--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote: "increasing achievement of equal rights (between races, genders, sexual orientations, etc.) tends to widen class disparity"
I thought you said both were the effects of economic liberalism; now you are saying one effect is the cause of another effect?
BobW
> On 8/10/07, Seth Ackerman
> <sethackerman1 at verizon.net> wrote:
> > > And it kind of sucked to be a black or female
> worker in the U.S.
> > > economy of the 1950s, compared with even the
> imperfect world of today.
> >
> > I'm not argung the opposite. But as a political
> message that can be
> > invidious. The subtext seems to be: in order to
> give blacks and women a
> > more equal chance, white middle-class families
> have had to be made less
> > secure.
>
> That's not a subtext but a historical reality:
> economic
> liberalization, which destroyed the mythical norm of
> post-WW2
> capitalism (e.g., working-class men, emulating the
> ruling class, could
> aspire to have their wives stay at home as
> "homemakers," and unionized
> ones in high-wage, oligopolistic sectors, earning
> "family wages," in
> fact often did), created circumstances under which
> struggles for equal
> rights (between races, genders, sexual orientations,
> and so on) made
> progress. That's been the case from North to South,
> West to East:
> economic and social liberalizations tend to go hand
> in hand; and
> increasing achievement of equal rights (between
> races, genders, sexual
> orientations, etc.) tends to widen class disparity.
> South Africa is
> perhaps the most obvious example of this global
> historical trend, but
> so are the USA, Cuba, Israel, and Iran, to take four
> countries whose
> ideologies are otherwise very different.
>
> Whether economic liberalization is a necessary
> condition for social
> liberalization or the former merely accidentally
> coincided with the
> latter, and whether it is possible to achieve equal
> rights without
> economic liberalization, should be a matter of
> debate, but this debate
> has yet to take place.
> --
> Yoshie
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