Harry Targ
The
War On Women has many dimensions—social, cultural, psychological—but in many
ways women’s issues are class issues. That makes the war on women a class war,
among other things. (Richard Eskow, Campaign for America’s
Future Blog, November 16, 2012)
I was planning my latest blog entry when I saw an
essay by Richard Eskow entitled “The War on Women is a Class War.”
Coincidentally the subject of the political consequences of class, race,
gender, ethnicity, and sexual preference was precisely the subject I wished to
address.
Eskow presented compelling data to show that as
income levels rise the percentage of women in the higher categories declines,
cuts in anti-poverty programs disproportionately affect women, on a worldwide
basis austerity measures disproportionately hurt women, cuts in Social Security
and Medicare in the U.S. would punish women more than men, and finally
reductions in taxes and growing inequality in wealth and income over the last
decade have disproportionately benefited men over women.
As I was planning my essay I was thinking about the
central features of the capitalist mode of production that has dominated most
of the world since the sixteenth century and how, politically, it has made
maximum use of differences to protect its fundamental features.
First, capitalism is a system based on the private ownership
of the means of production. Workers are paid to come to work to produce goods
that are sold by capitalists in the marketplace. The workers are paid a wage
that is less than the value of the products that are sold in the market. The
difference between the market price of the products and workers’ wages is where
profits come from. Marx used the term “exploitation” to refer to that system of
production in which the workers produced value based upon their time and energy
and the capitalists sold the products of their labor above the cost of labor.
Second, capitalism is a system that exists in
history. Over the years and centuries capitalist enterprises grew and grew.
Small enterprises consolidated. Huge ones emerged. When demand for one kind of
product declined others were produced. When markets in one geographic area
declined, capitalists moved elsewhere. When the demand for goods declined,
capitalists invested in services.
There has always been conflict over how much workers
were to be paid and ultimately who would control the work process, the
technology, and the profit. Marx called this “class struggle.” Because of
unequal political power there was a tendency for wages to decline except when
workers joined together and fought for the improvement of their lives. Creating
divisions among male and female workers and workers of different races and
ethnic backgrounds often weakened workers’ struggles to achieve economic
justice.
Capitalism regularly endured crises as demand for
products and places to invest profits declined and profits became so large that
capitalists could not figure out how to invest them to gain more profit. In our
own day, capitalists shifted dramatically from producing goods and services to
financial speculation and promoted political institutions to serve the needs of
financialization. And politics entered the picture when the largest capitalists
more or less successfully shaped political institutions to maximize their
interests.
Libraries of books describe the historical
development of capitalism and debate about how the system works and who
benefits from it. However, what remains basic to understanding capitalism as an
economic system is that it creates workers who dig the coal, harvest the crops,
clean the hotel rooms, teach the kids, and do everything else to keep the
system going. In a capitalist system almost everybody is a worker and, as the
system requires ever-expanding profits, the system strives to reduce the
differences among the kinds of work that people do to basic units of physical
and mental labor. Marx called this “proletarianization.”
A central feature of the “political” economy of capitalism is the drive to divide workers and
to use the political process to reduce workers’ realization that they have
fundamentally shared experiences; that is they all are in one way or another
“exploited.” A signature feature of capitalist political systems is their
effort to create and exacerbate differences; differences by race, gender,
ethnicity, sexual preference, and spiritual identities. The old slogan puts
this best: “divide and conquer.”
So today as progressives reflect on the recent
election and the future, it is important to get beyond narratives that in the
main emphasize difference. Eskow’s essay concerning the class war on women
serves as a useful reminder that what divides us could also unite us in a
common struggle.
In the months ahead we should rediscover the ways in
which we share experiences as workers in a capitalist system, at the same time as
we recognize different experiences based on race, gender, sexual preference,
and ethnicity.
One of the intriguing ideas embedded in the notion
of “21st century socialism,”
is that in a capitalist system workers are exploited in different ways and
suffer different degrees of pain but the
process of exploitation has a common structure and purpose. And after long years of reflection and political
practice, and many false starts, we can now integrate our awareness and respect
for difference into our conceptualization of what in human experience unites
us.
