Re: Why women in the workplace has helped destroy USA
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It\'s no coincidence that this post is dominated by those from the U.S. Let\'s look at other so-called \"developed\" nations. Canada, Western Europe, Australia: they all have a workers\' movement that is much more coherent than what is in the U.S.
There is no \"good\" or \"bad\" for \"the economy.\" The reality is that there are class interests in play. What is good for one class may often be contrary to the interests of another class. (Whitehall, you\'ve conflated the labor theory of value and the theory of surplus value, but I always enjoy reading your perspective.)
Let\'s looking at the class of people in families whose members must work for an outside employer to survive. This is not everyone. But it\'s the vast majority.
The workforce can always be divided into categories. There are Hutus and Tutsis (spelling?). There are short and tall. There are Dominicans and Peruvians. There are Spanish-speaking and Polish-speaking. There are black and white. And, oh yeah, there are men and women.
Employers do what they can to drive wages down. Workers do what they can to increase wages. In most developed countries, the workers were effective in acting on the fact that their best strategy is to organize themselves along class lines to increase their bargaining power with the employers.
In the U.S., the employers have generally been much more effective in convincing workers to view themselves as individuals, whose most effective strategy for self-advancement is to stand out as a more productive worker than their coworkers. Workers in the U.S. tend to look at their coworkers as competitors. Workers in other developed countries (I would call them more highly developed, but that is another argument) look to their coworkers as allies in the struggle to win better working conditions from their employers.
U.S. employers like to see the discontent of their employees directed at other employees, rather than at the employers. So whites will complain that the blacks who are hired aren\'t as productive, that the whites have to work harder for the same pay, etc.
Among the lower-paid strata, employers like it if some of the employees speak Spanish and others speak Chinese. There is bound to be some friction, but that is good from the employer\'s perspective.
Obviously, I am just scratching the surface of this book-length topic. But does anyone on this forum wish to live in a society where some people at birth are restricted from entering certain professions? India has a caste system which does something like this. You don\'t have to be a Marxist to oppose it. Leftists and rightists see the advantage to organizing a society where, as the saying goes, \"careers are open to talent.\" I want the person who is performing my plastic surgery ( [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]) to have gotten the job because they are the best qualified. I don\'t want talented Nepalese, or blacks, or women excluded on any basis other than their ability to perform the job.
I am not going to go into a detailed discussion of the problems of child-rearing. All I will say is that modern society exhibits for all the exteme interrelatedness and interconnectedness of people. Contemporary society is one where none of us could survive without a vast, complex network of individuals embedded in social relations of mutual dependence. We produce for people all over the world and we consume things made by people all over the world. To keep this system afloat we agree on certain standards. We have conventions about communication: there are rules for language and meaning. We have conventions about commerce: there are rules for contracts and obligations. We have conventions for money: all of us understand the significance of those printed sheets of paper and those numbers in our bank accounts.
The nuclear family is not natural. It is a response to certain social conditions. There are countless historical examples in which child-rearing is a community responsibility. I am not talking about Plato\'s Republic where children are taken from their parents at infancy and raised communally. But I am talking about forms of social organization where the burden of child-rearing does not fall completely and solely on the shoulders of the biological mother. People organize themselves into groups so that the burdens of child-rearing are shared.
Having women doing work outside of child-rearing is not contrary to nature. Human history is replete with instances of many societies where women were productive contributors to the economy outside of the child-rearing. But the society which reaps the benefits of women\'s contribution must, in return, take on its own shoulders some of the responsibility for child-rearing. We rely on the state to organize the defense our borders and to maintain the money supply. It must provide high-quality childcare.
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