What about Feminism?
International Viewpoint n° 271 — November 1995 21
ALONGSIDE ALL THE DECLARATIONS AND proclamations, there were three important debates in the NGO forum: the choice of China, the relative importance of economic and sexual rights for women in the third world, and the point of participation in such events at all. None of these debates opposed women from the south and the north. The division in opinion ran down the middle of a number of delegations.
The first argument opposed "Chinabashers" with those who were desperate to whitewash China's "achievements" in women's emancipation.!
The second was the argument between those who argued that "the real issue" for third world women is the impact of the structural adjustment policies dictated by the Bretton Woods institutions, while sexual rights affect only women in the first world.2
Consider, for example, this statement by Vimla Farooqui, a leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and its women's wing, the NFIW: "We will support the struggles of the women of the first world for justice and equality, and even the issue of the right to abortion of every woman, for which they are struggling, although this is not an issue of any importance for our women."3
Many feminists in India rejected the possibility of any serious intervention in Beijing.4 In contrast, a number of Indian left-wing women's organisations — not all of whom are feminists - produced a declaration indicating a high degree of anticipation about what the UN might achieve, if not in the here and now, then in the future.5 "The UN should constitute a monitoring body with judicial powers to check the activities of multi-national corporations in relation to the exploitation of labour and the environment. The present subversion of the UN mandate by the dominant powers... has to be reversed"6 by Soma Malik, Calcutta, October 1995
Making such calls signifies a good deal of faith in what the UN, or the G77, are capable of achieving. It also leads those with such expectations to take the Beijing conference very seriously. For example, Member of Parliament Malini Bhattacharyya of the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI(M)) has argued that "the pledge in Nairobi was for the complete eradication of poverty, not a few drops of aid in the ocean of deprivation. The struggle at Beijing was to withstand attempts to water down the Nairobi commitment."
None of these are unimportant debates. Concerning China, the question is not whether Hillary Clinton has a moral right to talk about injustice to women in China, given the intensifying bipartisan attacks on affirmative action, the right to abortion, and so on, in the USA. The real issue is whether consistent socialists and consistent feminists have any business trying to choose a lesser veil between the capitalist patriarchal system in the West and the bureaucratic-patriarchal, wouldbe-capitalist system in China. The brutality with which the Chinese regime is pursuing its own child family policy is well-known. Less well-known, but highly significant, is the fact that, in those areas of China where market forces are most developed, women workers now have insecure jobs, low pay, and a working day approaching 12 hours. Chinese authorities have taken a leaf out of the Singapore or Taiwan book, and made sure that unions cannot make trouble in these areas.
The presentation of cooked-up data by the Soviet Union has been thoroughly exposed. There is absolutely no reason to treat "official" China any differently. A socialist feminist has to criticise China for its extreme forms of anti-women, patriarchal population policy, its insensitivity to women's conditions in the transition to the market, and so on. Of course, US and European governmental criticism of China is hollow. For are they not preaching the same population policy (in Cairo), and the same economic policy?
This leads us to the second question. Aren't structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) a bigger problem for third world women than oppression of their sexuality? The debate is a real one. But it must be said, the performance of third world representatives at the NGO conference (let
22 International Viewpoint n° 271 — November 1995
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alone the governmental conference) was hardly impressive. 8 According to Dr. Samita Sen, one of the few feminists from India to participate in the NGO forum, "when the women's delegation from Bangladesh demonstrated against 'Norplant', no Indian or Pakistani women were to be seen supporting them. Similarly, when a few Indian women tried to attract attention to the new economic policies, hardly any women from Bangladesh or Pakistan were enthusiastic about it."9 Hardly a picture of solid South-South collaboration. Small wonder that Amnesty International expressed "unhappiness" with the lack of real progress. 10
Not all women in the developed countries are unaware of the activities of the IMF. World Bank, and the Imperialist powers. And even though many are, it makes little effort to assume from the outset that they are all colluding with the enemy. Devaki Jain was right a few years ago, when she said that feminists in the north were not interested in nor sympathetic to the G77, but that experience was leading them to modify their stance and even to accept the leadership of Southern women.!! So it makes less and less sense to treat women from the North as enemies to be fought, or at best people who ask for solidarity in their struggles, but offer no solidarity themselves. CPI leader Vimla Farooqui claims that "the struggles of the women of the first world... [are] not an issue of any importance for our women." Is she really unaware of the fact that abortion is banned or restricted in many countries? And that not all these countries are in the first world. The slighting tone in Farooqui's article is uncalled for. It betrays a callous indifference to the plight of hundreds of thousands of women every year. It certainly matches any first world indifference to Structural Adjustment
Why counterpoise sexual rights and Structural Adjustment Programmes? Is a woman who looses her job as a result of a SAP therefore indifferent to being raped?
The right of women "to control all aspects of their health including sexual and reproductive health"13 was included in the official document after human rights and health movement activists argued that, in the era of AIDS, women need to have the right to refuse unwanted sexual relations. This is a damaging way of getting the text adopted, and is of little value. It reduced sexual freedom to a question of health.
Sexual freedom is important. So are economic rights. Both are important in the South. Both are important in the North. The false opposition we witnessed in Beijing represents the collective failure of the movement North and South.
There is a limit to what we can expect from a UN organised conference. But the UN has not just been hijacked by the USA, as some of those whose God collapsed in 1991 seem to believe. The UN was set up in the aftermath of the Second World War, in strict compliance with the relationship of forces at the time. And, at its best, the UN is a sum of the regimes that socialists and feminists are fighting against. The idea of appealing to the UN, of calling on it to set up a body with judicial powers to oversee the activities of the multinationals is a big joke. And a sign of utter disorientation.
In the past, women activists managed to do rather better. Based in the struggles in the different countries, and linked together internationally, they were able to project an alternative to the mealy-mouthed palliatives promised by various governments. The importance of the Nairobi conference was not in the billions of dollars pledged by the USA, but in the fact that women activists came together and projected a clear alternative. It is by such principled battles, often as a by-product, of them, that serious reforms are wrested. Battles over paragraphs, unless they are backed by the muscle of a living movement, cannot gain more than a few dubious promissory notes, which cannot be cashed in unless the political equation
This is not meant to support a simple boycott. But we must recognise reality. The NGO forum was powerful in the past because it was dominated by independent activist groups, or at least contained a substantial minority presence of such groups. This time round, the UN hijacked the forum with little difficulty. Why? Because so many of the NGOs were manipulated by their donor agencies. And because the general weakness of the movement, particularly its radical wing, turned the preparations for this conference into something quite different from what happened a decade ago.
Feminists and socialists should see this sort of conference in the way Lenin analysed the Duma (parliament) of prerevolutionary Russia. He acknowledged that the Duma was a "pseudo-parliament", without real legislative power. But he recognised that the relationship of forces did not allow anything better. And so he argued that Bolsheviks should enter even this "pig-sty"
The United Nations can do nothing that the US and the other major powers will not allow. These imperialists have no wish to return the loot extracted in the recent intensification of their exploitation. But even so, with more global coordination, socialist-feminists, integrating the experiences of North and South, of various countries and issues, could have used the NGO forum to project a comprehensive alternative.
To do any more than this, we would need a stronger movement behind us. Networking at UN conferences may be useful, 14 but it cannot substitute for socialist internationalism, and organising which is based on that principle. Useful participation in imperialist-dominated international bodies demands of socialists and socialist feminists that we co-ordinate internationally. Notes 1. The Communist Party of India's Bengali daily Kalantar, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s Bengali paper Ganashakti, both ran several articles on the progress of women's emancipation in China. The Maoist intellectual Dr. Amit Bhattacharyya argued, in a "Women in History" seminar at Jadaypur University, that patriarchy was related to feudalism, and had been abolished as a consequence of the 1949 revolution. 2. See, for example, Razia Ismail, "Empowerment - or power?", Mainstream, New Delhi, vol. XXXIII, no. 40, pp. 21-25. 3. Mainstream, vol. XXXIII, no. 40, p. 31. 4. See, for example, the article reprinted from Cahiers du féminisme in International Viewpoint, September 1995 5. National Convention of Women on the Beijing Conference, February 1995. 6. Declaration of the National Convention, Mainstream, vol. XXXIII, no. 40, p. 33. 7. The Telegraph, Calcutta, 29 September 1995. 8. Many of the Indian participants in the NGO forum put themselves forward as the voice of the poor woman. Like many NGOs do in daily practice, they were in fact trying to use poor women as a power base 9. Joseph Gathia, "Beijing Agenda: A New Commitment", Mainstream, vol. XXXIIi, no. 45, 30 Sept. 1995, p. 26. 10. The Statesman, Calcutta, 8 September 1995. 11. D. Jain, Mainstream, vol. XXXIII, no. 40, pp. 16-17. 12. The Hindu (Weekly Edition), 24 September 1995. 13. The effect of the massive influx of money is clear, both in the transformation of the NGOs' work, and in the very lifestyle of (mainly) metropolitan NGO activists. 14. As advocated by Devaki Jain, op. cit., pp. 16, 19. For a more critical look at how "networking" is manipulated, see Razia Ismail, op. cit. Soma Malik is a member of the NNPM (Forum Against the Oppression of Women) in Calcutta, and a regular contributor to the press of the ICS, Indian section of the Fourth International
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