Daily Times

As one observes the political rise of right-wing populists across the world, it is hard not to notice a certain similarity in how they speak of women. Yodi Adityanath, the hardline priest recently elected as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in India, has long railed against women’s equality, declaring that ‘women don’t need freedom, they need protection’, that ‘Western-style freedoms are destructive to the Indian family structure’. Pakistanis are more than familiar with such sentiments – just last year, a law trying to empower women against domestic violence prompted a pitched street movement by the entire religious right on the grounds that it would destroy Pakistan’s family structure and Islamic values.

In Turkey, the aspiring autocrat Erdogan has waged a consistent ideological onslaught on ideas of gender equality, terming it ‘against nature itself’ and calling women who failed to reproduce ‘deficient’ and ‘incomplete’. The election of Donald Trump as US President too came on the back of a platform that included legal punishments for abortions, while fanning the racialized fears of his Far Right (and white nationalist) base about the ‘threat’ posed to American women by non-white immigrants.

Why is there such common ground in the anti-women discourses of these fascist movements across the world? After all, it is not as if Hindutva majoritarianism, Political Islamism, or White Nationalism – belief systems often violently opposed to each other – share any common cultural ancestry. Yet, in their obsession with the need to ‘control and protect’ women, they appear to echo a seemingly-primordial discourse that is immediately recognisable in multiple sociopolitical contexts.

The works of Maria Mies, a socialist-feminist theorist of patriarchal evolution, offer a compelling explanatory framework that explains the material basis underlying these commonalities. Mies, a sociologist by profession, is known for her study of the relationship between patriarchy and accumulation, which helped explain how the historical development of various systems of production – from feudalism to primitive accumulation to industrial capitalism – was rooted in the imposition of a hierarchical division of labor within the family.

Most primitive hunter-gatherer societies, Mies explains, were subsistence-based and much more gender-equal than the systems that followed them. It was only with the emergence of technology which made accumulation possible, that inequalities emerged. As men developed the tools to appropriate food and resources from nature, they began to see nature as separate and subordinate to them, as a resource to be exploited. In order to ensure control over the means of reproduction, women also came to be defined simply as part of nature – as a resource that had to be tamed and exploited through the ‘truly productive’and ‘fully human’ labor of men. While initially established through violence, these patriarchal relations were kept in place through the development of institutions like marriage, the family and patriarchal religious beliefs. Over time this led to patriarchal property relations – whereby the exercise of men’s productive labor on nature entitled them to possess its products – which included the possession of women by definition.

Mies contends that it is the creation of this unequal and predatory patriarchal separation – of man from nature, of man from woman and, later, of one’s ‘own’ group/tribe to ‘other’groups/tribes – that becomes the basis for the development of all further systems of exploitative economic production. Under feudal agriculture, land became the principal natural resource, which women and peasants were held in bondage to. As capitalism and colonialism expanded, large parts of the world came to be defined and divided as part of ‘nature’ – as savage and uncontrolled – and hence, open for colonization and exploitation. The control of women and their reproductive function – essential to produce labor power for resource accumulation – has remained intricately linked to all systems of predatory production and accumulation.

Patriarchal relations of production have been in place in much of the world for centuries, yet as economic systems change and enter crisis, such relationships come under pressure. The development of merchant capitalism and new technologies in Europe helped free women and serfs from bondage to feudal landholdings by creating demand for women’s crafts, helping precipitate feudalism’s demise as peasants, including women, fled to the new cities, and marginally enhanced their economic and social power over time. Mies describes how the reassertion of patriarchal and class power in that period (the 12^th to 17^th century) took the form of Witch Hunts, a phenomenon in which capitalists, the state and the church collaborated to violently persecute independent women of productive skill and influence and eventually, reestablish men’s control over their reproductive functions, albeit this time under capitalism.

For centuries hence, the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family remained the central social component of capitalist development the world over, with men as the providers and women as reproductive caregivers geared for the production and sustenance of workers for mass capitalist production.

Three recent factors over the past decades, however, have again brought the system to crisis. For one, capital’s tendency for accumulation, as well the rise of organized feminist movements, have increasingly brought more women into the ‘productive’ (and paid) labor force the world over, enhancing (marginally) their economic power relative to men. Secondly and more recently, the prolonged global economic crisis, characterized by falling real wages, volatile food price inflation (tied to climate change and agricultural financialization) and a rollback of state services and employment amid austerity have increasingly degraded the capacity of a large proportion of middle and working class men to fulfil their social role as ‘providers’. In much of the developed world, this psychologically-traumatizing regression of male power has also been exacerbated by technological change and automation, particularly through the relocation and loss of manufacturing jobs.

As global economic, social and climate transformation weaken the material basis for patriarchal power, right-wing populism is the primal cry that seeks to reestablish patriarchal subordination through a call for a return to the old ideological certainties; the sexual domestication of women, the continued, accelerated extraction of the earth’s resources for ‘development’, and the demonization of the cultural-religious ‘Other’ (whom ‘our’ women must be protected from) to justify one’s own excesses and drive to accumulate. Despite the reality that it is this very tendency for patriarchal accumulation that has brought the global system to the brink of economic, political and climate collapse, right-wing populism feeds on the fears of insecure masculinities to propose a reconstitution of old, destructive hierarchies.

As they call for a futile return to the old world, today’s rightwing populisms are all convinced of the distinctive greatness of their respective cultural identities. In truth, they are all mirror images of each other, the proponents of a decaying order desperately clinging on to patriarchal ideologies no longer supported by material reality, and unable and unwilling to deal with the loss of patriarchal power in the way that is necessary; by reimagining social roles and the division of labor in a way that corresponds to the economic needs and capacities of today.

The writer is a researcher on gender, development and public policy and a political worker for the Awami Workers Party. He tweets @ammarrashidt