I was musing with a friend about the variety of things each of us had seen and done at Conway Hall over the years – from TU campaign meetings through poetry society gatherings to arts and academic lectures. It was at Conway Hall that I first met John McDonnell, and got myself sufficiently embroiled in lefty goings on to get a seat on the national committee of the LRC (Labour Representation Committee).
Last weekend, it was radical feminism for me. A conference put together by Nordic Model Now, and featuring the wonderful UN rapporteur Reem Alsalem who has recently presented ground-breaking papers on both the causes of violence against women and girls (VAWG) and on exit strategies for prostituted women.
I learned so much! As a feminist and a socialist, I was already aware, in general, of how racism and sexism are the weapons of capitalism, and of the transnational, corrosive, violent nature of the sex-industry. Debates at FiLiA had showed me how aspects of the sex industry feed back and forth across the world, exploiting women here for the benefit of wealthy clients there, but during the course of Saturday, I saw those brave women, many of them survivors of the sex trade and/or trafficking, and/or surrogacy, effectively lay out a map for us, so that we could see how all those misogynistic, women-destroying, profiteering forces interact.
Every transnational industry is complex and ruthless. Whether underground, mafia-run outfits that can’t be marked on any map or glitzy corporations with their names on the front of high-profile city offices, their actions in the world have similar effects.
Every transnational industry develops and protects its supply chain, and seeks to make laws in its countries of operation work to its advantage. Take, for example, the new laws planned in the UK on the topic of surrogacy. They make absolutely sure no woman is going to make serious money out of being a surrogate mother. That’s how it’s made to look like a respectable business: the current line is that commercial surrogacy is bad but ‘altruistic’ surrogacy is okay.
Try to picture the woman who wants to be an altruistic surrogate. She wants to experience a highly medicalized, high-risk pregnancy, then destroy the dyad (the mother-and-child continuum) at the moment of birth. Even though she’s letting herself in for a lot of effort and a lot of grief. Even though surrogate pregnancies are three times more likely to be fatal to the mother than natural ones. Even though it’s an act that puts a tremendous strain on family relationships.
That is a LOT of risk and a LOT of grief. Perhaps worse still, it takes the central and most emotive of human experiences, the birth of a child, and makes it into a contracted commodity.
Yes, the child is chartered – and when that child grows up, s/he will find out, sooner or later, that s/he was bought and sold before they took their first breath. That’s what corporate profiteers do to those children, just as they seek to do with our public services, our rivers and seas and, so help us, to the very earth that sustains us.
But so long as the mother’s not making a profit, that’s fine. What the laws will make way for though is a whole string of execs bagging big salaries, overseeing a register of surrogates, organizing the procurement of eggs from (for example) Ukrainian women, and ‘host wombs’ from (for example) US or European women who’re hard-up enough to do just about anything in return for a year’s assured subsistence.
Or take, for example, a tour of the realities of refugee routes, of sex-trafficking and of prostitution, or the global trails of illegal drugs.
Or take a look at the enthusiasm with which the private health care industry recommends the freezing and saving of eggs and sperm to young sex-change candidates, so someone can help them have a baby later. (Who cares who…?)
Squint at the hazy points where they all blur together, then consider the way so many governments have looked into the obvious harms done by the sex industry, and then at their GDPs and at their lobbyists’ interests, and then said “oh, er, we don’t want to end the sex industry as such…”
Where were you?
It’s a shame more of my socialist friends weren’t at the Nordic Model Now conference – they’d recognize the transnational, corrosive, violent patterns in all that.
It’s amazing how many feminists I know weren‘t at the Nordic Model Now conference. Surely, every woman who cares about women and girls should have been there?
Well actually, I know the reasons for the absent faces. Every time I see a Saturday feminist event I want to go to, I have to decide whether to go to that, or to the national or local #FreePalestine event that’ll be on the same day. Talk about dividing your forces!
But it doesn’t feel like that when you’re at an event, it just feels as though the people who are there are the people there are. And if you have a foot in both worlds, you’ll know that each maintains a painful silence on certain topics. It can make you feel like a bit of an alien if you’re one of those who wants to see the whole of the moon.
Chasms
During the course of the day at the Nordic Model Now conference, a sister pointed out some women on the other side of the room who were right up at the Zionist end of the Israel / Palestine divide. I stayed away from them: a caution that’s a legacy from my days as a Labour Party officer in a particularly lefty CLP. I’d long ago had enough of those conversations about why we shouldn’t say ‘Zionist’ (even though they were), about how it’s an antisemitic trope to suggest that there might be ‘an Israel lobby’ (even though there was one, and it was blatantly trying to destroy our movement) and how you should never, ever call Israel a racist, or an apartheid, endeavour (even though we Labour Party members were all supposed to be fearless anti-racists).
‘Oh but you see, it’s all a cover for antisemitism. If you single out Israel for criticism….’
But we never did single out Israel. Remember Labour conference the year the hall was rippling with Palestine flags? I do, and I also remember that same year, there were stalls and fringe events about other countries, countries in South America, Africa and elsewhere in West Asia, who were suffering racist, fundamentalist, often corporate funded attacks and invasions – we wanted to know about, and reach out to, all of them. It’s what socialists do, because you just can’t do socialism in one country, when your opponents are transnational corporations and their client states, but those who weren’t on the left ignored those stalls and events, they just wanted us to shut up about Palestine. So we only needed to make a fuss about, and defend our right to talk about, Palestine.
We never did single out Israel for criticism – although we did, and do, point it out as possibly the last apartheid-based, blatantly settler-colonialist state. And we focus on it now because Israel is currently the world leader in killing women and children. How can there possibly feminists who don’t see that as a big issue?
If only more of those warrior-women from the rad fem conferences would come to our lefty gatherings, they’d understand…
… but there’s a real risk the lefties would go uh-oh, TERFS and SWERFS! Not that many of them though. Increasingly, when you talk to them privately, they know very well why we shouldn’t treat sex work as work like any other, and why gender ideology is dangerous, particularly to women and girls. They just haven’t quite managed to say so in public, yet.
But everyone’s talking about organizing, and about seeking solidarity. International socialism needs radical feminism and radical feminism needs international socialism. There’s a huge overlap, but it shouldn’t just be an overlap. Race, sex and class. If you understand the nature of any of those axes of oppression, you’re three-quarters of the way to understanding all of them. That would make you an anti-racist, radical feminist socialist internationalist – as most of the best of my friends are.
I don’t care what liberal feminism needs because (as the meme goes) the main features of liberal feminism are its determination to support men’s ‘rights’ in the sex trade, in gender identity debates, and in surrogacy law.
But for those who aren’t afraid of getting radical – I bet we have a lot more in common than a fondness for Red Lion Square. Let’s get organized. Radical feminist socialist internationalists, learning from each other’s activisms. There – that’s probably got my readers’ list down to about twelve.
Solidarity!
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Kay
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Kay Green 