Wealth Isn't Colorless or Gender Free: Capital and Intersectionality - a podcast by Laura Flanders

Capital is intersectional says guest Zillah Eisenstein on The Laura Flanders Show this week.

People with bodies labor, which means that the capital they produce is immersed in race and gender. Just like the bodies that make it, wealth’s not colorless or gender free. Anyone who pretends otherwise just isn’t serious about reducing inequality.

With gender equality more of a priority than ever, women still represent seventy percent of the world’s poor, according to the UN. They earn less than men (about half as much, even in advanced economies), even as they do more work (almost two and a half times as much when you include unpaid labor), and inequality between rich and poor women isn’t shrinking, it’s growing.

In the US, a 2011 study found that fully forty percent of single female heads-of-households were living in poverty and the numbers for women of color were even worse.

Sure the rise of extremism, war and the concentration of financial and corporate power hasn’t helped. Still, in the same two decades, women have gained legal rights, rights they can defend in court. More girls have gone to school. More women have gotten elected and become leaders.

Today’s inequalities can’t be explained simply by lack of legal rights or discrimination, says the UN. Nor are they inevitable.

What we know from our guests – women like Ai Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Saru Jaraman of the Restaurant workers -- is that equality hasn’t come from access to more precarious and poisonous jobs. An ever-expanding workday in the “gig economy” is not the answer either.

What’s needed is fundamental change – what many are calling The Next New System. And that’s got to come with explicit attention to racial and gender justice.

In 2016, the Laura Flanders Show will be producing a series of special reports on Race, Gender and the Next Economy with our friends at the Democracy Collaborative. Tell us what you think. If capital’s intersectional, what’s our intersection transformation look like? And where do you see it happening?

You can watch my interview with Zillah Eisenstein on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at the LFSHOW.org To tell me what you think, write to Laura@theLFSHOW.org.

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