Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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estricted crafts rose at a rate 3 times that for Third World<br />
workers. This was like a new wave of European immigration<br />
to reinforce the settler hold on their job market.<br />
And it was a "breath of fresh air," modernizing<br />
settler society. Now, for instance even the New York Times<br />
has a very literary "women's consciousness" column (called<br />
"Hers"), where feminist leaders and writers can reach a<br />
mass audience. The fractures of the sixties are being reconciled<br />
and reunited among settlers. Novelist Gail Sheehy<br />
wrote in this column: "Behind just about every successful<br />
woman I know with a public as well as a private life there is<br />
another woman. The dirty little secret is, all but one of the<br />
female leaders interviewed here has household help.. . "<br />
Sheehy herself tried Filipino and Argentinian domestics<br />
unsuccessfully (too "hostile") before going back to the<br />
tried and true Afrikan woman domestic. (17)<br />
While Women's Liberation is an essential part of<br />
the world revolutionary future, the struggles of women in<br />
various societies have their own national characteristics. In<br />
the U.S. oppressor nation the politics of Women's Liberation<br />
form but one small current within the much larger,<br />
overall Women's Movement. This larger Movement is proimperialist,<br />
and is concerned only with equality of privilege<br />
among male and female settlers. It is opposed to any<br />
liberation in general. The revolutionary ideas of Women's<br />
Liberation rested lightly upon the surface of the Women's<br />
Movement, and some individual women did pick them up.<br />
Real wages in the U.S. began to stagnate in 1967,<br />
when imperialism ran aground on the Vietnamese Revolution.<br />
For the first time since World War I1 rapid inflation<br />
was eating at the upward spiral of Euro-Amerikan income.<br />
In this continuing crisis the new income of Euro-Amerikan<br />
women saved the settler family from "loss of buying<br />
power" (a phrase of the oppressor nation economy that<br />
carries an almost traumatic weight). The new income of<br />
employed women contributed to the 22% increase in real<br />
per capita income in the U.S. between 1970-1980. The<br />
Euro-Amerikan family continued its way of life by becoming<br />
a two-wage-earner family (at a time when Afrikan proletarian<br />
families, for example, were increasingly becoming<br />
the reverse). By 1978 some 75% of the U.S. families with<br />
incomes over $25,000 per year had two wage-earners. The<br />
New York Times reported.<br />
"Across the nation women have swarmed into the<br />
workforce by the millions, swelling the numbers of multiincome<br />
families. That trend can mask the effects of inflation,<br />
since a substantial number of families are living better<br />
than they did.." (18)<br />
We are not just describing simple social bribery, as<br />
in the bourgeoisification of European workers in Germany,<br />
France, England, etc.<br />
In Europe the bribed workers came from a long<br />
history of class war, in societies with centuries of sharply<br />
defined and rigid class divisions. Their classes, however<br />
bribed and infected, still exist as formations in the actual<br />
social world - occupying traditional communities, continuing<br />
a definite class culture. Politically, the European<br />
working class still swell the large, nominally-"s~cialist'~,<br />
voluntary industrial unions (which do not exist in the U.S.<br />
oppressor nation), and are electorally represented by their<br />
traditional working-class parties - the German Social-<br />
Democratic Party, the French Communist Party, etc. Of<br />
course, the long-range trends of world polarization and internationalization<br />
mean that all oppressor nation societies<br />
have become more alike and will become even more so.<br />
In Amerika this bribery, this bourgeoisification,<br />
took place within the context of a settler society, which has<br />
its own history, culture and traditions - based not on class<br />
struggle, but on their material role as the privileged garrison<br />
over the continental Empire. The immigrant European<br />
proletarians were bribed by being absorbed - "in-<br />
TlravWwcllong f O$d Street In the Watt8 dectlonof Lo8 Angcles on dug. 14,1)85, three days after the rioting began.<br />
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