Photo: Red Women's Workshop

The Tories’ latest gimmick is a plan to subsidise the cost of hiring cleaners, gardeners and other domestic services. The plan revolves around introducing a scheme where the government would front half the cost of employing people to tidy rich people’s houses.

The reasoning, if it can be called that, is that this would ‘create jobs’ and boost the numbers of women in the workforce. Supposedly this will boost the profile of women in the workforce.

Cameron got the idea after hobnobbing on a taxpayer-funded junket to a  ’summit’ (talking-shop) in Sweden, which has a similar system. However, the Swedish version has been rightly criticised, since it principally benefits wealthy families earning around £5000 a month.

The idea that ordinary British working families, already pressured by deep cuts to vital services like Sure Start, are going to start hiring cleaners is ludicrous.

Even if this scheme did free up thousands more women for work, what jobs are they supposed to go into? Women already make up the majority of the lowest paid, most insecure jobs – the three C’s – cleaning, caring and catering.

Women also make up the overwhelming majority of public sector workers. With the Tories having already destroyed hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, they are now talking about raising the target to 750,000 sackings.

The increasing cost of living, combined with the fact that women workers are taking the brunt of job losses in this crisis, makes Cameron’s latest bright idea a fantasy.

Tax-breaks are also shit at redistributing wealth. They generally favour those with the awareness and resources to make their claims. Regular studies have shown that tax-breaks usually have lower take-up by those who would benefit most from them.

This policy is nothing more than a stunt by Cameron. His plan to get 30% of company boards made up of women reveals the crucial point: we don’t think that women in positions of power are more ‘resistant to corruption’ ‘less aggressive’ or any other sexist bollocks.

It’s class which is important. Women bosses profit from their female employees as much as men; Thatcher shows why women politicians are the friends of their class, not their gender.

Capitalism is a system which is immensely profitable for a few, because it uses the family and culture to maintain the super-exploitation of women across the world. From the kitchen sink to the equal pay acts, the capitalist state has begrudged women every single liberty which we have won through struggle.

We are fighting to end the exploitation of women’s unpaid work cleaning, cooking and caring within the family. We are for the collective organisation of domestic tasks. Providing efficient, universal access to cooking, childcare and cleaning services is how we can break down the biggest division between the sexes.

Such a demand is not achievable under capitalism. That’s why we are fighting for socialism – the democratic self-organisation of working people across the world. Real power in society is based on who owns what. Production of everything today is done according to the profit-logic of the capitalist market. This profit benefits a tiny minority who simply concentrate production on what is most profitable for them.

Socialism means putting the power of production into the hands of the ordinary people who produce. This is the only way we can ensure that our society is one based on fulfilling the needs of working people, rather than enriching an elite.

The oppression of women is the greatest barrier to building a new society. We mustn’t let the Tories smooth-talk about promoting women distract us from the fact that women are facing the greatest attack on our social status in decades.

We urgently need to build a mass, working class women’s organisation to resist the crisis which is driving women out of the workplace and into the home. Built on a class basis, this movement could help to rally resistance to the economic crisis around an alternative to capitalism.

This is what we are fighting for.

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