Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the pioneers of modern socialism, insisted that every adult member of society be “liberated” from parental work and instead fill “socially productive” roles. Mao Zedong of China embraced this doctrine and declared that “in order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity” which would foster “genuine equality between the sexes.”
Notice that here in just a few words, the work of bearing and raising human beings is labeled “unproductive activity” that women must be emancipated from so they can equally contribute to mankind’s economic security. Marx and Engels also promised that equalizing workplace participation would launch large amounts of money into the economy, facilitate equality, and make entire societies prosperous.
The Biden administration has added its voice to the chorus calling for every able-bodied female to join the work of contributing to the GDP. Recently, the Biden administration launched an initiative called the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security. At the launch meeting, Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council said we must all work to “achieve our shared vision for women’s full and equitable participation in the global economy.” She also said, “Studies show that closing gender gaps in the workforce could add between $12 and $28 trillion in global GDP over a decade.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated these sentiments: “The strategy that we’re putting forward has at its heart a simple vision: creating a world in which all women and girls everywhere can contribute to … economic growth and global prosperity. That’s a world in which we will all be better off. Closing the gender gap in the workforce by 2025 … would add up to $28 trillion to the global economy.”
The Care Of Children Becomes A Public Affair
So far, Team Biden is two for two on Engels’ plan: 1) Call for women’s “full and equitable participation in the economy” and 2) promise that affluence will follow.
But what about the kids? If everybody is participating “fully and equitably” in the public workforce and no one is available to shepherd their own children, who will be raising up humanity? Engels has the answer. He said that in a socialist society, “the care and education of the children becomes a public affair” and “society looks after all children alike.”
Klein appears to be familiar with Marx and Engels’ philosophy, because her next demand was for governments to ensure women’s economic security by “improving care infrastructure.” Blinken said the same thing: Governments must “strengthen the foundational support—child care, elder care—that allows women to participate equitably in the economy.”
But how will the world’s governments provide free or low cost day care services for everyone? Such an undertaking would certainly cut into the wealth that is supposed to materialize from women’s “full participation” in the economy.
The World Bank
Enter the World Bank. The U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security says, “The U.S. government has partnered with the World Bank and is leading diplomatic engagements to encourage partnerships in the recently launched global Invest in Childcare initiative, housed at the World Bank, which will expand access to quality child care and early learning programs globally.”
The World Bank, a financial institution within the United Nations system, boasts the primary goals of ending poverty and “promoting shared prosperity.” It pursues these aims by lending or granting money to different countries in the effort to redistribute wealth and incentivize participation in their initiatives. Their new childcare initiative, “Invest In Childcare,” launched just within the last year. Incidentally, in 2014, the World Bank signed an agreement with BlackRock, a major driver of ESG investing.
The program’s wording reveals the priority behind it: “Childcare has the potential to yield multi-generational impacts by improving women’s economic empowerment, child outcomes, family welfare, business productivity and overall economic growth.” It goes on to say that not only does childcare “enable mothers to participate in the labor market” but that for children “quality childcare can provide the critical inputs needed during the early years to build the foundational skills that will help them succeed in school and throughout life.”
Childcare may very well enable mothers to participate in the workforce, and many mothers may need or want to do just that. But is it a government’s responsibility to facilitate childcare for everyone? Many may also question whether data support the claim that quality childcare in the early years provides the critical input a child needs. To bolster their position, a major element of the World Bank initiative is to “make the case for childcare” through data collection as facilitated by the OECD and other actors.
Additionally, the World Bank plans to leverage “development policy lending,” which “essentially pays governments for policy reforms.” They say, “We will identify a set of childcare policy reforms which could trigger payments to countries.” And to ensure that the children of the world are in good hands, the World Bank will launch “quality assurance” initiatives, including “quality standards and regulation and monitoring systems.”
The World Bank says governments must act immediately to fulfill their duty to provide universal childcare: “Solutions are needed urgently. Governments need to ensure that childcare is available, affordable, of decent quality and meets the needs of all families.”
Buying Your Child’s Childhood
In short, the Biden administration has declared that universal childcare is the key to unlocking women’s untapped potential to contribute to the GDP. It has partnered with the World Bank to make childcare universally available and to pay countries for complying with their policy requirements. They will also produce data showing that childcare provides the best outcomes for children and will use “regulation and monitoring systems” to influence how childcare centers are run. To put a fine point on it, a global childcare scheme has been launched with the objective of getting little children away from their mothers and fathers and convincing parents, and society at large, that this is a great idea that will empower women, enrich children, and save the world.
This U.S. strategy is in line with what one early Russian socialist said: “To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state — that is our task.” He explained that to get mothers to surrender their children, the government would provide comprehensive care centers for all children where they would be “supervised by trained pedagogical and medical personnel” who would fulfill the children’s educational, physical, social, and emotional needs for essentially the first two decades of their lives. What mother could resist this great deal for her child?
To make this dream a reality, either in 20th century Russia or in the United States today, women and society must be convinced that unpaid mothering is “socially unproductive work” and that mothers can be successfully replaced by paid caretakers. People must be convinced that raising money is more important than raising children and that supposedly swelling the GDP by trillions of dollars is worth the price of selling our children’s souls to the World Bank.
It is a fact that some women find themselves in difficult straits and that their young children would be better off in childcare rather than alone or in other unsafe situations. But have the holders of the purse strings at the World Bank considered whether making early childcare the universal default could have any ill effects?
Politically Left-leaning psychologist Erica Komisar, with 25 years of experience in private practice, says that “a major social issue of our time” is the “effects of maternal absence on our children.” Komisar observes that “there has been a dramatic increase in emotional, social, and behavioral difficulties like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and increased aggression in children from toddlerhood through adolescence.” She says there are connections between these disorders and the “absence of young children’s mothers in their day to day lives.”
The U.N., the Biden administration, and the World Bank’s alignment with Marx and Engels should concern those who wonder whether these institutions are purposely trying to distance children from their parents. Engels described the end result of the “full and equitable participation of women” in the workforce in chillingly stark terms: “The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry and … this in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished.”
As this plan to commandeer the youngest among us in the name of economic security unfolds, I foresee a global avalanche against motherhood and the family coming. The U.S. administration, in cooperation with the World Bank and other partners, is planning to normalize, glamorize, and incentivize surrendering our youngest children to a global childcare regime while parents fade into the background as simply “stakeholders” in their children’s futures.
Prioritizing motherhood while one’s children are young is not a cop out. It is not refusing to contribute to the GDP. There is no GDP without capable humans to populate a capable workforce, and there are no capable humans without mothers. If we remove the work and the value and the influence of mothers, we cut off the branch all of humanity is sitting on.
The World Bank wants to buy your children. Don’t sell them.
Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family: Why the Global Campaign to Crush Motherhood and Fatherhood Can’t Win (Regnery Gateway, paperback edition, February 2023). An avid researcher, writer, and policy advisor on family issues, Kimberly has written for The Federalist, Townhall, The Epoch Times, The Daily Wire and other news outlets.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
