Korean child care workers on strike over working conditions
Communism Will End Hunger, Exploitation, and Sexism
USA, April 18— Nearly one in three people in the world did not have access to adequate food in 2020. The same was true of the million child-care workers in the US: one in three was food-insecure that year.
This in a country with over six hundred billionaires. That produces more than enough food for everyone living here.
And an agricultural industry that squeezed $120 billion in profits in 2020 from miserably paid essential farmworkers with few if any Covid protections. Most US child-care workers make little more than farmworkers. Like farmworkers, many are immigrants. Over 90% are women.
The work most necessary to sustain and nurture life has little value in the capitalists’ labor market. Supervising ad accounts can pay ten times more than supervising children. Growing a company’s profits can pay hundreds of times more than growing vegetables.
The capitalist rulers want nothing but the best for their own children but find nothing wrong with workers distracted by hunger minding other workers’ children. They reduce our children’s vast human potential to their future availability as wage slaves or cannon fodder.
Communism will be exactly the opposite. We will treasure and develop the potential of all, starting in infancy. We’ll put the highest value on vital work like producing food, raising children, making clothes and shelter, caring for the sick. We’ll encourage everyone to share it. Everybody, from young children to the elders, will contribute as they are willing and able. Nobody will go hungry while others eat their fill.
It will take more than guns to win and build this new society. It will also take conscious and concerted work to identify and overcome capitalism’s divisive lies.
We must expose and defeat sexist stereotypes and practices about “women’s work” like childcare.
Before industrial capitalism, most everyone in a household worked in or around their shelter and adjoining land, even if they didn’t own the land. But the rise of the capitalist wage system created a divide between wage labor (outside the home) and unwaged labor (inside the home).
Wage workers produce profits for the boss. The unwaged labor that produces and reproduces labor power is vital to capitalists because that labor power is the source of their profits. But this household “women’s work” had no market value.
Factory owners loved to superexploit unmarried women and children, building whole industries on their misery. They justified sub-poverty wages with the lie that it was “extra” (not necessary) household income.
In the 20th century, capitalists found new ways to turn domestic services into commodities on a massive scale. Processed foods. Health care in hospitals instead of homes. For-profit childcare centers. And more. As more households found they needed more than one full-time wage laborer to make ends meet, there was more demand for these commodities. And more opportunities for capitalists to profit from wage labor.
But “women’s work” still carries the stigma of being “not really valuable.” Some people think that childcare workers, for example, are only “supplementing” family income.
Communism will end the gendered division of labor, which is an important part of the material basis of sexism in capitalist society.
It’s why women childcare workers make so little – even less than men doing the same jobs. It’s why there is a growing gender gap worldwide in the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity.
It’s why one in three childcare workers in the US went hungry in 2020.
It’s why women workers are so often in the lead of militant mass movements, from Black Lives Matter in the US to the farmers’ strike in India.
And it’s one more reason for all workers to join the International Communist Workers’ Party.
Read our pamphlet “The Communist Fight Against Sexism” here
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