Gender, Feminism and the Civil Commons analyzes the gendered character
of both corporate and popular agendas and practices. The volume chronicles the
gendered and feminist precursors of the new millennium movement for popular
global policies and practices in opposition to the narrow profit-maximization
agenda of the corporate regime. In this regard, Angela Miles argues that
³international organizing and solidarity-building have been the realm of
internationalizing feminist movements for decades² and further that ³the
capacities that the womenıs movement has established should be explicitly
recognized as feminist capacities which are serving as a basis for and are
being elaborated in the struggle against corporate globalization.²
Another prominent theme is
globalization from below understood as the development of international
alliances and linkages aimed at articulating alternatives to corporate
globalization. Gender, Feminism and the Civil Commons elaborates a conceptual
framework which identifies globalization from below as the process by which the
capacities of local civil commons ³any social construct which enables
universal access of members of a community to a life good² are strengthened
and linked to their counterparts in other parts of the world.#1
The globalization from below movement experienced both repression and expansion in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Repression of the globalizers from below proceeded through an unprecedented legal and media campaign to conflate the movement against global corporate rule with an undefined international terrorism. The US government sought to curb debate with the presidentıs all-or-nothing-fallacy that ³you are with me or with the terrorists.²
With breathtaking doublethink US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick revealed the strategic criminalization of opposition to the global corporate regime :
On 11 September, America, its open
society and its ideas came under attack by a malevolence that craves our panic,
retreat and abdication of global leadership This President and this
administration will fight for open markets. We will not be intimidated by those
who have taken to the streets to blame trade and America for the worldıs
ills. (cited in Ainger 2001, p. 22)2
Under cover of the false equation
of dissent and terrorism, corporate chiefs moved rapidly to slash up to a
million jobs, secure new military contracts and obtain corporate welfare bailouts
in the circumstances of world recession. Their state representatives then
fast-tracked more extreme global corporate rule provisions, notably at the
November 2001 World Trade Organization meeting in Doha.3
However, in a strategically
unexpected dialectic, the mobilization from below both deepened and widened
following the September 11th watershed. To the millions resisting corporate
globalization were added millions more opposed to the US war without end. The
very conflation of protestors with terrorist spurred anti-war and
anti-corporate globalizers to ever more sharply distinguish between the
democratic and the crypto-fascist; between popular fighters for the civil
commons and the new Satan which the US regime had constructed.
The studies in Gender, Feminism
and the Civil Commons address the hidden grounds of the emergent global crisis.
Gendered class relations at the heart of the new death economyı are contrasted
with those central to a global, democratic life economy. By foregrounding gender
and elaborating an alternative conception of the civil commonsı, this volume
opens understanding to the connected dimensions of the democratic movement for
globalization from below. By offering a radical, gendered reframing of history
into the present, the analyses construct across the horizons of containment and
possibility, the theoretical links between popular fighters for the civil
commons, their historical conjuncture and social scientific investigations.
The practical relations of the
civil commons are being rediscovered and advanced across national boundaries in
a worldwide movement becoming conscious of its revolutionary meaning. Hardt and
Negri (2000) argue that the incipient self-awareness of this world movement is
evident in its articulation of three demands: global citizenship, a social wage
for all, and the right to reappropriation by reparations. The feminist force
within and shaping this world transformedı is disclosed in the following pages
as the inner mover of the world out of male corporate barbarism and into global
life security and freedom.
Foot notes
1.In late September 2001 the third
conference of Peoplesı Global Action (pga) brought together in Cochabamba,
Bolivia, ³the embodiment of globalization from below² including ³Asian peasant
unions a million strong; European and Canadian anarchists; indigenous peoples
Mapuche, Maori, Aymara and many others; landless movements from everywhere;
South African activists against privatization; Thai sweatshop unionists;
Chilean human-rights workers [and] other assorted grassroots radicals of many
shapes, colours, sizes and beliefs. They were pioneers of global grassroots
resistance to the World Trade Organizationıs free-trade agenda, and have been
involved in the growing anti-globalization protests from Bangalore to Seattle
to Genoa.² This ³embodiment of globalization from below [] challenges both the
market fundamentalists and their pact with transnational finance, and the
religious fundamentalists who, threatened by the power that pact has given to
Western elites, respond with fascism and terror.² (Ainger 2001, p. 21)
Gender, Feminism and the Civil Commons: Women and the Anti-corporate, Anti-war Movement for Globalization from Below
Terisa E. Turner & Leigh S.
Brownhill
The thirteen contributions to
Gender, Feminism and the Civil Commons build on three bodies of previous
scholarship. First is the vast body of work by Korten (1995, 1996) and
Chossoduvsky (1998, 2000), which demonstrates that corporate globalization is
inimical to the ecological and human project. These authors stop short of
treating what c.l.r. James (1977) has called the future in the present or the
groundings for response by a variety of social forces. They do not engender
their analyses. Gender, Feminism and the Civil Commons examines the deep
history of the civil commons and the gendered class character of its
reassertion.
Second, Mies, Bennholt-Thomsen and
von Werlhof (1986, 1988, 1999, 2001) have written extensively about the
gendered class dimensions of capitalist growth. They along with many others
including Shiva (1989, 1993, 2001) and Benjamin and Turner (1992) have
established the centrality of nature along with womenıs labour and fertility to
corporate expansion. Gender, Feminism and the Civil Commons advances the
discussion by focusing on resistance to corporate expansion by women, peasants,
indigenous peoples and other unwaged social actors who produce much of their
own means of subsistence; who find that the context and inputs for such self-sufficiency
are being eroded by corporate rule; and, who are at the forefront of organizing
both resistance and alternatives.
Third, Waring (1999) has
introduced a broad audience to the importance in economics of unpriced and
unwaged productive activity. In so doing, she has drawn out the gendered
qualities of pre-capitalist and local subsistence social and economic processes
which Polyani (1944) has called the moral economy, and the embedded economy;
and Chambers (1974) has called the economy of affection. Their conclusions,
however, consign these expressions of human history to the dustbin, citing the
overwhelming dominance of the global market and the information revolution. In
contrast, Waring posits the theoretical critique in a brilliant paradigm shift
but only begins to document the practice of reasserting a civil commons
understood as the organized provision of the essentials of life to all. Gender,
Feminism and the Civil Commons documents the emergence and practices of key
social actors who aim to legitimize, protect and expand this life-centred
political economy. In so doing the collection builds upon Hardt and Negriıs
Empire (2000), Dyer-Withefordıs Cyber-Marx (1999), the Dalla Costası Paying the
Price (1995) and Duffy and Benjaminıs ground-breaking collection, The World
Transformed (1994).
We now consider some origins and
definitions of the terms civil commons, gender, feminism, gendered class
analysis and globalization from below.
The civil commons refers to any
institutionalized human agency aimed at ensuring for all members of society the
essentials of life and its development, or what McMurtry (1998) calls life
goods. The civil commons has innumerable expressions, from vernacular language
itself to public health care, regulated clean air and water, universal
education, public art and architecture, open environmental spaces, nutritious
food, adequate shelter and effective interaction. It is within the civil
commons that women create and socialize human beings, the most critical product
of human labour from the perspective of both capital and citizenry.
Angela Miles builds on the meaning
of the civil commons by tracing its gendered history in Womenıs Work, Nature
and Colonial Exploitation: Feminist Struggle for Alternatives to Corporate Globalization.
She argues that the civil commons, as a concept and as a reality, has its
origins in the unwaged work of women and in the theories and longstanding
practices of the international feminist movement. The term embraces the
concepts of use value and the subsistence perspective, both of which refer to
humansı ability to satisfy their needs, see to their growth and ensure their
well-being. In Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing the Commons, Mies and
Bennholdt-Thomsen outline the subsistence perspective, which encompasses other
facets of the commons such as the negative commons and the reinvented
commons.1# The civil commons opposes the now familiar concept of the global
commons which denotes the knowledge, spaces, capacities and natural resources that
are defined by corporate globalizers as available for private commodification
and exploitation.
Gender is understood throughout
the volume as varied social constructions of people as women and men within
widely differing structures of power. Depending on the social relations which
shape them, gender constructions can be systematically invasive and
dehumanizing or they can enable the flourishing life of women, men and their
communities. Feminism in turn is understood here as the political recognition
that women are exploited under monetized capitalism and a commitment to resist
and overcome this exploitation. Under capitalism, the work of unwaged women is
channeled into profit-making through men, who frequently are husbands or
political designates such as chiefs. Exploited men, thus, often take part in
the exploitation of women through what this volume calls a male deal with money
capital. Men who break with this male deal and join women in gendered class
alliances, undermine this exploitation and build alternatives of and through
the civil commons. In African Jubilee: Mau Mau Women and the Fight For
Fertility in Kenya 1986-2002, Turner and Brownhill elaborate on these concepts
within a theory of gendered class struggle.
Gendered class analysis gives
particular attention to the ways in which class relations are gendered and
ethnicized. Central here is the insight that capitalıs profits rely both on
unpaid (surplus) work of employees and unpaid work of people, mainly women, who
produce and service the employees. Men are structured into the hierarchy of
labour power to be directly exploited but also, through the male deal, to
discipline and organize the exploitation of subordinated women. In this way,
exploited men are encouraged to accept their own subordination to their
employers in exchange for the power they are allowed and required to exercise
over women and in a practical way channel the products of womenıs labour upward
to capital, thus enhancing profits.
In gendered, ethnicized class
analysis, a very wide range of resistance to exploitation becomes characterized
as class struggle. Refusal by unwaged workers, whether women in the household
or peasant producers, to work within these relationships is class struggle that
undermines capitalıs profits. Struggles circulate or reinforce each other from
locations as diverse as the sites of waged production, consumption,
reproduction and nature (Dyer-Witheford 1999). Transformative action by the
unwaged, such as defense of the environment by indigenous peoples, can be
understood as action to build the civil commons. Gendered class analysis is an
extension of Marxıs historical materialism theory that gives weight to the
gendered and ethnic character of class relations, and includes both the waged
and unwaged among the exploited. Hence it avoids a segregated analysis of
gender and race and is able to explain social action by the approximately 80
per cent of the worldıs unwaged population. An example of the application of
gendered class analysis is the study of contemporary social movements as
expressions of class struggle rather than as mobilizations outside of class.
Many such social movements are led by women, and, in particular, by women from
indigenous, majority-world communities. These movements frequently deny
supplies of cheap labour power, social space and nature to capital.
Because the current drive by
capital to recover and increase profits depends in particular on globalized and
more intense access to labour and nature (natural resources such as petroleum,
forests and water), popular social movements have proliferated. The explanation
for this proliferation is that unwaged people depend for their very survival on
nature, their own creativity and the social infrastructure they have made and,
in the face of corporate parasitism, struggle to maintain. Yet nature and
social infrastructure are considered by capital as free inputs which, under the
contemporary regime of corporate rule, are in danger of depletion because they
are not replenished or maintained by capital or states (Benjamin and Turner
1992). Indebted governments have been pressured in the name of free trade to
enter the corporate-rule regime. Globalizing capital thus depends on
commodifying the very basis of the livelihoods of unwaged peoples. The
expansion of womenıs, peasantsı and indigenous peoplesı social movements is one
of the results. This particular application of gendered class analysis is
especially useful in helping us understand the prominence of women and other
unwaged peoples in the rise of democratic social movements and in their
international networking for coordinated action.
Globalization from below is a term
which, from the mid-1990s, was used to describe the increasingly global
orientation of social movements (Korten 1995, 1996; The Ecologist 1992). A key
background element to this development is the creation of a global corporate
market through the shift from a bipolar to a unipolar world. Corporations have
expanded and, in the process, have enmeshed all peoples more rigorously in the
world market. This dual globalization of capital and of labour underlines the
internationalization of social forces from above and from below. The late 1980s
were dominated by a worldwide social, political and economic watershed that
eclipsed the centrally planned economies of the Soviet sphere and galvanized
democracy movements everywhere. The global corporate market was further
consolidated through unprecedented buy-outs and mergers among major
transnational corporations. One consequence of corporate concentration is
greater unity of peoples and markets along with closer ties among those
directly and indirectly employed by giant firms. Corporate merging itself
fosters globalization from below.#2 Megafirms also promote divisiveness and
reaction as the homogenization of values and commodities undermines local
identities, reciprocities and democratic practices (Mies and Shiva 1993). The
drive to unity prompted by corporate concentration is countered by corporate
attempts to prohibit united action. For example, the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment (mai) specifically ruled out secondary boycotts against not only one
company but also parties with whom it deals. But in Canada, an April 1998 court
finding ruled that secondary boycotts are legal (Turner 2002, McMurtry 1998).
Worldwide restrictions on united action and freedom of association reached a
new zenith in the denial of democracy by 2001 anti-terrorism legislation
(Daniels et al. 2001).
Another stimulus to globalization
from below was the emergence in the late 1980s and early 1990s of international
networks embracing Third World women, indigenous peoples, and policy-focused
activists such as those in the anti-apartheid movement. Peggy Antrobus points
out in this volume that majority world women generated the first gendered
critique of structural adjustment programs in the lead-up to the 1985 Nairobi
un womenıs conference. Indigenous peoples expanded regional and international
coordination in the late 1980s around environmental and human rights issues.
The human genome project and the rise of gene patenting promoted the
self-organization of specific groups of indigenous peoples, some of whom were
mobilized by the 500-year anniversary of Columbusı conquest of the Americas in
1992 (Tokar 2001). Especially in the 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement
pioneered global campaigns to boycott transnational corporations profiting
directly or indirectly from business with the South African apartheid regime.
Coincident with this emergence of new social forces was the rise of a new
labour internationalism on the part of waged workers in and out of unions.
These new social movement actors convened international meetings and
coordinated practical actions on a global scale to promote change in
governmental and corporate policies. In 1993 Vandana Shiva characterized the
Indian popular rejection of trade-related intellectual property rights (trips)
as a simultaneously positive call for collective and community property rights.
The Uruguay Round of gatt (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) accelerated
the articulation of international trade regulations: the critiques of these
regulations by those adversely affected by them mirrored the international
scope of the new trade regime.
As corporate rule consolidated
itself, the popular responses to underdevelopment, inequity, political
repression and dispossession increasingly focused on the analysis of and
opposition to the global corporate agenda. The Mexican Zapatista (ezln)
uprising of 1994 emerged from a Chiapas womenıs mobilization to defend
subsistence culture against the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). It
led to the organization of two global Encuentros (meetings or encounters) in
which people from all societies were invited to propose alternatives to corporate
globalization and the neo-liberal agenda. The Encuentros were accompanied by
experiments with international referendums through which citizens were invited
to vote on economic alternatives using the Internet. The partially successful
1997 international resistance to secretive efforts to formulate and impose the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment (mai) was another milestone in the
processes of globalization from below (Turner 2002, p. 194-198; Mies and von
Werlhof 1999). Between November 1999 and January 2002, many international
meetings to expand and administer corporate globalization have attracted
hundreds of thousands of protestors. The protesters argued against
anti-democratic trade and investment agreements while offering
counter-conceptions of popular democracy.
Local movements have taken on an
international scope in a series of massive demonstrations beginning in Seattle
against the World Trade Organization (wto) in December 1999. The Battle of
Seattle spawned a chain reaction of demonstrations against the March 2000
Boston meeting on genetically modified organisms, the April 2000 Washington dc
meeting of the World Bank and imf, the June 2000 Windsor, Canada meeting of the
Organization of American States, the September 2000 Melbourne, Australia
meeting of the International Economic Forum, the September 2000 Prague meeting
of the World Bank and imf, The April 2001 Quebec City meeting of 34 heads of
state for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), the June 2001 Gothenburg
European Union Summit, the July 2001 Genoa g8 meeting, the planned but
cancelled September 2001 Washington dc meeting of the World Bank and imf, the
November 2001 meetings in Ottawa of the g20 and in Doha, Qatar of the wto, and
the New York City meeting of the World Economic Forum in January 2002. The
long-standing popular responses to policies of structural adjustment and
corporate rule in developing countries have now been joined by diverse voices
from the developed world (Shiva 1999, p. 204-206).
The Internet has been a crucial
asset in the constitution and expansion of the globalization from below
movement. In the 24-month period after the December 1999 Battle of Seattle, an
unprecedented international educational process framed in terms of corporate
versus popular globalization has unfolded. Scholarly, policy and mass-media
journals feature this debate as do university courses, research programs,
academic and Internet conferences and policy negotiations. The expansion of
debates on globalization from above and below is being further stimulated
through campaigns to declare illegal the frameworks for trade embodied in the
wto and regional trade agreements (Clarke 2000, Chossoduvsky 2000, Fogal 2000).
Such challenges to the very legality of the framework for corporate globalization
further legitimize the actions by those involved in globalization from below to
establish an international life economy that prioritizes the subsistence needs
of the earth and its inhabitants (McMurtry and Turner 2000, p. 6).
The thirteen studies in Gender,
Feminism and the Civil Commons are organized into three sections: Theories and
Histories; Corporate Enclosures; and Resistances and Transformations.
i. theories and histories
John McMurtryıs The Lifeground,
the Civil Commons and the Corporate Male Gang argues that corporate
globalizationıs principal victims and resisters are the women of the majority
and minority worlds. It provides the conceptual bearings required to understand
the expropriation and destruction of ecological and civil infrastructures by
the transnational corporate system. The framework of analysis identifies the
overlooked life-ground and civil commons, societyıs evolving social immune
system and the life-value calculus by which to assess authentic social
development and regression. This study distinguishes the civil commons and the
life-ground from the radically different notions of the global commons (as
propounded by the World Bank and other international bodies), the life-world (as
understood by Habermas and his following), civil society (as understood from
Hegel to current political rhetoric), and the global free market (the master
slogan of the transnational corporate system).
Angela Milesı Womenıs Work, Nature
and Colonial Exploitation: Feminist Struggle for Alternatives to Corporate
Globalization analyzes the ongoing global struggle against corporate enclosure
and for a transformational society centred on feminist principles and
practices. It argues that the civil commons, as a concept and as a reality, has
its origins in the unwaged work of women and in the theories and longstanding
practices of the international feminist movement(s). The emergence of a global
feminist consensus indicates the universal, negative impact on women and on the
earth of neoliberal policies. This consensus embraces the needs and demands of
a cross section of humanity in the struggle against corporate globalization and
for a feminist practice of reclaiming the global commons.
Joti Sekhon distinguishes feminist
participatory democracy from limited liberal-democratic practice in Democratic
Theories and Womenıs Practices. Conventional debates on democratic processes
have focused primarily on political activities in the public sphere, where the
participation of women is limited; and they have failed to adequately address
patriarchal institutional structures that exclude the diverse range of womenıs
activities that have political implications.
Feminist rethinking of the concept
of democracy is related to participatory democracy that broadens the concept to
include active participation in decision-making in the community, in the
workplace, in interpersonal relationships and in formal political institutions.
This broader vision of democracy allows recognition of the efforts by the poor,
the working classes, peasants, women, indigenous peoples, and other
disadvantaged and dispossessed groups to participate in making decisions that
affect them, and to challenge institutional structures and processes that constrain
them.
ii.
corporate enclosures
Torry Dickinsonıs Labourıs Window
on the Global Commons: Non-Wage Work and Feminist Movements in a Changing World
demonstrates that global economic development is not a process of global
convergence that brings higher wage export manufacturing jobs to women who used
to toil in the fields. This global economic process is not about gradually
equalizing wages or offering expanded opportunities to a new generation of
girls in the semi-periphery and periphery. It is about establishing new forms
of inequality and restratifying world labor. The conclusion suggests that
women- and community-centered economic relationships may be the only option for
survival and development.
In Genre et enjeux de securité
humaine: bâtir un programme de recherche-action, Rosalind Boyd and Suzanne
Boutin outline an ongoing research-action program to address the needs of
civilians, especially women and children, who are adversely affected by violent
political conflicts. This university-community cooperative program in Montreal
is concerned with how to help war victims resume their lives and feel safe and
secure within the borders of the post-conflict state, within the region or in
their new countries of residence.
Ana Islaıs Enclosure and Micro-Enterprise
as Sustainable Development: The Case of the Canada/Costa Rica Debt-For-Nature
Investment demonstrates that debt-for-nature investment conforms to the
neoclassical model of economic development, which itself underlies the current
environmental, social and cultural crisis. The Costa Rican ngos funded under
the debt-for-nature swap operationalize the ostensible commitment of the World
Bank, the imf, and the ngo, the World Wildlife Fund Canada, to pursue
³sustainable development² and ³gender equity² by means of the capitalist
market. A small fraction of Costa Ricaıs debt is relieved at the cost of
criminalizing citizens excluded from the commons, newly legislated as parks,
and by incorporating rural women into global market circuits that impoverish and
disempower them. In documenting these practices and their consequences for
local populations, Islaıs research challenges the claim that debt-for-nature
investment reduces poverty and ecological destruction and, instead, uncovers
the inadequacy of market-based ³solutions,² which in practice worsen the
problems they claim to solve.
Peggy Antrobusı Womenıs Defense of
Local Politics in the Face of Structural Adjustment and Globalization shows how
socio-economic and political developments in the small island states of the
English-speaking Caribbean (caricom) have always been shaped by global events
and trends as these have been adopted, modified or resisted in relation to the
specific conditions prevailing in these islands. This interaction between the
local and the global, and the implications for securing the goals of
sustainable livelihoods, are illustrated with reference to Peggy Antrobusı own
experience in national planning in the late 1950s, in local and community
development in the 1960s and in Women in Development (wid) programs from 1974
to date. One response to structural adjustment was wid programming, the success
of which was limited by the overwhelming influence of macro-economic shifts
towards neo-liberal policies. The emergence of a Caribbean womenıs movement in
the context of the un Decade for Women marked the beginning of a new kind of
politics in this region. This politics was much more aware of global events and
trends. It forged a distinct identity for Caribbean women who demonstrated their
capacities to strategize across regional and national borders. This identity as
Caribbean women within a larger international womenıs movement enriched and
empowered women in the region to promote their own agendas, pursue their own
priorities and launch their own campaigns while drawing on the support and
solidarity of women from other countries.
Nick Dyer-Withefordıs Nintendo
Capitalism: Enclosures and Insurgencies, Virtual and Terrestrial develops the
premise that the idea of the commons is today emerging as a crucial concept for
activists and thinkers involved in myriad mobilizations around the planet. This
follows from a shared experience of enclosure (the dispossession, expropriation
and fencing-in, across a wide variety of economic, social and psychological
registers) by the forces of a globally triumphant world market. A case study
connects two aspects of this process. The first is the binding of minds and
imaginations in the information spaces dominated by media corporations, using
the example of Nintendo, a leading company in the video game business. The
second facet of the contemporary enclosures is the incarceration of laboring
bodies of dispossessed peasants and subsistence providers in the factory-spaces
of these new planetary industrial zones. The specific case involves an assembly
plant operated by a Nintendo subcontractor, Maxi-Switch, in the Mexican
maquiladoras, where the destruction of a pre-capitalist peasant agriculture has
created a labor force available for re-enclosure and multinational exploitation
in the ³postmodern Satanic Mills² of globalized capital.
iii. resistance and transformation
Maria Miesı and Veronika
Bennholdt-Thomsenıs Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing the Commons opens
with the following questions: Who destroys the commons? Why have the commons to
be reinvented? Can there be something like global commons? What can new commons
be in rich industrialized countries? The authors argue that there can be no
reinvention of the commons in the industrialized North without a defense of the
commons in the largely subsistence-based South. They identify two opposed
concepts of reinventing the commons: first, that which means to defend, to
reclaim and to reinvent the commons from below, through grassroots action of
local people for local people; and, second, the concept constructed and
invented from above, namely the concept of global commons, which is being
introduced by international agencies and global players, mostly for the benefit
of tncs. The authors conclude that commons cannot exist without a community,
but equally the community cannot exist without economy, in the sense of
oikonomia, that is, the reproduction of human beings within the social and the
natural household. Hence, reinventing the commons is linked to the reinvention
of the communal or commons-linked economy.
Silvia Federiciıs Women,
Globalization and the International Womenıs Movement argues that globalization
is an attempt to intensify the exploitation of labor through a worldwide
process of expropriation of workers from their land, and acquired entitlements;
disinvestment in the process of reproduction, and investment in warfare. As
such, it is primarily an attack on women and reproduction. The study assesses
the main forms of this attack, the struggles that women are making in response,
and the prospects for the construction of an international feminist movement.
African Jubilee: Mau Mau
Resurgence and the Fight For Fertility in Kenya 1986-2002 by Terisa E. Turner
and Leigh S. Brownhill, examines a key moment in the fight for fertility in
post-colonial Kenya: the large-scale reappropriation of land by landless people
across Kenya in the new millennium. This rebirth of the 1950s Mau Mau armed
struggle for land and freedom is pursued through the 4.5 million-strong
Congress (Mungiki in Gikuyu) and the Organization of Villagers (Muungano wa
Wanavijiji). It is a struggle between subsistence and commodification, which is
conceptualized as a fight for control over fertility. Fertility is understood
as the capacity to produce people, food, cultural expressions, social networks,
and natural and built space. The fight for control over fertility is a
three-way struggle among (1) women producers and their male allies who seek to
defend and revive subsistence, (2) Kenyan male dealers who seek to control
womenıs labour and other production resources within commodified capitalist
relations and (3) international capitalists and their governmental brokers. The
study examines ten cases of land occupation and assesses the gains and losses
for each of the three sets of actors in the fight for fertility. It concludes
that women subsistence producers and their allies in gendered class alliances
have gained much ground and that the Kenyan land occupations are part of the
movement for globalization from below to rebuild the civil commons alternative
to corporate rule.
Marc Epprechtıs ³What an
abomination, a rottenness of culture²: Reflections Upon the Gay Rights Movement
in southern Africa, focuses on the mid-1990s watershed for gays, lesbians,
bisexual and transgendered people in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, South
Africaıs 1996 constitution included the right to freedom from discrimination on
the basis of sex, gender and sexual orientation. On the other hand, the
presidents of Zimbabwe, Namibia and other African nations vehemently denounced
homosexuality and equated gay rights with Western imperialism. The study
examines the vibrant social movement that has sparked such antithetical
developments. It focuses on the historical factors behind Africaıs belated
awareness of gay rights as a human rights issue, the nature of the reaction
against it, and the achievements and strategies of the gay rights movement in
(mainly) southern Africa today. It concludes that out gay activists are playing
a disproportionately important role both in the transition to democracy and in
the fight against hiv/aids.
Gender, Feminism and the Civil
Commons concludes with Habiba Zamanıs Globalization from Below: Feminization of
Migration, Resistance and Empowerment A Case Study, which explores how the
Philippine Women Centre in Vancouver has resisted the forces of
neo-colonialism, imperialism and corporate globalization. The Centreıs
activities have ranged from programs to empower the Filipino women in Vancouver,
and promoting the rights of domestic workers in Canada, to building strategies
of resistance against Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (apec) and against the
trafficking in Filipino women. The study examines the socio-economic-political
forces that led to the establishment of the Centre; assesses its strategies for
the advancement of Filipino women workersı rights around the world; and
highlights its promotion of alliances across national boundaries to fight
global corporate rule.
references
Ainger, K., ³A Culture of Life, a
Culture of Death,² New Internationalist, 340, 2001, p. 20-22.
Benjamin, C. and T. E. Turner,
³Counterplanning From the Commons: Labour, Capital and the New Social
Movements,² Labour, Capital and Society, 25, 1992, p. 218-248.
Bennholdt-Thomsen, V., N. Faraclas
and C. Von Werlhof, eds., There Is An Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide
Resistance to Corporate Globalization, London, Zed, 2001.
Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. and M. Mies,
The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, London, Zed, 1999.
Brownhill, L. S., W. M. Kaara and
T. E. Turner, ³Gender relations and sustainable agriculture: Rural Womenıs
Resistance to Structural Adjustment in Kenya,² Canadian Woman Studies/Les
Cahiers de la Femme, 17, 2, 1997, p. 40-44.
Caroit, J.-M., ³Chavez crusade
turns oil into a weapon,² The Guardian Weekly, 14-20 September 2000, p. 31.
Chambers, R., Managing Rural
Development: Ideas and Experience From East Africa, Uppsala, Scandinavian
Institute of African Studies, 1974.
Chomsky, N., Profit Over People:
Neoliberalism and Global Order, New York, Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Chossoduvsky, M. ³Seattle and
Beyond: The Illegality of the wto,² CovertAction Quarterly, 69, 2000 p. 54-59,
see also www.covertaction.org.
____, The Globalization of
Poverty, London, Zed, 1998.
Clarke, T., ³How to take advantage
of the WTOıs crisis of legitimacy,ı² CCPA Monitor 7, 2, June 2000, p. 1-6;
www.policyalternatives.ca
Dalla Costa, M. and G. F. Dalla
Costa, eds., Paying the Price: Women and the Politics of International Economic
Strategy, New Jersey, Zed, 1995.
Daniels, R. J., P. Macklem and K.
Roach, eds., The Security of Freedom: Essays on Canadaıs Anti-Terrorism Bill,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Duffy, C. and C. Benjamin, The
World Transformed, Guelph, Rhi-Zone, 1992.
Dyer-Witheford, N., Cyber-Marx:
Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Urbana and
Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Fogal, C., ³The MAI is in the
FTAA,² Defense of Canadian Liberty Committee, 22 April 2000,
www.canadianliberty.bc.ca.
George, S., ³The Corporate Utopian
Dream,² in Taylor, E., ed., The WTO and the Global War System, Vancouver,
International Network on Disarmament and Globalization, 28 November 1999, p.
1-2; www.indg.org.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri, Empire,
New Haven, Harvard University Press, 2000.
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Present, London, Allison & Busby, 1977.
Korten, D. C. ³The Failures of
Bretton Woods,² in Mander, J and E. Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy: And For a Turn Toward
the Local, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1996.
Korten, D. C., When Corporations
Rule the World, New York, Kumarian Press, 1995.
Marx, K., C
The Life-Ground, the Civil Commons and the Corporate Male Gang
John McMurtry
abstract
Scientific and everyday language
have long lacked generic concepts to identify the marketıs underlying systems
of natural and social reproduction. In consequence, expropriation and
destruction of these ecological and civil infrastructures by monetised capital
expansion has evaded understanding. This investigation provides the conceptual
bearings required to understand what has occurred and its modes of resolution
by explanation of the long overlooked ³life-ground² and ³civil commons², their
evolving ³social immune system², and a ³life-value calculus² whereby to assess
authentic social development and retardation. At the same time, the analysis
explains the causal structure behind a world-wide degradation and confiscation
of life infrastructures whose principal victims and resisters are unwaged
women. Finally, the argument distinguishes the civil commons and the
life-ground from notions of ³the global commons², ³the life-world² of Habermas,
and the now dominant concept of ³civil society.² Throughout, the analysis draws
on real-life examples to demonstrate deep infrastructures of human life advance
and regression which have eluded the received paradigms of social and political
analysis.
résumé
Depuis bien longtemps, il manque
dans le langage scientifique quotidien de notions générales pour identifier les
systèmes de la reproduction naturelle et sociale qui sont à la base du marché.
Par conséquent, lıexpropriation et la destruction des ces infrastructures
écologiques et civiles par lıexpansion du capital monétaire échappent à la
compréhension. Pour expliquer ce phénomène et ces modes de résolution actuels,
cette étude fournit une base conceptuelle des notions ignorées depuis
longtemps, telles que la Ğ base vitale ğ, la Ğ commune civile ğ, le Ğ système
immunitaire social ğ qui en émerge, et le Ğ calcul des valeurs vitales ğ,
notions par lesquelles on évalue le vrai développement social ou le retard. Par
ailleurs, lıanalyse démontre la structure causale entre la dégradation mondiale
et la confiscation des infrastructures vitales dont les principales victimes et
opposantes sont les femmes au travail non rémunéré. Enfin, lıanalyse
différencie la notion de la commune civile et de la base vitale de celles des Ğ
biens publics globaux ğ, du Ğ monde de la vie ğ de Habermas, et de la Ğ société
civile ğ qui dominent dans le discours présent. Lıanalyse se sert des exemples
actuels pour illustrer les infrastructures profondes des progrès et des reculs
de la vie humaine qui ont échappé aux paradigmes de lıanalyse sociale et
politique actuelle.
introduction
The civil commons can be defined
as any co-operative human construct that enables the access of all members of a
community to life goods. Like everyday language, which is its base, the civil
commons is normally presupposed as a given order of the world. It is also
conflated in this way with what is not the civil commons ancestral tradition,
custom and law which are all assumed as the fabric of everyday life, ³our way
of life.² There is no greater inertial block to social development than this
conflation. It blinkers out the distinctive nature of the civil commons ground.
A social practice, institution or
obligation only qualifies for the civil commons insofar as its implementation
in fact gives its social members universal access to life goods. Thus the
instituted belief that oneıs own societyıs hierarchy of privilege is specially
favoured by divine design is not a civil commons formation, nor is any customary
practice like rite-of-passage mutilation or ³natural rate of unemployment² that
may be assumed as ultimately necessary and good, but is, in fact,
systematically life-disabling.
On the other hand, a societyıs
instituted provisions of means of life for those in need, for example the old
and the ill, are quintessentially civil commons constructs. So are
environmentally sustaining regulations that recognize and protect, by force of
law, the life-values of natural commons. A foundational distinction arises
here. The regulatory inhibitions protecting natural commons as sources of life
goods make the natural commons a civil commons a distinction that has been
fatefully overlooked in historical and social scientific literature.1
Because the civil commons of a
society is usually assumed as an everyday substratum of life by its members,
there is little recognition of it. In fact, a powerful vested interest combats
this recognition as an unspoken threat to dominant privileges especially if
some own a great deal of private property while many go homeless or starve.2
Consequently, in any society of oppressive inequalities, the civil commons is
blocked from view by official representations, or denounced as ³unaffordable²
or ³socialist.²
The fatal flaw of the dominant
global market mind-set today is that it cannot, in principle, see the common
life-interest which is the regulating base of the civil commons. This is
because it cannot think past profit and priced commodities as a way of
providing people with goods. In consequence, the market value-set cannot
recognize the defence and the production of otherwise scarce means of life as
the meaning of an economy. Accordingly, the civil commons infrastructures of
non-capitalist economic formations have been the objects of genocidal invasion
and war for five hundred years from the continuous enclosures of the natural
commons for centuries in Britain and its imperial colonies, through the age of
the inter-continental slave trade, to the stripping of social sectors and
public regulatory systems in the world with the post-1980 era of transnational
privatization and corporate globalization.3
i.
underneath global market absolutism
When Margaret Thatcher said,
³Society does not exist, only individuals and their families do,² she expressed
the market metaphysic of atomic and self-seeking market agents by which the
globalization ideology is programmed a value-set in which the civil commons
snuffed out a priori. At its most life-blind, this mind-set repudiates any civilly
protected life-good that does not yield profit as a socialist provocation
³regulatory invasion,² ³tax expropriation,² ³obstruction of the market,² and so
on. The demands of the corporate market absolutism become warlike the more
independent a society is in providing non-priced goods and life-spaces free of
for-profit occupation. This deep-structural conflict of interest is an unseen
war on society across such phenomena as the death squads in the Third World and
the destruction of the welfare state.4
Although civil commons
institutions like national banks that loan to governments at low interest in
place of private bondholders, public broadcasting without advertisersı
financial control, public management of natural resource extraction, and public
health insurance and tuition-free education all work very well for the common
life interest, they also block out profitable control of these lucrative
resources and markets for the corporate sector. In the majority world,
community land title, political mobilization of the poor, union organization
and, above all, public ownership of natural resources have been deemed
³communist,² and their leaders targeted for assassination.
a. the
unseen base
Yet no market can survive or
flourish for long without the underlying life infrastructure of the civil
commons sustaining its social life-host as the lesson of the gigantically
failed capitalist experiment in the ex-Soviet Union shows. The civil commons
remains, nonetheless, unrecognized and untheorized as the unifying
infrastructure of every successful social order through history. It does not
even have a name.
Undefined vague categories of the
welfare state on the one hand, or social capital on the other, symptomize the
problem. Their ubiquitous usage comes with no criterion to distinguish the
life-serving civil commons from corporate subsidy schemes or bureaucratic
empire-building masked in phrases of the public interest. In particular, no
principle of distinction has been available to pick out public expenditures
which enable citizens with vital means of life (the civil commons) from state
outlays which merely bleed or oppress the citizenry with no gain in their
actual life capabilities (eg., rug-ranking hierarchies, non-defensive military
systems, or public porkbarrels for dominant political parties).5 Even
market-critical social theory lacks a category by which to identify this
underpinning life infrastructure of societies, and, more deeply, a general
principle by which to distinguish expenditures on it from structures of state
repression and bureaucratic waste.6
The problem of civil commons
blindness is therefore tridimensional: the unconscious presupposition of its
means of life as an everyday given, selection against its community-owned
resources by dominant private property and profit interests, and a general
theoretical underdevelopment in matters of unpriced life-means sustaining daily
existence. Even Marxıs wage-centred paradigm is blind to the latter.7 The life
infrastructure of the civil commons has in these ways remained blocked from
conscious identification or recognition of its underlying normative ground of
effective social life-organization across cultures and life domains.
b. the
life-ground under attack
The problem is, at bottom, a
market-induced block against seeing what is there. As long evolved and shared
life-goods of universally accessible clean air and water, healthcare and
education, public assistance and housing, community culture and communications,
collective walkways and transit, and biodiverse life-spaces are rapidly
degraded or stripped across the globe by a corporately-led program of defunding
and privatization, there is no unifying concept by which to comprehend or to
defend what is, in fact, being invaded and overrun. It is as if a society were
to be occupied and its social life base appropriated and dismantled by a
foreign invasion it cannot recognize because it cannot comprehend its own
deepest structures of community life-organization. Marxian thought, ironically,
conforms to this blocking out of the civil commons insofar as its theoretical
base is productive forces and class struggle, not the social and environmental
life-ground underlying both. Liberal thought is in principle far blinder
because it is a doctrine for maximally limiting the powers of the collective,
and granting ultimate sovereignty to rights of private property.8 These rights,
in turn, no longer have any grounding at all in whether they protect or enable
the actual life needs and capacities of community members.9
In these ways, societyıs
life-ground of reproduction has been effectively lost in a conceptual amnesia.
At the root of the blindness is a dominant economic paradigm which has no life
coordinates in its econometrics of input and output revenues. While its ruling
value of monetized growth escalates velocities and volumes of private money
demand and strip-mines ecosystems and domestic economies across the planet, its
value calculus cannot discern any problem. This is because the market paradigm
has no life parameters of judgement by which to recognize the disorder.10
ii. natural versus civil commons
a. londoners
against enclosures (1542)
Before this time the towns about
London had so enclosed the common fields with hedges and ditches, that neither
the young men of the city might shoot, nor the ancient persons might walk for
their pleasure in the fields, except their bows be taken away [] or honest
persons arrested or indicted [] a great number of the city assembled
themselves in a morning, and a turner in a foolıs coat came crying through the
city, ³Shovels and spades!² and so many people followed that it was a wonder,
and within a short space all the hedge walls about the towns were cast down,
and the ditches filled, and everything made plain, the workmen were so diligent
[] and so after the fields were never hedged. (cited from Hall 1984, p.
106-107)
Here the natural commons become
the social construct of the civil commons so far as natural conditions of life
are protected for universal access to their life goods by all members of the
community in this case by a spontaneous collective uprising against private
enclosures ³that were never hedged after.² If the young men with bows and
arrows were themselves to privately appropriate the life goods of this socially
protected commons so as to diminish its reproduction of natural life values,
then, to that extent, these young men would have violated the civil commons,
both as food providers and as host of fellow creaturesı lives.
b. turkwel
river, kenya (time immemoriam before privatization)
During the long dry seasons in the
far north west of Kenya, the people of the Turkwel River keep themselves alive
by feeding their goats on the pods of the acacia trees growing on its banks.
[] The acacia woods are a common: a resource owned by many families. Like all
the commons of the Turkana people, they are controlled with fierce
determination. (Monbiot 1994)
Here again we can distinguish
between the natural commons as an ecologically given land or resource and the
civil commons that effectively protects it and life means, and ensures access
of community members to its continuing vital means of existence. As with the
traditional village commons of England before their private appropriation by
agribusiness capitalism, the Kenyan acacia trees of the Turkwel River were
regulated to sustain their provision of life goods for all. Here too, rationing
defence of this communal access to natural means of life was an essential
social construct for their reproduction through time exactly the opposite
structure of the commons projected onto it by the market ideology of
privatization for protection (see note 1).
In both Kenya and England cases of
the civil commons in rudimentary form, there were strict community rules or
customs to ensure both that the natural resources were preserved and that there
was continued access of all members of the community to their life wealth. In
the English commons, for example, there was an effectively binding rule that a
commoner could only turn out as many head of livestock to the shared pasture as
were kept in the household corral over the winter. This is the nature of the
civil commons in its earlier forms, still conceived as the commons or now
with planetary ecosystem parameters, the global commons. It becomes civil
commons insofar as the common life-good for which it provides is effectively
protected by society from privatization or destruction.11
The global commons is a recent
coinage and fails as much as past commons concepts to recognize this protective
dimension that is all-important to the sustainability of shared life means.12
The us-led failure of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change and its simultaneous
exclusionary militarization of space make this deep-structural pattern of
privatization and destruction all too clear underneath official market ideology
and representations.13
c. costa
rica (1941-80)
The
Calderonista-Catholic-Communist alliance reflected [] a convergence of
interests [] in an unusual historical conjuncture. [] The social security
legislation passed in 1941 laid the groundwork for a national medical care
system and provided obligatory health, disability, retirement, unemployment,
maternity, and life-insurance for salaries below 300 colones []. The Social
Guaranteesı [a year later] included the formal creation of a national
healthcare system, a broader system of retirement and disability pensions [] a
low-cost housing program a new Labor Code minimum wage commission []. The
1948 civil war [won by the social democrat party] repressed the defeated
communists and calderonistas as well as organized labor [but]
institutionalized the reform process [] with a 10% tax on capital
constitutional prohibition of a standing army [] [and] shatter[ed] the
economic stranglehold of the powerful agro-export and banking families []
purchasing grain from farmers at guaranteed prices [] [and constructing]
retail outlets providing low-cost foods []. By the late 1970ıs, roughly
one-third of all agricultural producers belonged to cooperatives [which with] a
variety of public and cooperative research and extension institutions gave
Costa Rica the highest per hectare yields in the world and assured that coffee
production remained profitable in even times of depressed prices []. By 1980,
a remarkable 27% of the population of university-student age was enrolled in 30
institutions of higher learning a large-scale program of family assistance
[] established healthcare programs in rural zones and provided virtually all
low-income students with nutritious hot meals. (Edelmann 1999, p. 53-56)
I will not, here, labour the
post-1980 attacks on this evolving civil commons of Costa Rica, except to
observe that they were, by far, the same devices of civil commons stripping as
elsewhere in the world trebled oil prices, imposed debt crisis by
us-multiplied compound-interest rates, and imf and World Bank loans to pay high
debt loads on condition of privatizing reforms.14
Global market advocates endlessly
contend that all such government programs required restructuring for
efficiency. However, the case of Costa Rica discloses the opposite just as
comparisons of Russia or Nicaragua or Yugoslavia before and after the private
capitalization of their economies demonstrate more strikingly. Costa Ricaıs
people were far more aware of this pattern of fact than state and market
planners. Their civil commons fightbacks included a two-week public occupation
of the streets in April 2000 to successfully reverse a government decision to
privatize the nationıs publicly owned electrical-power system, the Costa Rica
Institute of Electricity. A bill was passed at the same time to include rights
for transnational corporate access to and control of the genetic codes of Costa
Ricaıs tropical-forest flora and fauna. (Rogers 2000, p. 2-5)
In overview, what is of particular
explanatory interest in these examples is that an underlying and unifying logic
links very different cases of civil commons constructions across times,
cultures and instances. All are structured to enable societyıs members a
universal access to one or another vital means of life or life good in some
form a life good being formally distinguished from a commodity by (1) its
freedom from price barrier, and (2) its property of enabling vital
life-capabilities.
Civil commons means of life are
characterized by the following features. All are life-serving structures which
reproduction is regulated by consideration of life rather than production or
price gains. All are non-utopian, functional structures of cooperative,
non-profit economic organization of the common life interest of society. And
all are, predictably, attacked by corporate-state policies of defunding and by
mass media vilification as ³wasteful cost burdens.²
In sum, the organizing idea of the
civil commons integrates all of societyıs protection and provision of unpriced
life goods into a common supporting structure of social meaning shared by all
cultures. The civil commons is, we might say, the long-missing link between the
is of economic organization for ever-accumulating private-profit maximization,
on the one hand, and the ought of social organization for citizensı vital
life-needs and capacities, on the other. But unlike utopian and revolutionary
ideals with which we are familiar, the civil commons is a long-evolved
historical fact underlying our present without any received category to
designate it.
iii. the civil commons as infrastructure of social evolution
The roots of the civil commons are
deeply entrenched. They begin with the origins of language itself, the
prototype and model of both humanityıs and the civil commonsı evolution. The
language of everyday life and community interaction is not only a ground and
model of the civil commons, but its prime medium and universal organizer of
human understanding. We know little of the origins of language, but most agree
it distinguishes human social organization. The ability to communicate the
properties, locations and relations of the worldıs creatures, plants and
minerals by symbolic universals food to eat, water and game sources, places
to go or not, names of individual members and so on confers on humanity its
greatest advantage of life reproduction, enjoyment and expression. From the
beginning, language has been the speciesı most important distinguishing tool.
It is also the communicative field of humanityıs evolving individual and social
ideas, projects and creations. Its second-order world of signs, meanings and
organizing concepts has lifted the species onto another ontological plane.
What is most important about the
nature of language for our understanding of human society and its development
is something philosophers and scientists have failed to register. The signs and
syntaxes of a language become ever richer for each the more others use and
share them. Language is thus a moving margin of life-range, deepening and
broadening the more people have and use it in common. Without its shared use,
it becomes a dead language. Confined to a class or priest caste in its written
form, as it has been through history, a language loses its powers of
communication in direct proportion to its confinement. This has been seen in
the past with the court-monopolized languages of Sanskrit, Latin and Norman French.
Today, the civil commons of language is controlled in its public expression by
a corporate agenda of copyright and dissemination that selects only what might
profit corporate stockholders. It is thus debased into a conditioning mechanism
of ad imperatives and slogans rather than being the interactive field of
meaning that defines us as humans.
The more the wealth of a language
is accessible and disseminated to everyone, the more individual people are able
to communicate by its expressive resources. The more they are able to
differentiate and extend their conscious lives by the self-directed exchanges
of its symbols and structures. In contrast, the global market system
constructs, selects and communicates languageıs constructions only so far as
they maximize shareholdersı profits, increasingly deforming it into a one-way
propaganda of sectarian signals.
Language is, in this way, a model
of the civil commons insofar as it grows in value for each the more it is
universally accessible and shared by all. Yet, this is not a property of
language that has been observed in numberless learned works on language. This
lost consciousness of languageıs underlying nature as the communal basis of
individuality is representative. Individuating wealth in common property is
incoceivable to the metaphysic of the market. It can only comprehend the
individual through what he or she appropriates in priced goods and private
profit. ³Market man,² as Gauthier (1986, p. 177) declares in basing his
morality on its principle, ³always seeks more.²
The marketıs inner logic has been
applied to the very conditions of life itself. As a consequence, the global
commons of the air, the atmosphere and the oceans have become industrial sinks,
while the worldıs forests and ocean habitats have been invaded and occupied as
moving reserves of privatized stripping and extraction. At the same time,
societies themselves have become increasingly restructured as corporate
instruments and resource sites, and the genetic structures of life-forms themselves
patented as private monopolies.15 But neither theory nor popular consciousness
registers the civil commonsı meaning as the common life-ground that underlies
human individuation. Conversely, it does not recognize the systemic threat to
life individuation by the homogenizing prescriptions of global marketization
masked as an agenda of ³individual freedom.²
iv.
the social immune system
As we have observed, language is
the primary layer of the civil commons. However, social life-organizations have
always survived because they have evolved a multi-level system of institutional
structures that protect and facilitate the lives of all their members. From the
beginning of human culture, these social immune institutions have regulated the
membersı lives and functions so as to prevent or to expel what is perceived as
dangerous to the communityıs health and well-being. Whether in ancient Jewish
or Egyptian or Hindu or Melanesian societies, we find this underlying structure
of organization as a cultural universal of enduring human social orders.
Despite the primitive nature of
the early development of these regulatory systems, their overriding organizing
principle of keeping the unclean away from the clean to protect the social body
from life-threatening disorders had many effective functions of social body
defence.16 For example, infected or toxic or dysfunctional food products and
practices were excluded from contact, ingestion or adoption, thereby preserving
both individual and community life-hosts from infectious agents, poisons and
maladaptive features. Even taboos, which contemporary medical science wrongly
supposes as harmful to social welfare,17 are typically prohibitions surrounding
the chief acts of life that have a life-protective value. Strict prohibitions
against contact with corpses, or against harsh treatment of infants, or against
promiscuous genital penetration, or against water-wasting livestock like pigs
in desert regions have all given social-body defences to society and its
members.
The invasion and spread of
contagions in tribal societies were, in this way, an embryonic form of immune
recognition on the social level of life-organization. It is, we argue, the
defining nature of the civil commons to develop blind customs into effective
social-immune competences. In contrast, social institutions that are not
life-protective but life-destructive, as military institutions of mass
sacrifice or free markets in childrenıs lives, are not the civil commons, but
its opposite. Such cultural disorders are precisely what the civil commons is
structured to prevent as a regulating norm of human development, however much
these pathologic structures may be revered as ³our way of life.² Since most
life-destructive disorders of social organization are instituted to privilege a
sect of the community, we see here an unseen meta-opposition within social
institutions through history: the principles of the civil commons versus the
principles of factional right to special privilege. Marx conceived this as an
objective class opposition of productive workers and exploiting owners. But
this is too narrow a concept because it misses the wider opposition of values
at work.18
A core strand of the civil commons
is socially understood science. In its lead forms, it develops exact principles
of test and falsification of what actually prevents disease, trauma or
depredation of human and non-human life-hosts (e.g., rules of hygiene).
Scientific public health systems, for example, originated in European city
centres over two centuries ago. Their purpose was to respond to masses of
propertyless humanity in urban markets. Its deprived life conditions caused a
host of deadly social threats of runaway sewage, polluted water supplies,
adulterated food products, contagious diseases, homeless people and abandoned
children without familial or civil commons support systems the very same
kinds of degradation we see growing again in the ³global free market² today.
In recognition of these dangers to
the lives of societyıs members, the modern civil commons evolved in response.
Increasingly universal life-protective programs and infrastructures were
consciously developed and instituted. These include hygiene and sanitation
systems of water supply, drainage and sewage (all being variously privatized
again); isolation and regulation of disease-bearing slaughterhouses and
cemeteries, and of infected life-hosts; development of medical societies, corps
of doctors, clinics and society-wide systems of distribution of inoculations
and vaccinations for recurrent diseases; and, despite fierce resistance from
the privileged ones benefiting from market arrangements of disease and cure,
the evolution of universal health-care systems and unpriced treatment of the
ill and disabled (revealingly not yet achieved in the civil-commons backward,
but market-leading usa).19 Women often led this great social development. For
example, in the case of the cholera outbreaks in London in the 1850s, women
campainged successfully to demand that the authorities ensure by public
ownership the extension of clean-water pipes to the poorer districts of the
city. As in other civil commons developments, it has been the gender-specific
function of women to lead the mutual-support relations of the civil commons in
the wider family of the community.
Subsequent to the introduction of
sanitary infrastructures and public health programs, a long development of
non-profit social institutions further constituted the civil commons of the
industrial age, regulating the market despite an endless ideology of
invalidation of non-profit public enterprises. So far as I know, there is no
history or study of these strikingly successful public enterprises as an
historical pattern over centuries, so one has to deduce them from the present
from beneath market cultureıs instituted blindness to the value of these civil
commons formations. Over time, public regulations were clearly instituted to
ensure the purity of food and milk as well as water supplies; inspection,
disinfestation and condemnation of private as well as public structures deemed
to be health hazards; the construction and maintenance of community systems of
waste and garbage disposal; systematic testing, inspecting and screening of
commercial products to validate their safety for human use and consumption;
formation of publicly enforced workplace standards in private factories and
places of business; provision of public centres, walkways and parks to ensure
non-priced enjoyments of free movement and life spaces; and development over
generations of non-profit public libraries, museums and education systems
accessible to all and managed by public servants for whom price or profit
demands would constitute a criminal offence. Quiet spaces free of corporate
commodity machines, however, have almost been annihilated altogether without
notice of what has happened.20
Let us reflect upon the full range
and depth of the architectonic infrastructure of evolved non-profit public
enterprises protecting and facilitating the lives of all citizens free of profit
tribute. Let us also examine both the quality of infrastructureıs long-term
achievements and its dramatically lower life-costs compared to the market. In
so doing, we are left with a picture of public-sector efficiency, durability
and good management. This is the very opposite of what is pervasively asserted
by corporate market propaganda. In this light, we can see that market
imperatives of deregulation and privatization are, in effect, campaigns to
reverse historical human evolution. Public enterprise is, in truth, a far more
efficient system of production and distribution of life goods than the
corporate market in every area in which it has been permitted to democratically
develop.21 Yet the short-term accounting parameters, for-profit management, cheap
methods and self-maximizing priorities of the market model are still asserted
as ³more efficient² in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Since
life-values are excluded from the marketıs monetary computation, which lacks
even a concept that refers to life needs, the doctrinal culture is
correspondingly decoupled, and so can see no problem.22 What its prescriptions
effectively demand is an abolition of human society.
With all of the subsystems of the
civil commons we may excavate, there is one unifying principle in opposition to
the corporate value-set. Not one civil commons institution or practice is
instituted or financed to generate money profit for private investors. All are
publicly formed over time to protect and enhance the lives of community members
as a value in itself. There is, however, no distinction to recognize this
profound opposition within even government expenditures. State activities and
outlays are increasingly funded and structured to serve corporate interests
before all else virtually all of the expenditures and subsidies on natural
resource
footnotes:
1. One must
distinguish, here, between the literature that forms the ideological
justification for corporate market privatization of various natural commons, notably
Hardinıs (1968) globally republished article ³The Tragedy of the Commons,² and
Goldmanıs (1998) developed empirical studies. Those following Hardin project
the capitalist market axiom of self-maximizing ³rationality² onto subsistence
herdsmen or other commons users who are precisely regulated by social norms
against privatized overexploitation. On the other hand, social scientists and
historians like E. P. Thompson and Goldman investigate actual facts. Yet it is
important to note that neither literature distinguishes the civil from the
natural commons.
2. Jesus and the Old
Testament prophets both inveighed against such unneeded property accumulations
while others were destitute. Their themal calls to feed the hungry, protect the
homeless and clothe the naked can be interpreted as early voices of the civil
commons. On the other hand, their persecution and, in the case of Jesus,
political execution can be read as archetypal illustrations of ruling
structures of power selecting for the liquidation of such initiatives. Liberation theology today may be seen
as an extension of the pattern, both in its stand for the poor, and in the
persecution of its stand by the established hierarchy of privilege for
example, in Latin American from 1975 to 1990.
3. The literature
on this genocidal pattern is complex and extensive. McMurtry (1998) explains it
in terms of the inner logic of the market paradigm which presupposes forms of
existence which annul the right of any other form to exist. This analysis is
furthered in Value Wars (2002) which shows the operation of this concealed
program in the genocidal destructions of the social infrastructures of Iraq and
Yugoslvia in particular, but also welfare state structures across the world.
4. The dominant role
of u.s. foreign policy and covert campaigns of international terror since 1945
in this continuous campaign of civil commons destruction is documented by Blum
(2000). Blumıs documentation features the u.s. security apparatusıs particular
involvement in the narcotics trade as a financial basis of its covert terrorist
operations alongside its overt military threats and armed invasions.
5. McMurtry (1999a)
provides in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (chap. 5, p. 223-226) formal
criteria whereby to distinguish public administrative structures which are
life-serving from those which are not.
6. Polanyi (1944) in
his classic The Great Transformation, talks often of the ³human and natural
substance of society.² He also speaks of specific provisions of means of life
by society for those requiring them to go on living (e.g., the Speenhamland
³allowance system² from 1795 to 1834), but nowhere conceptualizes this social
life infrastructure in exact or general principle, and proposes no precise
parameters to comprehend its nature across specific instances or social orders.
7. There is an
enormous literature of this kind, the most incisive being the analysis of
Waring (1988, 1996), which exposes the failure of both neo-classical and
Marxian economic theory to take into account the unpriced labour of women in
sustaining priced as well as future labour, as well as familial life-systems in
general.
8. Communitarianism
is a falsely named theoretical challenge to liberalism which typically deploys
the theoretical device of rights to apply to collectives (like ethnic groups)
as well as individuals. Communitarianism in this sense has nothing in common
with the concept of civil commons developed here.
9. Even when
communitarian analysis becomes life-grounded rather than right-grounded, as it
does in the work of MacIntyre (1981), there is no distinction between social
practices, the core community good for him, which enable versus disable the
community membersı lives. For example, traditional and long perfected
excellences of military and caste institutions qualify as quintessential moral
goods under his criterion of practices, although he does not engage this
criticism.
10.
The similarity of this invasive pattern of blindly reproducing private money
sequences overrunning life sequences of social reproduction is documented and
developed as an explanatory model in McMurtry (1999a). Interestingly, the
life-blind autism of the mathematical models to which contemporary economics
has become confined has been recently attacked by both eminent French
economists and their students at the École Normale Supérieure as a
³pathological taste for a-priori ideologies and mathematical formalization
disconnected from reality² (CCPA Monitor, 2001, p. 12).
11.
For an excellent source of concrete examples of traditional commons within
³sustenance economies,² see Mies and Shiva (1993).
12.
Mies and Beenholdt-Thomsen (1999) sense the problem here when they say that
³the concept of global commons is being introduced by international agencies
and global players, mostly for the benefit of tncs [transnational
corporations].² They insist instead on ³reinvent[ing] the commons from below,
through grassroots action of local people for local people² (p. 156 ff). What
this critique of the global commons concept does not provide, however, is a
principle whereby the corporate-state-invaded global commons can be recognized
and defended at a level of comprehension and action beyond ³the grassroots
action of local people for local people.² One may support the local standpoint
as far as it goes, but it does not speak to the deep problem. The concept of
the civil commons as defined here, in contrast, recognizes the global commons
as requiring a civil construct of protection to be sustainable ³a global
civil commons.²
13. The so-called Son of Star Wars
militarization of space (National Missile Defence [nmd] Program) is not, as
claimed for public consumption, a defensive project to stop incoming missiles
from enemy states. According to the u.s. Space Commandıs own description in its
officially circulated Vision for 2020 (my emphasis), ³the space dimensions of
military operations is to protect U.S. [private corporate] interests and
investments² (Slater 1999).
14. These external repressions of Costa
Ricaıs civil commons by u.s.-led financial policies have been drawn from
Edelman (1999, p. 60-95). It is useful to observe here as well that other more
specific tactics in the stripping of Costa Ricaıs civil commons infrastructure
were the flooding of corporate media by global market ideology and collateral
financial expropriation of the Costa Rica social system by usaid terms for
bailout and a parallel u.s.-funded system of agricultural research institutions
15.
Consider, for example, the following profile of planetary life destruction by
private corporate depredation. ³The unbridled plunder of the worldıs forests by
giant timber firms,² reports the Environment Investigation Agency of the UN
Inter-Governmental Panel on Forests, ³is increasing at an alarming rate. []
The $100 billion timber industry is running out of control. [] Unless swift
and decisive action is taken to control the intense pressures on the worldıs
forests, the 20th centuryıs legacy will be the extermination of most of the
worldıs species and massive social disturbance.² The timber trade, the un
Agency (Harrison 2000) reports, is 95% dominated by multinational firms who now
control 45 million hectares of rainforest. All log illegally as well as
legally. Mitsubishi leads the ³forest rapists,² Daishowa and Musa of Indonesia
face charges of corruption. Samling of Malaysia, Hyundai of Korea, the us Boise
Cascade, Rougier of France, Klunz and Karl Danzer of Germany and
Macmillan-Bloedel of Canada are charged with systematically illegal practices.
³Deforestation is wiping out plant and animal species, increasing soil erosion
and flooding and contributing to global warming,² the un report continues.
³27,000 species are made extinct each year in tropical forest alone.² (Harrison
2000)
16.
Much of anthropology can be understood as a decoding of tribal communitiesı
beliefs and practices which confer survival advantage by protecting them from
dangers and harms which would otherwise compromise their capacities to
reproduce. A prolific contemporary expositor of this view is Harris (1974).
17. Dorland (1994), for example, defines a
taboo as ³any of the negative traditions and behaviours that are generally
regarded as harmful to social welfare.²
18. The conflict at the deepest level is
between regulating value-sets. Value sets are infrastructural rather than
superstructural insofar as they regulate material actions rather than
rationalize them. The primarily opposing value sets of the contemporary world
can be analysed as life sequences versus money sequences of value (McMurtry
1999a, p. 105 ff). This opposition occurs within class agents, and also outside
them. Unwaged womenıs work too confronts this value-set opposition, as do
governments.
19. The
private market of health-care in the u.s. is a paradigm case of this social
backwardness at the heart of the worldıs leading corporate market system. ³The
cost [of healthcare] is approaching 15% of the u.s. gross domestic product, and
more than one-quarter of the population is not covered² (Brown 2000). What
Brown does not observe is that this is over $1,000 more per capita than the
public healthcare system of neighbouring Canada which covers all its citizens.
The us ³health maintenance² system also kills over 80,000 people a year by
malpractice (Nader 1996, p. 37). Naderıs figures are from the Harvard School of
Public Health.
20.
Franklin (1993) explains: ³Silence has to remain available in the
soundscape, in the landscape, and in the mindscape. [] What we are hearing, I
feel, is very much the privatization of the soundscape, in the same way in
which, in Britain, the enclosure laws destroyed the commons []. What does town
planning have to say about silence?²
21. The
privatization of British Rail and California electricity have been catastrophic
failures in productive and cost efficiency compared to their publicly
controlled forbears, as Ontario Hydro is turning out to be. In matters of life
services like health-care, the difference is not only increased costs and
reduced services by privatization, but the loss of tens of thousands of lives.
Market fundamentalism like other religious fundamentalisms is closed to fact.
See note 19.
22. Thus
even when theorists refer to the Lebensvelt or lifeworld as the continental
philosophical tradition does from Husserl to Habermas they do not mean any
form of life beyond what is borne by communicative symbols. The eminent
critical theorist, Jurgen Habermas (1984), for example, conceives of the
³lifeworld² as confined to the linguistic plane of existence. This ³lifeworld²
not only precludes all life that is not symbolic, but excludes the market
economy itself from ³civil society.² Habermas (1996, p. 366-72) writes ³What is
meant by civil society no longer includes the economy as constituted by
private law and steered through markets in labour, capital and commodities
[and] has an influence only on the personnel and programming of the system.²
23. An
excellent article exposing the incoherence of current political and economic
conceptualizations of ³social capital² is Ben Fineıs (1999) ³The Developmental
State is Dead Long Live Social Capital?² But even the critically acute Fine
does not penetrate this baseline distinction in principle.
24. We
need to distinguish this sense of capability from Amartya Senıs (1999, p. 75),
which means ³the alternative
combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve² or, more
simply, ³the ability to achieve functionings² (Sen 1992, p. 49). Senıs
definition could apply to a machine, and he does not provide a principle as
distinguished from examples to indicate how capabilities for life-promoting
functionings are to be distinguished from life-reductive functionings. My sense
of capability is restricted to range of life function, and does not require
alternative combinations. It is not clear that Senıs ³ability to achieve
functionings² rules out snowmobiling or shooting animals as such a functioning,
or counts the ability and air to breathe as a capability if there is no
alternative available.
25. ³Hog
Nation,² Editorial, Earth Island Journal, Spring 2000, p. 23.
26. While
Canadaıs Trade Minister publicly promises that public education and health-care
are not on the agenda of the World Trade Organizationıs General Agreement on
Trade in Services, the governmentıs own trade magazine, CanadExport, monthly
enthuses about the need for more wto regulations to protect all the
opportunities in foreign markets for Canada transnational businesses, with
education and health-care procurement contracts a regular feature.
27. See
McLaren, (1996, p. 3). Such figures are typically suppressed, however. The
European Union and the World Wide Fund For Nature, for example, suppressed,
demanded rewrites and then pulped their own commissioned expert report on the
state of the worldıs tropical rainforests after it reported that World Bank and
IMF structural adjustment programs required African, Caribbean and Papuan
economies to sell their forests for cash to pay back debts to foreign banks
(Brown 2000, p. 3).
30. Hayek
(1986) typefies market monotheism in his claim that ³our civilization depends,
not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be described
only as the extended order of human co-operation more commonly, if somewhat
misleadingly, known as capitalism [but in fact] the competitive market² (p.
6-7). His curious conflation of competition and co-operation with no
explanation is typical of a value-set whose totalization equates opposites as a
given.
31. Charles Krauthammer (2001) writes in Time
Magazine: ³America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power
in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, [corporate]
America is in a position to reshape norms How? By unapologetic and implacable
demonstrations of will²(quoted by Lapham 2001, p. 32-3). An academic member of
the corporate male gang, the author of its End of History, Francis Fukayama (as
cited), adopts a negative tact. ³A country that makes human rights a
significant element of its foreign policy tends towards ineffectual moralizing
at best [] ²(p. 36).
32. Angell (2001) disassociates himself
from this volume in which his work is republished.
33. At
the local level of the world-wide occupation, Turner (1994) defines and deploys
the concept of ³male dealers.²
34. The
pattern of unilateral command is formalized in McMurtry (1999, p. 45-57; and
2001, p. 7-8).
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Womenıs Work,
Nature and Colonial Exploitation: Feminist Struggle for Alternatives to
Corporate Globalization
Angela Miles
abstract
This article uses Hilkka Pietiläıs reconceptualization
of the economy as three spheres of production (free, protected and fettered) to
illuminate the new ways in which neo-liberal globalization is intensifying
exploitative capitalist processes. The study focuses on the particular
vulnerabilities of women, the value of their unpaid work, and the
transformative significance of their resistance.
résumé
Cet article utilise la réconceptualisation de
lıéconomie de Hilkka Pietilä, en trois sphères de production (la sphère libre,
la sphère protégée et la sphère entravée) afin de mettre en évidence les
nouvelles formes qui renforcent lıexploitation capitaliste de la globalisation néo-libérale.
Lıétude porte en particulier sur les vulnérabilités des femmes, sur la valeur
de leur travail non rémunéré et sur lıeffet transformateur de leur résistance.
introduction
The corporate globalization facing us today has
powerful links with earlier periods of capitalism. However, there are also
important differences. Capitalism has always had a global reach, and the growth
of capitalist markets has always and everywhere spawned not only a relative or
absolute impoverishment of women, colonies, workers, marginal groups and
communities, but also a decrease in cultural and biological diversity. In this
article, I will draw on Hilkka Pietiläıs interesting three-sphere
reconceptualization of the economy to examine the new ways neo-liberal
globalization is intensifying these exploitive processes. I will focus special
attention on both the particular vulnerabilities of women and the unique
importance of womenıs unpaid work and political resistance in this period.
Early increases in production for capitalist trade and
profit came at the expense of production-for-use, because they removed the
means of subsistence from individuals and communities (in core and periphery)
and because they institutionalized, if not slavery and genocide, mensı
dependence on wages and womenıs dependence on men (and now, more than ever, on
low wages). From the beginning, a cross-class ³male deal² (Turner 1997)
mandated higher wages for men, thus ensuring that womenıs dependence on and
service to men persisted as earlier patriarchal patterns crumbled and entirely
new modes of production emerged. The brutal processes of environmental and
social enclosure, appropriation, disruption and destruction at the heart of
market expansion in both ³old² and ³new² worlds reproduced patriarchal as well
as capitalist power.
Dispossessed European populations (like the Scottish
crofters forced into starvation when their common lands were enclosed to run
sheep for profit in wool) fled or were deported en masse to ³new worlds² where
indigenous populations suffered even more violent processes of enslavement,
dispossession, ecological destruction and ultimately genocide. Today, these
practices continue in both the ³developed² and ³developing² worlds.
In the economic south, forest dwellers are displaced
by cattle ranchers, communities are destroyed by oil and mineral extraction,
local populations are excluded from nature reserves for ecotourism and
biodiversity prospecting. In the economic north, corporate offshore fishing is
wiping out the inshore fishery, and family farms are being taken over by
corporate agribusiness.1 Environmental degradation, much of it fueling and
fueled by enclosure, is increasing everywhere. Ozone and soil depletion, water
and air pollution, and global warming threaten the whole planet, though the
most immediate and devastating consequences are felt by poor and powerless
communities where toxic waste is dumped (Sydney, Cape Breton), uranium is mined
(Western Shoshone), military overflying is practiced (Innu of Northern Labrador),
and oil (Ogoniland) and chemical (Love Canal) destruction is sanctioned.2
Capitalist markets fuel the concentration of wealth
and power in fewer and fewer hands. So, by 1997, 450 billionaires had assets
equal to the combined annual income of the poorest 50% of the worldıs
population. In this type of world, human and non-human life become commodities,
valuable only when they contribute to profit for these few, expendable when
they do not. Whole groups of people and whole communities are abandoned or actively
delivered to their fate all over the world. Street children, single mothers,
the homeless, the elderly, the disabled and the unemployed are written off.
Canadian farming and fishing communities whose viability has been destroyed by
corporate agriculture and fishing are declared redundant. Villages in the Upper
Nile are razed to make way for oil development (Flint 2001). Indigenous and
peasant communities in Canada, India and China, with aggregate populations in
the millions are respectively destroyed by the James Bay, Narmada and Three
Gorges Dam projects to produce hydro-electric power for ³development.²
The huge cost of this ³development² is masked by
national and international accounting and policymaking practices that use the
Gross Domestic Product (gdp) as the only measure of wealth and well-being. The
gdp recognizes only market value. The value of non-market factors, such as
nature, unpaid work and non-monetary production that are crucial to the real
wealth and well-being of individuals and communities and to the survival of the
planet is entirely omitted (Douthwaite 1999). Womenıs unpaid work is concealed.
Ecological damage and social destruction or appropriation suffered by the many
so that production can increase for the market (that is, a growing gdp) also
remain invisible unless the destruction opens the way to profit (Shiva 1989,
Waring 1988, Cobb and Halstead 1995).3
For instance, when local farmers who still grow crops
mainly for their own use and for local trade are seduced or forced to produce
for external markets and when local access to common land necessary for
subsistence is lost to large-scale agricultural, resource, or industrial
production for export, families start depending on money from unreliable crop
prices or on meager wages to buy goods, whose prices are also unstable. These
incomes often purchase less than the families previously produced. Worse, many
individuals or families donıt even get these inadequate incomes. In the end,
though, their purchases and the value of the expanding commercial production
still register as increases in wealth, while the displaced or superseded
subsistence production and its losses are never counted. Neither is the cost of
migration of individual community members or whole families in search of survival,
nor the ecological and health damage caused by large-scale chemicalized
monocropping, industrial production and resource extraction.
This sleight of hand allows increased profits for a
few, even at great social and environmental cost, to be presented as increased
wealth for all. It allows economic ³development² to be presented as a panacea
for the very impoverishment it creates:
Subsistence economies that satisfy basic needs through
self-provisioning are not poor in terms of deprivation. Yet, the ideology of
development declares them so because they do not participate overwhelmingly in
the market economy; that means they do not consume commodities produced for and
distributed through the market, even though they might be satisfying those
needs through self-provisioning mechanisms
[S]ubsistence, as culturally perceived poverty, has
provided the legitimization for the development process as a poverty removal
project. As a culturally biased project it destroys wholesome and sustainable
lifestyles and creates real material poverty, or misery, by the denial of
survival needs themselves, through the diversion of resources to intensive
commodity production. (Shiva 1989, p. 10)
i. pietiläıs
reconceptualization
Using data gathered in a Finnish government study4,
which ³sketched a comprehensive picture of our economy including the value of
unpaid labour and production in the households,² Pietilä (n.d., p. 6) has shown
that even in advanced industrial nations, much individual and community
sustenance and quality of life still depend on the health of the local
environment and on non-market relations, activities, goods and services. Her
important work broadens and redefines the economy to encompass three spheres of
production, namely free, protected and fettered. These provide a useful frame
for examining the qualitatively new processes of change driving neo-liberal
globalization and the central place of both womenıs work and womenıs current
resistance. She found that in 1980 in Finland:
the
free sphere, made up of all non-monetary production for local use including
housework and volunteer work, accounted for 54% of the total work time and 35%
of the total value of production;
the
protected sphere, including all private and public production of goods and
services for the home market by individuals, private businesses and public
services such as education, transportation and health, accounted for 36% of
work time and 46% of the value produced;
the
fettered sphere, all production for international exchange, that is all
production subject to the demands/fetters of international competition,
accounted for 10% of work time and 19% of the value produced.5
The neo-liberal agenda we are facing today is
essentially a corporate drive aimed at increasing the fettered sphere (and the
profits of transnational corporations) at the expense of both free and
protected spheres. In all national economies, even the most ³advanced,²
production in the fettered sphere (though greater than in 1980) remains modest
compared to market and non-market production for home consumption in the
protected and free spheres. Still, national and global economic policies, rules
and regulations pander more and more to the needs, desires and interests of
transnational corporations. The fettered sphere fills the whole screen of
popular and policy discourse. We are told, and most of us have come to believe,
that the global market is the economy. We peoples of the economic south and
north are told not only that our survival depends on private corporationsı
competitive success in this global market but, paradoxically, that we must be
prepared to sacrifice a great deal to ensure successful corporate production
for this market. This is very different from earlier periods.
The protected sphere as conceptualized by Pietilä is
twofold, consisting of both public/state and private production for domestic
consumption. Until fairly recently, this sphere had continually increased,
primed initially by the enclosure/appropriation/transfer of labour and resources
from the free spheres of both core and periphery. Historically, industrial
capitalist growth mainly expanded domestic production and markets (protected
sphere) fed by international ³trade² (fettered sphere), including trade among
industrial nations and umpteen forms of colonial exploitation, some more
obviously violent than others.6 Rising market demand in the metropoles came
first from an expanding trading class with money and from the independent
craftspeople, merchants, farmers and owners of capital who were getting richer
serving their needs; the demand also came from the growing numbers of
propertyless poor who were losing their subsistence livelihoods to othersı
search for profit and were being forced to provide for their own needs in the
market (if they could). The propertylessı new dependence on money and on the
market ensured their availability (originally whole families at desperately low
wages) as workers in household service, in capitalist agriculture, in crafts
and later, in industrial enterprises. The home consumer market expanded as some
of these male workers won wages high enough to support a rising standard of
living for family members, including dependent wives and children no longer in
the labour force.
Creating and sustaining industrial infrastructure
(canals, railways, roads, banking systems, hospitals, water, sewage and power
systems) also enlarges the protected sphere. So, too, does providing the public
and social services needed for a healthy and skilled (and compliant) work force.
Years of womenıs and workersı struggles in industrializing nations for a share
of the growing monetary wealth, and a better and more secure life have won
public education, health care, libraries, parks, unemployment insurance, old
age pensions, social assistance, safety protection and environmental
regulation, all of which enlarge the protected sphere.
The growing (largely low-paid) female labour force
that has emerged over many decades in crucial social services has reflected a
gradual collective and public sharing of what remain largely womenıs unpaid
responsibilities for individual and community health and for reproduction.
Growing private service industries such as fast foods, largely supported as
well by womenıs low wages, also bring womenıs traditional free sphere
responsibilities and work into the protected sphere.7
Economic growth has never been cost free, and its
costs and benefits have always been savagely unequal. However, in the years
between the transitional devastation of early capitalist development and the
triumph of neo-liberal agendas in the 1980ıs, this relative growth of the
protected sphere of the economy in the industrial nations has tended to
increase collectively and socially managed wealth as well as private wealth.
Popular struggles over these decades forged an industrial form of the civil
commons defined by McMurtry as ³any co-operative human construct that enables
the access of all members of a community to life goods²(McMurtry 2001, p. 822).
In the decades following World War ii, economic growth
was pursued in the name of the public good (understood as increasing personal
and public wealth). Economic competitiveness and growth were sold by
conservative as well as liberal and social democratic parties, not as ends in
themselves but as means to enhance personal incomes and improve services and
security. Harold MacMillan defeated the postwar Labour government in Britain
with promises of higher personal incomes and personal consumption as well as
better education, health care and transportation.
Since that time, the neo-liberal ideologues of
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney and their successors in all
political parties have largely succeeded in reversing popular expectations of a
better life through economic growth. People everywhere now expect to serve
rather than be served by economic growth, which has moved from a means to an
end in public discourse. Neoliberal ideologues no longer claim that economic
competitiveness will improve the lives of the general population. Rather, they
tell us we must sacrifice our wage levels, our social services and our social
security to ensure the international competitiveness required for growth.
The supposedly urgent and unavoidable need to repay
public debt and reduce government deficits is being used in both the economic
North and South to legitimize and enforce the neo-liberal agendas responsible
for this impoverishment. Structural adjustment programs imposed by the imf on
indebted countries of the economic South as a condition for continued World
Bank loans (desperately needed for debt repayment!) and selective fiscal
austerity and downsizing by national governments and capitalist corporations in
the economic North reflect these agendas. These also appear in the successive
removal of social and political limits on international trade, and investment
and on transnational production for profit in all regions through international
free-trade agreements (such as nafta and ftaa), gats (General Agreements on
Trade in Services) and trips (Trade Related Aspects of International Property
Rights).
Governments are bound to these agreements once they
have signed. Continuous and irreversible ³liberalization² is assured by ratchet
mechanisms that compel governments to ³liberalize² ever more, never less. The
provisions of these agreements are interpreted and applied not by national
governments, but by supra-national bodies. These bodies have the power to
nullify traditional practices and overrule elected governmentsı attempts to
pursue social, environmental and other ends that might conflict with unbridled
trade and profit (Palast 2001, Nader 2001).
In establishing these mechanisms, the g7/g8 nations
are actively abetting the transfer of state power from national governments to
international bodies. They are implementing a ³ruling ideology that centres on
the replacement of government and state planning by corporate strategic
planning, and the establishment of global corporate rule² (Shiva 1997, p. 22).
Alain Touraine calls this the triumph of capitalism defined as ³a market
economy that refuses to be controlled by external forces and institutions and
ties and, on the contrary, uses the rest of society as resources for its
rational economic action² (1998, p. 2).8
Earlier periods of relatively untrammeled capitalism
have preceded this one. And capitalist relations have always been global in
reach. Free trade is not a new aspiration or hypocrisy. In the nineteenth
century, in the name of free trade, Britain did nothing to check price hikes or
the export of grain during devastating famines in India and Ireland, even while
brutally prohibiting local production and trade in goods that British
manufacturers wished to sell. Likewise today, the world is being opened, not to
free trade with a level playing field, but to unfettered trade by transnational
corporations. Small producers of ³freely² traded goods are extremely vulnerable
to falling world prices that leave transnationals untouched. Two years ago,
coffee fetched $2 a kilogram; today it sells for less than $1 a kilogram and
prices are still falling. The livelihoods of 20 million households that depend
on coffee are collapsing, with devastating consequences. Meanwhile, the coffee
chain Starbucks posted a 40% increase in profits for the first quarter of 2001.
Nestlé, the worldıs largest coffee roaster, had profits exceeding $1 billion
last year for its beverage operations and is expecting a 20% profit growth this
year (Watkins 2001). José Bové, spokesperson for Confédération Paysanne, a
French farmersı union and major figure in the developing international
anti-globalization movement has asked:
who would dare to claim that the huge export of
coffee, bananas, cocoa and rice to the countries of the North over many decades
has improved the living conditions of peasants in the South? Who would ever
presume to say a thing like that while looking such peasants straight in the
eye, at a time when they face rising poverty? And who would dare tell African
farmers who have been ruined by competition from subsidised European meat that
the sweeping away of customs barriers has been a good thing for them? (Bové
2001, p. 30)
However, despite the devastation of unequal and
misnamed ³free trade² shared with earlier periods, the corporate globalization
facing us today is not just more of the same. Today, not only goods but also
services and capital are traded ³freely.² Local services and productive
capacity are being sacrificed to transnational profit rather than enhanced by
it. Hilkka Pietiläıs conceptualization of three economic spheres highlights the
significantly new logic of the neo-liberal agenda more clearly.
ii. the fettered sphere
raids the free and protected spheres
Unlike earlier periods when the protected sphere was
the main engine of economic growth and beneficiary of international ³trade,²
transnational capital is now, with the support of the national governments of
the most powerful capitalist nations and the multi-lateral international
agencies they control, brutally raiding the free and protected spheres of the
economy to enhance the fettered sphere.
Encroachment and parasitism on the free sphere is
intensified and expanded in new levels of exploitation that are colonizing life
itself and, ultimately, the future. Legislated preference or protection for
domestic producers is outlawed, and private companies along with public and
social services easily become prey to non-productive transnational corporate
buy outs (or give aways!). Any elements of the protected sphere that cannot be
turned to profit by transnational corporations are being dumped on to the free
sphere, where the increasing burdens of want and work, and environmental and
social destruction are borne mainly by women. International agreements and
domestic policies in almost all countries today routinely subordinate social,
environmental and cultural considerations to transnational trade and profit.
New levels of broader, more intense appropriation and exploitation countenance
no limits on economic growth (Barlow 1996).
Under nafta, for instance, traditional collective
landholding patterns and rights become illegal barriers to private ownership
and profit. The Zapatistas in Chiapas are struggling to defend communally based
livelihoods, and therefore indigenous and peasant survival, from this nafta
sanctioned robbery. When the Canadian government banned the use of a gasoline
additive hazardous to human health and the environment, its producer, Ethyl
Corporation, brought a $251 million suit under the nafta for damages to its
reputation and future profits. Canada settled out of court a year later,
lifting the ban, apologizing publicly, and paying $13 million.
Under the gats and trips, transnational corporations
have rights that are actually denied to local companies. They can challenge
governments over any of their actions, or the actions of others within their
jurisdiction, deemed to have infringed transnational property rights or
³unreasonably² limited their opportunities for profit. Cases are heard by
unelected judges at the wto in Geneva, Switzerland, in closed hearings where
neither the public nor the media are allowed, no transcripts are available and
no appeals are possible.
The wto recently ruled that European preferential
tariffs for bananas from small independent producers in the Caribbean infringe
agribusiness rights to profit maximization. It also upheld the import rights of
Monsanto and u.s. cattle and dairy associations against the European Unionıs
attempt, because of the known health hazards, to ban beef with synthetic
hormones.
Until the creation of the wto in 1995, few countries
in the economic South had intellectual property laws. Now, however, all 140 wto
members must conform to u.s. intellectual property rights legislation, which
extends patent rights for 20 years. Thus, protection for monopoly production by
transnational corporations sweeps around the world. When the South African
government passed a law allowing cheaper generic drugs to be produced and sold,
39 pharmaceutical giants used international trade agreements in the courts to
protect their 20-year patents and astronomical profits, despite the desperation
of people and countries doomed to do without life-saving drugs at these high
prices. World outrage at the drug companiesı actions in this case have resulted
in some face-saving moves on their part to make the drugs they produce
available more cheaply in the poorer countries. But the patents, providing vast
profits from 20-year monopolies, remain.
The g7/g8 governments are imposing neoliberal agendas
favouring the fettered sphere domestically as well as internationally. Through
the World Bank and the imf they have been forcing brutal ³structural
adjustments² on poorer nations for decades, insisting that these nations
maximize foreign-currency earnings (that is, earnings from transnational trade)
above all other production needs or policy goals in order to repay their
foreign debt.9 Each indebted nation of the South must accept a tailor made
Structural Adjustment Program (sap) proposed by the imf to receive the World Bank
loans it depends on to service its debt (Isla 1993a, 1993b). More recently, the
specter of domestic debt and deficit has been used to legitimize the imposition
of the same neo-liberal restructuring on the populations of the rich nations as
well (Isla, Miles and Molloy 1996). Government subsidies to big capital remain
intact10 and are even augmented as a panoply of austerity measures are
introduced in the economic South and North. In this way, external economic
pressure in the South and economic fear and mystification in the North fuel the
rapid and unequal shift of public and private wealth from the protected (local
and national) sphere to the fettered (transnational) sphere.
These policies include selling off emergency food
stores, ending price controls on staples, liberalizing trade, privatizing state
enterprises, ³downsizing² government offices, cutting back and privatizing
social services, reducing corporate taxes, as well as weakening labour and wage
protections including unemployment insurance, minimum wage and old age
pensions.
In the rich industrial nations, public broadcasting,
health care, child care, home care, public housing, welfare, unemployment
insurance, education and research, transportation, environmental protection,
garbage collection, public parks and amenities are cut, to name only some of
the affected areas. The resulting deterioration is weakening peopleıs
confidence in state provision. Accompanying talk of ³crises² is fostering the
idea that public services are always and necessarily ³inefficient² and
³unaffordable,² and ultimately not viable. Public wealth is redefined as public
cost, as a cause of impoverishment. Privatization is then offered as a
³solution² to the bogus crises.
Railroads, mines, airlines, local transportation systems,
postal services, water and power systems are being sold off to private owners,
despite disastrous consequences.11 Public services and government
responsibilities such as education, health care, air traffic control,
environmental monitoring, waste disposal and correctional services are being
farmed out to private transnational corporations with less skilled,
non-unionized, lower paid workers and lower (sometimes dangerous) standards of
performance.12 Even military functions are being privatized!13 Free trade and
international trade agreements that prohibit preferential treatment of domestic
businesses, ensure that ever larger, continually merging14 transnational
corporations are free to acquire local businesses and privatized assets, and to
provide services for profit anywhere in the world.
At the same time, new freedom of movement for capital,
goods and services, though not labour, has allowed transnational corporations
to shift their operations to little regulated, union free, low pay locations,
undercutting wage levels and worker security in labour forces already
threatened by aggressive business, by government ³downsizing² and by reductions
in workersı rights and benefits.15 Even though profits were at a 45-year high,
between 1980 and 1993, the Fortune 500 companies cut their payrolls by more
than 25%, eliminating nearly four million secure well paying jobs (At Home
2001).
The impact of these business practices on the growing
number of economic losers is heightened by the simultaneous shredding of social
safety nets as the neoliberal ideology plunders the protected sphere. This
appropriation of public wealth by corporate capital is legitimized in an
ideological climate that denies all communal life and redefines all public
wealth as personal impoverishment (³tax theft²). Margaret Thatcherıs famous and
extreme dictum that there is no such thing as ³society,² only ³individuals,²
has become the defining orientation of governments that paint every group
(except big business) as a ³special interest² and entrench corporate rights
over human rights. The anti-human presumptions that follow from this logic have
become so pervasive that they go unnoticed:
Lay off workers in Britain and move your factory to
the other side of the world - where labour is cheaper, unions are weaker and
regimes are more brutal - and you are hailed as an entrepreneur. Arrive in
Dover on the back of a lorry with the intention of working long hours for low
pay and you will be branded ³bogus² and labelled a scrounger. (Young 2001, p. 11)
Not surprisingly, in a system so skewed toward
corporate interests, the power and wealth of large corporations now far
outweigh all but the largest national economies. If the gross sales of
corporations are considered as equivalent to the gdp of a country, we find that
51 of the worldıs 100 largest economies are internal to corporations (Korten
1999). General Motorsı annual revenue is almost equal to the combined gdp of
Nicaragua, Namibia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, New Zealand and Ireland (Hertz
2001).
Vulnerability to social disintegration and ecological
destruction varies by region, race, class and gender and the poor, and
powerless suffer disproportionately. But everywhere today, people are
impoverished and environments threatened, because transnational processes
appropriate and destroy the wealth of the free and protected spheres, all under
the guise of economic growth (Waring 1988, Douthwaite 1999). Basic requirements
for sustaining life food, water and shelter are threatened for increasing
numbers of people in both rich and poor nations.
A few are managing to ride the wave swamping so many,
and they are getting richer as the rest get poorer.16 In keeping with general
trends, between 1979 and 2000 in the us, the wealthiest 1% of the population doubled
its share of assets from one fifth to almost one half (Beckett 2001). In Canada
between 1984 and 1999, the net worth of the rich grew by 39% while the poorest
saw no increase at all. Little wonder, then, that in 1994 there were 51% more
poor children in Canada than in 1989 (Carey 2001).17 Worldwide, the number of
people living on $1 a day or less increased from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5
billion in 2000 22% of the worldıs population. (Millenium Forum 2000).
As a result of this poverty, every single year 17
million people die of malnutrition and preventable diseases (Russell 2000).
Millions of others must sell themselves or parts of themselves or their
children to survive miserably, even for a short while. ³Trade² is growing in
blood, in body parts, in babies, in brides, domestic workers, child soldiers
and sex workers: 200,000 children a year are sold into Africaıs modern slave
trade (Fenkiel 2001); 7 million Filipino women have left their country in
search of work in Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East; 2 million
girls between 5 and 15 years are sold or entrapped, or recruited every year
into the ³commercial sex market² (un Population Fund 1997).
Human and non-human life has always been expendable in
the mad race for profit. Today, capitalıs parasitic relationship to life is
mushrooming wildly as corporate globalization dismantles democratic controls
built over many decades of struggle. All over the world, unchecked neo-liberal
³reform² is spreading deadly poverty and despair, provoking discontent and
communal strife, and feeding militarism as it is at once violently resisted and
more violently imposed.18
Not only are threats to life increasing everywhere,
life itself is being controlled and commodified in entirely new ways through
new reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and biotechnologies, the new
frontier of patriarchal capitalist development. New intellectual property
rights (iprs), allowing the patenting of seeds, plants, animals and human
genes, transform the very basis of life into private property and legalize
corporate theft of knowledge, seeds and plants from local populations who have
known and used and developed them over centuries. Vast areas of land are being
expropriated as nature reserves and local populations are being expelled to
³preserve² biodiversity for bioprospecting/biopiracy by or on behalf of
corporations (Isla 2001). Attempts are being made to patent the neem plant and
basmati rice in India, jasmine rice in Indonesia and brussel sprouts in the us,
to name only a few of the already legion efforts to gain private ownership of
existing popular knowledge and common wealth in genes and seeds.
Not all life patents, however, are for unchanged
pre-existing life forms. New genetic forms are being manufactured. Monsanto
corporation has developed and patented genetically modified seed designed to
withstand the spraying of its proprietary weed killer, Roundup. It is illegal
for farmers to re-use patented seed or to grow these seeds without signing a
licensing agreement to pay royalties. This is strictly policed by toll-free
snitch lines and private police who check farmers fields and crops. On March
29, 2001, in a case followed the world over, a judge ruled that a Canadian
farmer, Percy Schmeiser, whose fields had been contaminated by Monsantoıs
genetically modified canola seed, must pay the company thousands of dollars for
violating its patent on genetically modified canola seed (rafi 2001).
It is a small step from making it illegal for farmers
and peasants to use and re-use seeds without paying a corporation, to
developing a terminator seed, as Monsanto has done, whose sterility makes their
use impossible. Although this ³terminator technology² has been disavowed in the
wake of international horror, it clearly reveals that corporations are not
interested in owning life in order to protect it or to overcome scarcity or
feed the world!19 Quite the reverse in fact. tncs are actively removing the
means of livelihood from individuals and communities all over the world as they
construct a fragile, centrally owned and controlled global food system whose
priority is profit, not food security for the rich or the poor.20
iii. feminist struggles
Corporate globalization today is commodifying and
colonizing not only the means of life, but life itself. Womenıs work and
responsibility for the bearing and sustaining of (individual and communal) life
has become the central ground of both patriarchal capitalist ³development² and
the construction of alternatives. Women in both economic South and North are
especially vulnerable to the harms of corporate globalization, but particularly
active in resisting it and in articulating alternatives.
The enforcement of the same neo-liberal agenda
everywhere in the world links the fate of women in the North and South more
closely than before.21 The fettered sphereıs theft from the free and protected
spheres predominantly targets women (and their children) everywhere. When what
cannot be turned to profit is downloaded from the protected to the free sphere,
it is predominantly women who bear the extra burden, without pay. Thus, womenıs
lives and livelihoods are disproportionately at risk today, and women
themselves are suffering disproportionate increases in work.
In the economic South women are the protectors and
propagators of the seeds being appropriated or patented by the transnationals.
When subsistence resources are switched to production for the market, they
generally shift from womenıs to menıs hands. Young women provide the bulk of
the labour in the maquiladoras and micro enterprises springing up to take
advantage of cheap and unprotected labour. And women bear the brunt of social
disintegration and poverty. They are sold (or sell themselves) into marriage
and are trafficked (or traffick themselves) in the sex trade. They make up the
vast majority of migrant workers and, with their children, account for 80% of
all refugees.
When education is cut, more girls than boys lose
access. Women depend more than men on social transfer payments and public
services such as transportation, and they suffer unequally when these are
reduced. Women everywhere are the ones who must care for the young, the sick
and the old when child care, health care, mental hospitals and old age homes
are not available. When social service, health care and education jobs are cut
or contracted to the private sector, women lose a large proportion of their all
too few ³good jobs² even as they shoulder the bulk of the unpaid work needed to
compensate for the individual, communal and environmental costs of ³economic
growth.²
Women in local communities around the world are
challenging economic and religious fundamentalisms as they claim their freedom
and affirm and protect life. They are resisting those who would steal their
knowledge and seeds and transfer resources from subsistence production to
production for profit. They are preserving social and public services,
organizing labour in sweat shops, protecting the environment, opposing violence
and war, confronting tyranny, and defending and extending democracy.22 Whatıs
more, feminists are building regional and global networks around all these
issues; in the process, they affirm the core values of human and non-human life
and of biological and cultural diversity in opposition to the homogenizing
economic growth whose only catalyst is profit.
A few examples of these many regional and
international networks include: aaword (Association of African Women for
Research and Development), awran (Asian Womenıs Human Rights Network), cafra
(Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action), dawn (Development
Alternatives with Women for a New Era), Diverse Women for Diversity, finrrage
(Feminists International Network of Resistance to Reproductive Technologies and
Genetic Engineering), Indigenous Womenıs Network, International Network Against
Female Sexual Slavery and Trafficking in Women, International Women and Health
Network, isis (Womenıs International Information and Communication Service),
Latin American Feminist Encuentros, Network on Womenıs Human Rights, Women
Against Funda-mentalism, wedo (Women Environment and Development Organization),
Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Womenıs International League for Peace and
Freedom.
As I have shown in my book Integrative Feminisms:
Building Global Visions 1960s-1990s (1996), through these myriad locally
grounded international networks, the global womenıs movement is building a new
form of multi-centred movement that promotes solidarity through diversity
rather than sameness. Feminists are imagining and thus creating the potential
for new forms of non- homogenizing universality. The global feminist movement
is neither unicentred, nor decentred and points to the possibility as it builds
the capacity for alternative liberating global relations. Corinne Kumar calls
this a ³new universalism²:
not a universalism that denies the many and affirms
the one, not a eurocentric universalism; not a patriarchal universalism. A
universalism that will not deny the accumulated experience and knowledge of all
past generations [] that [] will not accept the imposition of any monolithic,
³universal² structures under which it is presumed all other peoples must be
subsumed [] A new universalism that will challenge the universal mode, the
logic of our development, science, technology, militarization, the nuclear
option. A new universalism that will respect the plurality of different
societies - of their philosophy, of their ideology, their traditions and
cultures, one that will be rooted in the particular, one which will develop in
the context of the dialectics of different civilizations, birthing a new
cosmology (DıSouza 1992, p. 44)
At the heart of these new human possibilities lies a
rejection of the dominance of white western men, of western modernization and
of capitalist ³development.² However, feminists affirming diverse knowledges
and cultures being marginalized and destroyed by these processes are not simply
defending tradition. They are promoting transformation and forward thinking,
because at the same time they are affirming the knowledge and work of women,
often devalued and disregarded in both traditional and modern cultures.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, feminists from the South
(Anand 1980, Antrobus 1983, Dakar 1982, isis 1983) and North (Boulding 1980,
Ehrenreich and English 1979, Leghorn and Parker 1981) from their different
locations, rejected profit centred development and capitalism; they instead
proposed alternative, women associated starting places and values for humanity
as a whole. In the early 1980s, for instance, dawn, a third world womenıs
network, articulated (among others) a feminist project grounded in
female-associated values and priorities:
The womenıs movement can have an ethic drawn from
womenıs daily lives. At its deepest, it is not an effort to play ³catch up²
with the competitive aggressive ³dog-eat-dog² spirit of the dominant system. It
is, rather, an attempt to convert men and the system to the sense of
responsibility, nurturance, openness, and rejection of hierarchy that are part
of our vision. (Sen and Grown 1987)23
In the u.s., Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich
(1979) wrote similarly:
We refuse to remain on the margins of society, and we
refuse to enter that society on its own terms The human values that women were
assigned to preserve [must] become the organizing principles of society. The
vision that is implicit in feminism [is that of] a society organized around
human needs There are no human alternatives. The Market, with its financial
abstractions, deformed science and obsession with dead things must be pushed
back to the margin. And the ³womanly² values of community and caring must rise
to the center as the only human principle. (1979, p. 342)
Feminists in all regions are seeking to transform the
dominant system rather than enter it on equal terms. They reject hierarchical,
competitive, market ruled, patriarchal capitalism as less than human, even
anti-human. They have come to see that what is called ³modernization² in the
economic North and ³development² in the economic South depends on processes of
often violent colonization of nature, women, workers, indigenous peoples and
traditional cultures and communities. And they are articulating ecological and
anti-colonial, women-centred perspectives that link all these struggles (Mies
1986, Mies et al. 1987, Shiva 1989).
conclusion
The consensus emerging among the worldıs feminists on
these transformative perspectives was evident in practice in 1991 when 1,500
women from 54 countries met in Miami at the World Womenıs Congress for a
Healthy Planet. Building on earlier dialogue in an array of networks,
participants produced a powerful and visionary set of regional statements and a
collective analysis and set of positions known as Womenıs Action Agenda 21, in
preparation for the United Nations Conference on the Environment and
Development (unced or The Earth Summit) (World Womenıs Congress for a Healthy
Planet 1992). Collections of feminist writing from Latin America (Oliviera and
Corral 1992) and Asia (Second Asian and Pacific Ministerial Conference on Women
1994), to name only two of many, confirm that these world wide feminist visions
and perspectives are shared and are shaping womenıs practice around the world.
Women are not the only group or movement criticizing not
only economic growth as a measure of wealth and well being, but also
colonialism and capitalism. But feminist perspectives are essential in
designing alternatives to corporate globalization and have yet to be properly
heard, understood, and acknowledged by other movements (Miles 2000). Women
stand at the core of the beleaguered protected and free spheres. Their
historical and mandated responsibility for individual and communal life anchors
their diverse global networks, their resistance to patriarchal corporate
globalization and their visions of a life-affirming future. A future fully
human society will necessarily be a ³feminized² society, where women have more
power, gender is less determining, and womenıs work and responsibility for
sustaining life become a defining social priority shared by all.
Notes:
1. The
average farm size in the UK today is 6 times that of 1967 (over 1,000 animals
compared to an average of 100 in 1967). (Branigan and Brown 2001).
2. A 1990
study of more than 3,000 U.S. cities and counties showed that pollution
exposure is both shockingly widespread and shockingly unequal. 57% of whites,
65% of Hispanics, and 80% African Americans were found to live in areas with
high air pollution (Laurel Rayburn 2001). Three out of five Black and Hispanic
Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites (World
Womenıs Congress for a Healthy Planet 1992, p. 35).
3.
Environmental and social destruction appear as pluses/benefits when they
offer opportunities for profit; otherwise, they are unrecorded/invisible. So,
for instance, a breakdown in community trust and safety will register as
increased sales of household locks and alarms. The September 11, 2001 attack on
the World Trade Centre will have increased the gdp of the usa.
4. Housework Study, Part viii, Official Statistics of
Finland, SVTXXII (1981).
5.
Pietiläıs research is reported in Waring (1988). See also, Pietilä (1993
and n.d.).
6. These
means include resource theft and extraction; forced labour including slavery;
government imposed taxes (used not only to collect revenue but to force fully
functional local economies into external trade to earn the required tax money);
unequal terms of trade and forced colonial export and import relations.
To give just two among a legion of criminal examples:
raw cotton was imported from India and cotton cloth was sold back to the
subcontinent by the British who established this ³trade²by destroying the
thriving indigenous industry. Anyone, caught producing cloth risked losing their
thumb. China, which had no need or desire for any European goods available was
nevertheless forced to ³trade² silks, pottery, spices and other goods demanded
in Europe. To stem the unacceptable drain of silver to China that resulted from
this lopsided ³trade,² the British introduced opium grown in India and sent gun
boats to defend ³free trade² whenever Chinese authorities tried to refuse this
³import.²
7. This
change does not release women from their unpaid work and responsibility in the
free sphere. It rather adds low paid work in the protected sphere to womenıs
continuing unpaid work load. So, it cannot accurately be spoken of as a shift
of responsibility from the private to the public sphere. Rather, private,
largely female responsibility is shared socially with the development of
services that are subsidized by womenıs low wages and rely on womenıs extremely
demanding double work day (paid and unpaid).
8. State
power, far from being supplanted by the concentration of power in transnational
corporations, is being used to serve that concentration. The dominance of the
global market that restricts national options, and is used to justify painful
restructuring in the name of competition, is itself the product of policies
dictated and implemented by national governments of wealthy nations and the
multi-lateral institutions they control, with the collaboration of powerful
groups in the economic south.
9.
Because of deteriorating terms of trade and massive interest rate jumps,
the foreign debt of these nations continues to rise, though they have repaid
the principal many times over. Interest rates jumped from 2.2% in the 1970s
when the debts were originally incurred to 16.6% in 1982. The World Watch
Institute reports that in 1971 the debt of developing countries was $277
billion, by 1997 it had reached $2,171 billion (2000a).
10. The
Ontario Government, for instance, relieved Ontario Hydroıs two main successor
companies of $21 billion of debt (Martin 2001).
11. In
Cochabamba, Bolivia, recently local people rioted to force the government to
take back newly privatized water services which had left them without water.
The privatized rail service in Britain has cost lives and ruined the rail
system. Privatization of power provision in California has led to energy
blackouts and interrupted service.
12. In
Ontario, the provincial governmentıs hasty off-loading of the water monitoring
function to private labs has been implicated in a serious outbreak of e-coli
that caused seven deaths and much serious illness (Brennan 2001, Harris 2001).
13. When
a Peruvian air force jet shot down a small plane on April 20, 2001 in the
mistaken belief that it was carrying drug smugglers, it was revealed that the
plane had first been spotted and wrongly identified by a us surveillance
aircraft carrying employees of a private firm with a cia contract. The
incident, in which a young mother and her child died, cast light on the
privatization of the drug war. A great deal of the $1.3 billion allocated for
Plan Colombia, the mixed programme of military and ³development² aid intended
to fund the ³drug war² in Colombia is going to commercial ventures. DynCrop has
a five-year $200 million contract to fly lethal crop-dusters over Colombia.
Other private businesses conduct aerial surveillance and have trained Colombian
officers (Monbiot 2001).
14.
Mergers of enormous conglomerates that would have been resisted earlier
are now the norm, representing a concentration of already excessive corporate
power. In 1970, some 50 conglomerates dominated the us mass media including
newspapers, books, magazines, film, radio, television and recorded music;
today, 10 corporations dominate (World Watch 2000a).
15. In
Ontario, Premier Mike Harris reduced social assistance by 22% as soon as he was
elected in 1995. In Canada, the value of the minimum wage declined 48% between
1972 and 1992. In 1989, 87% of the unemployed were eligible for unemployment
benefits; by 1996 tightening criteria had reduced eligibility to 40%.
16. A new
15 country study by the international organization Social Watch, documents
widening income gaps in every country since the advent of free trade
(www.socialwatch.org).
17. For
extensive documentation of increasing economic polarization in Canada, see
Yalnitzyan (1998).
18. The
United Nations Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995 estimated that the cost of
the absolute eradication of poverty would be $80 billion per year over 20
years, compared to worldwide military spending which was nearly $800 billion in
that year alone.
19. To
counter the costly negative publicity of this terminator seed, corporations
moved very cynically and very quickly (with public funding) to produce rice
engineered with Vitamin A precursors. Extensive publicity billed this ³Golden
Rice² as a solution for widespread vitamin A deficiency in the third world.
Free licenses ³for humanitarian use² were granted for all intellectual property
rights, and the rice is free to farmers earning under $10,000 per year.
Unfortunately, to gain the necessary Vitamin A from this rice, people would
have to eat 3kg (uncooked weight) of rice every day, whereas the normal ration
is only 100grams. The re-introduction of traditional diverse intercropping,
originally displaced by expanded monocropping of rice, would improve peopleıs
nutrition far more effectively than this genetically modified rice, but would
be much less profitable.
22. For
accounts of womenıs local activism see: Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies (1999);
Davies (1983, 1987); Garland (1988); Kishwar and Vanita (1984); match
International Centre (1990); Mbilinyi and Meena (1991); Morgan (1984);
Ricciutelli et al. (1998); and Schuler (1986, 1990, 1992).
23. This
influential document was developed collectively by dawn members and circulated
in unpublished form in feminist groups and at feminist gatherings before 1987.
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