'We won't go back!'
Ashcroft and women's rights
By Naomi
Cohen
The Feb. 1 confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney
general, with eight Democratic senators joining with the
Republicans to vote in his favor, is in many ways the logical
conclusion to the period of reaction in the decade since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc.
It signals that a significant section of the U.S. ruling
class is willing to abandon all pretense of working toward
social justice or equality for people of color, women or
lesbian, gay, bi and trans people.
It is hard for some to imagine a man with such a record of
unabashed, unrepentant racism, sexism and homophobia being
appointed to head up the U.S. Justice Department. But it is
entirely fitting also. It is fitting because the rule of law
in the U.S., as in any capitalist country, is the rule of an
exploiting class. It is the rule of a class that lives by
stealing the labor of the poor and the oppressed, and by
dividing the working class with backward ideas of racism,
misogyny and anti-gay bigotry.
In some periods the ruling class feels the need to hide
its medieval ideas. But in times of reaction, they feel free
to flaunt their hateful ideology.
Perhaps it is no accident that the Ashcroft confirmation
follows close on the heels of white rapper Eminem's Grammy
Award nomination. In two different arenas the same hateful
misogyny, racism and homophobia are put forward for mass
consumption. In the latter case, it is the giant music
industry that is sponsoring the dissemination of violently
racist, sexist, and anti-gay ideas.
In addition, the appointment of Tommy Thompson as
secretary of health and human services signals an attempt to
dismantle whatever is left of the social services won by the
great mass struggles of the 1930s and 1960s, including
welfare and affirmative action. Thompson is the man who
boasts about the Wisconsin Works program, also called W-2,
which became the national model for destroying the entire
welfare system under the Clinton administration.
Activists in Milwaukee are mounting a campaign to expose
the devastating effects of W-2 on Wisconsin's poor. According
to them, in the program's first year, the Black infant
mortality rate in Milwaukee shot up 37 percent. In other
words, health care for poor women, access to pre-natal care
and adequate nutrition are so lacking that infants are dying
at birth at rates usually seen in the most poverty-stricken
developing countries.
Capitalism profits from divisions
This is the nature of the "compassionate conservative"
administration that the workers and oppressed peoples are
faced with. It is no accident that the struggles against
racism, sexism and homophobia intersect in the person of
Ashcroft. It's not simply that he represents backward,
right-wing religious fanaticism, but rather that the
capitalist system itself profits from the division of the
working class.
Capitalism is a system based on exploitation and
oppression. At its core, the profit system needs cheap
sources of labor. And keeping the working class divided along
racial, sexual and gender lines, as well as pitting
documented against undocumented workers, adds up to more
profits and freedom of exploitation for the bosses.
Keeping women down, for example, means paying one half of
the working class lower wages--on top of the unpaid labor
they do in the home. And denying women reproductive freedom,
such as easy access to birth control and abortion, reduces
women to the status of semi-slavery. No human being can be
called really free if they do not have the right to make the
most fundamental decision about their own destiny, such as
the decision about whether or when to have a child.
Once a person is denied the right to decide her own fate
in terms of childbearing, it's not hard to see how women can
be marginalized as workers as well. If a woman is beaten or
even killed by a spouse or partner, it's no surprise that the
capitalist state in the form of the police, judges, prisons,
etc., often do not regard it as a crime worth punishing.
After all, women are still regarded as property at the
disposal of the men around them.
In this sense, it is very similar to the way racism works
to devalue people of color and homophobia demonizes lesbian,
gay, bi and trans people. Once people are targeted in this
way, it is open season for the racists, bigots, and police to
beat up, arrest or even kill with impunity.
This has been starkly illustrated recently with the spate
of revelations about police targeting of women for sexual
abuse and rape. The struggle in African American communities
across the country to end racial profiling by police has now
helped to uncover another form of profiling--sexual
profiling.
In New York's Nassau County, for example, several officers
have been charged with sexual abuse and rape. A lawyer for
several women told the Feb. 3 New York Times: "This is all
different officers. It is not one cop who has gone awry."
In other words, this is the accepted practice of dealing
with women, particularly poor women and women of color, by
men who have the power of life and death over them.
Marxism and women's oppression
Marxism has a long history of recognizing the oppression
of women as an integral part of the basic structure of all
class societies. Frederick Engels explained in his
groundbreaking work, "The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State," that the patriarchal family contains
within it the seeds of all forms of class
oppression--slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Here the women
and children are regarded as the private property of the male
"head of household."
Even though the modern working class does not have any
property to hand down to its "heirs" as the capitalist class
does, the social relations in capitalist society today still
reflect the oppressed status of women.
Just a glance at poverty figures for the population as a
whole reveals that the vast majority of the poor are women
and their dependent children. Along with this second-class
status goes unpaid labor in the home, job discrimination and
low pay, sexual harassment, battering, rape, and now, more
and more, denial of a woman's right to control her own
body.
Marx and Engels, and Lenin after them, recognized that the
only way to free women from these patriarchal, oppressive
conditions was to establish institutions to socialize the
work that was traditionally labeled as women's work, like
childcare, cooking and laundry. In fact, the Russian
Revolution of 1917 was the first in the world to pass
equal-rights legislation for women, including the right to
vote and the right to abortion.
The revolution also established cafeterias for workers'
families, public laundries, paid maternity leave and
universal day care, as well as universal health care and
access to jobs outside the home with equal pay and benefits.
These were revolutionary steps at the time, unseen in any of
the more developed capitalist countries.
In 1919, Lenin wrote, "Not a single democratic party in
the world, not even in the most advanced bourgeois republic,
had done in decades so much as a hundredth part of what we
did in our very first year in power.
"We actually razed to the ground the infamous laws placing
women in a position of inequality, restricting divorce and
surrounding it with disgusting formalities, denying
recognition to children born out of wedlock, enforcing a
search for their fathers, etc., laws numerous survivals of
which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, are
to be found in all civilized countries. We have a thousand
times the right to be proud of what we have done in this
field.
"But the more thoroughly we clear the ground of the lumber
of the old, bourgeois laws and institutions, the more we
realize that we have only cleared to build on, but we are not
yet building.
"Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating women, she
continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework
crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her
to the kitchen and nursery, and she wastes her labor on
barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying
and crushing drudgery.
"The real emancipation of women, real communism, will
begin only where and when an all out struggle begins (led by
the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty
housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation
into a large-scale socialist economy begins."
The limitations of the socialist revolution in Russia,
recognized by Lenin from the beginning, worsened after his
death. And some of the gains made by women in the early years
of the revolution were reversed. Long years of civil war,
imperialist encirclement and intervention, along with the
underdevelopment in the country itself, led to a political
reaction in the USSR. However, the concepts of the
socialization of housework and the responsibilities of
society to women and children were reflected in progressive
programs in all the socialist countries that followed, to one
degree or another.
Capitalist reaction out in the open
Today, with the collapse of socialism in the USSR and
Eastern Europe, the status of women in that part of the world
has sunk alarmingly. Now there is massive unemployment, loss
of childcare and health care, leading to poverty and illness
among women and children unseen in over 50 years of socialist
development.
With the example of the Soviet Union gone, it is easier
for capitalist politicians like Bush and Ashcroft to try to
revive medieval ideas about women's "place" as homemakers and
mothers. They think that they no longer have to justify their
reactionary, oppressive ideas.
But women will not be driven back a century. They are
almost half the workforce and absolute necessity drives them
to demand better pay and working conditions.
Ashcroft and Bush hope to usher in a new era of
reactionary ideas and repressive legislation. But now that
the ugly face of capitalist reaction is out in the open for
all to see, it can help to clarify the class relations and
the true character of the capitalist state. This is not about
a Democratic or Republican administration. It is about the
system that underlies both.
When Janet Reno headed the Justice Department under
Clinton, in spite of her being a woman and a so-called
moderate, the prisons were filled to overflowing with Black,
Latino and other people of color out of all proportion to
their numbers in the population. And the incarceration of
women on petty drug charges skyrocketed.
During her watch, the terrorist campaigns against women's
health clinics and abortion providers went on unabated. And
the gay-bashing of people like Matthew Shepherd, as well as
the execution of Wanda Jean Allen, a mentally disabled
lesbian, went on and on.
Now it will be clearer that our only means of putting an
end to the agenda of the Bush administration, which is really
the agenda of the capitalist class itself, is to fight them
everywhere, to mobilize and organize.
This fight is not simply for a more democratic capitalist
system. The fight is to abolish private property, which is at
the root of all oppression, and replace it with socialized
property organized to better the status of all humanity.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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