Gendered Class Analysis

Abstract

We need a more gendered and internationally oriented class analysis. As monopoly capital confronts its crisis of overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by scouring the globe for quick financial profits and cheaper sources of labor power and natural resources, its state and international representatives modernize counterinsurgency and crowd control SWAT teams to be the mailed fist behind the velvet glove of investment in the and women. The head of the women-in-development program of the Inter-American Development Bank has observed: Investing in women offers policymakers the highest economic and social returns at the lowest cost (Buvinic, 1997: 39). This represents a late 1990s version of a more feminized investment in the poor strategy initiated in the late 1960s by the World Bank (see Cockcroft, 1998). UN and other global estimates show women providing two-thirds of the hours of work, earning one-tenth of the world's income, and possessing less than one-hundredth of the world's wealth. According to the statistical calculations of the United Nations' Human Development Report 1995, women's economic contributions globally are undervalued by US$11 trillion. Just the unpaid housework of women is estimated at the market equivalent of 1,530 percent of the gross product (Bell, 1997). This superexploitation of women is a major consequence and cause of monopoly capital's seeking to fortify the relation between itself and villageor neighborhood-based domestic economies. Why is capital so interested in women? Besides the rise of feminism, there are structural reasons. Employers are aware of the central role of women in production. Following Seccombe (1992; 1993), we can recast-Marx's Department III (originally consumption) as that of the production of the sine qua non of all production: labor power. Department III of production does this on a daily and generational basis, organized through the family in a