--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
"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."
OK, that's clear. Would you say that the equal rights movements were consciously launched by the capitalist class in order to produce the effects you mention, or were those accidental or secondary effects?
BobW
> On 8/11/07, Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > --- 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?
>
> 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
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