[Marxism] Winning the Culture War, Losing the Class Struggle

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The Culture War is over, and conservatives have lost. No less an
authority on the conservative camp in the Culture War Paul M. Weyrich
declared in 1999: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture
war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it
isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in
general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our
victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are
important." If we have won the Culture War, though, why are we in
such bad shape?

* Union density peaked in 1953.
* The GINI index was at its lowest in 1968.
* The real hourly earning peaked in 1973.
* The real value of the average AFDC grant peaked in 1977.

That is because our social and cultural victories have been made to
serve the economic agenda that is against our class interests.

The Democratic Party successfully harnessed the liberalization of
social mores to the political and ideological power of economic
neoliberalism during the Bill Clinton years. The best example of the
Democratic Party's success in marrying social liberalism and economic
neoliberalism is the welfare reform. The partial victory of women's
movement made new assumptions dominant: the assumptions that
able-bodied women ought to work for wages rather than bear and raise
children as the primary duty of women and that mothers and fathers
should bear equal financial responsibilities for their children, so
fathers should pay child support instead of making mothers depend on
the government. The assumptions are not so much feminist assumptions
per se as liberal petit-bourgeois feminist assumptions in particular.
In any case, the Clinton administration effectively exploited the
newly dominant assumptions and abolished AFDC: poor women should work
and make the fathers of their children pay and become economically
independent of the government (or so went the ideology). . . .

The rest of my posting is at
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_montages_archive.html#108354621120591721>.
--
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>

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