INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY : CO-OPTED BY CAPITALISM

Kshama Sawant and supporters protest Amazon, one of the corporate sponsors of International Women's Day. 

March 8th is International Women's Day. While today it has been co-opted by business interests and promotes the feminism of the one percent, its origins lie in the work of leaders of the socialist movement over a century ago, including Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg. Today their work is continued by socialists such as Kshama Sawant and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY (IWD) and the theme this year is equality. It's typical of the warm and positive themes that the United Nations comes up with each year. In 2017 for example, when National was in power, the theme was 'Women in the Changing World of Work.' The focus was on the UN's 'commitment to gender equality, women’s empowerment and women’s human rights." Since 2001 IWD  has had a sponsored website and an annual theme.

This year the organisers of IWD invite you to celebrate the achievements of women and make an 'equals' sign with your arms to help promote a 'gender equal world'.

The website states:

'Equality is not a women's issue, it's a business issue. A gender equal world can be healthier, wealthier and more harmonious',

On the New Zealand website, UN Women Aotearoa New Zealand it states : 'The year 2020 represents an unmissable opportunity to mobilise global action to achieve gender equality and human rights of all women and girls.'

There have already been a number of events and they are listed on the website of the Ministry for Women. These events included a pricey breakfast on Friday, where one of the guest speakers was the Minister for Women's Affairs, Julie Ann Genter. She subscribes to a neoliberal-friendly brand of feminism which is not so much about confronting capitalism, but ensuring that more women are running it. In the last couple of years or so she has been complaining abut there not being enough women in the boardrooms of New Zealand business.

To suggest that can be any kind of equality under our present economic and political arrangements is the feminism of the one percent. It is trickle down feminism; it suggests that all women will be somehow better off if only more women were in charge. But as journalist Laurie Penny has observed “While we all worry about the glass ceiling, there are millions of women standing in the basement—and the basement is flooding.”

Given that IWD is now little more than a promotion for a brand of feminism from which only a small number of women (usually white and middle class) can benefit, its no surprise that it has attracted corporate sponsors like Amazon. Yes, Amazon. This is the same Amazon regularly criticised for, among other things, its poor wages and lousy working conditions and its anti union activities. This is the same Amazon that paid no income tax in the United States last year, despite making a $11.2 billion profit.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

One woman who has taken on the corporate power of Amazon is socialist and Seattle City councillor Kshama Sawant. She is campaigning to have a head tax, a per-employee tax on large corporations, imposed on corporations like Amazon. It has over 45,000 workers in Seattle so it would, potentially, have to pay millions each year through the tax. The tax actually was approved by the Seattle City Council in 2018 but was quickly repealed when Amazon made threatening noises about leaving Seattle altogether.

Earlier this year Amazon ploughed some two million dollars into the council election campaign of the Amazon-friendly Egan Orion, in an effort to unseat Sawant. It failed. Sawant said recently : 'We literally had the richest man in the world against us in the election and we defeated him. That took a lot of hard work and sacrifice on the part of hundreds, if not thousands. But we were able to do it.'

Last week she unveiled new legislation designed, once again, to tax Amazon and other big Seattle corporations. The revenue gathered will be used to provide affordable public housing.

in 2019 Amazon cancelled plans for a headquarters in Queens, New York after a widespread backlash from residents and politicians, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They objected to the nearly $3 billion in financial incentives the city and state had offered Amazon for the construction of the headquarters.

Amazon later announced it was going to expand its operations in New York, without the state giving it billions in tax incentives. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: 'Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway - without requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways. Maybe the Trump admin should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families.'

While both Sawant and Ocasio-Cortez would no doubt describe themselves as feminists, they would also say that feminism without socialism will never cure our unequal society. Only fundamental change to our economic system can make life better for women.

Among the corporate hashtags, its easy to forget that IWD was first celebrated 110 years ago by the Socialist Party of America to honour a New York garment workers’ strike. In 1910, inspired by the Socialist Party's National Women's Day, Clara Zetkin, a German revolutionary socialist and a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg, proposed that March 8th be declared as International Women’s Day to honour the U.S. demonstrations and working women all over the world. It was subsequently adopted by the socialist Second International.

Today it is women like Kshama Sawant and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are the true defenders of IWD and its real meaning, rather than women like Julie Ann Genter who complain that capitalism just doesn't have enough loyal lieutenants of the female persuasion.