction of workers lies in the hands of
individual workers and not the social collective—in order to reduce
the portion of social surplus-labor that is used for meeting workers'
needs rather than profit for the owners. Moreover, when subordinated to
private property relations, this results in family and interpersonal
relations characterized by what Alexandra Kollontai called
"possessive individualism": an ideological condition in class
society in which "love" relations are thought to be autonomous
from social conditions and are viewed as a relation of
"ownership", most often of women by men (Selected Writings
237-249). In such a situation, in which family and
interpersonal relations are subordinated to production for profit not
needs and relationships take on the character of possessive
individualism that is fostered under capitalism, women become
commodified as objects toward which abuse seems "justified".
The military, as an institution of
capitalism, is no exception. Cynthia Enloe has pointed out that the
military uses the "family" form to reproduce a "well-run
base" and "ensure a cohesive military a generation
later". As a result, she argues, it encourages traditional gender
conventions which "lower wives' expectations of paid work,
encourage them to derive their own sense of self-worth from their
husbands' accomplishments, and suppress wives' stories of depression and
physical abuse for fear that they might damage their husbands' chances
of promotion" (Enloe 72). This ideology has been useful for the
base (which is an institution of capitalism) in order to help conceal
the contradictions, particularly for women, of workers' dependence on
the family as an economic unit and, moreover, to get women to more
easily adjust to performing reproductive labor to produce the next
generation of labor-power. In short, the military makes use of the
privatization of the family under capitalism: the fact that workers,
whose surplus labor is appropriated for profit and are, therefore,
economically dependent on the family for their survival, at the same
time, are privately responsible for the reproduction of their own
conditions of life and the next generation of laborers. The decision to
start bases in which whole families live was an economic decision to
offset the cost from the social surplus-labor for social reproduction of
soldiers and officers. Despite the initial costs of accommodating
families, it was considered more "cost effective" in the long
run to have women's unpaid labor help to reproduce conditions of life
for soldiers, to reserve more of the social surplus-labor for owners.
This subordination of the family to production for profit (which is why
the military needs to be "reproduced" under capitalism to
begin with), combined with the subordination of sexuality to production
for profit through the routine international use of violence against
women as a weapon of imperialist warfare (in Vietnam, Rwanda, Kosovo . .
. ) as well as through the use of sex workers on and off military bases,
leads to the reproduction of conditions conducive to violence against
women in the home.
It is important to point out here,
that the problem of domestic violence cannot be resolved by changes
within the capitalist family and the relations of reproduction. The fact
that domestic violence is fundamentally an issue of production in class
society (and therefore cannot be resolved within measures aimed only at
changing "reproduction"), can be seen in the contradictions of
the military's domestic violence programs. While the U.S. military's
domestic violence program is considered to be the largest in the world
and seemingly the most "harsh" intervention and treatment
program according to many of its critics—because once domestic
violence is reported to military personnel, the commanding officer is
immediately informed and has the authority to court-marshal a
soldier—it is incapable of actually resolving the problems that
reproduce domestic violence because the military's entire premise is
built upon protection of the very conditions that perpetuate domestic
violence: private ownership of the means of production and the resulting
privatized family. This contradiction is evident, for example, in the
fact that as a response to the military's formal policies on domestic
violence, many women who are victims of domestic violence at the hands
of their military husbands will not report it for fear that their
husband will lose his job. This has been interpreted as
"evidence" that the problem of domestic violence is a
"personal" or "family matter" that, ultimately,
cannot be resolved outside of the family. However, at the same time,
numerous reports have made it clear that commanding officers often use
their authority to protect military personnel from conviction for
domestic violence, and to actively ignore or discourage women who put
forward official complaints (Benfer 2). What is often sighted as the
"reason" for this is that, according to federal law (the
Lautenberg Amendment), anyone who is convicted of a domestic assault is
prohibited from owning or operating a firearm, thus rendering them
useless to the military. In these "explanations" the military
gets treated as a "special population" that is separate from
the social conditions that produce domestic violence and domestic
violence, in turn, gets treated as a "private" family or
individual matter, not a matter of the social and economic relations
that the military is produced to protect. On the one side the
"state" (and the military as an apparatus of the state) is
represented as "above" class contradictions and a
"neutral regulator" of them, on the other hand, the
"citizen" is considered as a "monadic individual"
responsible for her own conditions of life, autonomous from exploitation
and economic compulsion.
What actually lies behind these
contradictions are historical conditions of necessity in capitalism: the
fact that, on the one hand, economic compulsion brought on by
exploitation in production drives women to continue to rely on the
privatized family even though it is a site of violence and abuse and, on
the other hand, the military is itself necessary under capitalism in
order to defend private property relations, and specifically the
interests of monopoly capitalists, that economically compel workers to
rely on the privatized family to begin with. These contradictions are
symptomatic of the failure to resolve domestic violence by means of
rearranging the social relations of reproduction. Negotiation with the
"state" for more resources to help crisis manage the
privatized family does not address the root issue of domestic violence.
What is needed is freedom from necessity brought on by exploitation.
This is because domestic violence is a problem that stems from
contradictions in production, which cannot be resolved through the
social relations of reproduction. Domestic violence is enabled by the
privatized family which itself is a historical necessity under
capitalism: workers are economically compelled to rely on it as an
economic unit owing to their increasing impoverishment in the social
relations of production (the more they produce, the more capital gets
concentrated into fewer hands), at the same time they provide a valuable
service for capital by absorbing the burden of reproducing labor-power.
The contradictions of the family under capitalism, therefore, lead to
greater economic and social contradictions for workers, not fewer.
Fundamental changes in the relations of reproduction require changes in
the relations of production. This is further seen in the fact that,
although capital historically necessitates the subordination of
relations of reproduction to private ownership of the means of
production in order to offset the cost to capital of reproducing
labor-power, this use of "cost effective" measures (what Lenin
called "clipping coupons") to reserve more of the existing
surplus-labor for profit does not stop the crisis in production and the
decline in the rate of profit. It reduces the drain on profit, but does
not itself resolve the over all decline in the rate of profit. This
requires access to new reserves of labor-power from which to extract
surplus-labor (through exploitation)—thus reproducing the economic
conditions of private property and their ideological effects that enable
domestic violence against women.
It
is not an autonomous "state power" (which locates change in
"reproduction") but the social relations of production based
on private property that the state is produced in order to maintain,
that is the "root cause" of violence against women through
warfare and domestic violence. "National security" is an
ideological strategy to represent the interests of the ruling class to
use imperialist warfare for a greater monopoly over the global
surplus-labor, as the general interests of all. Feminism, in order to
enable the eradication of domestic violence needs to confront the
conditions of exploitation in the social relations of production that
necessitate the state, imperialist warfare, and violence against women.
Without addressing the emancipation of labor from exploitation (the
private appropriation of surplus labor), and freedom of workers from
conditions of necessity in capitalism (such as the economic compulsion
of workers to rely upon the "privatized family" as an economic
unit to survive), women cannot be freed from the conditions that
reproduce domestic violence and imperialist warfare.
In contrast to
"liberalism" (which is indistinguishable from the
"right-wing" agenda of national security and its underlying
imperialist interests), the cultural "left" and
"transnational feminists" have advanced an "ethical
resistance" to the imperialist wars for their deterioration of
"civil rights" within the United States and their human
slaughter in Central Asia and the Middle East. However, in the face of
the "use" of women to defend the national security project and
the imperialist interests of U.S. capital in its efforts for a monopoly
over the world's oil production and related industries, contemporary
feminism and the cultural left have by and large abandoned any
fundamental transformation of capitalism for "resistance"
within globalization. Instead of providing a materialist critique of the
conditions behind the "national security" project—which
would require understanding it as an ideological alibi for private
property relations—transnational feminism has retreated into rereading
transnational capitalism as "always already" a sight of
"resistant agency" for women by presenting capitalist culture
as a "hybrid" site of "oppression" and
"resistance". In doing so, it embraces capitalism through a
cultural mediation: by suggesting that the problem for women has been
the "state" not capitalism, and that transnational capitalism
by "deregulating" the state, has now provided conditions that
enable "resistance" on the part of women. Thus, while seeking
to oppose specific consequences of the imperialist interests of U.S.
monopoly capitalists (i.e., warfare), transnational feminism does not
oppose the economic relations at the root of global capitalism (private
ownership of the means of production and production for profit).
For instance, we are told
by "left" cultural theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
that "imperialism is over" and that what we are witnessing is
the birth of "Empire": a "decentered and
deterritorializing apparatus" that is charged with sites of
"resistance". The "primary symptom" of this
"new global order", they contend, is the decline of
sovereignty of nation-states: that "no nation-state can today, form
the center of the imperialist project" (xi-xvii). Following suit,
in their statement, "Transnational Feminist Practices Against the
War" (October 2001), Paola Bacchetta, Tina Campt, Inderpal Grewal,
Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, and Jennifer Terry "question" the
notion of the nation-state "in the face of numerous examples of
transnational and global practices and formations". What is
necessary for feminist struggles against the war, they argue, is an
"analysis of the numerous ways in which transnational networks and
entities both limit and at the same time enable resistance".
Transnational feminism, in
short, is focused on re-narrating transnational capitalism as a
"positive" situation for women by representing it as a site
that is enabling of "resistance" to the
"nation-state". Moreover, the most "effective"
approach for women of the world in ending violence against them is one
of "resistant agency" against the "state". For
instance, Shahnaz Khan argues that the main problem with liberal
feminist representations of Afghan women as oppressed and silent
"victims" under the "veil" or "burqa" is
that it denies the agency, the everyday acts of resistance, and the
experience of women under the veil, and instead offers an oppressive
representation by representing Afghan women as in need of
"help" from the U.S. State (Kahn 1). Moreover, according to
this logic, this victimization is also enabled by those who see
transnational capitalism as fundamentally oppressive to women. What is
necessary, instead, Khan argues, is care and respect for the individual
"agency" of women behind the "burqa", their capacity
to "survive", to draw on "informal networks of power and
resources to survive and live to tell [their] tale" (14).
However,
here transnational feminists do not depart from the "liberal"
notion of "citizenship" as a "civil
citizenship"—the agency of the monadic individual—against the
state, articulated in transnational feminism as a "resistant
agency". While, unlike liberalism, they do not see the state as a
neutral arbiter on behalf of women and, instead see it as a
"regulator" of women's reliance on "informal networks of
power", transnational feminism still relies on the notion of
"agency" as civil citizenship. Thus,
for transnational feminists, the root problem for women is still the
"State" (that is "power relations") not class (that
is, exploitation). Moreover, the "state" is understood to be
autonomous from class relations. Thus, in response to the limits of the
bourgeois state in guaranteeing women freedom from domestic violence and
abuse, transnational feminism seeks solutions in "civil
society" independent of the state.
But where does this notion
of "resistant agency" lead in intervening in the conditions of
violence against women, including domestic violence?
In their book The End
of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham
(who write under the common pen name "J.K. Gibson-Graham"),
argue for a "resistant agency" in response to globalization
and violence against women. Following Sharon Marcus' deconstruction of
"rape", Gibson-Graham argue that both globalization and
violence against women need to be re-understood not as "inevitable
truths" but as "language scripts" that can be
"rewritten" and "resisted". For Gibson-Graham, like
Marcus, re-understanding globalization and violence against women in
these terms allows for "agency" on the part of women and
workers to "resist" physical or economic violence in the
"act" and to prevent it. For instance, according to Marcus, by
approaching "rape" as a "language script", feminism
can "shift the scene from rape and its aftermath" in the
courts "to rape situations themselves and to rape prevention"
(Marcus 387).
This is also the dominant
understanding of "prevention" in such films as Enough
starring Jennifer Lopez and Panic Room starring Jodie Foster,
which mark the degree to which in capitalist culture
"self-defense" is understood as the limit of intervention into
domestic violence in particular, and violence against women in general.
Agency, on these terms, is the individual woman's capacity to prevent an
assault from occurring in the first place by not accepting her
"victimization" as inevitable and instead "fighting
back". What this assumes is a very limited notion of
"agency" as freedom of the "private individual".
This is, in short, a re-articulation of the notion of "resistant
citizenship" as the freedom of the monadic subject from the state.
Domestic violence in this view becomes a matter of individualized
agency—of volunteerism for women—and is cut off from the social
relations of production that make it possible. This notion of
"prevention" makes domestic violence not a SOCIAL concern,
therefore requiring investigation into the underlying social and
economic conditions that enable the reproduction of violence against
women, but a PRIVATE matter and an individual woman's private
responsibility. This is a highly destructive position for women because
it steps backwards from the struggle to understand domestic violence as
a public and social issue and, therefore, a matter of the organization
of social resources (i.e., property relations) and instead makes
individuals responsible for "managing" social contradictions
on their own.
Moreover, by generalizing
Marcus' understanding of "rape prevention" to explain
globalization in all of its practices, Gibson-Graham represent
"resistance" to globalization on these same terms: as an
autonomous act of private individuals not requiring general
transformation of the social conditions of production for all. Far from
offering a mode of "resistance", this actually offers a
position that is highly useful to transnational capitalism, which is
daily trying to dismantle any social resources committed to the
economic, social, and physical well being of workers in general, and
women in particular, in the international division of labor. In short,
this position is consistent with the efforts of transnational capital to
dismantle social resources and re-privatize them and destroy any
conditions for social citizenship in order to stave off declines in the
rate of profit. Gibson-Graham's privatized view of globalization and
violence against women, for instance, follows the same logic as the Bush
administration, which, working on behalf of transnational capital, has
been working to dismantle social resources for women and reprivatize
them.
What is most troubling for
women is that this has become the dominant mode of addressing the
conditions of women's lives in the international division of labor.
Contemporary feminism, in short, has by and large been subordinated to
the interests of transnational capitalism. This is evident in the
growing popularity of what Spivak calls "globe–girdling"
resistance within contemporary "transnational" feminism: that
is, the notion that the basis of "agency" and change to
"resist" global capitalism are "transnational-local
initiatives" in civil society (Spivak and Plotke 8). In
transnational feminism, which assumes that the "state" is the
root problem, this has often come to mean developing "local
initiatives" that appeal to "non-governmental
organizations" (NGO's), as the sight of "resistance" for
women around the globe. What is considered to
be "radical" about "globe-girdling" is that it
"operates with the real goal of redistributing generated capital,
reallocating the uses of capital" (Spivak and Plotke 8). For
instance, according to Valentine Moghadam, "transnational feminist
networks" based on the "ethical assistance" from the
"international donor community" are evidence of the
possibility of "resistance" within capitalism for the
women of Afghanistan (Moghadam 7).
This assumes that by being
a "transnational effort" that is not linked to any specific
nation-state but instead uses the resources of non-governmental
organizations it is now "free" from the social contradictions
of the "state". But the social contradictions of the state are
the contradictions of private property and class antagonisms: the fact
that while the "bourgeois state" is the only provider
of social services at a time of transnationalization, it is
itself subordinated to the interests of production for profit and
deploys these services on behalf of the ruling class. Moreover, these
class contradictions do not disappear from the non-governmental
"international donor community". In fact, historically, during
imperialist warfare when the majority of the social surplus-labor at the
hands of the state in imperialist nations is being deployed in the
interests of monopoly capitalists, which requires massive social
resources to be transferred into "defense" and militarization,
other sectors of the capitalist class absorb some of the cost of social
reproduction in order to re-secure conditions in the workforce that will
enable them to make a profit.
The notion of "enlighteded
donorship" (to use Spivak's term)
advanced by transnational feminists is a "return" to the
privatized "charity services" for women in 19th
century United States—services based in "private interests"
(with no regard for even the limited norms of democracy under
capitalism) that helped to reproduce women as subjects useful for
capitalism, especially at times when social resources were monopolized
by war efforts (Daniels 11). NGO's, which are largely financed by
transnational corporations, are not "free" from private
property relations, they are an example
of the further privatization of social surplus-labor. They invest in
specific sectors of the global workforce in order to maintain conditions
in which they can more easily exploit workers, they do not address the
needs of workers, including women, for freedom from exploitation and the
social contradictions that class relations create in their daily lives.
For instance, some corporations have found it historically necessary to
invest in anti-domestic violence programs in order to offset a larger
cost to them—estimated at $67 billion dollars annually in the United
States—brought on by "absenteeism, lower productivity, higher
turnover and health and safety costs associated with battered
workers" (American Institute of Domestic Violence). But these
measures remain restricted within private property relations,
"family values" and helping the privatized reproduction in the
family function better for capitalism. They serve not to eradicate the
conditions in production that reproduce domestic violence, and violence
against women in general, but simply to offset the cost of domestic
violence to particular corporations.
Far from challenging the
material basis—the class relations—behind the state, transnational
feminism simply furthers the logic of privatization and inculcates women
into the imperialist project by presenting the complete deterioriation
of social control of resources, as an instance of "radical
agency". The formal opposition to the "state" and to
"imperialist war" by transnational feminism turns out to be a
quiet support for the economic relations of imperialism. The
support by transnational feminism for the "redistribution of
capital" conceals the source of the material contradictions for
women in the international division of labor: that is, the production of
capital—the fact that workers must work part of the day to produce
necessary labor for their own reproduction and part of the day to
produce surplus-labor for the ruling class. By supporting the
"redistribution of capital" as a radical act of
"resistance", transnational feminists are merely representing
the interests of monopoly capital for profit as the general interest of
all women. It is an economic necessity for monopoly capitalists
not simply to export goods but to "export capital" to new
regions to develop production relations conducive to raising profit.
When other imperialist interests are also competing to concentrate
production in the same regions in their own hands, or when other local
conditions owing to uneven development in capitalism prevent this from
being done through peaceful means, this makes warfare a necessary means
for monopoly capitalists to raise the rate of profit. But, in other
circumstances this can be done by peaceful means. NGOs, and the
transnational feminist support of them as the "alternative",
are merely one means to advance imperialist interests through peaceful
means. They are one way in which transnational capital exports capital
to secure profitable conditions of production: they serve as a
supplement to direct financial investment into industry and production
by specific cartels and finance capitalists, by investing in the social
and cultural conditions that will promote the adjustment of workers to
their new conditions of exploitation. The fixation on the
"state" and "war" as autonomous problems are an
ideological "decoy" for the underlying economic interests of
capitalism. What transnational feminism helps provide ideological alibis
for is not actually the dismantling of the "state". Instead,
it simply helps to ideologically "get rid" of the problems of
the state as the only provider of social services under capitalism and
the necessity of socially owned and controlled resources to emancipate
women, in order to create more room for transnational capitalism. What
it is instead set on dismantling is social citizenship, the
necessity for collective ownership and control of the means of
production so that the life conditions of citizens cannot be dictated by
the interests of a few for profit, but are determined on the basis of
human need. The notion of "resistant agency" is simply a
re-articulation of "civil
citizenship"—"autonomous" freedoms of the individual
abstracted from the conditions of necessity for the majority of women in
the international division of labor.
Understood on these terms,
arguments
about the individualized agency of women under the burqa, it is becoming
all too clear,
are a thin mask for protecting imperialism. This ideological strategy
specifically appeals to the interests of petit-bourgeois women of the
North (aiming to protect their share of the surplus-labor of women of
the South), who support measures of increased productivity for women of
Afghanistan and the Islamic diaspora so long as these
"investments" are made within production relations that will
allow for a greater "return" to investment in the form of
higher levels of surplus-labor. This project is not at all inconsistent
with the material basis and the ideological masking of the "war
effort" that transnational feminists formally oppose. For example,
many have held up as "proof positive" that the current war is
a war of "liberation", that Afghan women are now being taught
to read and write for the first time as a result of the overthrow of the
Taliban dictatorship. But the opportunistic track record of the United
States toward protecting the material conditions to ensure equality for
women in Afghanistan, Iraq, the United States . . . including freedom
from domestic violence, reveals that these conditions are only
"supported" when it is profitable to the ruling class. The
U.S. support for the literacy of women and freedom from state sanctioned
abuse and murder by their husbands was not a priority when it meant
accepting a regime in Afghanistan with which the U.S. could not easily
dominate the business relationship. Moreover, it is not an effort to
emancipate women from exploitation and oppression now that the Taliban
proved to be no longer profitable for U.S. monopoly capital. Instead, it
is an effort to process women into the skills necessary to be better
(i.e., more profitable) workers for transnational capital now that a
regime more friendly to U.S. capital rules in Afghanistan. Moreover,
because these women are coming out of a situation of state sanctioned
domestic violence and discrimination, they will prove to be cheaper
labor for transnational corporations. In like manner, by idealizing the
conditions of violence against Afghan women as a question of
"individualized agency" and "civil rights" (against
the U.S. and/or Islamic fundamentalism), transnational feminism erases
the necessity of economic security founded not upon private property and
"national security" but on collective ownership of the means
of production.
The contradictions of
"public control" over social resources under capitalism—that
is, in the form of the modern "state"—is not an effect of an
autonomous "state power" rather, it is the subordination of
these collectively produced resources to private ownership of the means
of production. That is, the fact that the state at its material basis is
a product of class antagonisms and is produced to protect class
relations. It is, as Marx and Engels argued, "a committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (57). The
state's social resources are the reserves of surplus-labor (made
possible by the exploitation of labor in production) that are allotted
for reproducing social conditions for profit, not need. Moreover, this
basic contradiction—the extraction of surplus-labor for profit and the
use of a portion of this surplus-labor to reproduce production for
profit—does not disappear if "reproduction" is further
privatized in the hands of specific corporations and non-governmental
organizations.
To challenge subordination
of workers' needs—including all women's need for freedom from domestic
violence—to production for profit, it is necessary to transform the
conditions of exploitation and private ownership of the means of
production that "necessitate" the production of surplus-labor
and, as a consequence, need the modern state to adjudicate a portion of
these resources to reproduce social conditions on behalf of the ruling
class. Women cannot be emancipated from violence against them, through
warfare or domestic violence, without freeing them from these conditions
of necessity under capitalism. That is, without abolishing the material
conditions that reproduce global violence against women—the privatized
family and the social relations of production on which it depends
(private property)—and putting in place social relations of production
based on collective ownership and control of the means of production.
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THE
RED CRITIQUE 6 (September/October 2002)
REDCRITIQUE.ORG
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