⇱ Index page

The Internationalist Archive

Gabriel Winant is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (2021), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award. 

For Issue #26 of The Internationalist, Winant draws from his research on the rise of the care economy in the United States to explore the evolving nature of the class system around the world, breaking out of the stale debate about “identity politics” to offer a novel perspective on the symbiotic relationship between gender- and class-based struggles for the future of socialism. 

From professional scholarship in the social sciences to horserace punditry at election time, it is common to hear the formulation that the politics of class are in at least some ways, and perhaps in all ways, working at cross-purposes to the politics of identity—meaning expressions of protest against inequality or domination based in group statuses such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or nationality. The problem with such arguments is that they require us to imagine that social class as a principle of social organization, and therefore as a basis for mass politics, enjoys a kind of conceptual purity that other categories do not. It is as though socialist politics has become contaminated by these other phenomena, which therefore need to be strained out so that workers' politics may again express itself. If the relationship between labor and capital is the foundation of modern politics, all else is ephemeral, a distraction.

But neither capital nor labor exists in abstraction. They meet each other in specific contexts, shaped on all sides by long histories of empire, the racial formations that arose through colonialism and developed in its wake, the fluctuating organization of the family and the forms of gender that it requires of individuals, and so on. Capital and labor never meet each other outside such histories—as if under false names on a moonless night on the outskirts of town. To explore the possibilities for socialism at any given moment, our task becomes not to wish these other histories away but to understand the historically specific contexts where capital and labor encounter each other, which shape the possibilities of organization and power for each.

One key example of this in the present is found in the interaction between feminist and anti-austerity struggles across much of the world. This dynamic is probably most clearly evident in Latin America, where the Ni Una Menos movement against gendered violence has flowed into and interacted with the reemerging second Pink Tide: increasingly explicit feminist politics characterize many of the renascent governments of the left in that region, whose rise has seen the rapid expansion of abortion rights from Mexico to Argentina. But it is not only in Latin America that we find this connection. In Poland, the pro-natalist nationalist government has faced mass resistance from both feminist movements for reproductive rights and the teachers’ union, whose members demand both better wages and working conditions and the rejection of centralized conservative control over curriculum. These struggles have directly informed each other. (The overwhelming majority of teachers are women.) On the other side, too, the Catholic Church both provides strikebreakers against teachers and agitates for a clampdown on “gender ideology” in schools. In the United States, these parallels are especially clear: a campaign of homophobic, transphobic, and racist panic is currently underway, aimed expressly by its engineers at discrediting public schooling and public teachers all together in favor of privatization and the transfer of responsibility for teaching labor onto the family—implicitly mothers, who are also being stripped of their reproductive rights in the same moment.

What underlies these convergences between feminist and more obviously “economic” anti-austerity struggles is the changing division of labor, which in some form is playing out globally. Economic growth models—whether developmentalist in poorer countries or Fordist in richer ones—have sputtered and made impossible the traditional heterosexual patriarchal nuclear family form. In some places this form never became dominant and was only a normative aspiration or imposition; in others, it briefly seemed to congeal before again falling apart. In any case, as the jobs that correspond to it have become unavailable, women have entered the workforce globally. More than this, however, they have entered jobs that are themselves informalized compared to the regulated industrial work of the previous moment, or at least its aspirations. 

At the same time, as more of the household has become involved in generating cash, households have also had to come to depend increasingly on support from a broader set of sources for their “social reproduction” needs: care for the young, the old, the sick, the disabled, food supply, laundry, and so on. This transition is easy to grasp in stylized form if one thinks of a poor community where one woman does laundry for all the families in the neighborhood, another teaches the children, another nurses the sick and the old, another cooks the meals, another cleans the homes, and another watches the babies. Such a situation—even seen schematically like this—obviously does not mean that gender has lost its power to organize social life. What it does mean, however, is that the erosion of previous modes of working-class survival has thrown the global proletariat increasingly back onto these circuits of social reproduction; in doing so, it has extended and elaborated those circuits. Questions of who is responsible for doing laundry, watching or teaching children, preparing food, and nursing the old, thereby taking on increasing political saliency. As they do so, it becomes an imperative of class rule to make sure that girls turn into the kind of women who will accept these roles without complaint—and that girls and boys and women and men are clearly demarcated from each other.

This general process has stimulated conflict over the enactment and embodiment of gender across the world for the past several decades with increasing intensity. However, the environment of the pandemic certainly sped up these conflicts, as it demanded each society answer the question of whose work is essential and what that means: who is entitled to child care or nursing, and who must provide it. It is no coincidence that struggles over the conditions of work in schools and hospitals, therefore, correspond in time to those over the rights of trans people and women: they are the same question in different aspects.

The Internationalist Archive