On March 8th every year women worldwide celebrate International Women's Day. In cities and towns everywhere on this day, or near to it, women gather in various ways to celebrate our solidarity as working women, review and celebrate our victories and bravely and tenaciously highlight the extreme, pervasive and brutally intrusive unique forms of oppression and exploitation that women and children across the globe suffer.
On March 8th , IWD, this year I watched a movie entitled HOLLY. Today I have rented a movie called the Stoning of Soraya M. I choose these movies deliberately to watch at this time of the year.I do this to remind myself and hopefully others who I speak to , that we must not get lost in the everydayness of our local struggles and forget the destructive economic, sexual and physical exploitation and brutality inflicted oppression inflicted upon working and poor women in the rest of the world, in countries and places so far away.
I have also been following the news about protests and strikes in Greece. Seen the pictures of pensioners and workers on the streets ,frightened and angry at the most recent austerity measures that will be imposed on them in an attempt to prevent the Greek economy from collapsing and potentially triggering yet one more global economic crisis.
And of course the vital and encouraging rising up of students of all ages, workers and families against the cuts to education in the US, especially in California.
You may well ask what does the mass sexual and physical abuse of women and children globally have to do with the pensioners and workers in Greece and students and workers in California.
The bottom line is that capitalism is the bedrock and source of all the exploitation and oppression whether in Thailand, Africa or Vietnam, Greece or the USA. It is the source of misery and suffering in the multitude of ways we experience and witness it every hour of the day.
In an article entitled Globalization and The Sex Trade:Trafficking and Commodification of Women and Children , sociologist Richard Poulin writes;
" The sex industry previously considered marginal,has come to occupy a strategic and central position in the development of international capitalism."
He exposes the role of the World Bank and the IMF in the encouragement of prostitution and sex traffiking in countries like Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines among many others, as a "development strategy," essentially linked to the encouragement of tourism as a growth industry in these countries within the global agenda of world capitalism. He writes, "Under obligations of debt repayment numerous Asian, Latin American and African states were encouraged by international organizations like the IMF and the WB to develop their tourism and entertainment industries." In this excellent and well written article he shows how women and children are commodified and completely objectified as'"new raw resources" within the framework of national and international business development.'
He writes that 'We can see that in every case the "goods" in this market move transcontinentally and transnationally from regions with weak concentrations of capital to regions with strong concentrations...200,000 Bangladeshi women and girls were the object of trafficking to Pakistan, and we find that 20,000-30,000 Thai prostitutes are from Burma."
How often outside of scholarly articles do we ever see the ghastly facts generated in this article in the mainstream media? How many " ordinary " North American and European men revel in junkets to countries like Thailand, Vietnam, the Phillipines etc to use and abuse these "raw resources?"
The IMF and the World Bank-if we look really hard we can read about their role in international"development." How often do we condemn the structural adjustment policies forced upon poor countries, the massive debts imposed upon these countries-debts that will never be repayed except through total compliance.
We ofen read about the forced tranformation of domestic economies to export based economies where working men and women are forced into factories and agricultural work , at less than subsistence wages and deplorable working conditions and how whole villages and communities are destroyed. Domestic demand is destroyed and products and produce is shipped to wealthy consumers, while workers starve are almost starved, are locked into huge factories and deploreable housing conditions, unable to buy rny of the goods they produce for international investors.
We read about the IMF forcing the privatization of resources like water and electricity and whatever public services may exist. All part of the grand scheme of global capitalism to exploit and rape the resources and steal the labour of poor countries.
Few if any of us make the connection with the IMF and the WB though with the turning of the bodies of women and children into raw resources.
Poulin writes 'Kidnapping, rape and violence continue to act as midwives of this industry. They are fundamental not only for the development of markets,but also for the manufacturing of these goods,as they contribute to making them "functional" for an industry that requires a constant supply of bodies.'
We need ask how is it possible that we do not know these deplorable facts -how is it possible that when we do hear anything at all in the mainstream media-the fault and condemnation is never laid where it belongs-solely in the actual workings of global capitalism .
The movie HOLLY goes a long way to bring home at a gut level the horror of these facts. It fails to place the blame where if belongs and leaves the watcher left with feelings of depair and anger , offering only the bandaid hope of NGO's and charities, and very little at that. But watching this movie on IWD -led me to further investigation. The question that arose for me became clearer and I was compelled immedialtely to research the role of the IMF and the WB in this mass rape and destruction of the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of women and children.
If anyone reading this blog is unconvinced of the need to bring these issues to the fore then perhaps they should watch a scene in the movie where several young girls - just babies really-perhaps 6 years old run begging to "customer" to perform "yum-yum" - oral sex.
It is clear that in this case these girls are not allowed to offer "boom-boom" - sexual intercourse, as this may in the long term be too damaging to the goods , the "raw resources."
So 2 days after IWD 2010 I am writing this. I had hoped to be able to blog on the day but found it took too many hours trying to write and to say just a little of what needs to be said-to write just a little of needs to be written.
IWD`is over for this year - but the despair and brutality inflicted on women and our children, a necessary component of the capitalist system goes on long after the marches and celebrations and will never end until the capitalist system is brought down.
Women and children will never be free from rape and brutality under capitalism and we
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