Seventh international Conference of The Arab Women’s Solidarity Association
Creativity , Dissidence and Women

Paper presented by Sherif Hetata
Corporate Capitalist Globalisation Fundamentalism and the Family

Cairo 21-23 May 2005

Patriarchy is the institutionalized enforced authority of males over females. To permit the exercise of male domination it must permeate the entire society, impose itself on production, consumption, politics, law and culture. The domination of men over women is closely related to the domination of the rich over the poor, to class exploitation, and to the domination of white men over coloreds or blacks. It operates not only through institutional enforcement in the different areas of human activity but to a great extent through the creation of a false consciousness which instils the conception of male superiority over female inferiority in society as having always existed, thus as “natural” making the abolition of male domination extremely difficult. Culture, religion, upbringing, education, the media cooperate to reinforce this conception.

The foundation, the rooting of patriarchy lies within the family structure which is built on domination of the male over the female, on a unit which breeds this domination. It is the male dominated family structure which gives patriarchy its legitimacy, and its power and which helps to conceal it. Without the family patriarchy would be unveiled as pure domination and would eventually be overcome by the disenfranchised female half of our world which has historically been kept under submission.

It is the present family structure which nurtures patriarchy, gender discrimination, the dictatorial oppression of women and anti-democratic values and practices.
From here arises the unyielding struggle waged by ruling political economic, and social forces to maintain the male dominated family structure which characterizes our global world. It is a struggle spear-headed by the Bush neo-conservative male administration in the United States, echoed by his fundamentalist Islamic, Jewish and Christian cousins in many parts of Asia, the Arab countries, Africa and Latin America, by the Catholic Pope, the Islamic Sheikhs of Al-Azhar and other Islamic religious institutions, by the Islamic politico-religious movements, the Orthodox Christian churches, the Rabbinical schools in Israel and by the fundamentalist Baptist and Judeo Christian coalition in the United States. For despite the so-called war on terror, and the so-called “clash of civilizations”, despite the conflicts of interests and oil and the wars being waged by these forces between one another, they are in fact allies converging in the maintenance of the world neo-liberal capitalist financial system ruled over by the multinationals, in the maintenance of patriarchal domination of men over women, of the patriarchal system ruling over society. All these factors are inter-linked integral parts of the global system.

At the basis of this system lies the male dominated family unit. It is akin to the molecular cells which constitute the human body. Since the structure is a total structure built on a system of linkages, the struggle against masculine domination over women, against the patriarchal family is a struggle against this total system by women and men in the different areas of life. It is the dissident, creative resistance of women to class, race, religious and patriarchal discrimination and oppression which will change society and the world. Women by the very nature of their situation will make the creative link between the economic and the social, the political and the cultural, the sexual and the religious, the personal and the public the local, the regional and the global, between gender, race and class.

Women by the very nature of their situation within the family know that the basic unit of society is the patriarchal cell in which economics, politics, culture, sex, religion, class and race meet and combine to function as the foundation of global capitalist multi-national society. Thus it is mainly women who are targeted by the fundamentalist revival intent on fighting back against the disintegration of the patriarchal family engendered by capitalist modernization and by the increasingly independent role of women in society, by their resistance to gender discrimination, by the increasing feeling of social and psychological insecurity amongst men threatened by a loss of authority over women and family and the encroachment of the state on their prerogatives, in a world of chaos and conflict which drives them to seek refuge in the stillness and authority of home. In addition there are many women who share the fears and the anxieties of their men and are driven into submission to patriarchal values and practices lived for so many centuries, are driven even to joining fundamentalist movements.

But it is women who will also advance to the forefront of the struggle for democracy, social justice and peace against the global multinational capitalist and fundamentalist forces intent on war and on on depriving people both women and men of their economic social, cultural and political democratic rights. Central to this struggle will be the overthrow of the patriarchal family.