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10-06-05, 1:03 pm
This is one of the better books published in the past year on the question of globalization that examines and critically links the issues of women's labor, global capitalism, imperialism, and gender inequality. In fact, Women and Globalization emphasizes capitalism's need for the super-exploitation of women in the drive for profits around the world. As co-editor Delia Aguilar writes, in "globalized economics where the race to the bottom is critical for superprofits, it is primarily the labor power of 'Third World' women – and unfortunately children... – that is the cheapest of all."
At the heart of globalization, the process of globalizing capitalism and the imposition of neoliberal policies everywhere, women are targeted as the bulk of low-wage, non-union workforce. They are directly affected by severe cuts to social programs – welfare, education, health care, and more. As a result, they are recruited into a migrant labor and low-aid service-sector that dominates important parts of the emerging global economy. Protections are few and organizing is impeded by neoliberal governments, corporations, police and military forces, and other structural factors – forces and conditions that capitalists depend on to drive wages down and profit margins up.
Labor and class relations, writes Aguilar are the "kernel" of this book because they drive capitalism and capitalist globalization. As such the dozen or so essays in the book describe conditions of migrant and "settled" women involved in domestic labor, farm work, prostitution, factory labor of various types, retail and other service industries, health care, and unpaid home work. The stories treat life across the globe, from South Africa to the Philippines and Nicaragua to the former Yugoslavia. Most also bring to the foreground efforts to unionize, transform legal and other social relations in order to block the worst exploitation and oppression and to build movements for broader and deeper changes.
While work and class are at the center of the discussion taking place in this book, racism, sexual exploitation and gender discrimination form a substantive level of analysis. In fact, authors Hsia-Chuan Hsia, Grace Chang, April Ane Knutson among others note a direct relationship between globalization of capitalism and the internationalization of sexual exploitation and other forms of exploitation and oppression directed at women as well as racism and xenophobia.
This is an unusual book in that it adopts a women-centered analysis of capitalism. It calls for what Aguilar describes as a feminism that makes sense. Feminism, especially as conducted by academics, writes Aguilar, tends to fetishize resistance of individual women at the expense of ignoring the relations of production that structure capitalism as a system. Eliminating class from feminist analysis does no justice to the struggles of women around the world fighting for organization, collective struggle, and systemic change.
This book deserves a wide readership and careful study by both academics and activists. It is an important sourcebook for class unity, international solidarity, and understanding an all too infrequently discussed dimension of capitalist globalization.
Women and Globalization
Eds. Delia Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana
New York, Humanity Books, 2004.
--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
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