GegenArgumente radio broadcast, Vienna, February 16, 2020
Women in capitalism:
Recognizing “women’s problems”
instead of criticizing the reasons for themWhen dealing with the topic of “women” today, we are faced with the following starting point:
First, the demand of the original women’s movement has been fulfilled: there is legal equality for women. The demand that women should be recognized as equals in our society would be met with open doors today. That’s how every relevant authority sees it now.
As a woman, you are allowed to speak out everywhere, claim to be particularly affected, and demand to be taken into account. The mere fact that someone who wants something or complains about something does so as a woman, i.e. refers to her sex, is considered an argument. All you have to do is say, “I, as a woman” – that’s how to get involved in the awarding of professorships, appointments to positions, even public discussions: with the question “have any women spoken yet?” It doesn’t count to say “I, as a communist” want to say something; I as a woman does! What a woman then says is of secondary importance. But as a woman, she should definitely say something. She can then say any nonsense without being contradicted, or if she says something correct and exciting, people don’t deal with what she says because it’s not about the content of her contributions, but that she says something as a woman. No other standpoint can come across like that, but that of women can; they can ask if it’s about them too. They have really achieved recognition for this standpoint. The problems that women have – no matter what they are – are treated with respect: it is emphasized that they are to be taken seriously.
There are women’s representatives, equal opportunities offices, quota rules, even the national anthem praises women’s contributions. The women’s issue can also celebrate enormous success in the reform of language. If a word denotes a profession, class and other generality, it has to be grammatically “inclusive” or it is seen as disrespecting women.
If today women also hold offices in political parties, universities, and on company boards, if they are allowed to study mathematics or join the army, then this is considered at least a step in the right direction, an expression of a successful women’s policy. Male supremacy has been broken when and to the extent that women are included in everything in proportion to their share of the population.
Second, everyone is willing to admit it: Women continue to have unique problems which have not been eliminated by equal rights. This finding is based on a number of disparate facts: women are still “underrepresented” in the higher professions, quotas or not. If an employer pays women less, they are not allowed to cite gender as a reason in court. This is then considered discrimination and is prohibited; but lower pay continues to exist. There are state-funded women’s shelters everywhere; marital abuse and violence have not been eliminated, nor has the ruinous double burden of raising children and working. Harsher penalties for rape have not lead to rapists becoming extinct, etc.
So there is a consensus, one which is widespread in feminist circles, that this “discrimination” against women continues to exist, even though equality – which actually is or would be a good thing – should actually have solved these problems.
The following will develop counter-thesis against this claim that “true equality” is still missing and of a “discrimination against women”:
The demand for equal rights misses the reasons why women are worse off in the labor market as well as the reasons for the unappealing forms that life as a couple occasionally takes. According to this thesis, the fact that legal equality improves the situation of most women only marginally is due to the fact that legal inequality is not the reason for this situation.
1. Women’s liberation – Equal rights
Since its inception, the women’s movement has responded to the role that women have to play in capitalism by calling for equal rights. The starting point was that women were confined to children and marriage, obliged to provide conjugal services to their husbands, and dependent on his income. In the competition for work and wages, they were worse off and especially vulnerable to the business cycle. The women's movement criticized this as an injustice against women in particular. It identified a relative disadvantage compared to men and took a stand against it. Women and men should be equal in every respect.
The demand for equal rights for women is based on the assumption that women have something in common that somehow makes them allies, apart from their class and status, from all their differences and contrasts in material circumstances, regardless of whether a woman is the spouse of an entrepreneur, a wage earner, a teacher, etc. In other words, they stand in opposition to the other collective of “men” as such and are in a bad position in relation to them.
What’s wrong with this view? It is a matter of whether and how the state groups “women” into such a collective and treats them legally. The fact is that, according to the law, “women” were in a worse position than men in earlier times and were all equally affected by these laws. Only: being equally affected by state laws comes nowhere close to a positive identity of interests among women.
Wanting to transform this condition of being similarly affected into a common interest without asking whether this particular condition of being affected includes a common ground at all and, if so, whether this is a common ground that one – even as a woman! - should have reason to desire, is the initial mistake of the entire women’s movement: that there really is such a thing as an interest that women have in common that unites all women together in a collective or at least should unite them together.
a. The situation of women on the labor market and how it is perceived
When it comes to women on the labor market, we still hear the criticism that women are predominantly employed in the low-wage sector, that women can’t move up the career ladder as easily, that it is more difficult for them to get on executive boards, and so on.
What does the criticism actually aim at when people complain that women are predominantly employed in the low-wage sector? “Low-wage sector” – that means, first, that there is a wage hierarchy and, in turn, a sector whose wages make it extremely difficult to make ends meet. Anyone who is bothered by the fact that it is predominantly women who are employed in the low-wage sector is not bothered by the fact that there is a wage hierarchy and a low-wage sector, but that the ratio of men to women is not right. This point of view is not based on the question of whether the wage is enough to live on, but whether low wages are shared equally between men and women.
If there are more women at the top of the professional hierarchy – and less men – this might be an advantage for those who get such positions. But why should it advance the cause of women, i.e. all women, if a few of them are now at the top instead of the bottom? The question of who will get what, if women are missing in professorships or in political offices, apart from the person gaining power and tenure, is no longer even raised.
By what yardstick does the accusation of unequal treatment actually criticize wage differences and differences in career opportunities? The women’s movement does not ask why women are treated differently, but rather: Is the poor treatment justified? In other words, is it fair that women are excluded from competition only because they are women? It is not based on an interest at all, but rather specifies a criterion, separate from an interest, for the extent to which it deserves consideration by the other side. The criterion is precisely the one that capitalist society itself claims to apply: The distribution of aspirants to professions should take place without regard to the person, but solely on the basis of merit. Personal characteristics should not – so it’s said – play a role.
The women’s movement adopts this standard set by capitalism itself and emphasizes: it is not our fault that we are excluded. We provide no grounds for this: we are just as capable, etc. Lower pay, fewer female university professors, etc., is an unjustified demotion of women as a collective; one that women do not deserve. All the standards for the required productivity and pay, the sorting into good/bad jobs, are thereby accepted.
The fact that in education and the labor market there is a sorting, a distribution of circumstances in life, that there are winners and losers – what is the women’s movement's criticism of this? Not that there are winners and losers, but the distribution of men and women in both groups is scrutinized according to the principle that it is ok if women are among the losers in the competition as long as there are an equal number of men.
What’s the mistake in the complaint about unequal treatment? It is not true that the disadvantaged position of women in terms of pay and careers is due to unequal treatment. It was and is a product of equal treatment according to the standards of the current economic order. It is due to the criteria to which they are subjected in the same way as men when they look for a job or aspire to the higher positions. It is due to the standards that the capitalist labor market applies to everyone who depends on it to make their money.
What kind of standards are these? When wages are costs and employers want to see as much work as possible for as little money as possible, they select their carefully calculated higher earners based on extremely petty standards – especially when the labor market is overcrowded. This is the argument against women: after all, they have a second job: having and raising children. Either they already have kids or they will. The mere fact that women have this second social role loses them points for reliability, regardless of whether or not they plan to start a family.
What is held against women here is a socially recognized and enforced racism in the question of hiring labor power. Workers are judged according to the average characteristics of the collective to which they belong: Older workers can no longer find jobs. Why? Because it is said that the older you are, the less healthy you are. The personnel manager doesn't even have to check whether this is true in individual cases. Being a woman = a competitive disadvantage because of the second social role – regardless of how the individual woman handles it, whether she even wants it, etc. This racism is not simply due to a wrong attitude, a narrow-mindedness on the part of personnel managers. It has its roots in the capitalist calculation with the price of labor. Unequal treatment is the result of equal treatment in terms of usefulness for capital. Workers are compared according to this equal standard and, in case of doubt, differences are turned against them.
In this kind of an economy, showing consideration for special features or human characteristics along the lines of, for example, “Maybe women deserve special allowances for when they are pregnant, menstruating, etc.” – this is out of the question. This economy is not measured by what it can do for people but, conversely, people are judged and sorted according to their usefulness for the economy. Instead of criticizing the standard, the women's movement is committed to proving that women can work just as hard as men, if not more so.
They attribute the continuing disadvantages faced by women, despite being legally equal, to outdated prejudices. There is no denying that prejudices exist. As already mentioned, for example, a woman in a job interview is seen as potentially having the role of a mother and therefore a reduced willingness to work, regardless of her individual life plans. If you attribute the rejection by a hiring manager to prejudice, what are you doing? The criticism assumes that the assessment made by the HR manager should be objective and should capture what a person is really capable of. It ignores the power to evaluate: the right to use behavior as an indicator of unsuitability.
The stuff of prejudice is not simply an arbitrary attribution, but of the power to make judgments about the person based on valid social criteria of inclusion and subordination: Because they are like this, they also belong in the lower/higher category. To deny this, to hold against it: No, she is also fully capable, does not criticize the meanness of this categorization, but wants a different one.
In other words: prejudice is effective because someone with authority applies it. If someone sees every woman as principally an expectant mother, a woman could be completely indifferent to this if she doesn’t have anything to do with this guy, if he has no decision-making power over her, such as a personnel manager who decides on hiring. It’s not just a matter of a narrow-minded point of view which you don’t have to worry about, but in the case of the personnel manager, both women and men are in a relation of dependency. This power to decide on the ability of others to earn an income is not contested, but the decision should just be free of prejudice. Such a critique recognizes that sorting takes place and, in the form of its ideal, also recognizes the sorting standards, but only wants to see them applied in a strictly objective way.
This type of criticism is also unwilling to acknowledge why these prejudices – the sexist judgments made against people in job applications – are so persistent. They are due to an interest in a perfect match between the employee’s abilities and the job requirements, and women and men are assesses on the basis of this interest. This interest is the real scandal and not that more women are being pushed aside in the process. By the way: if the personnel manager is told that women are also capable of doing something – then that’s fine with him. What now is gained for the cause of women?
b. Women and the family
The demand for equal rights in the marital relationship was aimed against the subordination of women to men in the family. Not so long ago, this was still legally chiseled into family law. The wife had to obey her husband’s decisions. She was primarily responsible for household chores and taking care of the children. She had no legal rights outside the domestic sphere, i.e. she was not entitled to make purchase, rental, and employment contracts independently and without her husband’s consent. She was financially dependent on her husband.
This has now been abolished according to law: Since the 1975 reform of family law in Austria, the man is no longer the “head of the family” and can no longer forbid his wife from working. Husband and wife now have equal rights and duties; they are now equally obliged to look after the family and to take care of each other and the children.
The institution of the “family” – living together and having children – is not simply a private matter. The state looks after it, putting the partnership under its “protection.” It turns a relationship that is entered into for private reasons, based entirely on free will and affection, into a contractual relationship. Of course, the state cannot and does not want to force people to get married and have children – they do that themselves, for their own reasons. But as soon as they do, family law pounces. What you do for the other person or for a life together is then a legal obligation. The state turns a voluntary agreement into a compulsory community: two people legally form an economic unit; you can’t get rid of the other person for the rest of your life, even if the interest in being together has long since died out. The relationship with the child is also not simply one of affection and care; the state does not rely on this at all. Children = the duty to raise them; parental authority = legal responsibility, regardless of whether people are able to do so at all, financially, etc.
Why does the state do this? It uses a relationship of love which exists without any action on its part to turn it into its own seedbed, the nucleus of the state. Because of the services demanded of the family, it does not leave it up to private whims, but makes it permanent through family law. No sooner have two people taken to each other and married than they find themselves in a relationship of obligation to each other and their offspring. Parents may see things however they want, but for the state, children are its offspring. Renewed units of its people: there should be enough Austrians in the future for all the tasks and functions that states have in store for their citizens. The people are a national resource that the political power can draw on for all the tasks it wants done: the labor market, the army, etc.
In doing so, the state quite naturally assumes that the economic conditions under which the majority of its citizens live are not exactly conducive to the provision of family services. It uses people’s affections to ensure that the reproduction of the workforce goes halfway smoothly: the family as an economic community, responsible for each other with their income. It uses the interest in children to reproduce its younger generation. When it comes to raising children, the state does not rely on affection, the desire to be responsible for each other, or good decisions. It turns this into a legal claim of the spouses against each other and also of the children against the parents.
The women’s movement never criticized this use of love by the state for an obligation to fidelity and care beyond the transience of love, or the burdening of relations between the sexes with the costs and sacrifices of national reproduction. As if it were completely self-evident that two people’s love life should be inseparably linked to such costs and sacrifices, its necessity remained undisputed. The women’s movement only criticized the fact that the sacrifices to be made for the survival of the family were not evenly distributed between husband and wife. The man should also do the dishes, devote himself to bringing up the children, and serve the woman’s happiness, just as she should serve his. Working to support the family also came to its attention, but not as what it is, as an obligation to serve the wealth of others, but as a privilege that should by no means be reserved for men.
However, the state’s interest in the family is only half the story: the second half is how the “spouses” themselves relate to their cohabitation and what they expect from it. The private sphere is seen as the part of life where people can do what they want, as the sphere of self-realization. Working life is seen merely as a means to this end. There is a subjective reversal of the real relationship, which for everyone means fulfilling functions for capital and the state. Reproduction is a means to this end.
How this manifests itself therefore depends heavily on your wallet. The lower the wage, the more this supposed self-realization is reduced to merely restoring one’s ability to function at a job. The life partner plays a special role in this idealism of self-realization. In the other, in the “future together,” the point of view is summed up. For this “for us,” you do everything, you take on all the hardships of the job...
But you also expect something in return from your partner: attention, understanding, being there for you when you’re tired after work... You think you have a right to that from the other person. After all, you only do it all for the family... With this expectation, the spouses go at each other and the children. This can only turn out badly and leads to the unpleasant scenes and extremes of violence in private that you read about in the newspapers.
The romantic relationship quickly turns into a relationship of exchange and entitlement in which the other person can only fail. They can’t compensate for everything you do at work, or perhaps they don’t want to, but instead make demands of their own: instead of soccer and bowling, staying at home, wanting something from you, etc. Everyone knows this at least from their parents. Similarly with children: they say that children = my happiness. Parents have an idea of how they should act, what they should become: if creating a being in their own image can only go wrong, then children are “disobedient”....
The material resources of the family certainly play a role in getting this compensation. But the mistake is this claim, regardless of whether it is asserted by a man or a woman. That is why the material situation does not really determine how each side asserts his or her legal right to their services, to their wishes, to living up to his or her own expectations, in some cases even with beatings.
The demand for equal rights for women in this relationship does not criticize this idealism which defines capitalism as a good/bad condition for private life, nor the false claim to self-realization. Rather, it criticizes the fact that the family gives too little space to women’s right to self-realization, making it available only to men.
2. A people’s movement against “discrimination”
The call for equal rights was answered: however, the equalization of their legal status with that of men has not improved the lot of the vast majority of women. Rather, legal equality was accompanied by the integration of the majority of women into capitalist working life. Their “liberation” from the confines of the home only led to a universal custom of first an additional income, then a double income – so much so that today no one measures a proletarian wage for either a man or a woman by being able to support a family on it. “Women are allowed to work” has become “women have to work” if you want to afford children at all. Today, only one income in the family is an expression of either a special poverty (many children, unemployed) or particularly high earnings that are unusual for workers and low level employees.
Most wives and mothers remain dependent on arrangements with their husbands not only because of the enduring lie of family happiness, but out of sheer necessity. Many a marital battle remains in the family, no matter how much divorce law prescribes an equal sharing beyond all questions of fault. The fact that this right does not bring freedom to normal women is not due to the law, but to the average total income, which does not allow two households to be provided for.
The fact that legal equality has not changed the situation of ordinary women has not prompted the representatives of the critique of inequality from the better off circles to question the reasonableness of the old demands for legal equality.
How does the women’s movement explain this? They cling to the call for equal rights and regard the situation of women as an expression of the denial of existing rights. This is called discrimination and is a very positive attitude toward the legal decrees of the state power: they would promise equality, but for other reasons this equality would be denied to women in the practical life of society.
So the women’s movement is quite wrong in noticing that the situation of women is not about a legal question. The women’s movement sees that there is more to it than bad or unjust laws; not state or economic concerns, but a fundamentally wrong attitude of men toward women. Now they are fighting the spirit of the old, abolished laws as a male morality: they are just not ready to truly appreciate and recognize women.
3. Positive gender racism against macho men (feminism)
This is how the women’s movement became feminism and the discovery that women’s rights are being denied became universal. Only from this point of view does the indefinite personal pronoun of the German language become an insult to the female gender. Only from this point of view does the career woman unite in solidarity with the “oppressed woman” in whose name she criticizes and finds herself at least as affected as her. Not only do women earn less in factories, they also can’t become the head doctor of a large clinic as easily as men; and both are equally reprehensible because both are an expression of an ideal disrespect for women that is at work everywhere in society.
However, there is a contradiction in the purely idealistic standpoint of making accusations in the name of a denied honor, which is what gives feminism its radicalism. Women notice that they can’t demand recognition, but not in the sense that it shouldn’t matter to them, but just like despised American blacks with their “Black is beautiful!” they award the denied recognition to themselves and mutually ensure that women are honored as women. They acknowledge themselves and are proud of precisely the things that their despisers despise. In this way, gender becomes of absolute importance: one sees oneself as a woman – and cultivates femininity. Whereas in the past people used to demand equal opportunities and access to business, education, and public life, they now demand segregation: women’s cafés, women’s clubs, and women’s spaces at the universities. Women are different, have a women’s tradition, and a women's ideology.
Pride in the otherness of women draws its content from all the macho racism about female inferiority; now, of course, as positively re-evaluated characteristics, as self-realization and the nature-given definition of women: feeling instead of thinking, holistic instead of analytical, creators of the wonder of life instead of technology, maternal sacrifice as maternal happiness. This is not just an abstract theoretical exercise: the representatives of the cause of women want social recognition for the special nature of women – whatever it may be in detail is debatable, but it is certain that it exists somehow.
Being a woman is not only a right, but also a contribution to this society: society benefits when the female element is allowed to play a role everywhere, even in the army. A lack of respect for women not only fails women, but society. This is how the women’s movement has arrived where it is today: It’s all the rage to need to be all woman and free in this – in the meddle of capitalism, it can be put forward as an argument at any time and on any occasion. This argument proclaims the same thing in all matters of bourgeois life, namely that women are affected in particular, and this gives them a special right to be taken into account. This certainly has nothing to do with any real change in the status of women – all that is being demanded is respect for the dignity of women in what they do in and for the capitalist enterprise. And this respect is at work when the women’s point of view is allowed to be represented and heard.
On the one hand, this makes her easy to please. She is well served by being mentioned in all affairs, from politics to the military to parking spaces. On the other hand, the advocates of women’s dignity are unlikely to ever finish with their pleas. The extensive circulation of their point of view is the only progress in the women's issue; and from their point of view, there are still tons of macho men to be dealt with in terms of confessions and quotas.