index of 2006 workshop papers

Women Organizing for Global Justice

by Ann Ferguson
University of Massachusetts, U.S.A.

My aim in this paper is to investigate some of the various global social movements involving women against corporate globalization, sometimes called “globalization from below”, to see what concepts and visions of social justice they presuppose and advocate. I am including in my purview women’s self-help and empowerment projects which in some way challenge capitalism and male domination. Is there a way that we can frame these movements to see a historical trajectory that can create a unified vision and be capable of achieving it? That is, to develop an alternative vision that is not merely utopian but one that can be achieved in spite of the hegemonic forces arrayed against us?

Here I am going to concentrate on the ideological questions involved in an alternate vision of global justice. Radical social movements have to gather strength from moral arguments against the existing order, pointing out injustices even according to the existing conceptions of Justice that are based on capitalist morality: for example, government corruption, collusion of private corporate interests with politicians in representative democracies who claim to stand for their constituents’ interests, and monopolies, such as WalMart is coming to be, which make the so-called choices of the free market not available to consumers and workers who must deal with them.

I shall compare and contrast three different paradigms of Social Justice that are presently being used by women activists against aspects of corporate capitalist globalization. These are the Neo-Liberal and Libertarian Conception of Justice, the Welfare Liberal or Social Democratic Conception, and the Solidarity Conception of Justice. Although appealing to all three paradigms can be morally effective and mobilize people against existing injustices, only the last paradigm can mount a successful radical critique of the existing order which presents a vision of a systematic alternative social and political economy and alternative form of globalization.

The two main camps defending the justice of capitalist democracy as a political economy, Neo-Liberals and Social Democrats, disagree on whether to prioritize individual Freedom or Equality when there is a conflict between them in the operation of a capitalist democracy, with the former camp emphasizing freedom and the latter equality. Radicals argue that the social and economic policies of neither camp can overcome the two internal critiques of a capitalist political economy discussed below, particularly in the age of corporate globalization. They maintain that no form of capitalism is able to deliver its own values, either freedom or equality, to the majority, and hence that capitalist democracy does not meet its own internal criterion for social justice.

Justice as Freedom: Libertarian/Neo-Liberal Capitalist Democracy

The main principle of justice of capitalist democracies can be stated as the right to equal freedom or liberties in a political and economic system based on individual freedom of contract, whether this be in the economy, the family or the social contract of government. John Rawls (1971) frames this as his first principle of Justice as Fairness. According to this paradigm individual political and civil liberties and the right to private property should be prioritized over any government control of the political and economic spheres that might jeopardize these liberties. The social contract of government should be a representative democracy. Critics have argued that the massive inequalities and class differences that occur in the process of capitalist accumulation allow only the wealthy few in capitalist democracies to truly have the freedom to exercise civil and political liberties and to amass private property.

Justice as Equality: Social and Welfare State Democracy

The advocates of social democracy in the twentieth century have come both from the left and from the center of those defending capitalist democracy. A capitalist welfare state which provides a safety net of economic rights and entitlements such as unemployment and welfare benefits, health care and public education has been defended ideologically as a way to balance the values of Freedom and Equality more equitably among the owning and producing classes in society. Sometimes it is defended on the grounds that the system needs not just to promote not just negative freedom from inference but should provide everyone, even the poorest, the positive freedom to have the opportunity to meet their basic material needs and the tools they need (health, employment, education, housing) to freely choose to pursue their life goals. Social democrats promote world development projects with the aim of guaranteeing even the poorest sector in poor nations a right against poverty, and in this way promote capitalist globalization which respects John Rawls’ second principle of justice, the principle of difference (Rawls 1971, 2001) that demands that institutional arrangements must benefit the worst off classes or groups. They aim to reduce vast inequalities in wealth and by so doing, promote a sense of fraternity or solidarity among citizens.

Radical critics of social democrats and welfare state liberals argue that welfare entitlements are only given to the popular classes when the capitalist economy needs shoring up against recessions, depressions and popular resistance to such impoverishment (Durand, 2005). The demand side Keynesian government deficit-spending that hitherto supported such welfare states has now gone out of favor, since this type of capitalist social policy relies on a graduated income tax that taxes big corporations and the wealthy. But the process of corporate globalization allows transnational corporations to increase their profits by leaving high tax countries in favor of lower tax ones, by outsourcing their production and reducing their labor costs. International competition for cheap labor and the need to cut corporate taxes to reduce capital flight abroad has meant that most capitalist nations have cut their welfare state spending to avoid amassing huge deficits. Most have turned to neo-liberal economic policies: cutting corporate taxes, privatizing national resources and hoping that the creation of this new private capital will create incentives for the expansion of national corporations which will provide more jobs at home. But due to corporate globalization, the real wages of the popular classes have fallen even in the rich countries: families have only been able to keep up with the rising cost of living by having more and more mothers working full time in the wage labor force in addition to their unpaid housework. Some welfare liberal critics of the effects of neo-liberal globalization in terms of the skewing of wealth and the inequitable use of material resources have called for a Global Resources Dividend fund to guarantee the world’s poor some access to a minimal share of these resources (Pogge 2003).

Feminist critiques of the welfare state like Young (1990) also argue that the top-down dispensation of welfare based on the perceived merit of the recipients creates a bureaucracy with professionals who make recipients powerless and demean them, thus undermining their self-esteem. Women on welfare are made to seem the undeserving dependents who are living off the work of others, and distinctions are made between the deserving and undeserving (Fraser 1997, ch. 5 with Gordon). The state presents itself as the powerful father giving handouts to the feminized and powerless citizenry.

The Appearance/Reality Critique of Capitalist Justice

A. Appearance of Civil Equality/Reality of Inequality

Those in the Marxist Critical Theory tradition have mounted “immanent critiques” of capitalism that also apply to corporate capitalist globalization. An immanent critique points out a contradiction between the appearance or claim that a particular principle of justice is in operation and the reality that in fact the practice has subverted the principle . The recent Enron scandal where employees who were shareholders were defrauded of their pensions are examples of how the massive power of large corporations and their CEOs can undermine a democratic politics and business practices which represents the interests of the majority of people, rather than the wealthy elite.

Women activists have used immanent critiques of corporate capitalist globalization to highlight other examples of an appearance/reality conflict within systems of capitalist democracy. First, they have organized against the impunity of perpetrators of murders and violence against women. The male domination that has accompanied all existing capitalist systems has made it especially difficult for women to have their basic human rights defended. This is the situation of the nearly one thousand young women, mostly maquila workers who have been murdered with impunity in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. As the Mothers for Justice for our Daughters group there have shown, the Mexican political and legal authorities are not investigating these cases seriously, and are simply trying to create a cover-up of this systematic violence against women and violation of the basic right to life.

A similar situation is occurring in Guatemala City, where a new lesbian feminist group, Lesbiradas, has been created to challenge cultural homophobia, and to work in coalition with other mostly women’s groups to connect and challenge gender and sexual violence against gays and lesbians with violence against women. When she talked recently at UMass/Amherst, the co-founder of this group, Claudia Acevedo pointed out that nearly 20% of the women murdered over the last four years have been women suspected of being lesbians: hence the connection between misogyny and homophobia in gender violence. This sort of impunity to perpetrators of violence against women is an example of an appearance/reality disjuncture in contemporary capitalist patriarchal criminal justice practices.

Second, there are contradictions between the ideology and reality of freedom for women, e.g. in reproductive rights. The right to control over one’s body in the making of reproductive decisions, whether in sexuality, birth control or planned parenthood through the right to abortion, are severely restricted for women in nation states which ban or restrict access to abortion or means of contraception. Political liberalism, since it presumes toleration for conflicting visions of the good including religions, has not been able to guarantee reproductive justice for women in the face of fundamentalist religious pressures on governments to keep abortion illegal, restricted or economically unavailable. Although in liberal theory the economic sphere of the capitalist free market is separate from the political sphere of the government which claims to defend civil and political rights, in reality, capitalist corporations and governments sacrifice such rights to authoritarian governments and organized patriarchal religions so long as they are guaranteed their bottom line profits. Organizing in resistance to this, there are many women’s projects for reproductive health rights that are operating as NGOs, both in the US and globally.

A third contradiction between the idea of political democracy and the reality of the power of the wealthy to control social policy in capitalist nations is the ubiquitous class bias that occurs in social environmental policy that leads to many cases of environmental injustice. There are innumerable battles being fought against class bias in environmental policy. Locating toxic waste dumps near poor communities which lack political clout is an example of the injustice in the distribution of political power and the costs of economic development in the capitalist system. We don’t have to look to Mexico or Latin America for examples of this same sort of class and gender bias in public policy. The Katrina disaster in New Orleans occurred in spite of clear knowledge that levees, barrier islands and other infrastructure repairs were required to avoid it, yet repairs did not occur because the majority of those who were endangered by this negligence are African-American or Latino and poor, single mother-headed families.

Internal Contradictions of Capitalist Globalization: Growing Economic Inequalities and Injustice for Labor and the Poor

The second kind of internal critique of capitalist values is based on the internal economic contradictions of the capitalist system that make it impossible to deliver its values to the non-wealthy classes. A key internal contradiction of the capitalist political economic process in a world of nation states is that the so-called “free” trade treaties, which multinational corporations press national political leaders to sign, allow for the free flight of capital across national boundaries but permit restriction of the flow of labor in the form of immigration restrictions. Labor then becomes “unfree” in the sense that it is restricted in its freedom to follow the best markets and wages, so the promise of bourgeois justice of freedom for workers is undermined . National working classes become pitted against each other as multinationals are free to amass profits and capital from the labor of one national group and use that to outsource future work to those outside the country of origin where laborers can work for less. Hence we see the resistance to the granting of amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the US by many sectors of the working class who fear that they are used to undermine trade unions. We can also note the rapid cross-border organization of immigrant rights organizations and networks in response to the current debate in the US Congress over whether to criminalize illegal immigrants and to tighten border security, and the huge outpouring of solidarity in favor of immigrant rights in US national demonstrations in the spring of 2006 and in the so-called Great American Boycott for Immigrant Rights on May 1, 2006.

Examples of working class organization to resist and challenge some of the internal contradictions of capitalism abound, not only with labor union organizing efforts within nations, but also in the attempts to create international solidarity between trade unions to support each others’ campaigns for social and economic justice. In the name of citizen equality, such campaigns for fair wages and a minimum income have also often pushed nation states to expand their welfare and unemployment safety nets, thus invoking the broader notion of justice connected to social democracy.

An impressive Mexican labor union, the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), has made international coalition with the United Steelworkers of America and the United Electrical Workers (UE) to combat the “foreigner” blaming that otherwise goes on with national working classes who find their jobs outsourced to a poorer country. As they travel to each others’ countries and communities, representatives of each union see more of the similarities in their exploited conditions as workers so as to not concentrate so much on the differences. Angeles López, a local organizer at a shoe factory in Guanajuato , Mexico , emphasized at the 2005 Women and Globalization conference the creative community and labor education work around gender, race and other forms of oppression that FAT does. She is a lawyer who teaches popular education courses on workers’ labor rights to women, but also has helped organized a Gender Justice network in the community between various community organizations which does popular education around gender issues such as domestic violence, and environmental and reproductive health rights issues. In indigenous areas they also discuss institutional racism. It is an example in practice of a feminist “intersectional” analysis of domination systems and their connection to the sort of politics of difference social justice analysis given by Iris Young (1990), rather than simply the classic left economic class reductionist analysis. FAT has critiqued the neo-liberal model of capitalist development currently held by the Mexican government and has demanded the return of welfare subsidies for the poor that the NAFTA treaty led the government to drop.

Internal vs. External Critique: Justice as Solidarity

The forces of capitalist globalization are at the base of the failures of state socialist societies in the so-called Second World (the USSR, China and Eastern Europe) to survive. As the authors of the Midnight Notes Collective (2004) point out, the social contract of social welfare guarantees and a reduced rate of wage exploitation in state socialist societies could not compete with what they call the “new enclosures” by corporate capitalism of the world’s formerly commonly owned resources, whether this be indigenous communally owned land in Nigeria or Mexico or Columbia, or the elimination of workers’ collective ability to defend free housing in China or public health care in Mexico. Authoritarian corrupt governments in state socialist countries, the lure of globalized consumer culture and Western hegemony in military might have also all played their part in diminishing the strength of the state socialist vision as an alternative to capitalism. From the point of view of values, it might be argued that collectivist values in Stalinist regimes were over-emphasized at the cost of individual rights while in Western capitalist democracies, particularly the U.S., there has been an over-emphasis on individualism at the cost of collective solidarity. The crises over both sorts of value imbalance have fueled decentralized autonomist alternative visions that are neither classically capitalist or socialist but that aim to promote both collective solidarity and individual rights through participatory democracy that recognizes the need for a politics of difference (cf. Young 1990).

An increasing number of the anti-corporate globalization social movements are no longer satisfied with either the welfare state capitalist model or the state socialist model as alternative visions for social justice. They are developing another paradigm for social justice we can call the Solidarity Model of Justice, which is based on an Autonomist decentralized vision that bypasses both the state and the capitalist economy. They do this by promoting alternative cooperative economies, communal ownership of land and natural resources or leaving them as “commons”—owned by none—and alternative visions of political democracy as more participatory and local, based in semi-autonomous municipalities and communities and social movements loosely linked together by solidarity through fair trade and political coalitions against neo-liberal globalization. The visions of those in these alternative political, social and economic spaces are either frankly anarchist, wanting to eliminate the state and its political power altogether, or they are autonomist visions in which the hitherto centralized power of nation states is bypassed in favor of local and transnational decision-making based on solidarity networks from below: like small farmers, labor unions, workers’ cooperatives, and representative town and community institutions.

A feminist historical materialist method can help us to understand the development of an alternative conception of Social Justice based on socialist-anarcho-feminist visions. Workable and sustainable alternative visions and values which challenge the values of an existing society in a way which undermines justifications for the existing economic order can only be based on the actual development of alternative social relations of production, that is to say, alternative economies, which give people a realistic and not just utopian understanding of what is fair and just. Marx critiqued the social democratic Gotha Program for its utopian attempt to promote the principle, to each according to their needs, for he argued that a capitalist system which rewards capital not labor can ultimately only promote principles of justice that are based on rendering unequals to unequals, eg. based on one’s property or capital, including human capital, or work/”merit”.

The anti-corporate globalization social movements have created alternative economies which are strong enough to challenge the unequal justice based on property rights that the hegemonic capitalist political economy promotes. These alternative spaces include worker-owned cooperatives and banks or loan funds, which many empowerment projects for women are based on. These spaces are operating under the principle of Justice as solidarity; that is, from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, where all are understood to be working for the good of the collective whole. These are not isolated examples of coops or individual projects, but whole networks of people which are forging what Bowman and Stone (2004, 2006) call a solidarity economics, and what Alperovitz calls a commonwealth tier alongside of the capitalist economy and centralized nation state.

Examples of such networks with a solidarity political economy include worker-cooperative takeovers of abandoned privately owned factories, put out of business by neo-liberal globalization, in Mexico and Argentina. They involve demands for re-distribution of lands to small landless farmers and agricultural workers, and the idea of collective or communal property or “commons”, as demanded by the indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. Indigenous and worker’s movements there and in in Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia and Argentina have created “gift” economies and collective rather than privatized domestic work of reproduction, as in collective community soup kitchens, childcare, and workers’ cooperative schools such as the one now operating in La Matanza barrio of Buenos Aires, Argentina by the MTD, or unemployed workers’ movement. The Zapatistas and others are demanding protection of the environment through the creation and protection of bio-preserves that should be seen as an environmental commons rather than to be privatized and degraded by multinational corporations.

Many of the large alternative material bases of cooperative economics and localized participatory democratic politics—think of the large semi-autonomous region in Chiapas governed by the participatory democracy of the Zapatistas, or the thousands of squatter community land take-overs governed in a similar process by the 1.2 millon member MST, or Movimiento sin Tierra, in Brazil—have evolved quite a different understanding of the concept of economic democracy, workers’ self-management, than is possible in developed capitalist economies. Here such cooperative businesses are constantly in competition against large multinational corporations and hence must often submit to the logic of profit and competition to create inegalitarian hierarchies between management and capital, and between worker-owners and temporary workers, that run against cooperative values (cf. Bowman and Stone, 2004 for a discussion of problems faced by the Mondragon cooperative complex in Spain and others).

In this sense we can see how the poor countries on the margin of the global capitalist system, those who still have some connection to traditions of communal economics in agriculture and to production for use, have developed social movements that are leading the way in the critique of global corporate capitalism through the concept of fraternity and solidarity based on these alternative economic and community bases. Nonetheless, there are also creative labor union solidarity movements across borders between developed and developing capitalist economies that support worker cooperatives and worker takeovers of non-producing factories, such as the alliance of the Mexican Frente Authentico de Trabajo (or FAT), discussed either, and its allies the United Steelworkers and the Union of Electrical Workers (UE) in the US and Canada. The fact that there are more than 11,000 worker-owned cooperatives in the US, including such large companies as United Airlines as well as the growth of the consumer cooperative movement again in the U.S., shows that the contradictions of capitalist globalization, even in the world’s richest country, are allowing alternative economies to grow here that are beginning to sustain alternative conceptions of social justice. Gar Alperovitz (2005) argues that the US has developed what he calls the “commonwealth tier” of alternative economies based on promoting the public good, which includes not only cooperatives, but community development projects, municipal corporations and a large non-profit sector of enterprises.

The Social Justice of Marginalized Others: The Example of Gender

An aspect of the alternative political economies created by global social movements that also connects to alternative conceptions of social justice is attention to gender, race/ethnic, class, sexual and disability justice that have been developed by such movements and their academic allies. Feminists and People of Color have been at the forefront of developing the academic theories of a social justice politics of difference, most notably in the US (cf. Iris Young 1990, Judith Butler 2004, bell hooks 1984, and Charles Mills 1997). They have argued that all forms of marginalization and subordination of individuals by socially constructed categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and “normal” ability should be challenged, as well as material segregation based on such categories, and the denial of political voice to such groups. Global feminist movements have coalesced around the claim that women’s rights be seen as human rights, and thus that sexual and domestic violence, plus women’s reproductive and sexual rights be included in the human rights world agenda as well as rights for parity in political representation and that issues of poverty, education and health as they impact disproportionately on women be addressed (cf. MacKinnon 2006, Kerr 1993).

Many social movements who are building this Solidarity Autonomist Paradigm of Social Justice have begun to lay a material base for alternative political economies to promote such goals and protections for hitherto marginalized groups. The Zapatistas have demanded rights of self-detemination over their land which has historically been restricted to property for use not for sale. In the case of women’s rights, some key principles have been to challenge the sexual division of labor that has denied women equal political representation. The Women’s Revolutionary Law of the Zapatistas insists on reproductive choice, the right to choice in marriage and rights against domestic violence. Other social movements have also set up collective rules and policing of their communities to eliminate or attack domestic and sexual violence.

For example, the MST in Brazil has organized gender commissions within the movement, which have pressed the understanding that they are a movement based on families and not individual workers. Hence both men and women should be seen as co-actors in the movement and not just the male workers. They have instituted a strict code against domestic violence that requires a male worker to leave a squatter community if he has engaged in domestic violence against his wife. The MTD in La Matanza, Argentina, consists of unemployed workers who support workers’ cooperative factory takeovers and do street actions critiquing the policies of neo-liberal globalization. It has a parents’ cooperative “free” school to teach their children critical thinking, including a critique of gender stereotyping.

Some of the fastest proliferating types of so-called “empowerment” projects for women in the developing world are economic cooperatives and cooperative revolving loan funds for small business owners. Although these might be critiqued as mere stop gap measures that do not deal with the ongoing structural causes of the feminization of poverty due to corporate globalization, they can, in the right circumstances and in conjunction with other social movements for justice, provide an alternative material base for values of solidarity and alternative visions of social justice. For example, in the San Miguel de Allende, Mexico region there is a network of women’s cooperatives called Mujeres Productoras. Their organizer is Yolanda Millan, one of the members of the coordinating committee of the Center for Global Justice there. Also represented at the Women and Globalization conference at the Center in the summer of 2005 were two cooperative group movements that stem originally from the organization of radical Christian base communities in the theology of liberation movement in the 1960s. One of these representatives, Elisa Curiel from Campeche, talked about how the women’s economic cooperatives had allowed them to become more independent of their men, and to have more of a political voice in the defense of indigenous rights in the environmental battles they have with foreign developers and the Mexican government. Another set of women, those representing CEDESA, a network of small farmers, has done popular education around demands for water and land and adequate education since the late 1960s, and has helped spearhead alternative production of honey and a barter fair for their products among the members.

Conclusion

My aim in this paper has been to highlight how women activists are at the forefront of struggles for global justice. Their struggles involve both internal critiques of injustices which violate women’s human rights as citizens, as workers, and as the biological reproducers, and external critiques of capitalist justice. The external critiques are creating a new vision of Justice based on a politics of Solidarity. This new value of Solidarity as the base for justice is developing from alternative political economies which have either resisted corporate capitalism from a traditional economy based on use, or have formed alternative economies of resistance such as gift economies or workers’ and community cooperatives. The social movements using such alternative economies have also alternative political models based on radical participatory democracy.

An example of this process is modeled on the Zapatista idea of “mandar obediciendo”, to lead by obeying from below, or in a non-hierarchical fashion (EZLN 2005). Another example is the consciousness-raising of identity politics, begun in the US civil rights and feminist movements and furthered by a complex intersectional theory of semi-autonomous domination systems of race, gender, class, sexuality and nationality. This has influenced many contemporary left social movements to create coalitions around class-based demands for economic justice that are non-reductive, and that also include demands for racial, gender and national justice against Eurocentric, patriarchal and neo-colonial global economic and political structures.

In all of this, the influence of global transnational feminist ideas and organizing, from the UN world conferences on women and the Latin American Feminist encuentros, to NGOs doing popular education around women’s human rights, have been extremely important. Women-focused projects, including gender commissions within mixed left social movements, have been influenced by, and influenced these feminist theories. Even when they are pitched simply at the practical level of meeting women’s material and human needs, with no explicit radical or revolutionary vision in mind by those who are engaged in them, I will argue that they represent the possibility of an alternative economy, an alternative politics and oppositional community networks that can flower into full-fledged movements against corporate globalization and a more robust moral vision of a better world. Hence the slogan of many of these projects and social movements: Another World is Possible! And some are even saying: Another World is Necessary!

References

Alperovitz, Gar 2006. “Another World Is Possible”, Mother Jones (January/February 2006).

Bowman, Betsy and Bob Stone 2004. “Cooperativization on the Mondragón Model: As Alternative to Globalizating Capitalism”, Humanity and Society, v. 28 #3 (October).

---- 2006. “ Latin America ’s New Solidarity Economy: Argentina ’s Crisis”. www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers

Butler, Judith 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Durand, Cliff 2005. “Globalization and Social Justice”, Center for Global Justice, www.globaljusticcenter.org/papers/durand05.htm

EZLN 2005/ “Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona” , Part I and II. http://chiapas.indymedia.org/

Fraser, Nancy 1997. Justice Interruptus. New York: Routledge.

hooks, bell 1884. Feminist theory from margin to center. Boston: South End.

Kerr, Joanna 1993. Ours by Right: Women’s Rights as Human Rights. London: Zed.

MacKinnon, Catharine 2006. Are Women Human? And other Interantinal Dialogues. Cambridge MA: Harvard University.

Mills, Charles 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University.

Pogge, Thomas 2003. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms.. Malden MA: Polity/Blackwell.

Rawls, John 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University.

---- 1985. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14, no. 3.

Young, Iris 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University.

index of 2006 workshop papers

To leave comments on this paper: click here.

To read comments already contributed: click here.