Feminizing the Latin
Labor struggle
James D. Cockcroft argues for a more gendered and internationally oriented analysis of labor struggles According to the head of the women-indevelopment program of the Interamerican Development Bank, "Investing in women offers policy makers the highest economic and social returns at the lowest cost" (Buvinic, 1997:39).
This is a late 1990s, feminized version of the investment in the poor strategy initiated in the late 1960s by the World Bank (see Cockcroft, 1998).
UN and other global estimates show women providing two-thirds of the hours of work, earning one-tenth of the world's income, and possessing less than onehundredth of the world's wealth.
According to the statistical calculations of the United Nations's "Human Development Report 1995," women's economic contributions globally are undervalued by US$Il trillion. Just the unpaid housework of women is estimated at the market equivalent of 1,530% of the gross domestic product (Bell, 1997). This super exploitation of women is a major consequence and cause of monopoly capital's seeking to fortify the relation between itself and village- or neighborhood-based "domestic economies."
Why is capital so interested in women? Besides the rise of feminism, there are structural reasons.
Employers are aware of the central role of women in production. Following Seccombe (1992, 1993), we can recast Marx's Department III (originally consumption) as that of the production of the sine qua non of all production: labor power. Department Ill of production doe this on a daily and generational basi organized through the family in patriarchal framework. Its importance i manifested by capital's resistance t socializing Department Ill costs o production through the provision o public community services, daycar centers, and the like.
The global spread of corporate giant like McDonald's reflects the capitaliza tion, not socialization of Department II of production. Women's unpaid house hold work makes it easier for employer to pay all workers less, while patriarcha and related gender ideologies mak women even more superexploitable.
At the same time, most of Latin America's "formal sector" workers bu numerous goods and services relatively low prices from the immisen ted masses hawking their ware or skill on neighborhood streets or in th marketplaces. This helps reduce pressur on what the wage can buy, an indire subsidy to capitalists.
Capital finds in women not only non-waged source of production Department III that subsidizes capital i Departments I (capital) and II (consume goods) of production by reducing th costs of labor power. It also finds a va pool of inexpensive, non-unionized, an sometimes skilled labor power Departments I and II. Most workers i several U.S. hi-tech industries today female, often first or second-generati Latina and Asian immigrants. Wome everywhere are increasingly heads families and major family "brea winners" (see Safa, 1995).
Studies of the immiserated masse have documented their central role
capital accumulation not only as a "reserve army of labor" but as participants in the direct production of surplus value and the circulation, distribution, and consumption of commodities.
Mexico's 4,000 maquiladoras (hi-tech, labor-intensive assembly plants) rely largely on a female labor force. Modern garment and other industries have "re-invented" the sweatshop and subcontract out so-called homework to poor women in "domestic workshops," super-exploiting mostly female "owners" and their "employees," often immigrants from poorer areas (see Alonso, 1995; Beneria and Roldan, 1987; Cockcroft, 1983; 1998; and Latin American Perspectives, 1998).
While in the countryside a depeasantization process is disguised by peasant production for markets and subsistence, in the cities a process of proletarianization and immiseration is often disguised by petty-bourgeois forms of economic activity that usually generate surplus value or realize it on behalf of capitalists.
The widespread immiseration that accompanies the proletarianization of some into a modern industrial work force denies the benefits of proletarian status (social security, unionization, etc.) to millions while limiting the benefits won in hard-fought battles by the industrial proletariat.
Super-exploitation of labor develops and creates anew supposed "non-capitalist" forms of production and distribution, thereby helping to combat the declining tendency of the rate of profit inherent in capital-intensive industrial production (Marx, 1967) while also absorbing some of the unemployed and inculcating them with what the anthropologist Sol Tax once called a "penny- capitalist" ideology (Tax, 1963).
Further, the capitalist mode of production supplants or "absorbs" noncapitalist modes of production; it does not "preserve," or "combine with," or "coexist with" them. What look like noncapitalist forms of production and distribution offer up to capital raw materials, certain necessities of life for labor power's reproduction, and even finished products (see Alonso, 1991; Cockcroft 1998; and de la Pena, 1975).
U.S. and Canadian capitalists seek low-paid, easily exploitable labor power not only by moving production offshore but also by relying heavily on immigrant labor. Mexico's high rates of "maquiladorization" and emigration reflect this.
In 1995, some 27% of Mexico's workforce were either unemployed workers or migrants in the United States (Cockcroft, 1998, Table 7).
Moreover, growing numbers of Latin America's immigrants to the United States and Canada are female. Employers welcome these tax-paying immigrants and new laws are making it harder for them to unionize or partake of society's social services.
The media-orchestrated and politically encouraged immigrantbashing in the most industrialized countries reflects capital's attempt to divide workers and maintain a higher level of labor discipline. Labor union confederations like the AFL-CIO are recognizing the need to "organize the unorganized" - mainly female workers and immigrants, many of whom had already started organizing themselves prior to the 1990s.
Before the Immigration Reform and Control Act and other laws were passed to block their efforts, immigrant workers organized what in the 1970s and early 1980s was the largest and most militant independent labor union in the United States, the American Federation of Workers (see Cockcroft, 1988, 1999).
There is also a growing recognition of the need to internationalize and "feminize" labor and human rights struggles around larger issues like North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, as well as specific union organizing attempts like those among Mexico's maquiladora or California's strawberry workers (see Mexican Labor News and Analysis, 1997-98; Labor Notes 1997-98).
The struggle against women's oppression in both its patriarchal and its capitalist form is central to any accurate class analysis and potentially successful strategy for change.
Women constitute the major superexploited group among the immiserated masses and much of the modern working class (more than a third of Mexico's workforce in 1998).
Underpaid and non-waged women subsidize both capitalist firms and household economies, and are central to both.
Of all social movements, those of immigrant workers and poor people are the least stable or predictable. Yet their power has been manifested repeatedly, with women often in the forefront, from the attempted revolutions in Iran, the Philippines, and Central America to the Zapatista and EPR uprisings in Mexico.
Whatever the long-range results of those particular attempts at change, no one can deny their profound national, regional, and international impact.
The political and class direction they take depends in part on the political tendencies of other groups in society, particularly the more regularly employed proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, and activist intellectuals (see Cockcroft, 1989, 1996).
Theoretical errors such as conceiving of the poor and immigrant workers as "marginalized" instead of central to capital accumulation can generate corresponding errors in practice. Many labor union and social movement leaders silsuz fail to recognize and emphasize the objective links between the immiserated and proletarians.
A lack of gendered class analysis and praxis can lead to a failure to match the reality of heightened female initiative and participation in social change and revolutionary processes with sufficient commitment to having a female leadership and a serious implementation of reforms respecting women's needs and rights.
Only when the working poor, the working class, and concerned organizers and intellectuals recognize the role of the immiserated masses and the women among them as not only that of a "reserve army of labor" but also as a highly important activated arm of capital accumulation for domestic and foreign capitalists can the burgeoning mass social movements and union organizing drives among the poor be linked in the fundamental dynamic of class struggle in capitalist societies. That struggle pits capitalist owners against urban and rural proletarians and takes on increasingly significant gender, ethnic, and international characteristics. * References Alonso, José Antonio. 1991 Mujeres, maquiladoras, y microindustria domestica. Mexico City: Distribuciones Fontamara. Bell, Peter F. 1997 "Thailand's Economic Miracle: Built on the Backs of Women.' State University of New York-Purchase: unpublished paper. Benería, Lourdes, and Martha Roldin. 1987 The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting and Household Dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buvinic, Mayra. 1997 "Women in Poverty: A New Global Underclass", *, Foreign Policy, Fall 1997: 38-9. Cockeroft, James D. 1983 Immiseration, Not Marginalization, Latin American Perspectives, 10:2, 3 (Spring, Summer): 86-107, and 'Pauperización, no marginalización, ' Coyoacan 15 (May): 34-52; 1988 Outlaws in the Promised Land: Mexican Immigrant Workers and America's Future. 2nd ed. New York: Grove Press; 1989 Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah of Iran. New York: Chelsea House; 1996 Latin America: History, Politics, and U.S. Policy. Chicago: NelsonHall Publishers; 1998 (in press) Mexico's Hope: An Encounter with History. New York: Monthly Review Press; Mexico City: Siglo XXI: Outlaws in the Promised Land: The Politics of Immigration. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. de la Peña, Sergio 1975 "Acumulación originaria y el fin de los modos de producción no-capitalistas en América Latina, " Historia y Sociedad, 5 (Spring): 65Labor Notes 1997-98 Monthly: 7435 Michigan Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48210 Latin American Perspectives 1998 "The Urban Informal Sector,' 25:2, Issue 99 (March). Marx, Karl. 1967 Capital. New York: International Publishers. Safa, Helen I. 1995 The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean. Boulder: Westview Press. Seccombe, Wally. 1992 A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London: Verso; 1993 Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline. London: Verso. Tax, Sol. Penny Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). The author is visiting professor at the State University of New York at Albany. He is the award-winning author of 25 books and a long-time labor and political activist. This article originally appeared in Latin American Perspectives, Issue 103, Vol. 25, No. 6, November 1998, pages 42-46. Thanks also to Mexican Labor News and Analysis for bringing this article to our attention in MLNA v.3 n.19, 2 Nov. 1998
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* Australia