Discussion+Doc+7,+Class,+Gender,+and+NDR

The Political Economy of Transition in South Africa 1994-2004

 * CLASS FORMATION, CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN**


 * The Interrelationship of Class, the National Question, and Gender in the NDR**

The argument in the paper that the class dynamic is the determining contradiction, and that most existing analyses of the NDR have tended to under play class relations and class struggle as motive factors, is a correct one.

That the combatting of gender inequality is also a central task in the advancing of the NDR is acknowledged in the paper. But issues related to gender relations and the complexities of the gender struggle as a 'struggle within a struggle', and as one which touches both the personal and the political, should be expanded.

Although down through the years the women's struggle was integrated in the broader struggle against apartheid, it was never totally subsumed. Yet liberation organisations have tended to subordinate gender issues in the NDR, it has been contended. This was due partly to theoretical limits but more fundamentally to patriarchal relations within our organisations.

All Alliance organisations needed to ensure that gender, in its relation to class and race, was integrated in all our theoretical and practical work and struggles. At the same time we needed to ensure that issues related to women's oppression also had an independent focus, especially in the building of the women's movement. Cde Thenjiwe Mthintso has written that gender equality would not simply be a by-product of democracy. A deliberate struggle was going to be needed to ensure that gender transformation became an integral part of democratic transformation. We needed to have better monitored and supported the struggles to mainstream gender in the organs of the state and in its policies, in the wider society and in our own Alliance organisations, challenging patriarchal ideology and practices there.

Linked to this the building and maintaining of a mass movement has not been easy. This includes the building of the women's movement. It was difficult to forge joint programmes of action in the Alliance. We need to deepen our understanding of the challenges which have faced us, identifying the factors which have tended to fragmentation and demobilisation. On the other hand different forms and processes of women networking, collaborating and forming coalitions have come to the fore in civil society.

We need a broad movement for the transformation of gender relations. It would need to embrace the different kinds of women's movements, which have different racial, class and gender underpinnings, Cde Mthintso has said. It would also need to involve both men and women as an integral part of the broader movement for transformation in South Africa.

But the deracialising of society and the building of socialism will not on their own end patriarchy. It is only in a classless society that this will happen. In our struggles to build socialism now we needed to have paid greater attention to forging new gender relations. "We often lose sight of the connection between these two principles of our struggle. The achievement of a socialist future is dependent on the class composition of the forces that come to power in the NDR, and the extent to which women are organised as part of their class". All Party cadres, and not just the women, need to ask: have we done enough to advance the participation of working women in our struggle?

Black women in general and African women in particular, have played the central role in the reproduction of the working class, which the paper recognises. The legacy of their triple oppression is the product of a particular kind of development (11th Congress Programme of Action). What needs more emphasis in the paper is that over the last decade the issue of the exploitation of women's reproductive or unpaid labour and their subjection in the family and household has taken on renewed significance. This has been against the background of the move from the RDP to GEAR to the Growth and Development Summit.

Because the Alliance did not work well, because of the downplaying of class relations and class struggle, and because we have battled to integrate the need to transform gender relations adequately in our analyses and activities, our responses to burning issues of social reproduction, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, gender based violence, and the addressing of basic needs, have been inhibited.

This has brought into renewed focus that women's rights are human rights. The products of the great struggles and suffering of the masses of the people, human rights have been institutionalised. Yet especially black working class and poor women have faced immense obstacles in exercising them. These constitutional rights include the right to a healthy environment, nutrition, water, housing, health and education.

The RDP included the right to basic needs. That we have been hobbled in their provision provides another perspective on the difficulties of mobilising the poorest of the poor (who include black youth, and the rural and migrant poor).


 * In the 1970s an extensive body of literature emerged seeking to analyse apartheid society from a perspective of class and class struggle.**

We need to reconsider the issue of migrant labour and cheap labour power today. It has been asked:
 * Cheap Labour Arguments**


 * what are the strategies of cheap labour power now - what are the patterns of reproduction of cheap labour power
 * to what extent were women the migrant labourers now
 * does cheap labour power not need to be reproduced now
 * was a new authoritarianism and a new form of cheap labour power emerging in the workplace based on market forces

We need to identify the patterns of mobility of particularly vulnerable workers and the working poor in Southern Africa. These include domestic workers, male and female informal traders, migrant labour, farming communities, and children or mobile informal groups usually not documented.

Related to this migration, the household as a socio-economic unit and the division of labour operating there, in both the rural and urban areas, is being restructured. Another feature is the breakdown of the extended family and changing forms of the family in Southern Africa, with those headed by poor black and working class single women predominating. What needs to be traced is how this has affected the 'welfare system of remittances' from employed workers. It has been said that the presence of female headed households was a theoretical and practical dilemma for both feminists and Marxists.

Most women have found themselves in the informal sector while those in the formal sector are concentrated at the lower levels, usually in sectors known as 'women's work'. "This was contrary to the Marxist prediction that the liberation of women from household to public employment would automatically lead to their broader liberation".

The value of the concept of reproductive labour, based as it is on "the social relations of daily and generational reproduction", derives from its roots in historical materialism. According to the materialist understanding the foundation of social life is found in the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life. Social reproduction is tied to the ability of people to meet certain basic needs which will not succeed " so long as one fundamental means of reproducing ourselves - the production of subsistence goods - is commandeered by the forces of capital accumulation".

Welfare responsibilities and the costs of reproduction have been shifting to the local, community and even household levels, increasing the burden especially poor women must bear. Probably the most critical but often the least recognised social, economic and cultural effects are within households and families in the townships, informal settlements and slums in both the rural and urban areas.
 * Class determination and trends in the working class and other popular classes**

There has been the increased domination of the process of reproduction, and not only production, by the market internationally. It has tended to split the social from the economic, the formal from the informal, and production from reproduction. Reproductive work is being transferred to and from the market, for example, childcare, health care, food preparation, and other domestic labour. Also, there is a blurring between paid and unpaid work as when a woman produces goods for the market from the house while engaging in household tasks.

In 2002 according to available statistics the South African workforce looked like this:


 * **LABOUR** || **FORMAL** || **INFORMAL** || **+** || **DOMESTIC** || ||
 * **FORCE** || **WORK** ||
 * 11946 000 total || 7568 00 || 3059 000 || + || 1E+06 || = 4063 000 ||
 * **5434 000 women** || **2859 000** || **1486 000** || **+** || **963000** || **= 2449 000** ||
 * **5434 000 women** || **2859 000** || **1486 000** || **+** || **963000** || **= 2449 000** ||

Globalisation is resulting in labour market changes that are reducing the size of the formal labour force, that is,secure, permanent, full-time employment(Horn, 2004). What used to be called `a-typical' work - part-time, casual, temporary, seasonal, contract, home-based, piece-work and unpaid family labour - is becoming increasingly typical in the modern global labour market.

Another problem is the systematic under reporting and misrepresentation of women's contribution to the economy. It is probable that the size of the informalised working class continues to be underestimated. There is a void in gender specific statistics in Southern Africa. The work of the vast majority of women in the lowest social strata in the formal sector of the economy, or in subsistence farming, is not recognised. This helps perpetuate inequality between men and women.

Because most trade unions have not traditionally organised 'a-typical' or self-employed workers in the informal economy, the organised workforce is shrinking and trade unions' numbers are declining. While sectional determination for domestic workers and farm workers has been won, setting basic working conditions and minimum wages, other sectors are largely unprotected by legislation. They are also marked by increasing insecurity of employment and worsening conditions of work.

If the real nature of our economy's productive work is to be revealed, we must explore ways in which the different forms of work which are dominated by women, and which are greatly undercounted and undervalued, or are not recognised as work, could be better covered. There is a need to develop mechanisms which capture reproduction as well as production, and to incorporate it in the analysis of growth and structural change.

Steps have been taken to improve the measurement of reproductive labour, or to overcome the gender blind nature of macro-economics. Gender budgeting has been used as a tool. This was spearheaded by the Parliamentary Committee on the Quality of Life and the Status of Women and NGOs. There has been also the People's Budget initiative and a range of economic literacy programmes which have been developed by a coalition of COSATU, churches, and NGOs. Statistics South Africa time use survey of 2000 was the first national attempt to measure unpaid care work. It showed that official statistics significantly underestimate the more invisible forms of work being done by women. Overall, how effective these attempts have been needs to be evaluated.