In this phase of difficulty, fragmentation and loss of memory, I think it is fundamental to give force and vigour again to the conquests of the feminist movement. A free society is unthinkable which does not face its own culture and the thought of women. The struggle for the liberation of the woman and the class struggle are parallel and inseparable.
The analysis must begin from our material conditions, of women connected as subjects to the internal processes of production and reproduction, and not as abstract political subjects (as we are often considered in society and in the movements). Consciousness of double exploitation, of gender and of class, must push us to elaborate, to attempt, a radical criticism, to understand the reality in which we live, and to act within it.
Reproduction for a long time appertained only and exclusively to the female, because it was considered a natural and biological sphere, that is, genetics. In fact, the conviction is widespread that domestic work and care is a pleasure or that it is easily compatible with salaried employment, that is, that it is not a necessary job.
The traditional family is not a "natural" society, it is a historical product as is any other type of family existing in other times and places, it is the last left-over of the monogamous patriarchal family, founded on the male lineage, on masculine authority and supremacy. If the patriarchal family of the pre-industrial era contemplated a minimal form of mutual assistance and solidarity, the current nuclear family mirrors and perpetuates the hierarchical and authoritarian principle of a society divided into classes, founded on inequality and on discrimination. Upon the family and particularly on women, the state discharges many of its contradictions and its inefficiency on the social level. From the unpaid domestic work of women are drawn enormous profits and economies in social services, through ever greater cuts to the public expenditure. Therefore, the historical, economic and cultural facts that determine the role of the woman as "angel of the hearth", a role that has changed and consolidated with the advent of capitalism, become invisible and functional to it.
Proposing again a political intervention on the forms of reproduction is necessary and fundamental, above all in the light of the new attacks on the social state, past and future, on pensions, on the quality of the life, on health and on social income. These new forms of structural adjustment of the world economy and therefore also the national economy, signifies for us women unemployment and therefore a return to the home to develop domestic work and care.
If women are central in reproduction, when they get out of the ghetto in search of an income entering the ground of production, the situation is, if possible, still worse.
In a word, the woman has the same rights as the man on the job, although our presence in the productive processes is historically more precarious, less guaranteed, unskilled, and above all subject to the whims of capital, and in reality the spectre of unemployment makes the women accept absurd conditions. Discrimination in the job market doesn't occur only through the roles, the work, the means, the tools, the tempo, the schedules, the shifts, the much vaunted flexibility, the structure of the workplace, and of the cities constructed exclusively on a masculine model; but the discrimination that takes place also in the control of the body and of its functions such as reproduction (note the work contracts that exclude marriage and pregnancy).
In the textile sector, where the presence of the female workforce is high, already in the middle of the 1980s, night work was introduced, the suppression of the weekend holiday, the introduction of continuous shifts. These conditions force many women to the enforced choice between not having children or resigning through the evident incompatibility between work outside and inside the house.
On the other hand we know well how the three confederations of "regime" must plan with the firms, allowing and legitimating entry salaries, area contracts, contracts of realignment for firms in crisis, and much worse with the motivation that a starvation-salary is always better than unemployment or dismissal!
In the scenario of new forms of employment, that is, temporary work, enforced part-time job hiring etc emerges more and more strongly in the service sector, the so-called third sector, the non-profit making concerns.
These non-profit making enterprises, while on the one hand they make up for to the lack of the state, which cuts services, on the other they are structured like real social firms that make profits and it still means exploitation for men and women workers.
Being a new form of very precarious work, underpaid, insecure and flexible, there is consequently a strong presence of women in the third sector. Besides this, these social enterprises or co-operatives lessen enormously the possibility of conflict being created because:
1. The employees are assimilated to the master as partner-workers;
2. The type of subjects with which they have to deal, namely, disadvantaged and marginalized users, therefore are hardly assimilable as pure commodities;
3. The strong blackmail of the loss of work seen in the current economic phase.
This resulting picture is very dangerous and worrying if we consider that also many comrades work in a disciplined and willing way inside this sector
With the imposition of the global market, Western capitalism has moved sections of production elsewhere, namely to those Eastern European countries (Yugoslavia and Albania) where at first it did not have access and to the South, employing low-cost workers, above all female and children, with forms that approach slavery. This means exploitation and slavery there and occupational blackmail here, with the threat of a shift of a big part of production.
The process of globalisation imposed by capital automatically implies a new international division of labour (NIDL) and a new sexual international division. The NIDL is a part of a vast process which, in a large part of the Third World, has upset the conditions of life of these populations: destruction of the economic activities linked to the land, deprivation of every type of assistance and of care, formation of a proletariat forced to depend for its own survival on monetary relations, even though completely without a monetary income.
In Africa, Asia and South America, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, through progressive structural adjustment and the politics of economic liberalisation, have deprived millions of people of any income and half of production, presenting these politics as the pillar of the new world economy today and of the NIDL.
The tools adopted for the affirmation of the liberal model have been progressive cuts to the state school, continuous devaluations of the currency, mass unemployment, privatisation, expulsion from the land for the marketing of the natural resources, the inauguration of an almost permanent state of war caused by impoverishment which exalts the contrasts owing to religious, political and ethnic difference. The first consequence of liberalism has been the sentencing of the proletarians of the Third World to a vast migratory movement from the South to the North: a real situation of "global apartheid"!!!
Globalisation weighs above all on women because in the countries of the Third World and Eastern Europe it means substantially, for the first, eradication from the land and, for all, conditions of aberrant life. The women forced to emigrate to the West, on the basis of a mirage of an amelioration of their life, end up doing old work like domestic service or prostitution: women immigrants are forced to leave their family, children and affections to face loneliness and insecurity, be it legal or social.
In this context, it is necessary for every project of international feminism to embrace as its own the struggle which the women of the Third World are carrying forward against the payment of the foreign debt and structural adjustment, which today is the most obvious aspect of the attempt on the part of the advanced capitalist countries to definitively colonise the Third World and, more generally, of the fact that capitalism is unbearable for best part of the population of the planet.
The expansion of capitalist relations has shown in fact, not only that capitalist development continues to be production of shortages and of death, but that the condition of its survival is the continuous creation of new divisions inside the international proletariat, divisions that still today constitute the greatest obstacle to the realisation of a world community free from every form of exploitation. It is in this sense that feminist politics must overturn the NIDL and the plans for globalisation of the economy and capitalist accumulation that are the causes of it.
It is also necessary not to confuse it with reformist feminism which believes in the need for power to "adjust" the conditions of the woman in the world, without thinking of radical demolition of this sexist and racist capitalist system.
I maintain therefore that to make a correct and profound analysis in regard to these themes it is necessary to create a conscious co-ordination at the provincial and national level.
We must destroy the prejudice that feminism is now out of date, above all for those women, many of them young people, that confuse the supposed emancipation with liberation. It is not "masculinising themselves" for women to free themselves: it is affirming our ideas, our needs, our desires, our differences for the creation of another society.
And I address myself not only to women comrades, but to all comrades to affirm that it is necessary to think of a political intervention, of a way of struggling that is oriented to demolishing the millennial sexist dominion and to sabotaging the project of capital in the revolutionary perspective of overturning it!