Fri Mar 15, 2024
March 15, 2024

“Empowering” women or “organizing” the struggle for their liberation?

 

 After March 8th, International Working Women’s Day, it is important to think about the content of women’s struggle. In the frame of growing male-chauvinist and sexist violence; being left aside, marginated and oppressed by the society, it is normal we stand up for the place we deserve and work hard for. But is women’s empowerment the true solution to women’s oppression, or the bases of the problem are much deeper, structural, in this society? A debate that must be made.

 

 What is the ideology of empowerment?

Empowerment theories have a complex origin and a quite perverse developement. Although it is true the initial formulations emerged during the 70’s, approaching the debates of dependence and “modernization” of the “backward” countries, the rhetoric and concepts of dependence were coopted by the UNO and many NGOs, directly or indirectly bonded to the USA, to face the raise of women in struggle. By say of the UN, the World Bank, the big companies and the academicists and institutions who promote the official version of “empowerment”, women’s struggle for their collective liberation of the oppression they suffer will make advances through an individual struggle to put women in situations of, and with, economic, political or social power, inside the current capitalist oppressive structure.

Empowering women to participate fully in economic life across all sectors is essential to build stronger economies, achieve internationally agreed goals for development and sustainability, and improve the quality of life for women, men, families and communities”.[1]

What victories does the “empowerment” aim for, together with the “third feminist wave” who promotes it? For more female presidents, companies’ leaders, actresses and cientists; more multimillionaire women, more women to receive “micro-credits” in India to start their own business or to study training courses to be promoted at the companies they work for. All of this aiming to “build stronger economies”, meaning strengthening the system which exploits the work of 99% in benefit of the accumulation by a 1% -besides destroying the planet-. To make matter worse, regading the farse of empowerment, it is enough to take a look at the slogan of the New York Summit, organized by the UN and big multinationals, on March 2016: “Equality means business”.[2] A full imperialist love statement. So where are women’s interests in all of this…? It seems pretty obvious the “empowering women” speech emerged to stall, captivate and deviate the collective struggles of women and trade-union organizations, in upsurge during the 70’s, to improve female workers’ rights.

 

“Empowerment”: an old ideology with a new name

The implicit frame of empowerment theory is there is no need to change the society to end male-chauvinism and all other forms of oppression, but women can achieve more “power” inside the current society. Also, the struggle for “power”, which means to occupy political and economic power prestigious positions today almost entirely monopolized by men, is and individual struggle rather than a collective one. To be even more precise, according to the UN, the WB and the imperialists countries, it is a struggle which is no longer a struggle, but has to do with education, workshops, courses, trainings, micro-credits, grants, mentorings and other stuff like these; they have to make more effort instead of questioning the rules of the game. Empowerment is a process oriented exclusively to women of the rulling class and middle sectors (professionals), but not at all to female workers, although its rhetoric is misleadingly wide.

Basically, it is a new version of the ideology of meritocracy, promoted by capitalism, about the “self-made man”, so now it is about the “self-made woman”; if women make efforts, are strong enough and make sacrificies, they will have more power. This is nothing else than a new form of celebration of individualism, and a renewal of the fictitious framework of free competition.

Empowerment theory comes to say capitalism should develop special tactics and ways to help women compete with men for the best spots, so half humanity, women, can feel “more represented” in this society, which exploits them, oppresses them, rapes them and kills them; therefore, the system as a whole will be “more bearable”.

 

What matters is who you rull for and how

Now, for example, in the United States’ Presidential Campaign, we have to hear things from Hillary Clinton and her supporters, pretty similar to what we heard during the campaigns of Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), Laura Chinchilla (Costa Rica), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Dilma Rouseff (Brazil), or Angela Merkel (Germany): that their victory would be, by extension, the victory of all women, and sometimes we even have to hear that opposing their candidature means to be a male-chauvinist.

We are not tired of saying this: to be a women does not guarantee in itself any progressive political program. Clinton, for example, BFF of major corporations, specifically Walmart, which has several sanctions for wage discrimination to women, is no guarantee than current problems of most women, workers and peasants, will be solved. Clinton and Merkel (as Tatcher, in the past) have nothing of progressive; they are women coming from the rulling class, which women from the working class have nothing to do with.

It is time to confront and strongly question the “policy of identity”, almost hegemonical since the neoliberal turn during the 90’s. Because such identity is not political, it is a hardly stable reality, as it is a product of social relations (class, gender, race, nationality, sexuality, gender construction, etc.). Personal identity is just a rougher or smoother surface over which politics are projected or constructed. What is political is the collective, conscious, organized struggle. Such is the policy that organizes our society of classes. And such struggle is distorted during elections, because the social forces representing the interests of big multinationals and financial clusters organize to find a political candidate, male or female, to renew the promise of “democracy”, “illusion”, “equality” or whatever matches the moment, with the true goal of appeasing and co-opting the struggles to get a new “democratic” turn to legitimate their actions. Will we, male and female workers, fall for the farse of the “identity policy”, or will we recognize there are two parties of the imperialist bourgeoisie, organized and disputing the political power?

 

Working women and the matter of power

For working women, that is 99% of all women, March 8th must not be an “empowering” day, which means, a day to celebrate those who reached positions of power, and to be glad for them. It must be a day to question the power structures; to be more precise, to debate on how the oppression to women is combined with the exploitation of the working class as a whole; how this oppression is not just an ideological phenomenon, as it has a material base: on one side, the invisible reproductive work (including slave domestic work), accepted in fact by society and family as a women task, and on the other hand, the systematic discrimination of women, which leads to more exploitation (lower salaries, job insecurity, easy desmissals, less qualified jobs, etc.).

Besides, the society we live in, in which working women should only look to “empower” themselves, settles to male-chauvinist violence, currently killing thousands of women, raping them, executing them for infidelity, discriminating them by not being heterosexuals, or by not identifying themselves as “women” (large sectors of LGBTTI). Is this the society we are supposed to empower in?

So, the question for this March 8th is: will we look for individual empowerment, only available for middle high classes, inside the society, or will we organize together with all exploited ones to take the power and change the society as a whole?

 

Notes:

[1] http://www.unwomen.org/es/partnerships/businesses-and-foundations/womens-empowerment-principles

[2] http://weprinciples.org/

 

Translation: Sofía Ballack.

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