> True, but the concept of gender roles and is so deeply entrenched that
> changing it will take years.
I won't argue that this is false (or that it is true), but I do want to point out that the assumption of a "deeply entrenched" *concept* not being changeable except over a long period of time is just that, an assumption, and a relatively unexamined one at that.
There is another hypothesis that one might play with, namely that *unless* male supremacy *within the working class* recieves a major jolt over a relatively *short* period of time there will never be a united working class, there will never be major reforms (beneficial to the conditions and power of the working class) within capitalism, and there will never be a socialist revolution.
I believe when mere philosophers play with the concept of social change they like to pose three questions:
1. Is it good?
2. Is it possible?
3. Is it necessary?
In respect to working class unity (= progress towards revolution) I personally think the first two questions are irrelevant. Only the third counts. If you are a free falling body at 20,000 feet, the questions of whether it would be good or possible for your parachute to open are rather academic in all the negative senses of that term. I think only the third counts as to the smashing of male supremcacy *within* the working class: it is so necessary that questions of its desirability or possibility are silly.
I stick by "mutual ruin of the contending classes" (Marx/Engels) and "socialism or barbarianism" (Luxemburg), and think that the more positive of these outcomes in the U.S. depends on the creation of a left that is, substantially, neither racist nor sexist: and that such a change will at some point come quickly or it will not come at all.
Carrol