Women at the Forefront of Social Transformation

America is polarizing politically, but not primarily along the party lines of the two main political parties, or between red and blue states. There is a deeper polarization of wealth and poverty underway in society, reflected in the inequities that capitalism has wrought in the right to vote, to care for yourself, your children, and your aging parents. More and more of us recognize it is no longer a given to walk down the street or, if you have one, to sleep peacefully in your home without being killed by the police. As the world celebrates International Women’s Day in March 2022, women may (as in the historic Chinese saying) “hold up half the sky,” but right now humanity and the fate of our earth relies on their leadership within a global, multi-national class that can’t survive, unless humanity finds a new way to live.

Gender inequality is built into the historical development of capitalism. Ours is a property system that amasses social wealth in private hands, while requiring most of humanity to work or starve. The propertyless have always worked as wage-laborers, domestics, or slaves and have always been disproportionately female. Today, women make up two-thirds of the global workforce.

What’s new? As digital technology is increasingly applied to all areas of production, the only way for corporate private property to continue making profits is to replace human labor. Wealth today can only be made by plundering and speculating. The 2008 financial crisis and the economic collapse of world’s economies in COVID times are markers of the end of this economic system.

The owners of global wealth cannot solve the problems of the real economy. People cannot buy necessities without access to money from jobs. Over eighty percent of American workers were living paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic. COVID has speeded up the polarization of wealth and poverty. In 2020 alone, speculative capital plundered the world’s collective social wealth more than ever in history, while impoverishing millions worldwide. Neither humanity nor the earth can survive such a dysfunctional system.

The reproduction of society and the planet now rests largely on the sections of society with nothing to lose. Workers are called “essential” during this pandemic because they guarantee life. Most of today’s so-called essential workers are women. Caregiving is at the center of a new social force in society. Caregivers of all genders have died, leaving more than 140,000 American children orphaned in the US due to the pandemic alone. Women’s leadership is essential to a new unity based on common necessity.

Women and Global Fascism

Our society has become a corporate dictatorship that devalues life. The vast majority of the world’s population is economically interdependent. For capitalism, however, the value of human life follows the value of human labor power. The rulers cannot allow economic equality. Nor can they allow the majority of humanity to create the kind of social relations most of humanity considers necessary for a future on this planet. This is the reason for the dreadful effects of the pandemic on most human life globally.

Our interdependence, though, is also our saving grace. Leaders of a social movement are beginning to understand the objectivity of their mutual connection. Women have kept families and society together on this earth through slavery, migration, pandemics, and war. They have had to fight for life largely outside the system of wage-slavery and against corporate private property relations. Their place in the growing movement for basic needs puts women at the forefront of societal transformation.

Capitalism’s rulers are forced to rely more and more on Fascist state forms to control us. Attacks on reproductive rights and other gender violence are at the center of the growth of social fascism. In response to the Texas heartbeat bill, Paxton Smith’s high-school valedictorian address went viral. “Millions of us… (now) have… six weeks to decide…if we can take the responsibility to bring another human being into the world,” she said. “Without our input or consent, our control over (our) future has been stripped away from us…I hope that you can feel how…dehumanizing it is… I cannot…promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights, a war on the rights of your mothers, a war on the rights of your sisters, a war on the rights of your daughters.” This teenager knows what’s at stake. She will not accept being a forced to take responsibility for society’s failings.

The American constitution has never allowed for economic equality, nor does it protect equal rights regardless of gender. One in three women today face rape, or mental or physical violence. Women of color and LGBTQ folk face the highest rates of violence, with 2021 the deadliest year yet of anti-transgender violence in the United States. Women, particularly black women, face militarized policing. The death of Black 26-year old ER technician Breonna Taylor became a rallying point for the movement against police terror in America. The movement for #MeToo, clean water, quality healthcare, and public education as well as against attacks on voting rights, militarized border control, and destruction of the planet are all marked today by proletarian women’s leadership.

These movements have never been able to separate social and political rights from economic rights. Gender-violence is a leading cause of homelessness. Those most victimized by a racialized gender violence are becoming leaders for a new class of impoverished workers, the only class that has the ability to restructure and reproduce society in the interest of life. To control our lives and those of our families and communities, this collective social force must make demands on government and ultimately be the government.

Humanity’s way forward is a cooperative economy that uses our social wealth to fight for life and the health of the planet. Any pretense about “the right to life” without that must be exposed for what it is, an apology for the forces of death and destruction. What’s new is that society as a whole must find the ways to do, consciously and collectively, what those thrown out of this private property system were historically forced to do to survive. The role of revolutionaries is reconstruction. We are part of and rely on the leaders of a common necessity, teaching as we fight to make our class conscious of its rightful place in history. In the name of parents, caregivers, and essential workers everywhere, Happy International Women’s Day!”

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