Women and Revolution – Robin Yeamans

WOMEN AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION

In the age of robotics, women and children have been reduced to commodities, as never before.

Under The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 2010 (CAPTA) and the cynically named Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), children are treated as commodities, with states and corporations reaping huge financial bonuses for breaking up families. The federal government pays states $4,000 per head for a child adopted out. States also receive $6,000 per head for a “special needs” child adopted out. Once the children are taken from their mother, they are diagnosed as depressed, making them worth even more to the states. For an “emergency” removal, the state gets $10,000. Since this became the law, what percent of removals do you think are so-called emergencies?  These kids have such a clear price tag that their status as commodities is undeniable. The parents in juvenile court keep trying to meet all the requirements of their program, do this, do that, and they have no idea that the issue is cold hard cash, not their parenting ability.

As the US moves towards open fascism, women are particularly at risk, as shown by the attacks on choice (which are called “pro-life”). Under German fascism, “the violent propaganda for more births, are accompanied at the same time by the policy of wholesale sterilization of the alleged unfit or mentally weak . . . . the conscious reactionary policy of modern capitalism in its most extreme decay.”¹ In the US this is reflected by prohibitions on abortion for white women, which will be followed by sterilizations for non-white and poor women. In the 1950’s, John D. Rockefeller III created the Population Council, later to be joined by the Ford Foundation. These elite philanthropists poured money into studies of birth control, aimed especially at poor and brown women. The Rockefeller Foundation and others worked to develop “an anti fertility vaccine . . . to be easily administered to large numbers of women using the least resources.” Adequate birth control is inseparable from adequate medical care and can’t be accomplished by a vaccine alone. But adequate birth control and health care would put the control of women’s bodies into women’s own hands, and that wasn’t the goal of the large foundations.

Women are at their most vulnerable during pregnancy and birth. Horribly, the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the US is murder:

“We found that homicide was the leading cause of death among women who were pregnant … and accounted for 20% of deaths among that group, compared with 6% of deaths among nonpregnant women of reproductive age.”²

The women who survive pregnancy in the US face the highest rate of maternal deaths in the developed world. Only in the US is the maternal death rate rising as it declines elsewhere.

Treating women openly as commodities, the medical system inflicts unnecessary caesarian section operations on a huge percentage of women in the US.

Around the world, a C-section rate of approximately 19 percent seems to be ideal for the health of both women and newborns, according to an analysis of childbirth in 194 countries published [in Nov. 2015] in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the United States, however, about one in three births happen by C-section, a rate that has risen dramatically over the past few decades, from 5 percent in 1970 and 20 percent in 1996. By contrast, about 16 percent of births in Finland and 24 percent in the United Kingdom are from C-sections.³

Not only can a c-section be scheduled at the surgeon’s convenience, but it results in greater hospital income is much higher for a c-section, as reported by The NY Times:

The average total price charged for pregnancy and newborn care was about $30,000 for a vaginal delivery and $50,000 for a C-section, with commercial insurers paying out an average of $18,329 and $27,866, the report found.⁴

Gee, wonder why a third of new mothers now get c-sections. A mom about to deliver has been commodified. No matter how personally nice doctors and nurses may be, the system is capitalism, and for it mother and baby are commodities to produce profit.

Women’s wages continue to be lower than men’s. The AAUW reports that women on average are paid 80% of what men are paid. First, this results in huge profits to employers who hire women. As an example of the huge profits to be made from discrimination, Qualcomm in 2016 paid $19.5 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged unequal pay for women. This was a compromise settlement, which means we can’t tell how much the company really benefited from its discriminatory pay system. If one company benefits that much from its discrimination, the full amount of extra profits due to such practices are certainly in the billions, if not more. Second, the women relegated to lower-paid employment status gives men a social power above them.

Not only are all levels of government the biggest discriminators, but in October 2017, California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have required companies with more than 500 employees to report median and mean salary data on male and female exempt employees, which would have been published online by the Secretary of State. This Democratic Party governor didn’t even want women to have data collected, which is a far cry from acting on it. He was right there to protect the profitability of the large companies.

The book “Brotopia” describes the position of women in higher education and the tech industry:

In 1984, the year the Macintosh [computer] was unveiled, women in tech reached a high point, receiving almost 40 percent of computer science degrees. Unfortunately, that’s when women’s progress in tech suddenly stalled.

. . . . Today women earn just 22 percent of computer science degrees, a number that has remained basically flat for a decade.

…[W]omen hold a mere quarter of computing jobs in the United States, down from 36 percent in 1991. The numbers are actually worse at big companies such as Google and Facebook. . . . The statistics are downright depressing for women of color: black women hold 3 percent of computing jobs, and Latina women hold 1 percent.⁵

In the high tech industry, women are found in jobs such as food service, etc.

When Trump was elected president, the largest ever march in US history was the Jan. 2017 Women’s March. Women and children are suffering, and they knew what Trump’s election meant.

Seeing the women in motion, the nonprofit organizations and the government seek to funnel female protest into avenues that will not result in real social change. If an organization takes this line of least resistance, they’ll get grants, funding, support, favorable mentions in the media. But groups really struggling for social revolution will get none of that and may well be attacked by police and governmental agencies.

The government encourages women to engage in a woman-versus-man battle that is no threat to the power structure. From the government point of view, encouraging women to fight against rape is the desirable path because it defines men as a group as rapists. But really this is just a help to mass incarceration, as can readily be seen from the rotten treatment of women and children who are victims. They are just commodities used as an excuse to funnel men into the system of mass incarceration.

In Capital, Marx explained that capitalism will drive not only men but also women and children into employment:

“In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing labourers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and labourers was forthwith changed into a means for increasing the number of wage-labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the workman’s family, without distinction of age or sex. Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children’s play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family.

“The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour-time necessary to maintain the individual adult labourer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour-market, spreads the value of the man’s labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labour-power. . . .”

In the US since 1938, while most  child labor was outlawed, federal labor laws have excluded child farm workers from labor protections provided to other working children. The law didn’t say that “Latino children” were excluded from legal protection—but that was the reality of it. Needless to say, the government doesn’t gather information on the number of minors who work in the fields, but estimates are that there are approximately 500,000 farmworkers under the age of 18. Where pay is by the bushel, for piecework, there is a strong impetus to drag the entire family into the field.

While Marx was correct that capitalism would drive women into the employment market, in the end stage of capitalism, robotics, women are being driven out of employment.

Since about the year 2000, a smaller and smaller percentage of women participate in the civilian labor force. First, capitalism dragged them into employment, and now robotics is tossing them out of jobs, ending entire jobs, and divisions of labor. The answer is not a call for jobs, jobs, jobs but a call to end capitalism forever in favor of a communist economy.

Jobs that were predominantly filled by women were the first to be replaced by computers and robots. The book Race Against the Machine reports:

[M]any types of clerical work have been automated, and millions of people interact with robot bank tellers and airport ticket agents each day.⁶

The women’s movement has to chart its own independent course and avoid the beckoning, welcoming path of least resistance. They need to be fearless in raising the special needs of women and children and insisting the political groupings and parties address them.

Confronted by imminent fascism, we either take up the cause of women’s issues with a vigor, or the fascist forces will convert women into a reserve of fascism. We must ensure that by fighting truly for women’s and children’s issues, women take their place as the forefront of social revolution.