That A (economic liberalization) is in part a cause of both B (increasing achievement of equal rights) and C (increasing class disparity) doesn't mean that B, having been brought about in part by A, can't in turn help further C.
Increasing achievement of equal rights expands the reserve army of labor and removes certain social obstacles to the market, both of which tend to increase capital's power over labor. Achievement of equal rights therefore can be even accompanied with the social and economic decline of the poorer strata of peoples who won equal rights, which has especially been the case for Black men. Theoretically, it should be good for labor as well, in that it also removes certain social obstacles to working-class organization and collective action, but the benefit for the working class has not materialized as much as the benefit for capital, at least in terms of class power. We have to ask why.
On 8/11/07, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The USSR did so, policy toward homosexuals
> notwithstanding. I would be suprised if Cuba didn't
> too, though you seem not to think so.
The USSR, too, eventually adopted economic liberalization, culminating in Perestroika, accompanied with Glasnost and, for instance, feminism autonomous of the party-state (see, for instance, Cynthia Cockburn, "'Democracy without Women Is No Democracy': Soviet Women Hold Their First Autonomous National Conference," Feminist Review 39, Autumn 1991, pp. 141-148, <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0141-7789(199123)39%3C141%3A'WWIND%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23>), and then the end of Soviet socialism; and Cuba's social liberalization has also come with economic liberalization, albeit the latter has been very modest. There are economists in Cuba, however, who would like to liberalize far more than Fidel Castro has allowed so far:
While in the country we sought to learn what we could
about how Cuba was responding to its economic
difficulties, and how the government's understanding of
and commitment to socialism was shaping that response.
We were told repeatedly that many Cuban economists
looked to the Chinese "market socialist" growth strategy
as an attractive model for Cuba.
We hoped that this was not true. But at the conference
itself, when the discussion turned toward the challenges
facing Cuba, several Cuban economists publicly endorsed
the Chinese experience of rapid export-led growth based
on foreign direct investment (FDI) as offering the only hope
for Cuba to sustain its socialist project under current
international conditions. Although these economists were
only repeating arguments we had heard from progressives
in other countries, they were especially jarring to hear at a
conference concerned with the contemporary relevance
of Marxism and in a context where there was little gain to
be imagined for the economists making them. Fidel Castro
was also at the conference and the Cuban government had
already firmly rejected market socialism. (Martin
Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, "Introduction: China and
Socialism," Monthly Review 56.3, July-August 2004, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0704intro.htm>) -- Yoshie