Wages for Housework in India?

 (This is a slightly edited version of a presentation at a panel on ‘Herstories of Wages for Housework’ on Day 1 of the Symposium on Wages for Housework, 4–6 March, 2021, organised by the Laws of Social Reproduction Project (Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London); Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE); and the Feminist Economics Saturday Discussion Group (FESDIG), New Delhi.) 

Presentation on India to panel discussion on 'Farmers' struggles from India to the US'

I’d like to start with an event which at first sight seems to have nothing to do with the farmers’ struggle, but I’ll explain how it does. After the countrywide lockdown was imposed in the last week of March 2020, life came to a standstill. But by April, there was a massive exodus of migrant workers from towns and cities thoughout India, tens of millions of them, trekking back hundreds of miles to their home villages, mostly on foot, a few on bicycles, a few catching lifts from trucks for part of the way. They encountered searing heat and brutal treatment from the police – beatings, being locked in stadiums converted into open-air prisons, sprayed with chlorine disinfectant – but still they persisted.

So who were these people, and why were they undertaking this journey in the midst of a lockdown? In fact, these were family members of some of the very same people participating in the farmers’ struggle: small and marginal farmers, and especially agricultural labourers. Unable to make a living in their villages, they’d migrated to towns and villages looking for work, and the only employment they’d been able to find was unregulated and extremely exploitative, often through labour contractors, and with absolutely no security. Some of them slept in their workplaces, others got together and rented a small room in a slum, packed together like sardines. When the lockdown was declared, employers suspended production and contractors vanished, often without even paying workers for the work they had already done. Living from hand to mouth with hardly any savings, what could they do? Those who lived at their place of work were booted out at once, those in rented accommodation soon followed. With public transport suspended, they decided to walk to their villages.

But hadn’t they left their villages precisely because they couldn’t make a living there? An interviewer asking this question got this answer: ‘If we’re going to die anyway, we’d rather die with our families at home.’

The bloody road to today's borders in South Asia - and how to move in the direction of peace

From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, attempts  to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities in South Asia have spawned wars and crimes against humanity. They have also resulted in  almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed from the mid-20th century until today: Hindu nationalists in India launch physical attacks against Christians and especially Muslims, falsely accusing them of carrying out fraudulent conversions, duping Hindu women into marriage, and cow slaughter; in Pakistan, religious minorities, including minority Muslim sects, are accused of blasphemy and often killed; rationalists in Bangladesh have been lynched; and minorities in Sri Lanka are being persecuted by Sinhala nationalists, who have forcibly cremated Muslim victims of Covid-19. Such attempts are all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. As an activist who comes from Sri Lanka and lives in India, I have been involved in campaigns in both countries against the toxic ideologies and restrictive ethno-religious  identities – Hindu, Muslim, Sinhalese, Tamil – that cultivate much of this violence.

Christianity and Abortion Rights

Feminists see abortion rights as part of the struggle to establish a woman’s right to control her own body; for a wider constituency, it is also a demand for safeguarding the lives and physical and mental health of women and girls.^[1] Far from winding down, the struggle around abortion rights has, if anything, heated up in the twenty-first century. Women in several countries of the world have engaged in unprecendented organisational and outreach activities to win over other women and put the issue on the agenda of progressives. But the backlash has also been severe, and fundamentalists of various religions have been at the forefront of it (Eternity News 2019). Christians are prominent among them.

There are countless Christian denominations with different positions on key issues including abortion, and there are contradictory positions even within each denomination. The most uniform is Roman Catholicism, where the Pope lays down the official anti-abortion stance, yet almost half of lay Catholics think that abortion should be legal. The Orthodox churches (Greek, Russian, Eastern, etc.) also have Patriarchs who oppose abortion, but a survey in the US showed that the majority of lay followers believe abortion should be legal (Pew Research Center 2014). Mainline Protestant denominations – Anglicans (including US and Scottish Episcopalians, and Anglican churches in former British colonies), Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, the United Church of Christ and others – support abortion rights, although a small minority of followers do not (Markoe 2018). Three-quarters of Evangelical Protestant denominations (sometimes known as ‘born-again’ Christians) oppose abortion, but a quarter do not.

The 2020 Elections in the United States: A Socialist View from Afar

While votes were being counted after the US elections of November 2020, despots from around the world – in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela and Brazil – crowed over the delay in announcing results.[1] It is easy for rulers in countries where opposition leaders are disqualified, killed or hounded into exile to mock the time taken to count votes meticulously. However, many of us watching with envy from afar  – ‘envy’ because the persecution of minorities, crushing of dissent, domination of the media and destruction of democratic institutions has gone much further in our countries – have nothing but admiration for the way in which a would-be dictator has peacefully been overthrown.

But what about claims by the Trump campaign that the election was stolen? It is clear to us that there have been systematic efforts to steal this election… by Trump and his diehard supporters. That became evident well before the election when he started alleging, in the midst of a deadly pandemic in which many feared the risks of in-person voting, that he opposed extra funding for the Postal Service because mail ballots encouraged voter fraud. At the same time Republican mega-donor Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General by Trump on 15 June, began making changes to the U.S. Postal Service – like a reduction in employee overtime hours and the elimination of postal sorting machines – that would sabotage the timely delivery of mail ballots.[2] We saw reports of polling locations being shut down and African-Americans complaining about the long distances they had to travel in order to vote. With Trump instructing his supporters to come out and vote on election day, and several states counting mail-in ballots only after in-person ballots had been counted, the scene was set for his post-election claim that he had won. He expected the case to go to the Supreme Court, and explicitly stated that he was nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the court because he believed she would vote in his favour.[3]   

Comment on "Workers Who Benefit From the Exploitation of Other Workers" by Marcel van der Linden

 

Working-class internationalism is needed more than ever today, and this attempt to try and understand why it has been so hard to achieve is very welcome.

Capitalism is inherently global; the imperative to ‘accumulate, accumulate!’ pushes it to expand into every corner of the world in search of new sources of raw materials, land, markets and labour power. What has been characterised as ‘the first international division of labour’ emerged out of the imperialist phase of capitalist expansion, when capital depended heavily on state intervention to support its expansion around the world. Inevitably, this led to inter-imperialist competition and conflict, as each imperial power tried to assert control over more territory, either directly, by establishing its own rule in the countries it colonised, or by less direct methods, such as installing local leaders whose interests were so entwined with those of the imperial elite that they could be partners in exploiting the working people of their country.      

In this period it is possible to identify both direct and indirect benefits accruing to workers in the imperialist countries from the exploitation of colonised working people, as listed in the paper. In general, then, it is true that imperialism in this period eventually provides benefits for workers in the imperialist countries which are enabled by the exploitation of working people in the colonies, but with three caveats:

Rolling Back the Global Advance of the Far Right

 

In recent years, there have been many articles by socialists and left-liberals noting with alarm the advance of far-right regimes and parties in the United States (Donald Trump), Europe (the National Front/Rally in France, UKIP and the Brexit Party in the UK, the League in Italy, Vox in Spain, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, AfD in Germany, Freedom Party in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary) and indeed throughout the world: Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jin-ping in China, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyep Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines – the list goes on and on.[1] If we add regimes that were already extremely authoritarian, like the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gulf Arab monarchies, the picture looks bleak indeed.

One common explanation for the growth of the far right and simultaneous decline of centre-right and centre-left parties is the espousal by the latter of neoliberal policies which have led to job losses, widespread poverty, and growing inequality. In many instances, they have also pandered to anti-immigrant sentiment instead of combating it. Since they are seen as the mainstream or ‘the establishment’, it becomes understandable that people hurt by these policies should turn to other parties which have previously been less popular.

There is some truth in this explanation, but it begs the question why the number of people turning further to the left has been so much smaller than the number turning further to the right. One reason why this could be the case is that the left has been badly divided, with a section of it converging with the far right on many issues. For example, the supporters of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria include former KKK leader David Duke, the white supremacists demonstrating at Charlottesville, British National Party leader Nick Griffin, Greek fascists of Golden Dawn, the French National Front, the Belgian Vlaams Belang – all neo-fascists who see their own politics reflected in Assad’s ruthless totalitarian regime. Yet at the same time there are people who are seen to be on the left – figures like Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, David North and Alex Lantier of WSWS and Max Blumenthal – supporting Assad by spreading his propaganda. Again, Putin invited observers from European neo-fascist parties like the French National Front, Italian League, and Freedom Party of Austria to endorse a widely-boycotted referendum preceding the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, yet this annexation was also endorsed by people seen to be on the left like John Pilger. [2] A third example is Brexit in the UK, fronted by far-right ideologue Nigel Farage, whose campaign poster picturing a long queue of refugees bore a striking resemblence to a Nazi poster.[3] Yet some MPs in the Labour Party as well as sections of the extra-parliamentary left also supported Brexit.