Feminism Seduced

How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World

Hester Eisenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a pioneering reinterpretation of the role of mainstream feminism, Eisenstein shows how the ruling elites of developed countries utilize women's labor and the ideas of women's liberation and empowerment to maintain their economic and political power, both at home and abroad. Her explorations range from the abolition of "welfare as we know it" and the ending of the family wage in the United States to the creation of export-processing zones in the global South that depend on women's "nimble fingers"; and from the championing of microcredit as a path to women's empowerment in the global South to the claim of women's presumed liberation in the West as an ideological weapon in the war on terrorism. Eisenstein challenges activists and intellectuals to recognize that international feminism is at a fateful crossroads, and argues that it is crucial for feminists to throw in their lot with the progressive forces that are seeking alternatives to globalized corporate capitalism.

1

Globalization and Women’s Labor

In the burgeoning literature on globalization, only a limited number of studies focus on the centrality of women’s labor. Yet this process has drawn millions of women, particularly women of color, into a new female proletariat.¹ As Delia Aguilar notes:

To speak of globalization without center-staging women of color would be a grave mistake. In the era of globalized economics where a race to the bottom is crucial for superprofits, it is primarily the labor power of “Global South” women … that is the cheapest of all. From the maquiladoras in Mexico … to assembly plants and export processing zones [EPZs] in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Rim, to subcontractors and garment sweatshops in global cities and in nations of the periphery, it is women’s labor that allows and guarantees maximum profitability for the corporate elite, a tiny minority of the world’s inhabitants. (Aguilar 2004a, 16–17)

Globalization as the word is generally used refers to a complex series of events stretching over a time span of some four decades beginning in the early 1970s. It involves a range of actors, from government and corporate leaders and major investors to central bankers and heads of international financial institutions.² In this account I will emphasize those parts of the process that seem most relevant to my argument: the ways in which the managers of the global economy are making use, not just of women’s labor, but also of feminist ideology.

For global managers and their cheering section in the corporate media, globalization is a process of integrating countries into the world market by dismantling the mechanisms, from tariff policy to capital flows, that gave countries control over international investment. The collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and its allies after 1989 facilitated this process enormously. Using “free-trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and structural adjustment programs (SAPs), the globalizers have transformed local economies across the world, allegedly “reforming” and modernizing them to get rid of archaic entities such as state-owned enterprises. To the globalizers this is an unmitigated good, and they have been assiduous in promoting this process as beneficent.

But from a more critical perspective, globalization has been a process of impoverishment and disfranchisement for many hundreds of millions of people. The macroeconomic changes adopted by Global South countries under the pressure of debt have in effect abrogated their economic sovereignty, opening their economies, with very few restrictions, to international corporations seeking a cheap and docile labor force and a high return on their investments (I will explain this process in detail in Chapter 5).³

In the developed world, meanwhile, the “social compact” extracted by labor unions and Left political parties from governments in the postwar era is under severe attack, symbolized by the attempt of President George W. Bush to demolish social security (thankfully unsuccessful) and to partially privatize the provision of Medicare (partially successful).⁴ Highly paid manufacturing jobs have been cut dramatically, and a low-wage service economy has been constructed. The tax structure has been skewed to benefit the rich and the very rich, and a process of increasing inequalities has affected the United States along with the rest of the world. With the decline of unions, a “flexible” workforce of part-time, contract employees has emerged, producing an economy where some one-quarter of workers are earning poverty wages. All of these changes make up the process of globalization.

GLOBALIZATION DEFINED

What exactly does globalization mean? The word itself was introduced into the management literature in the early 1980s, and was rapidly taken up by the business and mainstream press.⁵ The originator of the term was a much-acclaimed business writer, Theodore Levitt, who in 1983 pointed to the need for multinational corporations to make changes, both in their manufacturing techniques and in their sales strategies, calibrated to local social behaviors and cultural preferences, in order to be able to sell their products worldwide. Keep an eye on those social behaviors! This is the entering wedge for the uses being made of women, as workers and consumers, and the uses being made of feminist ideology, in the newly globalized world order.⁶

To grasp the process, it is useful to draw an analogy to the growth of the United States in the nineteenth century. One basis of the enormous wealth that was accumulated was the creation of a single market across the entire continent, so that goods could be shipped freely from state to state (see Tabb 2001). In the twenty-first century, the aspiration of the globalizers is similarly to create a single market out of the entire world. This means the destruction of all barriers to the free flow of capital, from tariffs to capital controls, so that nation-states in effect become like the states within the U.S. federal system: open for business without impediment.

New York Times columnist and writer Thomas Friedman is one of the major celebrants of globalization. According to Friedman, the relatively closed national economies of the pre-1970s cold war system controlled their own monetary and fiscal policies. But in the newly globalized economy, the main decisionmakers are no longer the political leaders of nation-states, but the Electronic Herd. Members of the Herd include institutional investors such as pension funds, corporations investing their profits, and, in recent years, “hedge funds” investing pools of capital around the world and betting on the rise and fall of commodities, companies, and national currencies. In this new era, the Electronic Herd roams freely across the globe. With the new diversity of financial instruments, everything can be bundled into tradable items, from mortgages to overseas bonds. The elimination of capital controls fosters a series of stampedes, with investors seeking the highest returns rushing in and out of national economies (Friedman 2000).

The removal of governmental regulations and other barriers to world investment was extremely profitable in periods of rapid economic growth. But this transformation also concealed major dangers should the world economy encounter a downturn. This was dramatically evident from 2007–2008, when a worldwide credit crisis ensued, linked to the issuance of housing mortgages in the United States to people who could ill afford them. The resulting foreclosures sent waves of panic throughout the world financial markets.⁷ Particularly after the dramatic bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the “rescues” orchestrated by the U.S. government of Bear Stearns, AIG Insurance, Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association), and Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation), governments all over the world stepped in with multibillion-dollar bailouts of their own troubled financial institutions.

But to return to the optimistic narrative of Thomas Friedman: he calls the giant multinational corporations (MNCs)—companies such as Ford, Intel, Compaq, (the late)Enron, and Toyota—the Longhorn cattle, carrying out foreign direct investment, building factories, utilities, energy plants, and other long-term projects all across the globe. In the preglobalized era, when countries still maintained tariff walls, MNCs built factories abroad to jump over those walls and sell directly in foreign markets. But now, to compete in the global market, they can divide up their production chain geographically, producing and assembling their goods in the cheapest possible places.

Countries compete for the entry of MNCs because they need foreign capital, international standards and technologies, foreign partnerships, and market information. Governments now must heed the market, as political power no longer stems from holding office (Friedman 2000, 101ff.). Just as states in the United States compete with one another for corporate investment, with tax breaks and cheap land and utilities, so now all nations must compete for the favor of the Longhorns and the Electronic Herd.

This competitive vision is evident on the back pages of The Economist, where endless charts array the countries of the world according to their economic indicators, from gross domestic product (GDP) to trade balances to foreign reserves.⁸ The overriding goal for each country is to attract investment, and to do this each must conform to the dictates of international economic orthodoxy, which means having to cut taxes, reduce public spending, privatize government enterprises, and eliminate capital controls, so that investors are no longer prevented from bringing their profits home.

The mainstream press celebrates this competition, and cheers on countries seen as conforming to the demands of the international investors. Thus, the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, and its capital Almaty, with skyscrapers sprouting in its newly created downtown, is featured in the New York Times. Dennis Price, general director of Bogatyr Access Komyr, the biggest Kazakh coal mining company, lets us know that “his” country is “well on the road to having one of the 50 most competitive economies in the world” (Greenberg 2006).

The “modernization” of women is considered an important indicator of a country’s progress in the international economy. Thus, we learn from the editor of the Kazakh edition of Cosmopolitan magazine that “women are getting married later, they have their own apartments. Attitudes about sex are changing very fast” (Greenberg 2006). A similar phenomenon is taking place in India, where advertising campaigns have widely disseminated the image of a “modern” woman. In these ads “there is a sense of inevitability … that India and Indian women have emerged out of decades of state control and finally have the opportunity to express themselves. There is a sense of having been ‘behind’ other countries for decades and having finally ‘caught up.’ The new liberal Indian women have finally joined a global league of modern female consumers” (Oza 2006, 25). I will return to this theme of women as an emblem of modernity in Chapter 2.

The Long Boom

The background to the current era of globalization is the worldwide economic boom that preceded it. The period from the end of World War II in 1945 to the mid-1970s is often called the Golden Age, or the Long Boom—the longest period of sustained economic growth in the history of the United States. Powered by the giant economy of the United States, most countries also experienced unprecedented economic growth, and some—such as Japan and South Korea—became powerful economic actors in their own right.

At home, the U.S. economy went into high gear. Consumer spending, pent up during the war years, sparked growth in cars and household appliances. Housing spending soared, meeting the needs of millions of returning soldiers and their families. Many (mostly white) families moved to the new suburbs like Levittown in Long Island, supported by the creation of Fannie Mae, which offered low-cost mortgages. Substantial public investments by the federal government included the G.I. Bill, which paid for college education for veterans; the national interstate highway system; schools ; and utilities. Meanwhile, high levels of militar y spending resumed with the outbreak of the Korean “conflict” (1950–1953) and then the war in Vietnam (1965–1973) (Tanzer 1995).

Working families provided a ready market for consumer goods. Suburbanization meant the growth of shopping centers and drive-through restaurants, plus the automobile. “No single product—with its extensive linkages to other economic sectors, including highway construction and petroleum refining—has ever so dominated the imagination of the population, or the base of a national economy, as did the car. Perhaps one in six Americans owed his or her job to the car” (Bluestone and Harrison 1982, 114).

On the world stage, the United States emerged from World War II with more than half of all the usable productive capacity in the world, serving as banker to former allies and enemies alike. U.S. domination was cemented by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, which effectively made the U.S. dollar the principal reserve currency. Under this agreement, the currencies of most other countries had fixed exchange rates pegged to the dollar. To participate in international trade, countries were required to acquire dollars, since they could not use their own currencies to pay for goods and services from abroad. The agreement also established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the international financial institutions (IFIs) located in Washington, DC, that were designed to help rebuild countries after the devastation of World War II, and to regulate currency exchanges, so as to prevent a recurrence of the trade rivalries that had triggered the Great Depression of the 1930s.⁹

As the United States expanded with military bases and international security agreements, U.S. corporations with the necessary size and experience went with it. These companies made massive investments abroad in new plant and equipment, producing for foreign markets and later for the U.S. market. Direct investment by private U.S. capital abroad grew rapidly. The plants, mines, distribution centers, and offices of multinational corporations began to establish a global-scale production system. By 1978, one-third of overall profits for the 100 biggest corporations and banks came from overseas operations (Bluestone and Harrison 1982, 113).

Competing with the West were the Communist powers of the Soviet Union (after 1917) and of China (after 1949). Between the capitalist West and the Communist East were the countries of the Third World. The concept of a Third World (Tiers Monde) was introduced by the French journalist Albert Sauvy in 1952. The First World was the West—the United States and its capitalist allies. The Second World was the Communist bloc of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Communist China, and North Korea, which “rejected market capitalism for socialist planning” (Prasad 2007, 11). Finally, the “ignored, exploited, scorned Third World” (Sauvy quoted in Prasad 2007, 10–11) was made up of the newly independent countries that, like the Third Estate of the French Revolution, sought to establish their own economic and political sovereignty.¹⁰ The concept of an independent Third World was embodied in an important international conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, where leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt founded the Non-Aligned Movement. Although divided ideologically, these nations all sought to make their own decisions about the path to development and modernity.

The ideological rivalries of the cold war gave Third World countries considerable room for maneuver, as the United States and the USSR competed to provide development assistance. Despite its free-market rhetoric, the United States supported state-led development for its allies: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Even though there was great diversity among the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, most pursued a common development strategy, which involved a significant role for the state in encouraging industrialization and economic growth. This was clearly the case for the Communist countries of the Soviet Union and China, whose revolutions had taken them out of the orbit of the capitalist system. But for other countries of the Third World, although still within the capitalist orbit, many governments sought to maintain sovereignty over their own economic development. Thus, in Latin America, Argentina and Brazil pursued a policy of “import substitution.” Keeping tariff walls high, they encouraged local industry to grow, while seeking funds to build their infrastructure from such First World institutions as the World Bank.

The End of the Long Boom and the Restructuring
of the World Economy

Much has been written about the transformation of the international economy since the end of the Long Boom, when, in the early 1970s, economic growth began to slow down worldwide. The challenge to U.S. economic hegemony had been building since the 1960s. The United States was threatened by the economic recovery of Europe and Japan, faced with a strengthened challenge from Third World nationalism abroad (symbolized by the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries [OPEC] price revolution of 1973), and encountering rebellious social movements at home, from Black Power to the women’s movement. Weakened by the prolonged war in Vietnam, the United States was losing its competitive advantage. High profit rates began to fall, and no major technological innovations had emerged to match the stimulus to growth represented by the cars, highway, and housing investments of the 1950s (Tanzer 1995).

In response to what both government and corporations perceived as a crisis of profitab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How I Came to Write This Book
• 1 Globalization and Women’s Labor
• 2 Women, Work, and the Mainstreaming of Feminism
• 3 Fault Lines of Race and Class
• 4 In the United States
• 5 In the Global South
• 6 Islamophobia and the Global War on Terror
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author