Author's Note

The mystification of money and power issues in the United States (and elsewhere, of course) seems to me often to take the form of complicated, even hair-splitting analyses of abstractions like “justice,” “fairness,” and so on, which are discussed as if they were extremely difficult to define and so abstruse that the discussion is elevated into a Heaven of ideas where such ordinary things as human beings and concrete events in their lives don't exist. As I recall it, Gender Justice was a Right-wing attempt to confuse all of us by insisting that the most minimally nominal “freedom” was identical with real freedom. Nope.

Dear Editors

The concept of “liberty” over which Rosemary Tong spends so much time in her review of Gender Justice (January 1986) is a fake; it doesn't exist today except for a very small minority of the rich and powerful (virtually all of whom are white men) and it never did.

The liberty of the free market, which is what the book's authors are talking about (it's enjoying an ideological revival today, for obvious political and economic reasons), never applied to the peasants who endured appalling conditions in the factories of the early Industrial Revolution because they'd been kicked off their land. Nor does it apply today to giant corporations, multinational banking, massive advertising, and a situation in which, of the largest 100 economic powers in the world, 57 are countries and 43 are multinational companies. (One-third of world trade now consists of each multinational company trading with itself.)

We live today in a world in which oligopolies (a few giant corporations which control the majority of the market) raise prices in good times and bad, prefer large per-item profits on a low volume of sales to smaller unit profits on many more sales, and shift the social costs of pollution, ecological disaster, poverty, unemployment, aging and disability to everyone else – anyone else – in the name of “liberty.” This isn't liberty.