By Shefali Mehta
In the history of civilizations, one can trace a movement from community living to individualism. To notice how far we have come, we only need to compare tribal cultures with the post-marketization culture. Tribal communities celebrate their festivals in groups; their dances are always in group formations. An important feature is the use of masks, eliminating the performers identity and lending them all with a culturally binding one. Today the most prized performances happen under spotlights, where the identity of the performer bears a large amount of weight in its overall success.
This change can be linked directly to the economic modes of production. Feudalism had lords holding estates while large populations of men work as serfs. There is hardly any scope for social mobility. With mechanization, specialization in various fields (designers, managers, distributors and the think-tanks) we have entered an economy where the focus has shifted to what an individual is most adept at doing.
So today figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs represent what young people are encouraged to fashion themselves after. In a sense it is highly liberating, every individual is his own hero, upward mobility is possible and has no dead-end until a person decides to stop. But socialism is deeply rooted in a sense of community over individuals, shared resources and equitable distribution over accumulation. Private property which for socialism is a theft is the basic premise of capitalist production. This is why proponents of laissez-faire would stress on the need to keep socialism off from any society that is desirous of individual liberty.
Neo liberal individualism has threatened to absorb (to some extent it already has) second wave feminism into becoming conducive to capitalism. The second wave feminism had its quarrel with the state-organized capitalism for its blindness to the non-economic issues which pester our society like reproductive oppression and sexual violence. The motto of rejecting economism and politicizing the personal created an impetus which combined the economic and the cultural, calling for a restructuring of society devoid of hierarchy (be it class-based or gender-based) and resting upon more egalitarian and democratic foundations. But the turn towards identity politics with a heavier weight upon individual identity ended up being hand-in-glove with neo-liberal ethos which put behind the social responsibility of equitable distribution of resources in favor of the model of social Darwinism, pushing women to compete in the very social organization which second wave feminism sought to challenge.
We do require a critique of economism, which is to say that we need a decentering of the very concept of work which is restricted to income generating labor. Domestic labor and childbirth are very well in the realm of valuable productive work, though never measured against any monetary value and hence unvalued. However, this critique of economism should not pass into individualistic identity politics where it goes into the extremity of individual autonomy. Not that there is something fundamentally flawed in identity politics, in fact feminism is premised upon the identity of woman, but there is a difference in the political implications of what identity we are fighting over. Too much individualism supports the capitalist tenets of primacy of individual profit, freedom of choice, and meritocratic advancement (which is not as innocent as it sounds and creates an ever widening gap between wealthy few and poor masses).
An individual must have the power to make choices for his/her benefits, but this freedom has to be constrained when it comes at the cost of the rights of masses. Development has to be a shared goal and not individual profiteering. From a critique of careerism, we have come to celebrate female entrepreneurs. The matter of contention is not whether women should be encouraged to work outside homes or not, rather it is whether we should let masculinism define work and patriarchy to judge its worth. We also need to critically examine how capitalism has absorbed female labor power mostly in low-wage jobs. Women often lose jobs because of pregnancy and are not trusted for higher positions. Even at top posts discrimination happens in the form of unequal pay.
This reminds of the urgency of the need to retrieve feminism from becoming party to capitalist ethos in trying to liberate women. Any form of feminism which proceeds without taking principles of Marxism with it threatens not only to become the prerogative of educated, rich and relatively much liberated women but also fails to reorganize society on egalitarian principles; similarly, any socialist development which is insensitive to gender disparity replicates inside its fabric the very social stratification (albeit in gender terms) it was out to eliminate.
Shefali is a sceptic by nature, with a critical eye on culture, ideologies and evolving trends of societies. A student of English Literature at Delhi University, she is particularly interested in the lives and history of people living in the Indian subcontinent and contemporary issues like terrorism, exile, human rights and global capitalism. Mostly interested in theory, she also likes to explore regional cinema. Contact her at shefali.tie@gmail.com