The Worldwide Resistance of Women to Neoliberalism

Neoliberal globalization is based on patriarchy and therefore on the widespread oppression of women. Confronted by accelerating impoverishment and by more and more sophisticated forms of exclusion, numbers of women are aware that the diversity of their demands and their experience of economic pluralism form a counter-current to the dominant economic theory - neoliberal and patricidal - and represent serious forms of resistance.

For example, the women's organization of Papua New Guinea is at the front line of the battle against the "agrarian reform" and the "reform of education" imposed by the World Bank and the IMF. The same is true in Kenya, where there are women who, since 1980, are on the front line of the battle against global enterprises. When the price of coffee fell, they abandoned that crop, and sowed vegetables, which they sold at market or used for their families. The Freedom Corner Mothers demonstrated against the arrest of their children who were opposed to companies' neoliberal programs since 1990. Their opposition has unleashed a wave of land appropriation by landless peasants in Kenya and in the rest of Africa.

In another arena, the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia were mainly initiated by women protesting genocide, rapes, and ethic cleansing. In the Philippines, women have caused the closure of American military bases, releasing huge sums of money for their country. This battle for peace truly represents an arsenal of actions tied to education and health and aimed at true social justice. In Argentina, during the military dictatorship, the Mothers of May Square played a role of the first importance. They were the first to denounce the atrocities and to reclaim their imprisoned or "disappeared" children. Today in each neighborhood, there are women who convene popular assemblies, a new form of direct democracy. They are at the forefront of the creation of alternatives, such as the system of barter.

The solidarity or popular economy

The solidarity or popular economy is not merely a sector reserved for the poor, an offshoot that has adapted to the neoliberal system. According to Heloisa Primavera, an Argentinean economist, "the solidarity economy is not a system for suffering a little less, but for changing the system." She adds that women make up 70% of barter clubs throughout the world and these almost exclusively run by women. According to Cécile Sabourin, a Quebecois economist, the patriarchal vision of social, political, and economic systems renders invisible the contribution of women to the economy. It is necessary to place more value on the expression of their creativity in all its potential for social transformation. "The solidarity economy has economic and social repercussions and allows for family balance," confirms Aminata Diongue Ndiaye, regional coordinator for Dakar's women's actions. Loans granted to women contribute to a great deal more than just economic activity. They allow access to care, to education, even to marriage. While mostly occupying the informal sector, Africans invent or experiment with initiatives in the solidarity economy. Their activities pursue, above all, an added social value, by jointly developing connected services, such as the rebuilding of schools, the renovation of hospitals, including maternity hospitals, even the repair of roads. It's a "life economy."

Measure the damage as well

A priority: to reconsider wealth. If everything has a cost, it is not necessarily monetary. Is it right that a school or a maternity hospital should be financially profitable? The production of wealth can be measured alternatively: pleasure, social bonds, health, education, respect for life - and the costs as well. The thousands of deaths on the roads or the heart attacks and cancers of the North contribute more to the pharmaceutical multinationals than to the sale of papers. On the other hand, they cost in humanity, in quality of life, in environmental protection, in the preservation of nature. It is a matter therefore of also measuring, thanks to new ways of monitoring destruction, the damage produced by industry, intensive agriculture, wars, violence, exclusion, unemployment, and the one-dimensional thinking channeled through the major communication monopolies.

To ignore the evidence while reconsidering wealth leads to an inversion of logic. When an NGO receives a public subsidy, it is not a debtor. It produces wealth that is social, relational, environmental. It becomes an operative on behalf of an absent state that, in a manner of speaking, subcontracts the production of services for the general good. If a NGO bends to the discipline of the market and adopts its criteria for profitability, it then makes up one of the pieces of the gigantic jigsaw put in place by the neoliberal system. It is necessary to learn how to recognize our own abilities and knowledge, which can never be measured as the profit from invested capital. It is a matter of urgency to build and to value different economic models that are based on another definition of wealth, one that identifies levels of damage and supports an economy with strong added social value. Such models are mostly supported by women throughout the world.

NOTE:
This text is freely excerpted from an analysis by Joëlle Palmieri, which can be found in its full version online here. It forms part of the dossier Féministes pour une autre mondialisation that Pénélopes put on line in June 2002.