Women's Oppression

["P Chandra" <prchandra10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

 

Theses on the Political Economy of Women’s Oppression

 1. A cursory look at the statistics demonstrate that there is a direct relation between a steep rise in the emancipatory consciousness for/among women within the society and the quantitative leap in the incidences and varieties of atrocities on women. In a way it is an indication of the ongoing crisis in the patriarchal set-up, but it would be tautological to attribute this rise in consciousness to some ethical awakening or inspiration, since the latter too cannot come out of nothing or weary thinking. They are flames, which are fuelled by a holistic transformation of the society, i.e., the material base for them is inherent in the fact that the existing society “produces its own grave-diggers.”       

 2. Violence against womanhood has generally been superficially analysed. It has been considered natural when it occurs regularly in wedlock, or else deviant for which legal provisions may suffice. Even, the feminist discourse generally offers a simplistic analysis of the problem by stooping down, firstly, to subjectivity, and secondly, to a-historicism. It stresses on the bourgeois concept of freedom based on individualism and the principle of social atomism. Further, it refuses to recognize the qualitative differences between the patriarchies or patriarchal forms in different socio-economic formations (which eventually leads it to formalism).

 3. The evolution of patriarchy was not only a result of the division of labour, but also and foremost, represented “the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument of breeding children.” The transformation from a matrilineal society to patriarchy was, of course, not any ethical degradation or usurpation, but reflected a change in the material base of the human existence. Once, patriarchy was firmly established, it became a need for every socio-economic formation to reproduce it as an important control mechanism to conserve itself.

 4. The degradation of womanhood and her sexuality to “a mere instrument” generated the process of its reification (its reduction to the state of thing-ness/property). It is in this aspect that the genesis of violence against womanhood resides. A woman of a particular community, caste or socio-economic stratum is raped to “teach” that section of the society, in other words, to reproduce the hierarchical structure.  Rapes in such incidences are, allegorically, violation of the property rights of that section. Reification, further, entails indiscriminate sexual harassment. Child molestation within a family is an _expression_ of this phenomenon. In fact, family is the nucleus, which reproduces the patriarchy or subjugated womanhood.

 5. In the society based on competitive logic of commodity production, patriarchy acquires new roles and functions. Patriarchal ethos, which binds women to the four walls, serves as a means to reproduce labour power (this role provides a wider satisfaction to the acquisitive class, as this function of motherhood and wife-hood are largely unaccountable and, hence, unpaid labour). Further, the patriarchal family structure effectively allocates a large section of the reserved army of proletariat by generating ideological rationalisations for it. Hence, it sublimates a potential danger to the mode of production. Frequent ‘liberal’ waves make this gender-bias a mechanism to obtain cheap labour, too. Subjugated and reified womanhood is called at workplace as a seller of labour-power and sexual violence there functions as a control mechanism, to degrade her role as a ‘free’ labourer. This role of blackleg conferred on women labour reproduces an ideological divide similar to racism, caste-ism, regionalism, etc. Thus, sexual harassment further becomes an _expression_ of the frustration of the fellow male workers, which essentially ensues from an increase in the labour market competitiveness.

 6. But herein lies the contradiction that entails the capitalist crisis, to be more particular, the crisis of capitalist patriarchy. “Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association." Despite a rampant occupational segregation, it is the increased exposure of womanhood in the public life, or to be more precise, in the labour market that explains the growth of consciousness (which is effected through the essential logic of capitalist development). It is this fact that disallows any long-term homogeneity in women’s emancipation movement, except on some reformist measures. Non-Marxist Feminists envisaging the contrary are utopians, the most radical of whom cannot go beyond demanding women’s right to property. They do not question the material base on which the capitalist patriarchy sustains, and thus cannot provide any permanent solution to its crisis – which lies in the socialisation (not even the state ownership) of means of production.

Pritha Chandra, Centre of Linguistics & English, School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (India) - 110067