By Lisa Macdonald
Over the last decade, capitalism's efforts to shore up profit rates have resulted in a serious decline in the living conditions of the majority of the world's population. Report after report documents that the gap between rich and poor is growing, both between countries and within countries.
The most exploited layers of the working class — women and people of colour — are bearing the brunt of the neo-liberal restructuring and attacks on wages, working conditions, health, welfare, education and public ownership.
The austerity drive is aimed at taking back the gains made by the workers' and social movements in the developed countries over the last 40 years — universal welfare payments, expanded public education and child-care services, higher wages, equal opportunity and affirmative action legislation, environmental safeguards.
The gains of those progressive movements stand in the way of increasing exploitation to the levels needed to restore profit rates.
So the aim is to break the organisational strength of the movements and break down the advances those movements made in raising consciousness among broad layers.
Capitalism needs to de-fund, coopt or even outlaw movement organisations and launch ideological campaigns to reassert, for example, that women's "primary" role is child-care and aged and youth services within the family; to break down solidarity between workers in the First and Third Worlds; and to re-raise social Darwinist theories of white superiority.
Capitalism has to deepen the fragmentation of the working class into "competing" groups — white against black, male against female, family against family — all vying with each other for jobs, welfare and survival.
How well progressive people and movements understand and resist this process will determine just how far capitalism can take its attacks.
Unity in diversity
Capitalism has imbued significant sections of the population with racist and sexist ideas. A large proportion of white working people, for example, put their privileges as whites ahead of the interests of the working class as a whole, including working-class people of colour. Likewise, many male workers put safeguarding their privileged position as men ahead of the collective interests of male and female working people.
Only by being forced to confront the questions of racism and sexism head on, to struggle alongside women and people of colour, will these workers come to realise that many of their interests are the same.
For this process even to begin, we need strong, independent anti-racist and women's liberation movements which involve all those who want to struggle against their specific oppression. Sex and racial oppression operate according to their own structures and dynamics, as do the struggles against them.
But, even though all women suffer discrimination, all women do not share the same social status. A women who is treated as inferior because of her sex can be treated as superior because of her race or class, even in relationship to men of another race or class.
Race and sex oppression intersect in the lives of women of colour, the overwhelming majority of whom are also working class. Compared to men of colour, women of colour score lower on just about every indicator of human well-being. They are oppressed as women.
But they are also oppressed as people of colour. Aboriginal women's health and educational status is significantly less than that of non-Aboriginal women. Their average life expectancy is 16 years less than that of non-Aboriginal women.
Under capitalism, some women are able to use their race or class position to resist sexist oppression more effectively, and even to assume the role of oppressor in relationship to black and working-class men and women. This makes class and race privilege important factors in analysing the nature and role of the women's liberation movement.
Inevitably, in a women's movement that remains almost exclusively Anglo and middle-class, a significant section will have vested interests in maintaining rather than abolishing the capitalist system, to the extent that it privileges them as whites and members of the middle class.
This was illustrated very graphically in the struggle for women's suffrage in the US in the first decades of this century. When it appeared that white men (who already had the vote) might grant black men the vote while leaving white women disenfranchised, the overwhelming majority of suffragettes expressed anger and outrage that white men were insulting white womanhood by refusing to grant them privileges that were to be granted to black men.
They admonished white men, not for their sexism, but for their willingness to allow sexism to overshadow racism.
For those women who see feminism solely as a way to demand entrance into the existing power structures, it simplifies matters to make all men oppressors and all women victims. Issues of race or class are avoided because the goal is to share privilege rather than to win equality for all.
Liberation of all
To build the strongest possible women's movement, it is necessary to acknowledge and make space for the different experiences, needs and priorities of different groups of women.
This does not mean, however, that differences should be elevated over the common experience of women as the oppressed sex, or that class and race differences between women remove the necessity for united action against a common oppression.
The movement will need to win the support of the majority of women, and therefore of working-class women and women of colour. These women are unlikely to join a movement in which the majority of participants are unconscious of, or even eager to maintain, race and class hierarchies.
As African-American feminist bell hooks put it in her 1981 book ain't i a woman: "as black women, our struggle for liberation only has significance if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people".
This means, for example, that Reclaim the Night collectives should reconsider demands for greater police powers to protect women in domestic violence situations. For Aboriginal women, even though they too are bashed in the home and want to struggle against this, calling for greater police intervention is tantamount to calling for more Aboriginal men's deaths in custody.
In fighting against racism and sexism, we need to be conscious always of not cutting ourselves off unnecessarily from potential allies.
It is a reality for the women's movement that, even as women of colour and working class women suffer gender oppression in their daily lives, they are fundamentally linked to men of their race and class by their shared experience of those oppressions.
This was vividly illustrated, much to the horror of the largely white, middle-class feminist movement in the US today, by African-American women's overwhelmingly positive response to the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial last year. In the context of the widening gap between the life chances of blacks and whites in the US and the racist ideological offensive, the trial was seen first and foremost as the trial of an African-American rather than of a man.
Every issue
The women's movement must be able to accommodate as equal participants women who are also fighting in other movements. This necessity is captured in the slogan, "Every issue is a women's issue".
That means not only that the women's movement needs to fight around all issues affecting women, but also that struggling against all instances of exploitation and injustice from women's point of view enriches and strengthens the women's liberation movement.
Alliances between different groups of oppressed people and their movements are, while not easy to achieve, essential. It's not just a question of combined struggles being bigger and therefore more powerful.
Oppressed groups working together for specific reforms, against specific injustices, is the best — in fact the only — way to break down the divisions within the working class along race and sex lines. It is the only way to replace identification with the ruling-class's sexist and racist ideas with an understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Only masses of people, united and organised around those experiences of oppression they have in common, have the potential to create a movement which can dismantle the system founded on race, sex and class inequalities. Those "masses" — the working class — include the majority of women and the overwhelming majority of people of colour.
In the words of black feminist Anna Cooper in a speech to a women's congress in the US in more than a century ago:
"Let women's claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favouritism, whether sex, race, country or condition. If one link in the chain is broken, the chain is broken."
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