Though the spread of global capitalism has been taking place for hundreds of years and is
therefore not a new phenomenon, the last few decades has seen an increase in the desperation
and intense poverty it has created for billions of the world’s people. At the global as well as the
individual nation-state level, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor has widened to
unbelievable extremes. In 1995, the net wealth of Bill Gates1 alone was greater than the
combined net worth of the poorest 40 percent of Americans. That is, Bill Gates’ sole net worth
was more than nearly 106 million peoples’ combined. By the late 1990s in the U.S., the average
income of the top 20 percent of families rose to thirteen times the income earned by the bottom
20 percent. This was an increase from the 1970s, where the top 20 percent of families held ten
times the income as the bottom twenty percent. As the World Bank has reported, half of the
world’s population (more than 2.8 billion people) survives on less than two dollars a day, 1.2
billion of those people on less than a dollar. Twenty years ago, in 1991, 85 percent of the world’s
population received only 15 percent of the world’s income. And the situation has only worsened
today, as three hundred and fifty-eight people own the combined wealth of 2.5 billion people.
That is, three hundred and fifty-eight people together have as much wealth as nearly half of the
world’s entire population.2 This is the reality that the spread of global capitalism has produced.
While the majority of the world’s people are forced to participate in the race to the bottom in
order to “have lunch or be lunch,”3 superprofits are made off their backs, transforming the
wealthy into the extremely wealthy.
What all of these harrowing statistics of world poverty make obvious to us is that the
spread of global capitalism is a grave problem the world faces. Therefore, anti-globalization is a
key component of any feminist, decolonizing agenda, as the spread of global capitalism relies on
the maintenance of racism and sexism in the most explicit of terms. As Delia Aguilar notes, “In
the era of globalized economics where a race to the bottom is critical for superprofits, it is
primarily the labor power of “Third World” women […] that is the cheapest of all.”4 Therefore,
when modern globalization is discussed as “based less on the proliferation of computers than on
the proliferation of proletarians,”5 who exactly the proletariat is must be defined: women of the
so-called Third World.