Women, imperialism & the fight for socialism
By Monica Moorehead
Capitalist expansion--imperialism--has meant
the feminization of poverty.
More than 1 billion people live on a dollar a day or less.
Some 880 million people have no access to any medical
services.
Seventy percent of the world's impoverished people are
women.
This mass poverty has led to an enormous accumulation of
wealth in fewer and fewer hands. According to the United
Nations, the world's 200 richest people more than doubled their
wealth in 1998, to more than a trillion dollars.
The assets of the three top billionaires are more than the
gross national product of the 48 least developed countries with
a population of 600 million people.
The roots of this poverty are found in the long-term legacy
of colonialism and cur rently "globalization" or
neocolonialism.
After World War II, a new form of colonization evolved,
organized by the banks through the instrument of the Inter
national Monetary Fund, which has forced over 100 countries to
sign so-called structural adjustment agreements. These
agreements force governments to sell off state resources to the
corporate monopolies, cut back spending for social welfare,
devalue their currency and open up trade to imperialist
penetration with the aid of crushing subsidies. All this leads
to the destruction of local and national economies.
The greatest concentration of dire poverty and
underdevelopment is on the African continent. African women
bear the greatest brunt of this poverty. One-third of all
families worldwide are headed by women. The highest proportion
of female-led households is in Africa.
According to the United Nations, in the developing countries
on the whole, women produce half the food--in Africa as much as
three-fourths.
A 2000 World Bank statement reads in part: "While more
African girls are attending school, only 74 percent of African
girls are enrolled in primary school, compared with 86 percent
of boys. While 65 percent of African men can read and write,
fully half of African women cannot. The high fertility in
Africa, 5.5 children per woman, also translates into higher
morbidity and mortality rates for African women, compared to
the rest of the world. For each 1,000 children born in Africa,
91 will die as infants, while the figure is 37 per 1,000 in
East Asia, 32 in Latin America, and 23 in Eastern Europe."
Over 34.3 million people are infected with the HIV/AIDS
virus in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Some 71 percent of the
world's HIV-infected population lives in South Africa,
Botswana, Swaziland, Zim ba bwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Namibia,
Malawi and Kenya. Over 60 percent of them are women. The UN
estimates that 50 percent of all girls in Kenya now 15 years
old will be infected in their lifetimes.
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry holds accessible HIV/AIDS
treatments hostage to the grab for profits. AIDS has been the
number-one killer on the African continent, especially of
women.
Socialism and women's liberation
Where socialism once guaranteed jobs, paid maternity leave,
childcare, health care, vacations, pensions, nutrition and
basic political rights of the working class, now mass
unemployment, homelessness, prostitution, and all the ills of
capitalism have quickly developed in the former socialist
countries after the counter-revolution.
In Eastern Europe, there is a widening slave trade of women
and girls. It is estimated that more than 500,000 Eastern
European women and girls are brought to Western Europe for
sexual exploitation every year--a business estimated at $7
billion annually.
Between 1980 and 1994 in the developing countries, the
industrial working class grew from 285 million to 400 million
people. Almost half of these new workers were women.
Imperialism has extended its upswing in production by
re-conquering one-sixth of the earth's surface and adding 300
million people to its sphere of exploitation. For example, it
is targeting the 600 million people on the African continent as
new "consumers" to buy the imperialists' products.
The United States gained a free hand to greatly intensify
its thievery in the oppressed world, which had been partially
protected by the existence of the USSR.
The historic significance of the 20th century will be that
the Russian Revolution took place. A tiny, downtrodden working
class in a peasant country, with 85 percent illiteracy, was
able to seize the power from its capitalist class, hold it and
build up a country that defeated the Nazis, launched the space
age and made great strides in solving the problem of national
antagonisms.
It was a spontaneous strike of women garment workers in
Russia that sparked the Russian Revolution.
Despite the Russian Revolution's great flaws that helped
imperialism overthrow it, its significance lies in its
accomplishments. The revolution showed that a new, superior
form of planned human society free of bosses and exploiters
could exist and develop under the most unfavorable conditions
imaginable. Women made the greatest strides under socialism;
for example, they outnumbered men in becoming doctors and
educators.
Millions around the world are still fighting for a socialist
future.
These revolutionaries, especially those in the imperialist
countries, must continue to extend a hand of solidarity to the
women and men from Iraq to Palestine to Haiti to the
Philippines to Africa--especially those on the front lines of
resistance in the so-called war on terrorism initiated by the
Pentagon and the White House.
This solidarity includes supporting the right to reparations
to compensate for cen turies of slavery and colonial
oppression.
In 2001 the heroic Nigerian women inspired women everywhere
when they demanded reparations in the form of jobs, health care
and economic development when they took over several
Chevron-Texaco installations in Nigeria.
Reprinted from the April 29, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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