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Column: Feminism and anti-globalization While the anti-globalization movement that has been nipping at the heels of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank made its presence known in the U.S. in Seattle two years ago, women in other parts of the world have been fighting global capitalism for decades, by for example, organizing women workers in the maquiladora plants, fighting structural adjustment policies, and struggling to protect the environment. Nevertheless, women are conspicuously absent in theories about globalization. This is one of the points of departure for the latest issue of SIGNS, an important feminist theory journal, which is devoted to the issue of gender and globalization. All of the essays raise questions about what globalization means economically and theoretically, although none see a need to turn to Marx to help them comprehend capitalism. Two of the essays are particularly interesting. "Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics" by Suzanne Bergeron and "Is Local:Global as Feminine:Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization" both raise questions about how and why gender drops out of analyses of globalization even though so much has been written about women in the global workforce. Both authors are dissatisfied with the dialogue on globalization. For Bergeron, the problem lies in the fact that discussion is divided between those that stress the nation-state against globalization and those that theorize the demise of the nation-state and call for a transnational global movement against capital. Some feminists still look to the state as the site of battle, for example, by trying to get more social services, while others repudiate such struggle and call for global sisterhood. The problem with many of those calling for global sisterhood, Bergeron argues, is that they assume globalization to be a totalizing and oppressive external force. For example, Gita Sen, an Indian feminist writes: "Capital is the sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads not only of those who organize workers, the marginalized poor and women, or dare to protest against environmental decay and plunder, but over governments who attempt to regulate the conditions under which capital can operate with a national economy. Clearly delinking from the global economy is not a real choice: few economies are large or self-sustaining enough to attempt this without enormous suffering." Because of this, Sen argues, women need to act globally, not locally or nationally, if they want to get anything done. Similarly, Valentine Moghadam, an Iranian feminist, argues that the massive entry of women into the global workforce erases distinctions based on race and nationality, thus laying the groundwork for a global women's movement. Here, Bergeron argues, capital is seen as all-determining and inevitable. To Bergeron and Freeman, this way of "theorizing" capital erases multiple subjectivities and alternatives. Rather than "theorizing" globalization
that way, they argue, we need to look for ways that globalization is disrupted. They don't point to anti-globalization movements or to
environmental movements as the alternative subjectivities. Rather, they focus on women who are able to "benefit" from global capital, for example,
women in Sri Lanka who use the wages they earn as workers in the informal sector and in multinational corporations to fund women's centers and food
cooperatives. By doing so, women supposedly resist and disrupt the For Sen and Moghadam, globalization makes it easier not to have to rethink their post-Marx Marxist narrowing of all relations to class. Because the world is being subsumed in a rapid way by capital, class narrowly defined becomes everything. It is this narrow view that Bergeron rejects. But she makes a fatal mistake by equating post-Marx Marxist theorists like Moghadam with Marxism. Marx had a much more complex view of capitalism and the non-capitalist world that is being ravaged throughglobalization. In his last decade, Marx was researching what we now call the Third World, paying particular attention to gender relations, as he searched for multiple pathways to socialism. Both Bergeron and Freeman fail to envision a different type of society, a revolution, perhaps different and specific forms of socialism unique to each culture and country. Isn't this the only way to truly challenge the hegemony of global capital? Making the vision of a new society real in the movement today will require some theoretical and philosophical work on our part. The impending war makes this work all the more urgent. |
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