Anarchocyclist

Yesterday i went to a full day of events at the vancouver public library that were done in memory of the women killed in the montreal massacre. I went to several presentations and round-table discussions and was extremely impressed. I left the library at 10pm with a renewed sense of purpose, convinced that my previous understanding of revolution was naïve because i didn’t understand the centrality of women’s exploitation to the way our current society functions.

ya, i think i knew quite a bit about various aspects of patriarchy, but i never quite connected the dots as much as i should have. So many of the articles on politics and economics that i read on the internet are written by men who completely ignore any aspect of women’s struggle. For instance, i really like Michael Albert’s writing on participatory economics, but the fact that he constantly ignores women’s oppressions as part of “another sphere” detracts from his analysis. Our current economic and political systems depend on women’s enforced dependence on men.

All of the events i attended yesterday were tied together in many ways. I went to a discussion about the proposed testing of an experimental aids vaccine on poor women in the DTES by Merck Frosst (a huge pharmaceuticals company), and the discussion illustrated many connections between various ways women are oppressed, and that led nicely into a talk on Guaranteed Livable Income. There was also a talk about abolishing prostitution, and another one about policing and its effects on women (and particularly women of colour).

One of the most interesting things i saw during the day was a diagram of the “iceberg” of production. At the top, poking out of the water, were the market jobs; the standard things we call jobs. But underneath these are the non-market activities that make everything else possible. The most important parts of our lives are non-market activities…things we do that aren’t just tit-for-tat economic trades. When you spend time with your friends and family, do they pay you to do it? Raising children is something that takes tremendous amounts of time, energy, and money, but is somehow not considered “productive”, even though it’s “producing” the next generation of worker-consumers. It is also primarily women who are doing this work of raising children, and are not paid for it. It’s not something they can just walk away from, either. So if a segment of society does this necessary work, but never gets paid for it, and can’t leave it for “productive work”, aren’t they slaves?

The answer is not to say that motherhood is undesirable, although we should insist that men do their fair share too. What i think is a great answer is the Guaranteed Livable Income. It makes complete sense to me that in our time of stupendous overproduction and surplus, we should ensure that everyone has the means to satisfy their non-negotiable needs: nutritious food, shelter, clothing, etc. Everyone should have a livable income, no matter what.

This is not some utopian dream, either. It’s easy to see that the resources to do this are available right here, right now. here’s a blurb from livableincome.org

A guaranteed income system would be less costly than allowing people to live in poverty. One study has shown that it costs $30,000 to $40,000 for one homeless person per year for service and emergency shelter costs with an average of $11,410 being spent just on criminal justice costs. (Volume 3, Costs of Homelessness in British Columbia, B.C. Government 2001)

There are numerous studies showing that being poor is the biggest indicator of poor health. If we’re so worried about health costs, as the media seems to think, then why not prevent the needless ill health by ensuring everyone has nutritious food and good housing? seems simple to me. You’d think the right-wingers would love it because it would save them money.

One of the reasons i think they don’t love it is that it would be a huge step in freeing women from financial dependence on men. If every woman had the concrete financial choice to live in a good house with good nutritious food, then men would have a hard time treating women as property as much as they do right now. When asked what the biggest barriers to leaving prostitution were, many prostitutes cited their inability to get adequate food and shelter. (see “Not For Sale”, a great book that brings together all sorts of studies on prostitution and pornography). We hear some people talking about a ‘red light district’ as so-called harm-reduction, but if women need food and shelter, why should they have to suck cock to get it? Give everyone the food and shelter they need and then we’ll see how many “choose” to get fucked by violent men all day. Choice is when you have many options available and the power to pick any one of them.

Once women (and all people, really) have a wide range of choices in front of them, including the choice to participate in non-market activities without having to be poor, many problems will be on the way to being solved. Pretty much any social problem you can name has a large connection to lack of the basic necessities. We could nip many things in the bud by ensuring that those necessities are guaranteed.

Take, for example, this upcoming Merck Frosst hiv vaccine study that they want to do on poor women in the DTES. They want these women because they are “high risk” for contracting AIDS. Why are they high risk? because when they don’t have food, shelter, and the economic power to control their own lives, then they are forced to compromise. they might start using intravenous drugs to take the pain away, and then they might start sharing needles due to lack of clean facilities and heinous drug laws designed to persecute them. They might be forced into prostitution due to lack of power. Once in prostitution, they might be forced into sex without a condom, again due to lack of power.

But here’s Merck Frosst looking at testing this possible hiv vaccine on them. It’s a HUGELY expensive study, and the government can always give them money for research and development, but somehow says they can’t afford to give people the necessities of life! How would this situation be different if everyone had those necessities? How many fewer “high-risk” women would there be then?

Another part of it is that women in our society still don’t have control over their own bodies, and have difficulties gaining the power to say no to sex. As seen in the case of the man who raped a woman and then claimed he was asleep while doing it, men still find all sorts of ways to gain access to women’s bodies. Another really really good article i read lately was the Rapist checklist, which illustrates many of the ways that men rape women but claim that it’s not rape. So the question becomes, how can any woman not be “high-risk” for HIV in a society that condones rape? if a woman can’t choose not to have sex, how can she choose not to have AIDS? check out the recent case of a woman who accused 3 men of gang raping her, only to be charged herself with filing false accusations with the police. Even though the judge thought that the 3 men’s testimonies were too contradictory to convict any of them with rape, he felt they were just fine for filing charges against their accuser.

All of these things put women at higher risk, but they don’t get the same standing as the for-profit research of Merck Frosst. One begins to suspect whether this vaccine isn’t just being developed to keep men safe from AIDS when they use the women of the DTES as prostitutes, in conjunction with the calls for mandatory STD testing of prostitutes (but not for johns).

k, i’m gonna continue ranting on this later, but it seems to me that (a) GLI is a huge step in solving many problems, (b) is easily affordable with what currently exists…we just have to fight for it, and (c) would give women a huge degree of autonomy and power. i’ll just quote stan goff again here ;)

I will not be refering to “feeling empowered.” When I refer to power, I am assuming that power consists of the real, structured, material ability to make and carry out decisions against the will of others, and politically, to the legally enforced (which always boils down to physical force as a last resort) entitlement to the materials of nature, the labor of others, and the bodies of others.

If women have guaranteed resources to get nutritious food, shelter, etc, then they will not be as susceptible to the power that men hold over them in our society.

i think the priority for men who want a better society is to join a group that is doing something concrete to support women’s liberation, to take leadership from feminists, and to tell other men about these things. feminists are up to their neck in other things already…educating men is something men should be doing. Doing these things is the fastest path to revolution.

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 16:47 pm and is filed under Front Page, Politics, event report-back, gender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.