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