Posted by John, July 12th, 2010 - under Julia Gillard, Reaction.

Tags: Feminism

Julia Gillard’s ascension to the Prime Ministership has exposed the fault lines of Australian feminism between the liberals and the liberationists.

Already some feminists are complaining that the attacks on Gillard are because she is a woman, not because she is a reactionary.

Some committed women unionists have swung totally behind Gillard despite the fact her policies are the antithesis of all they stand for on workers’ rights, equal pay, equal love, the Northern Territory intervention, climate change, refugees, Palestine … The list goes on.

For many feminists (but not all) it is gender that is all important, not class.

For the revolutionary left the basic issue is class, an analysis which helps explain why women are oppressed in our society. But it also explains Gillard’s reactionary policies.

Gillard rules for that small minority – men and, increasingly, women – who live off our labour. They make the big decisions in society, for example about living standards and jobs and about what to produce and how much, all in the name of profit rather than satisfying human need.

In this Gillard carries on the tradition of such wonderful female ruling class politicians as Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir.

From the revolutionary left’s position, the scrutiny of Gillard has been as intense as that of Rudd. Both are the lapdogs of capital.

Gillard has been the harbinger, if this was at all possible, of Labor’s further move to the right.

The capitulation to the big 3 mining companies, the attack on refugees, the continuation of the war in Afghanistan and of the intervention in the Northern Territory, the blind support for Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians, the widening of the gap between men’s and women’s wages, are all examples not of Gillard as a caring sharing woman but of her as the brutal overseer of a system that dehumanises women and men.

Her policies hurt women – women as workers, women as refugees, women as Palestinians, women as aborigines.

We on the Left criticise Gillard not because she is a woman but because she attacks women in order to serve the interests of her class. She is part of the problem, not the solution.