Political liberalism, the language of equal rights of individuals, is an ideological reflection of equal exchange in the market, the dominant ideology today. This ideology, to one degree or another, shapes our structure of feeling, whether or not we are aware of it. We cannot but be affected by it because we all live under the capitalist mode of production. My view is that we should at least become aware of it, first of all, and then consciously criticize it, but mine is a minority view even among self-identified socialists, many of whom believe that socialism is an extension of liberalism.
In each social movement -- feminist, Black, Latino, Asian, queer, etc. -- there have been various schools of thoughts. In each case, liberals have become hegemonic, marginalizing leftists who argue that liberation of working-class members of their oppressed communities is inseparable from liberation of their class. To the extent that the question of oppression gets transformed into that of equal rights, however, working-class members of oppressed communities naturally get left behind even as better-off members make advancement, joining the dominant group, strengthening the empire by making it more liberal and democratic. Many poor Black men remain jobless and get trapped in the criminal justice system, even as Condi Rice gets to help make America's foreign policy.
Moreover, the oppressed may embrace a view of equal rights and liberalization that helps erode the public sector, trade unions, and so on, given such institutions' inadequate service to them, rather than mobilizing for reforms that would help improve them: school vouchers, popular among Blacks according to some polls, is an example.
Worst of all, equal rights are conceptualized in an ahistorical fashion, divorced from the context of capitalist development of the core that underdeveloped the periphery, convenient for humanitarian imperialism.
On 8/11/07, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Whether economic liberalization is a necessary
> > condition for social liberalization
>
> I think it can be stated with some certainty that it
> is *not*. The Bolshevik revolution produced enormous
> social gains for women. Unless you want to subsume
> the NEP under the category of "economic
> liberalization".
>
> I suspect the same is true of other developmental
> states, i.e. Cuba or China, but I do not have recourse
> to any empirical data on this.
Can social revolution bring social gains without economic liberalization? You bet. But social gains are not the same as equal rights or social liberalization.
Besides, it is not clear if there can be another Jacobin social revolution like the October Revolution. I rather think that Iran's Islamic Revolution was probably the last of the Jacobin wave that began with the French Revolution.
On 8/11/07, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
> Sat Aug 11 06:48:07 PDT 2007
>
> The USSR, too, eventually adopted economic
> liberalization, culminating
> in Perestroika, accompanied with Glasnost and, for
> instance, feminism
> autonomous of the party-state
>
> ---
>
> Seventy years later. The social liberalization* was a
> product of deliberate Soviet policy, which was not
> economically liberal to say the least.
>
> * Liberalization in terms of acceptance of women and
> {nonreligious} Jews. In terms of acceptance of
> homosexuals and religious people, not to mention
> people who didn't agree with the government, quite the
> opposite. Soviet treatment of homosexuality was
> probably worse than during the last tsar -- but don't
> ask me for a cite on that, because I don't have one.
I was speaking of the historical trend of the post-WW2 period. Reforms introduced by the last Tsar and the Bolsheviks were part of Russia's transition from feudalism to modernity, a different matter than economic and social liberalization of the post-WW2 period, which is change within the overall context of global capitalism.
As for sexuality, modernity created conditions for certain new freedoms -- most importantly, emancipation from patriarchy -- while closing down spaces for certain kinds of sexual practices that had existed before. Before modernity, there were a wider variety of sexual regulations in particular and social organizations in general in the world than there are now. Capitalism has a powerful tendency to standardize, its seeming diversity of "choices" only available within the overall standardized world. -- Yoshie