Written by Jess
Spear and first published at Rupture
It was hot
outside that day. In the remote area of KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa a
young man watched as five men approached him on the porch. “Could we have a
drink?” one of them asked. As they finished the water they asked if they could
go inside and thank the woman that lived there. The young man led them in the
front door. Moments later shots rang out as the
men gunned down the young man’s grandmother and environmental organiser,
Fikile Ntshangase, and raced out.
The death of
Ntshangase removed a thorn in the side of the Tendele Coal mining company. They
had been pressing
for over a decade to get the small number of remaining families to vacate
their land so their mining operation could expand. Like Berta Cárceres before
her, the resistance of Ntshangase and her community is part of a long history
of people defending nature as part of defending themselves, their history,
their culture, and their future. The role of women like Ntshangase and
countless others in defense of nature and with it, life, illustrates the
connection between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of
nature.
The rise of
ecofeminism
Wherever the
forces of destruction attempt to cut down trees, pollute our air and water, and
rip away the earth for minerals, women have been leading the resistance. In the
cities and communities, women have fought for clean water, air, and land for
their families to flourish. From the very first “tree huggers” in the Chipko
Movement in India and the Comitato dei danneggiati (Injured
Persons’ Committee) protesting pollution in Fascist Italy [1] to the peasants
in La Via Campesina, the people of Appalachia fighting mountaintop removal and
indigenous defenders of the Amazon, women have been and are today leading
communities in struggle against capitalist destruction of our environment.
The rise of
second-wave feminism alongside environmental movements in the 1970s led to the
emergence of ‘ecofeminist’ politics which saw “a connection between the
exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and
oppression of women”. [2] The term ‘ecofeminism’ was coined by the French
feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort
(Feminism or Death) published in 1974. One of the first ecofeminist movements
is the Green Belt Movement - aimed at preventing desertification by planting
trees - in Kenya started by Wangari Maathai in 1977.
Of course, many
men are also fierce campaigners against capitalist destruction, organising mass
movements to defend the forests and land, like Chico Mendes in the Amazon and
Ken Saro-Wiwa in the Niger Delta, who were both tragically murdered for their
activism. However, the most well-known environmental activists today are
undoubtedly women: Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Naomi Klein, and Vandana Shiva. Even here in Ireland, Maura Harrington helped
to lead the Shell to Sea campaign and today the most well known radical
environmental activist is arguably Saoirse McHugh.
That both women
and nature are dominated and exploited is undeniably true. The question for
ecofeminists and ecosocialists is why and what can be done about
it?
Ecofeminism,
patriarchy & capitalism
For some
ecofeminists, women’s affinity to nature comes from ‘their physiological
functions (birthing, menstrual cycles) or some deep element of their
personalities (life-oriented, nourishing/caring values)’. [3] In this way they
“understand” nature, whereas men do not and cannot. Women have a spiritual
connection to “Mother” earth. These ecofeminists locate the exploitation and
oppression of women and nature in patriarchy, where men control, plunder, rape,
and destroy both. Climate change is literally a ‘man-made
problem that requires a feminist solution’. The feminist solution, in this
case, is more women’s voices, more women in positions of power, and more women
at the table discussing their experiences and their ideas on what to do about
environmental problems.
Undeniably
society is patriarchal (see below). We know it from the statistics and we women
know it from the million and one experiences we’ve had that reinforce the idea
that men are better, stronger, smarter, and overall more capable.
Capitalism
& Patriarchy
Capitalism
emerged from a patriarchal feudal society in which male private property
inheritance demanded women’s bodies and lives were subordinated to the needs of
the family. All kinds of sexist ideas supported women’s supposed inferiority to
men, though the forms of oppression women experienced was of course uneven
across class and racial lines. Peasant women certainly weren’t forced to learn
multiple languages and the basics of etiquette to attract a husband.
They
worked in the fields and in the home. But they were nonetheless affected by the
ideas and culture that emanated from the top of society because as Marx
explains, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas...The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as
ideas…”
Patriarchal
norms and behaviors, and crucially the laws that enshrined men’s right to own
property (including the women of their family), meant that men would become the
first capitalists, not women. While rich women were confined to stuffy drawing
rooms, crocheting and waiting for the day they would marry and ensure property
inheritance continued along the male line, working class women and peasant
women, who had no property, laboured as mothers, carers, and domestic servants,
regardless of how much they had to work outside the home to survive.
Today this
continuation of social reproductive labour by women means that even though in
many countries they’ve gained political and civil rights - through persistent
struggle by countless women as well as LGBTQ+ people and men - the ability of
working class and poor women to exercise these rights continues to be
restricted. It is hampered by both capitalism’s dependence on the free labour
they perform in the home, the undervalued care work and often precarious,
part-time work they do in the formal economy, and the sexist ideas that persist
and ensure the gendered division of labour is reproduced year after year,
generation after generation.
Patriarchal
ideas, norms, and behaviours have devastating impacts today on women. Not only
from the discrimination, abuse, and violence they face from men as well as the
state and state-supported institutions. The highly gendered division of labour
in society means women are not only working outside the home to ensure their
families have all they need to live, they are also putting in on average three
times more hours than men at home. In Ireland, women labour in the home an
extra 11
hours a week compared to men. This impacts the kinds of jobs they can take,
which affects salary and wages, working conditions, and whether they are free
to fully develop their interest and talents.
Women are also
at the frontlines of environmental destruction, toxic pollution, as well as
climate and ecological breakdown. In Flint, Michigan it
was the women in the community who raised their voices when the effects of
lead poisoning became clear, and who today, six years on, are still fighting
for clean water. As subsistence farmers, producing half the food globally, and
in the global South, planting and harvesting as much as 80% of the food, women
are forced to reckon with desertification, lack of nutritious food, access to
clean water, and destruction of nature in general more than men. In a natural
disaster, women
are also 14 times more likely to die.
The experiences
of these women, who make up the majority of the poorest people on the planet,
who have and will
be more impacted by the pandemic and its aftermath, should be brought to
the centre of discussions about solving climate change and ecological breakdown.
Not only because they are most affected, but also because they have unique
knowledge and skills that will be key to planning how we can establish a more
harmonious interaction between society and nature. Vandana Shiva explains
that,
“In most
cultures women have been the custodians of biodiversity. They produce,
reproduce, consume and conserve biodiversity in agriculture. However, in common
with all other aspects of women’s work and knowledge, their role in the
development and conservation of biodiversity has been rendered as non-work and
non-knowledge.”[4]
The involvement
of women in farmer and peasant organisations expanded the struggle for food sovereignty
to include combating gender-based violence and equality for women. The women
within La Via Campesina for example ‘defend
their rights as women within organisations and society in general...and
struggle as peasant women together with their colleagues against the neoliberal
model of agriculture’. They help organisations understand the many
obstacles preventing women from joining and contributing to movements, in
particular ‘the division of labor by gender [which] means that rural
women have less access to the most precious resource, time...’
Central to
ecofeminism is a rejection of human domination and control over nature in
favour of a recognition of ‘...the centrality of human embeddedness in the
natural world’.[5] As John Bellamy Foster[6] and other metabolic rift theorists
have contended, this is also a central point in Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx
wrote that “[human beings] live from nature...nature is [our] body, we must
maintain a continuing dialogue with it if we are not to die.
To say that [our]
physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked
to itself, for [we] are a part of nature.” Unless we struggle for a complete
transformation of our society-nature interaction, where production is organised
in an ecologically balanced way, the rift between nature and humanity will
worsen with devastating consequences for human health, environmental
destruction, climate disruption, and irretrievable biodiversity loss.
Ecosocialist
feminism
While
ecofeminists rightly point out the subordination and domination of women and
nature as having a common cause, Marxist ecofeminists (or what I would call
ecosocialist feminists) disagree that women’s connection to nature is rooted in
their reproductive biology. The essentialism of some strands of ecofeminism
leads us down a path of biological determinism that so much of second-wave
feminism was fighting to destroy, and we are still struggling against.[7] We
also need to reckon with the revolution in the gender/sex binary demanded by
trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who do not and will not fit
into the simple male/female categories and all the cultural baggage that goes
with it.
While we
recognise the unique knowledge women have in care work, for families and for
nature, we don’t accept that it’s inherently female or feminine, as some
ecofeminism suggests. Cleaning the house, cooking meals, raising children,
farming to feed your family, or gathering the daily water is not “women’s work”,
but rather the needs of society forced onto their backs. “Saving
the planet” is not inherently women’s work or responsibility either. We
want to end the gender division in and outside the home and we demand this work
is organised amongst the wider community, for example through free public
childcare, community laundromats and canteens.
This would have the effect
of freeing women from this work now, but would also opens the door to a society
in which the community is responsible for organising social reproductive work
and sexist ideas about “women’s” vs. “men’s work” can begin to wither away.
Women will then be free to choose what work they want to engage in, including
the farming, environmental/ecological work so many already perform, enriching
all of society by their contributions.
In contrast to
“essentialist” ecofeminism, ecosocialist feminism sees women’s “connection” to
nature and our environment as socially constructed and reinforced for material
reasons. “[W]omen are not ‘one’ with nature...[we’ve] been ‘thrown into an
alliance” with it.[8]
Capitalism
treats nature and women’s social reproductive labour as ‘free gifts’,
completely outside the formal economy (and therefore without value) and yet
absolutely central to its ability to generate profits. For example, the value
of an old-growth forest is not accounted for when the trees are felled and the
wood used to make furniture. Under capitalism, the value of a commodity
(whether it’s a shirt or a house) is based on the average amount of labour
power used to make it, including the work that went into acquiring the
materials, but not the “value” of the raw materials in themselves.
It’s
the same for domestic labour. Labour in the home - the cooking, cleaning, and
shopping - ensures workers are fit and able to labour in the workplace day
after day;and the labour required in birthing and caring for children ensures a
new generation of workers is prepared to enter the workplace and create wealth
for the capitalists. This is all done primarily by women and for free as far as
capitalism is concerned. These ‘free gifts’ - from nature and women - are
‘expropriated’ by capitalism. They are taken and consumed in the process of
capital accumulation without compensation, cheapening the cost of production
and externalising the real costs onto the rest of society.[9]
For Marxist
ecofeminists, the domination of men over women in society and nature at large
is therefore not a result of patriarchal ideas alone. Their continuation and
utilisation by capitalism maintains divisions between women and men (alongside
black/white, straight/LGBTQ, cis/non-binary) workers and poor people to ensure
profits continue and their rotten class system endures.
Most
importantly, ecosocialist feminists underscore the crucial difference between
working class or peasant women and women who make it to the top echelons of
power. Ecofeminism can sometimes “over-romanticiz[e] women and women’s
history...” and “[assert] a ‘totalizing’ image of a universalized ‘woman’,...
ignoring women’s differences”.[10] While all women experience sexism, the needs
and demands of “women”, even working-class and peasant women, are not uniform.
Not all working-class women were forced into the role of housewife. As black
revolutionary socialist Claudia Jones explained in her essay ‘An End to the
Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!’, capitalism’s structural racism
meant that black women in the 1940s were often the main breadwinner in the
family and had to work long hours, usually cleaning or childminding for white
families, before they came home to labour for their own.[11]
We also need to
keep in mind that the call for more women’s voices is all too easily met within
capitalism with the Josepha Madigans, Angela Merkels and Ursula Von Der Leyens
of the world. The new Biden administration in the U.S. is the most recent case
in point with the first black and Asian vice president and the first indigenous
woman to lead the Department of Interior.
The rise of the
new women’s movement alongside a growing climate justice movement gives impetus
to ecofeminist ideas, which is overall positive (despite the essentialist
arguments, which must be strongly countered). Yet, as long as private property
rights are upheld for corporations to do basically whatever they want to the
forests, land, and water with impunity and as long as states act in their
interests against ours, whether it’s by the hands of men or women, nature will
continue to be destroyed, the climate disrupted, and women will
disproportionately suffer (with poor, black and brown and marginalised women
suffering the worst).
We must go much further and demand an ecofeminism that is
unflinchingly anti-capitalist and socialist and move towards an ecosocialist
feminism that sees our labour as the beginning of the way out. Under
patriarchal and racial[12] capitalism, working women and peasants labour in and
outside the home. This dual role gives them an insight into the
unsustainability and destructive character of capitalism. It’s why so many
movements for radical change are led by women, despite the extra barriers in
our way. But it is in our labour in the workplaces and where we produce for
capital that we have the most power to fight and win.
Like fuel to
the engine, profit is what powers capitalism, and all profit comes from our
labour in the workplace. Whether we’re cleaning the floors, staffing the till,
or operating machinery in a production line, our labour is what keeps the
capitalist system going. If we decide to take collective action, to slow down
our work or even go on strike, for an hour, a day or indefinitely, it would
bring businesses, cities, and even whole countries to a grinding halt. This
means workers, which comprise the exploited and oppressed majority, actually
have tremendous potential power when we are organised.
Women workers
alongside the men in their workplaces have used their power to fight back
against the sexism they experience - as McDonald’s workers did - and to go
after big oil - as teachers in West Virginia did. When the INMO went on strike
in 2019 they made clear that their demands for pay and retention directly
impacted the inadequate healthcare we all receive, and while they didn’t win
everything they demanded, they won more than the government was originally
offering.
We need to build on these examples and countless others from history,
strengthen our ties in workplaces as well as the community and get organised to
challenge patriarchal capitalism wherever it attacks life, in society and our
environment.
Notes
1. Ledda,
Rachel, 2018. Women’s presence in contemporary Italy’s environmental movements,
with a case study on the Mamme No Inceneritore committee, Genre et
environnement.
2. Mellor, M.
(1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material
Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2.
3. Ibid
4. Mies, M. and
Shiva, V., 2014, Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation”
from Ecofeminism, Zed Books, New York.
5. Mellor, M.
(1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material
Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2.
6. See Marx’s
Ecology (2000) by John Bellamy Foster and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (2018) by
Kohei Saito.
20. Marx, Karl,
1845-6, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist
and Idealist Outlook B. The Illusion of the Epoch.
7. That is,
reproductive ability should determine (and in many cases, limit) your role in
the home and in the workplace to those deemed “women’s” work - childminding,
cooking, cleaning, teaching, nursing, and so on.
8. Mellor, M.
(1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material
Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2.
9. See
monthlyreview.org/2018/01/01/women-nature-and-capital-in-the-industrial-revolution/
10. Mellor, M.
(1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material
Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2.
11. See Spear,
Jess, ‘Lesser-spotted comrades: Claudia Jones’, Rupture, Autumn 2020.
12. ‘Racial’
capitalism denotes the history of capitalism’s development was a history of
brutal chattel slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and immense
destruction of the natural world. “Capital” Marx wrote in Capital Volume 1,
“[came] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.
