By Laura Fitzgerald
According to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum, it will take 134 years to reach gender equality. This preposterous projection is an indictment of capitalism. The sunny optimism of the World Economic Forum, that it will take one and a third centuries to get gender equality neglects to take into account that capitalism in fact has us hurtling backwards.
In Sudan, women have taken their own lives en masse to avoid rape by paramilitaries.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are nothing if not creative in the twisted ways in which they foster gender apartheid. Not content with denying girls an education, women have been banned from studying in medical institutions with disastrous consequences for their access to any healthcare. Women have also been banned from singing, and even from hearing other women’s voices.
Across Europe the far right is rising, scoring major electoral conquests in Austria and Germany most recently. In the US, five of Trump’s cabinet picks are men accused of sexual harassment – no doubt a conscious attempt at trolling feminists in the men he chooses to elevate.
The far right are ideologically wedded to patriarchy, including abortion bans and a view of women’s role as ‘in the home’. The far-right’s selective outcry on violence against women is interwoven with its racist patriarchal worldview – macho, far-right tough guys have to violently ‘protect’ helpless white women from the Black, brown and migrant men that they demonise. Meanwhile many of the far right’s foot soldiers’ heroes, from Trump, to Conor McGregor, to Andrew Tate, run the gamut of rapists, serial harassers, abusers of minors, and sex traffickers.
The 2010s saw a global feminist and queer wave that encompassed Repeal, MeToo, the feminist strike, and Ni Una Menos. Five years in, the 2020s have given rise to a significant push back against this feminist and queer wave of struggle.
The degree to which patriarchal gender norms are infused in the far-right is striking — any cursory look at the images on the National Party’s website will give you an insight into the same as it’s chock-full of gym-sculpted young men, almost exclusively. The far-right rise is coming straight out of today’s capitalism. It’s unfortunately no fringe aberration, it is capitalism today. It’s an era in which billionaire bigot, Elon Musk, richest man in the world and geeky, edgelord tech-bro, can own a social media giant and be in Trump’s cabinet while he spouts his clueless but terrifying ramblings about Andrew Tate’s ‘bid’ to become British Prime Minister. Meanwhile billionaires who previously preferred to project a more enlightened veneer are scrambling around to appease Trump and the far-right — as per Zuckerberg’s ditching of fact-checking by Meta and coronation of Trump ally, Dana White.
It’s the ramping up of transphobia everywhere that gives perhaps the biggest insight into the degree to which the system is pushing back against the freedoms that feminist and queer struggles promise. Trans people’s very existence throws the rigid gender binary into question, and for this they are so cruelly targeted. This rigid gender binary that is innately patriarchal, serves capitalism deeply. From the $10.8 trillion unpaid care work that women do annually – labour that regenerates the workforce for capitalism, enabling the worker exploitation that makes capitalism’s profits; to the macho ideology that is imbued in so much of the propaganda for capitalism and is widespread in imperialist armies and occupying forces, alongside racism; to the division created amongst the working class of the world via sexism and queerphobia – capitalism fosters and relies upon gender oppression.
The whole trajectory of this vile system – the capitalist hellscape that’s defined by genocide and ecocide, that perpetuates a pervasive culture in which abusers are rewarded while survivors are denigrated, a system that boasts record homelessness side by side with record wealth of a miniscule billionaire class – indicates without question that capitalism can never achieve gender equality. We need a feminism that’s infused with anti-capitalism and socialism and urgency.