Cap is the root cause of patriarchy – workk will find a way to be bad

Kafila -- First published May 23, 2013, posted at the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission. The brutal gang rape of a woman in December 2012 triggered a mass movement against violence against women in India. The perpetrators were sentenced on September 13, 2013 -- Sexual violence cannot be attributed simply to some men behaving in "anti-social" or "inhuman" ways: it has everything to do with the way society is structured: i.e., the way in which our society organises production and accordingly structures social relationships. Once we understand this, we can also recognise that society can be structured differently, in ways that do not require – or benefit from – the subordination of women or of any section of society. What are the material structures that underpin sexual violence? As I address this question I will also engage with some of the arguments made in two recent articles which offer a professedly Marxist analysis of sexual violence and women’s subordination in India; one is "On the empowerment of women" by Prabhat Patnaik, in the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s People’s Democracy, January 27, 2013, and the other is "Class societies and sexual violence: Towards a Marxist understanding of rape", by Maya John, Radical Notes, May 8, 2013. Prabhat Patnaik analyses the differences between gender oppression in advanced capitalist countries and countries like India. He notes, rightly, that the development of capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries was accompanied by a destruction of their pre-capitalist structures, facilitated by colonialism and the resulting large-scale emigration into the so-called "new world". Whereas in India, “the 'old community' associated with our pre-capitalist structure … continues to remain with us”. The persistence of pre-capitalist structures and extremely stubborn feudal survivals in India is undoubtedly significant in producing the specifically Indian variant of patriarchal oppression. A glaring instance of this is the phenomenon of khap panchayats [unelected caste councils] that pass diktats and death sentences on couples who marry by choice, especially those that do so in defiance of caste norms. However, some of Prabhat Patnaik’s arguments and conclusions are questionable. Among them is his assumption that it is only pre-capitalist structures that provide a base for patriarchy; and consequently that in the advanced capitalist countries, gender oppression remained only in the form of “patriarchal attitudes”, “essentially as a part of the superstructure”. This goes against the grain of Marxist analysis, and an entire body of work which has painstakingly mapped out the structural basis of gender oppression in capitalism. Central to this understanding is the role of the gendered division of labour, whereby the burden of reproductive labour has been privatised and assigned to women. Production (involving wage labour that produces surplus value) and reproduction (of life in a literal sense as well as of the necessities of life, involving women’s unpaid household labour) are both equally central to capitalism. The gendering and privatisation of reproductive labour, whereby the socially necessary labour of child care, cooking, cleaning, etc. became "women’s work" to be done inside the household, took place in class societies pre-dating capitalism. Capitalism itself displays contradictory impulses. On the one hand it seeks to draw everyone – men, women, children – into production. On the other, it has an interest in retaining reproductive labour as "women’s work" so as to ensure that the cost of such labour is minimised – both for the wage-paying capitalist as well as for the capitalist state. Patriarchy is therefore one of the axes of the capitalist system; part and parcel of the structural edifice of capitalism. Patriarchal ideology does not hang unsupported in the air; it is not a matter of "mindset" or "attitude" alone: notions of feminine "nature", "duties", "good and bad women" and sexual propriety for women are produced, nourished and deployed to mask, mystify and justify women’s unpaid reproductive labour and the patriarchal family where such labour takes place. The tension between women entering the workforce and continuing to bear the burden of "housework" has been a factor in forcing the state, in some countries, to concede state-funded child care, health care, education and so on. But in neoliberal times, with the state adopting "austerity measures" to bail out capitalism in crisis, we are witnessing a global cut-back in such social spending. Any state that pursues such policies needs to persuade women to accept the burden of housework as "women’s work", and to dissuade women from rejecting traditional roles. It is notable that some of the worst rape culture remarks by US Republican senators (who could compete with India’s patriarchal lawmakers in misogyny) have been made recently to promote arguments against the right to abortion. The enormous resistance to, and organised reaction against, conceding the right to abortion or same-sex marriage in the US is an instance of how much the capitalist class still invests in the family institution and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction within it. One should also be wary of locating the structural basis for gender oppression in India solely in pre-capitalist structures. Capitalism in India, and the Indian state, also have a stake in the gender division of labour and the patriarchal ideology that supports it. The character of capitalist development in India, too, is such that it promotes caste and gender oppression, including several of the regressive elements associated with the pre-capitalist structures. Moreover, global capital too is implicated in the project of Indian patriarchy. International media coverage of the Indian anti-rape protests tended to discuss the issue as unique to "Indian/Asian culture". They chose to overlook the fact that gender violence, sexism and rape culture are thriving in the West, and moreover that neoliberal policies pursued by global capital are complicit in perpetuating women’s oppression and redeploying patriarchal structures and attitudes in order to exploit women’s labour in, say, Bangladesh or India! The case of Bangladeshi women producing for Wal-Mart in exploitative and unsafe sweatshops that prey on and promote their insecurity and subordination has come to light time and again, especially in the recent tragedies of factory fire and building collapse that killed hundreds of young working women.