ANALYSIS: By Catherine Rottenberg

A few days ago, I received a message from my son’s secondary school announcing that it would be celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) on Friday. The message read:

“The school is selling Feminist jumpers to mark the event. Jumpers are on sale for 10 pounds ($13) – please ask your daughter or son to bring 10 pounds cash to the English office if she/he would like to wear one.”

A few hours later a friend called to tell me, tongue-in-cheek, that International Women’s Day t-shirts are passe and that sex toys are the new t-shirts, sending me a link to “IWD sex toys” currently on sale.

READ MORE: More International Women’s Day articles

The irony is that International Women’s Day began as an initiative of the Socialist Party of America to honour the 1908 garment workers’ strike in New York, which, at the time, was the biggest industrial action ever taken by women workers in the United States.

Hence, the dedication of a day to women began as a struggle against capitalist economic exploitation, where women demanded better working conditions and higher wages.

It is true that, over the course of the 20th century, International Women’s Day has undergone many transformations. In certain countries and contexts, it has served as a day simply to celebrate women and their accomplishments.

It has also been a catalyst to mobilise women around the world to rally for a variety of political causes: from working women’s rights through the right to vote and participate in politics to anti-war protests and, more recently, gender equality.

Problematic tokenism
There is, of course, always a certain problematic tokenism when setting aside one day during the year in which we either celebrate women and/or protest gender inequality.

But in the past few years, and particularly with the rise of Trumpism and the far-right across Europe, South America, India and many other places, International Women’s Day has taken on increased potency and significance.

Indeed, the demonstrations organised today, March 8, across the globe have become more militant and intersectional since 2016.

One has only to think of Spain, where last year millions walked out to protest against gender inequality and sexual discrimination, or the US, where the Feminism for the 99 percent movement called for a women’s strike.

The agendas of many of these protests go well beyond “equality”: They are demanding gender, racial, economic, and climate justice, understanding that these issues are inextricably linked.

And yet, as the message from my son’s school and the IWD sex toys reveal, alongside the more militant direction of International Women’s Day, there has also been another parallel development, namely, the increasing commodification of March 8 and its branding by corporations.

Solidarity by shopping, not struggle
Scholars call this brand activism, where corporations attempt to improve their reputation by using some popular and often progressive cause in their PR and advertising campaigns. The businesses and corporations thus give in order to get.

An example of this is the fashion e-tailer Net-a-Porter which has launched an exclusive limited-edition collection of IWD T-shirts in collaboration with six women designers. It is true that all of the profits go to a charity supporting women survivors of war, but activism and empowerment here is equated with buying an expensive t-shirt with words like “You Go Girl”.

Women, in other words, are encouraged to express their solidarity not through struggle or protest, but by shopping.

This corporate appropriation is clearly part of a wider cultural phenomenon – the rise of neoliberal feminism.

This kind of feminism encourages women to invest in themselves and their own aspirations, inciting them to build confidence and “lean in”. And while such feminism acknowledges the gendered wage gap and sexual harassment as signs of continued inequality, the solutions they posit, such as encouraging individual women to take responsibility for their own well-being, do not challenge the structural and economic undergirding of these phenomena.

Neoliberal feminism is palatable and marketable precisely because it is a non-threatening feminism. It doesn’t address the devastation wrought by neoliberal capitalism, neo-imperialism or systemic misogyny and sexism, so it is easy to embrace and it sells well on the marketplace.

Its message is the exact opposite of the one advanced by the women’s strikes at the beginning of the 20th century.

Feel-good feminism
Moreover, given the rise of this feel-good feminism, it is not hard to understand why suddenly everyone is eager to claim the “feminist” label: from movie stars like Emma Watson to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Nor is it difficult to understand why this feminism makes good business today.

The popularity of feminism and its widespread embrace is not a bad thing per se. But it is crucial to understand what kind of feminism has become popular and why.

A watered down and defanged feminist message is neither going to uproot patriarchy, nor is it going to help us resolve the existential threats to life on earth.

We thus have two competing forces at work at the moment. On the one hand, we have a popular, commodity-driven feminism that serves as a handmaiden to neoliberalism.

On the other hand, we have a growing movement of mass feminist mobilisation that is demanding transformative social justice.

In the US, such mass mobilisation has been spearheaded by activists like Alicia Garza, who is one of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter and Linda Sarsour, who was cochair of the 2017 Women’s March, the 2017 Day Without a Woman, as well as the 2019 Women’s March.

Their feminism is a threatening one because it challenges the intersecting systems of oppression: from white supremacy through Islamophobia to misogyny and neoliberal capitalism. These women carry on the revolutionary spirit that sparked the first IWD over a century ago.

Which feminism “wins” in many ways depends on us. I, for one, have made my choice. Today, I will join the Global Women’s Strike and will bring my two sons along.

Dr Catherine Rottenberg is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. This article was first published by Al Jazeera English.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Most of us realise that there is something wrong with capitalism as we know it. We also accept that capitalism is here to stay; the only practicable alternatives are evolutions of capitalism, not from capitalism.

For most of its history we have experienced capitalism as processes of inequality and contradiction. Capitalism as we know it exhibits the growth dynamics of a runaway train for which both stopping and not-stopping spell present or future disaster. We opt for future disaster. Economic growth is understood as the process of making money at an accelerated rate.

This is primitive capitalism. And it is the manifestation of a ubiquitous mode of modern thought that I refer to as liberal mercantilism. The principal metaphor of liberal mercantilism is gold, which in turn is the principal metaphor for money. Liberal mercantilism is the belief that the economic purpose of life is to make money, that the amount of money each of us makes is a measure of our success in life, and that the amount of money a country makes is the measure of its success.

There are two main strands of liberal mercantilism; conservative liberal mercantilism (which, in the past few decades, has embraced both neoliberalism and neoconservatism) and progressive liberal mercantilism (which embraces both social democracy and socialism). Progressive liberal mercantilism is about making money, taxing it, and governmental spending of it; conservative liberal mercantilism is just about making money. Progressive liberal mercantilists argue that you have to make money before you can spend it. Conservative liberal mercantilists argue that you have to spend (invest) money in order to make money. Both emphasise making money, and economic growth..

Liberal mercantilism is underpinned by a primitive capitalism that only acknowledges private property rights, or public property rights (as in state capitalism; government ownership) that are equivalent to private property rights. Primitive capitalism has no public hemisphere. It’s analogous to a single-hemisphere brain.

Liberal mercantilism represents a wrong path; indeed a false path, much as Ptolemaic astronomy and alchemy have represented false paths in the history of science. In another sense, however, it is a real path, in that liberal mercantilism is truly the existential path that modern humanity is on, and uncritically so.

The alternative to liberal mercantilism is economic capitalism. Economics began as a project to rid capitalism of mercantilism, the crude belief that the economic purpose of countries was to operate ongoing trade surpluses. (Donald Trump is an unreconstructed mercantilist; in his way of thinking, countries wage trade wars, seeking victory through ongoing trade surpluses.)

Economics both succeeded and failed; in economics, wealth is utility (and the sources of utility), not money. Economics, though liberal in its origins, is not a part of liberal mercantilism. But most economists are, to a greater or lesser extent, infused with the liberal mercantilist belief system; especially those economists who, through specialising in finance, clearly equate wealth with money and monetary derivatives.

Capitalism – proper capitalism, full capitalism, economic capitalism – represents a balanced economic order that draws on both private and public property rights; that has private and public hemispheres that complement each other. Private income sources are both private equity (property) and labour; what individuals (and groups of individuals) own, and what they make and sell. Public income is sourced from public equity (the essence of capitalism’s inchoate public hemisphere); it may be retained by public organisations (governments) to be spent on collective goods and services, or distributed, principally as benefits (using the proper capitalistic meaning of that word), to individuals (as economic citizens).

Most ‘capitalists’ are not proper capitalists; they are liberal mercantilists. Most people who advocate for capitalism as we know it are primitive capitalists. And many people who run businesses are mercantilists, drawn in the main by wanting money as an accumulating store of wealth, and not simply by wanting the means to acquire the consumer services that represent the actual purpose of market economic activity.

In economic capitalism, money is a means, not an end. It is not wealth; rather it is a social technology; arguably our most important social technology. Money is important as a technology, not as wealth. Wealth is the services that give us utility; wealth is whatever has value because of the happiness that such wealth enables us to enjoy. The economic purpose of life is to survive and prosper, where ‘prosper’ means to attain the higher forms of happiness.

Capitalism must evolve. Embrace that evolution.