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Christa Wichterich
The more that the topic globalisation bundles other topics in the international women's discourse, the louder the call for a feminist alternative model to the rule of market and money. The negative effects from the world-wide take-over of Nestle, Levi's and CNN getting evident and the problems afflicting women are levelling out to one another around the globe. Despite an economic growth poverty and ecological damage will increase in the future whereas the number of places of employment and social standards will shrink. It seems to be the need of the moment to create alternatives.
The situation is double edged: The market economy, now free from borders and customs conquering the last corners of the earth via e-mail, subjects all local forms of production, trade and consumption, almost as a proof in itself that economic alternatives are not even imaginable or possible. This claim takes the wind out of the sales of all consideration of alternative models, depresses visionary strength and rebuffs fantasy. The feeling begins to take-over that we are sitting in the middle of a system that we cannot get out of.
On the other hand lots of women see the positive sides of globalisation. This is not only because women - mainly those in Asia and Middle America - have over the past years gained positions in export-orientated production, trade and services, through which they have opened up new opportunities for life and action. But also the world-spanning communication flow is something that many women don't want to miss out on. These networks make it possible to have a world-wide connection of women's movements. This offers the chance to exchange experience and ideas and to spin-off alternatives across the globe, like never before.
The world market integration with the ever-deeper intertwining and internetworking of markets, media and multi's and the growing dependency of countries on one another, has run-down critical alternative theories, which were based on economic independence. It is exactly these countries which sought to uncouple themselves from the world market that are faced with the severest economic problems. The reality seems to have contradicted the theories of self-reliance and auto-centred development.
It has also become quiet on the front of the Subsistence-perspective, which Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof developed in the Eighties. Through their critique on catching-up development and modernisation these three German development -sociologists suggested the utopia of a new subsistence -economy as a "direct production and conservation of life not transmitted via production of goods." (Mies, 1986). Such a new moral economy (Mies, 1986) should release itself from the money economy, link out of market mechanisms and base itself on regional self-sufficiency models with the centre of a resourceful agricultural economy. This would be a good prerequisite to resolve not only the international but the gender based hierarchy of the division of work and thus bring on the end of patriarchal gender relationships.
Most of all, following the Tschernobyl catastrophe, a rejection of every high industrial production, of highly developed technology and of the nature-controlling science, became clearly bound with the vision of a new, world-wide ordering of economy and society. As a transitional strategy for the over-developed countries to the subsistence-economy, a re-ruralisation and a going back to basic-necessities should be observed. For the southern countries a freeing from export orientated production is seen as the answer.
It is the achievement of Benholdt-Thomsen, Mies and Welhof to have proved that the process of making profits is not only based on the monetarist production of goods and services, but also on the unpaid production done by women. Women constantly subsidise with their unpaid field-, household- and family-work the prices of a growing economy without appearing as a statistic in the gross national product. Female economists today point out exactly this double structure. Diane Elson talks about the parallelism of two economic systems: "the commodity and care economy"; the Italian Antonella Picchio differentiates: "The production of commodities aims to maximise profits whereas the re-production of people aims at happiness, well-being and survival of people" and the Finnish Hilkka Pietil takes a different stance in respect to the use of nature, the "extraction economy" and the "cultivation economy". Elson demands a basic change of "the relationship between earnings and the satisfaction of one's needs", a transformation of the economic systems, which should have at its core a new distribution and revaluation of paid and un-paid work.
In the international women's debate exists a wide consensus on the goal of an alternative model for economic politics. Women want an economy that is primarily orientated at needs and care. Provision instead of profit - in this respect the current debate agrees with the subsistence-perspective - although not with the overall condemning of market, money, industry, technology and science. Elson, for example, demands that women have to reclaim the markets.
Although the goal is clear the ways to achieve it still have to be found, at least in the theoretical strategical debate, which seeks to combine the micro-, meso- and macro economic planes. Should women delink from the world market or should they link in to fight for changes from the inside. How is it possible to break tightening control of market, money and multi's?
A first step is to produce economic literacy and to rip apart the veil of sex-neutrality of the global markets. Like this globalisation not only has the visible side of the border-less flow of goods, money and information, but also the invisible side of the migration of millions of women into the trade with women, homework and publication. The social as well as the high ecological costs of liberalisation and deregulation are kept quiet. The fact that between 40% and 60% of the total world trade is transacted and puzzled out between combines and not at all on the "free-market" is often kept in the dark. At the same time the emphasis of international capital shifts increasingly away from production to speculation on financial markets.
One political strategy is to re-build the world market in a way that is more friendly to women and to the environment and socially just: softer instead of harder credits, ethical instead of inconsiderate banking, with particular support for socially and ecologically orientated companies, with fair-trade, socially and ecologically just taxation systems, transparency and the democratisation of companies, institutions, so that civil-social powers can carry out pressure and achieve changes. Although women hope to achieve a part of this utopia through reform and softening of hard structures but they don not leave the ground of a market like reality and the logic of dollars keeps on showing effect.
WEDO (Women's Environment and Development Organisation) from New York, demands for example, that the New World Trade Organisation WTO in Genf provides democratic structures so that women's organisations within the institution have a forum for negotiations. This way women could bring in their topics and concerns, and for example demand barriers against trade with women.
Oxfam in England has a similar strategy of breaking the system from inside. It negotiates with multi's about social clauses and a voluntary code of conduct. The Clean Clothes campaign in Holland can register the first success of their strategy in bringing multi's to give better working conditions to women. Due to the massive pressure from the consumers-side, clothing wholesalers have given in to paying to the quality of clothing and moreover to the quality of places of employment in the so-called "cheap wage countries".
But the myth
that there is no alternative to a globalised market still has to be broken.
The more intense and large it becomes, the more power is concentrated in transnational
companies and in international financial institutions, the more difficult it
will be to think-up feminist alternatives. The key concepts of the Seventies
and eighties which have been revised a long time ago are now fallen back upon:
self-reliance and basic needs strategy should be feminized, the subsistence
theory reappears in the form of caring economy. While economists break their
backs over how to recycle the good elements of the old theory, the practice
has outdistanced the theory.
Many women in the South and East take alternatives out of a pragmatic survival strategy. The sheer necessity forcing them to seek survival strategies on the edge of the market economy. In East Africa small farmers who cultivate cash-crops such as coffee have experienced that this does not provide their existence on the long term. Increasingly more land is becoming exhausted and poisoned by the production of cash crops. With soil and earth becoming more commercialised, conflicts on land-rights are aggravating.
On the Philippines small farmers have to fear that the liberalisation and deregulation will take away their income and their land over the next years. Additionally the government has given mining rights to foreign construction firms which will destroy large areas of land and moreover has agreed to foreign rice import on a large scale which will ruin the market for the natives.
Based on this experience women are seeking to strengthen their subsistence production in order to cover their own needs and to supply local and regional markets. They don't see their economic chances on the world market but in these areas where they are already strong: in the informal sector, in barter trade and in regional trade. Thus women from Uganda are no longer so eager to accept offers of credit for coffee and cotton cultivation. They instead want to use the land to provide for their own needs and lend money for a trade, which they are controlling themselves. They want to trade regionally, to use rivers like the Nile for transport, instead of flying products around the globe. South-south co-operation and regionalisation of the market appear to be an alternative to globalisation. The women aren't completely rejecting market rationality but they want structures that are controllable, over which they have an overview and which provide space for elements of moral economy.
In the North there are also ever increasing parallel structures to the globalised market. For example, in cashless service exchanges or with chips replacing money, with direct marketing from the producer to the consumer, economic models with controllable circles and experiments with shared use, such as car-sharing and stewarding in communities .Hilkka Pietila pleads for a strengthening of the non-market forming economic shares in the household instead of transferring more work and knowledge out of the households. Linking in or out of global markets according to the result of this strategical considerations is at present not a "neither" or a "nor". A double strategy is required on the way towards a world economy meeting women's needs. But as to the question of which globalisation women welcome, one answer is clear: an inter-continental exchange of experience ideas and strategies between women's organisations.
Christa Wichterich, sociologist living in Bonn (Germany), works as free-lance journalist and consultant in women's projects in East Africa and South Asia and has published several books on the recent series of UN-conferences.
Translated from German to English by Liza Foreman