[DEBATE] : Dissing culture (Re: DEBATE (Fwd) Two good ThoughtLeader blogs)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On Dec 15, 2007 4:05 PM, Dominic Tweedie <dominic.tweedie at gmail.com> wrote:
> "The more proletarian people are, the more conservative they tend to be"
>
> Do you have any data to support this statement?
>
> The best work on the the relationship of family and class is Engels' "Origin
> of the Family, Private Property and the State", and works building on it
> such as Kollontai's "Social Basis of the Woman Question" and Evelyn Reed's
> "Woman's Evolution".

The North-South gap in culture of the sort with which we are familiar,
in my view, became a fact only after the pill, the so-called sexual
revolution, second-wave feminism, and GLBTQ rights activism in the
North in the long sixties.  Before that, in some respects --
especially regarding same-sex sex -- the South probably made more
sexual freedom possible (at least for men) than the North.

But today the aforementioned gap is striking: in the North, relatively
liberal interpretations of the legal right to abortion* are the norm
(excepting Ireland), whereas countries that ban, or more commonly
severely limit the right to, abortion are largely in the South; and
recognition of same-sex unions is becoming the norm in Western Europe
(if not yet in the rest of the North), but that is hardly the case in
the South.  (Regarding abortion, it is not strictly a function of
economic development: formerly and still socialist countries,
regardless of their levels of economic development, tend to have
liberal abortion laws.  This socialist qualification does not apply to
legal recognition of same-sex relationships.)

As for intra-national class gap, "It is well documented that increases
in educational attainment are associated with less traditional gender
role orientations (Gump, 1980; Harris, 1980; Thornton, Alwin, &
Camburn, 1983, for example)" (Richard J. Harris, "Changes in
Predictors of Gender Role Ideologies among Women: a Multivariate
Analysis," Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, February 1998,
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_n3-4_v38/ai_20574386/print>),
and educational attainment in capitalist countries is correlated with
family income.

Leftists need to think about how they want to approach people whose
class backgrounds make them far more conservative (by the standards of
typical leftist cultural judgment) than they are.

* See  World Abortion Policies 2007,
<http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/2007_Abortion_Policies_Chart/2007AbortionPolicies_wallchart.htm>.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>