Women in India, Capitalist Crisis and Venezuela.

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

This is the trailer for the short film, Period End of Sentence that won the Oscar for the best Documentary Short Subject at the 2019 Academy Awards.

I had not heard of it and came upon it by accident on Netflix I think it was because I couldn’t find it on You Tube with English subtitles. As I sat there watching these women describing what life is like for them when they get their periods I couldn’t stop thinking about my own mother and how incredibly strong and resilient she was in the face of how oppressed and held back women are all over the world. How opportunities that are available to males even in the poorest societies, are closed doors for women. In so many societies they are sold to men in the form of dowry’s and even though arranged marriages are not necessarily bad, the woman still has little choice of who she wants to marry escape her. When I think of forced marriage I can’t help comparing Hugh Hefner, a man who walked around in a bathrobe all day surrounded by half naked women in bunny suits, to those rich Saudi men in their robes. Same mentality, easy access to sex, just different clothes.

Throughout all cultures menstruation is considered unclean, a dirty thing. In some religions a woman on her period cannot enter a temple and in fact anything they touch is considered unclean. This short film gives us a real sense of what it is like for women in India as sanitary pads in stores are generally too expensive for poor women. As much as 82 percent of women in India still do not know what a sanitary napkin is or what it is used for according to the Times of India.

I want to urge people to see this movie as it shows how the women learn how to make their own inexpensive sanitary pads using a machine invented by a man who was a social activist.  I want to touch on another aspect of India using this crisis of the unavailability of something that is so basic in the first world so bear with me.

The western media refers to India as the world’s largest or most populous democracy with a population of 1.2 trillion. As a democracy it is one of the world’s poorest by some accounts, something so basic as sanitary hygiene for us is available to only 18% of India’s women.

There are 287 million illiterate adults in India according to Oxfam, the largest of any country and 37% of the global total. It is 123^rd out of 135 countries in female illiteracy. Here are some interesting comparisons:

India

Female life expectancy at birth is 70.5 years

Health expenditure as percentage of GDP 4.7%

Infant mortality rate, Males 36.7 Females 39.1 (per 1000 live births)

Maternal mortality rate 174 deaths/100,000 live births (2015 est.)

Compared to Cuba

Female life expectancy at birth 81.4 years

Health expenditure as percentage of GDP 11.1% (2014)

Infant mortality rate Males 4.9% Females 3.9 (per 1000 live births)

Maternal mortality rate: 39 deaths/100,000 live births (2015 est.)

Venezuela

Female life expectancy at birth (2018 est.) 79.3 years

Health expenditure as percentage of GDP 5.3% (2014)

Infant Mortality Rate Males 12.5% Females 11.2%  (2018 est.)

Maternal mortality rate: 95 deaths/100,000 live births (2015 est.)

China

Female life expectancy at birth 78.1 years

Health expenditure as percentage of GDP 5.5% of GDP (2014)

Infant mortality rate Males 12.2 females 11.4 deaths/1,000 live births (2018 est.)

Maternal mortality rate: 27 deaths/100,000 live births (2015 est.)

Note: the statics above unless otherwise stated are from the CIA world Factbook list of countries.

Perhaps India might need a bit more of the Chinese approach to improve living standards. The US too. One might wonder why US capitalism is not on the border of India and China for example, or India and Pakistan, another US ally, to get precious medical and food aid to that poor starving backward country.  Why is US capitalism not threatening to invade to help the poorest of the poor in India? One reason? It doesn't care about poor people, we have millions of them here in the US.

The US mass media carries stories daily about the horrific conditions in Venezuela caused apparently by socialist policies. (Watch this video for a more accurate assessment of the present economic crisis in Venezuela) But as we can see, India is certainly in a sorry state despite sections of the Indian ruling class having accumulated massive wealth. India has the fastest growing population of millionaires at the moment increasing 20% in 2017 to over 260,0000. There were 31 new Indian billionaires in 2018 alone.

The US mass media never refers to this massive humanitarian (and environmental) crisis in India as a capitalist crisis. Nigeria. South Africa, Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt Greece, and the massive poverty and violence in the US itself, is never referred to as a crisis of capitalism. But Venezuela is singled out as having serious economic problems due to socialist policies.

The CIA website itself points out that, “Social investment in Venezuela during the CHAVEZ administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation through social investment. "Missions" dedicated to education, nutrition, healthcare, and sanitation were funded through petroleum revenues.”

The CIA informs us that the sustainability of this progress is questionable as it depends on oil revenue.  But unlike India, Venezuela achieved these gains through socialist policies. Venezuela had half a revolution. The CIA admits that close to one million, “middle- and upper-class Venezuelans” emigrated. This is the class that US capitalism is allied to, the upper classes, or the bourgeois of any society. The welfare of the mass of the population, providing a decent life for all, that can only be guaranteed by a society collectively controlling its own wealth and its own economy, is impossible through the capitalist mode of production which has inequality, racism, sexism and war built in to it.

All of the former colonial possessions have lagged for other obvious reasons, they were plundered for centuries buy the European colonial powers. This is why Ireland one of Britain's first colonies, never developed for centuries. A recent study estimated that Britain stole $45 trillion form India in its 173-year occupation. There’s a reason the British bourgeois called India the Jewel in the Crown. This theft does not have its roots in a nation's DNA or character flaws, it is system driven. As Marx pointed out 170 years ago:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere………… It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The humanitarian crises that capitalism is inflicting on the world is never attributed to capitalism. India is in a far worse state than Venezuela when we consider the numbers involved but it is a Democracy. Other capitalist economies are in worse condition than Venezuela and have been for decades, but we are told this is not genuine capitalism, but “crony capitalism”

Neither Indian capitalism, and there is a very small but powerful capitalist class in India, nor US capitalism can eliminate the human suffering in India or even here in the US. It is hard to imagine what it means to live in a society where a woman cannot go to work or school because she doesn’t have access to such a basic need as a sanitary pad.

But with Venezuela, US capitalism the world's dominant capitalist economy is compelled, as part of creating this world in its own image, wants to “introduce what it calls civilization into their midst,” and if necessary will slaughter hundreds of thousands of them to do it.