> oh, nothing much. i just wanted to isolate this and repost it in case
> anyone missed it in all that HMTL crap which loaded your essay with ’s
> every other line.
>
> i've not seen such a lovely bit of a sentence in quite some time, not at
> least since it became clear that war protesting was all about organizing
> for the revo, not really stopping the war!
>
> kelley
Ask the average American on the street their opinion on Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Are they going to tell you about the things such as this that it produced? If they ever heard of it at all they will probably condemn it. Gallup says only 25% of women consider themselves feminists. According to a Time/CNN poll, only 32% of the population have a favorable image of feminism. Overall, 37% of all women perceive feminists as man-haters, and only 39% of all woman feel feminists share their values. The Southern Baptist Convention approved a plank that said "women should submit to their husbands". That's what public opinion on feminism is.
American women didn`t get the right to vote until after Soviet women did. Russian women could join the military far before ours could. In fact, I`ve even seen American propaganda from the 1950's that glorified the wonderful lifestyle of the stay-at-home mom who had so much more access to makeup and other things important to her than their unfeminine Bolshevik counterparts.
The class system is the hub around which sexism, racism, nationalism, fundamentalism, homophobia and so forth rotates. The "long march through the institutions" is primarily concerned with fixing these issues, as they only go to serve allegiance to the class system. The point is that a cultural revolution can only go so far in a capitalist society, and it must be realized that these things can only be patched up in a capitalist society, and really only done away with in a "socialist" society. In a capitalist society, the impetus is for a man to want someone to serve him, and a woman to have someone to protect her. Why else would 37% of women view feminists as man-haters and 44% of women felt feminists didn't respect stay-at-home moms? They see feminism as a threat to the system is protecting them, and within a capitalist society, there is a perverse logic to it.
There are many reasons why the class system is and should be the nexus of all these things (racism, sexism, homophobia etc.), one of which is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90%+ of people are in the working class. It is the concern with the widest appeal, and what you're signing people up for to buy into the rest of the package. If I'm a white heterosexual American man (which in fact, I am), it's very easy for me to not care about the concerns of blacks, homosexuals, non-Americans and women. But once I'm on-board for the whole class war thing, you've got me signed up for all the other stuff too.
-- Lance
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