No. 64
FAMILY VALUES:
Weeping in the Playtime of Others
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
The Political Economy of Family Values
Feminists say that patriarchy existed long before capitalism existed and that means that the feminist agenda for human liberation and for progressive social change is a separate agenda from that of class struggle and economic justice.
I agree. Patriarchy did pre-date all forms of capitalism by millenia.
But patriarchy did not precede nor does it exist apart from a particular political economy out of which it sprang to displace other, prior family forms.
And All Our Yesterdays.
For most of human history...maybe as far back as 400,000 years, family forms and family values centered around matriarchy. Usually some set of sisters and a grand mother who took primary responsibility for raising, rearing and feeding the children of the family.
In hunting and gathering societies, men were sometime visitors. As a political economy, hunting and gathering supported a gendered division of labor with men off hunting and women with their children gathering small animals, seed and root crops and well as the fruits and fabrics which feed, clothed and sheltered the family. For men, it was a short, brutal and nasty life of tribal warfare, of far ranging chase after herds of buffalo, wildebeast, or the mighty mastadon. For the family, life centered around the sororate.
In horticultural societies, patriarchy began to displace matriarchy. Slash and burn farming gave some settled life to family forms and brought men into direct conflict with the women of the family for both social and moral power. With an advantage in physical force, men staked out a place in the family form we call patriarchy.
But it was in hydraulic political economies in which women were made subserviant to the master of the house. Irrigated agriculture meant that property rights over a given piece of land became of over-riding importance. Ownership and property rights for land and water are outside imagination in hunting and herding families. Always on the move, claims to use and fruits of a piece of land were seasonal and the subject of violent warfare between differing tribes and families. But permanent title to land and buildings emerged in the great hydraulic societies some 4000 or 5000 years ago or more.
Ownership of land requires rules for the transmission of ownership from generation to generation. In the middle East, Europe and Asia as well as Africa and South America, this meant that males inherited...the eldest male in some societies. Patriarchy emerged out the this new poltical economy...that of settled agriculture.
Other social forms emerged as well out of the hydraulic societies of Persia, Egypt, India, China and the Incan empires in the new world. Great hierarchies of status and power replaced the simple age and gender hierarchies. Great armies replaced the wandering bands of predatory warriors who murdered, looted, raped and returned in tribal times. The division of labor became ever more divided and sub-divided; experts, specialists, craftspersons and skilled technicians emerged out of settled agriculture along the tigris-euphrates water courses. Great cities replaced the small villages of horticultural life. Education and the knowledge process became ever more complex; the learning and teaching moved from kin to clergy. Great religions displaced the local gods. Moses and monotheism displaced the female gods of antiquity. Great changes in family life and new family values emerged as patriarchy displaced matriarchy. Feudalism, empire and universality of family values emerged out of irrigated valleys and deltas over the past 4000 or more years.
Patriarchy did not precede nor does it exist apart from a particular political economy out of which it sprang nor have we seen the end of the history of political economy...thus we have not begun to see the whole of family values. Ever new forms of intimacy arise every day to ground ever different family values.
Patriarchy has been around only 4000 years or so. It emerged out the the political economy of settled agriculture.
It is these family values of which conservatives speak even today. Even today as a new poltical economy has emerged to displace feudalism.
As long ago as this was that , it was but a fraction of human history. There are more political economies to come and new family values to displace the old values of patriarchy.
And now the last of Our Yesterdays
Commodity capitalism emerged out of the market places of ancient towns and cities. It expanded with the development of trade routes across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. It began to take its modern form with the avarious adventures of Spanish, English, Portuguese and French explorers who helped transform continential feudal empires into global colonialism around 1700 with the voyages of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, DeSota and later the English predators. Workers in colonial countries were put to work little more than slaves in order to ship spices, coffee, sugar, and local goods to home markets. Women bore the brunt of this indentured labor and the exploitative connections between patriarchy and capitalism were set. Males were exploited; females were super-exploited under colonial rule. But the setting for both production and consumption in the earliest forms of colonial commodity exhange was always the village cottage or the family farm. Commodity capitalism, as a political economy did not challenge patriarchy; it only used it.
Patriarchy pre-dated industrial capitalism by more than four thousand years. With industrial capitalism, factory work displaced the cottage work of women and children. It replaced the father with the foreman as the direct class enemy of both female workers and male workers in mills, mines, shops and fields. The labor of women became preferred to that of males since, in patriarchy, males were accustomed to more status than women and were more versed in violence than were women. The short version of the history of the labor market is that women work better, cheaper and with less physical resistence than do men in industrial settings. Capitalism found it could lower labor costs with women and reduce labor struggles and in the moment, began the long collapse of patriarchy.
Capitalism began its long attack on patriarchal family values in the same instant.
Children were no longer a valued treasure; they became net energy sinks rather than energy accumulators at an early age. As the knowledge process exploded to accomodate this new political economy, children stayed in formal schooling longer and longer. And in every era became ever more economic liability. Family values centered around large families became family values centered around small families.
Extended families were no longer the basis of human intimacy. Extended families become economic liabilities in labor markets. Why hire a nephew if a stranger can work harder, faster, better? Why hire family when strangers can be laid off or fired.
Why hire family when strangers can be exploited and super-exploited in ways friends and family cannot. Women who bore eight, ten, twelve or more children become the target of mild amusement in factory towns and city shops as urban life displaced rural life.
As industrial capitalism displaced family systems of production and distribution in goods, services and foods, property rights within the family became moot. There was no landed property to own or to inherit and very little personal property to transmit. More and more property is owned by fewer and fewer families. More and more property is, in these times, owned by corporations, mutual funds and state agencies. Primogeniture as a rule for transmission of property became irrelevant. And the male perogative in birth and status in the family took a hard, hard blow.
And, as capital was moved around the region and to new areas, jobs moved. Occupations were no longer family trades and family crafts or family professions. The corporation displaced the family as the possessor of job titles. Capitalism began the erode the very core of the self system. Age, gender, ethnic and occupation identities were important only as they could be used to lower labor costs, expand market demand or foster labor competition between social groups.
Finance Capitalism took pride of place above commodity and industrial capitalism in the last century. Banking and investment now drive global politics. Where once commodity capitalism gave rise to colonialism; where once industrial capitalism gave rise to nationalism; where once the two together fueled the great wars of Colonian conquest in the 1800's; where once the two together fueled the great wars of capitalist competion in the 20th century; where once the two together resisted the struggles of socialist liberation in the third world, now both together are being tamed and divorced by finance capital.
Finance capital, reduced to digits inside computers, is now moved around the world in ways bars of gold, fields of corn or warehouses of goods never could. The family as the locus and holder of wealth does not exist in cyber-space. Family values become obstacles to the movement of capitalism along with ethnic values, nationalist values and of course, human values.
And What of Today?
Capitalism, as we know it, has driven family values for only 400 years or so. Today there are some 20 or 30 family forms each of which has far different values from those emerging out of agricultural patriarchy. In 1994, I asked my Intro students at the University of Michigan-Flint, to create a list of family forms in Flint today.
they came up with some 26 different forms of intimacy. Among these were:
Dinks with double incomes and no kids seem to be the most highly valued form of intimacy in these days.
Sinks follow with increasing frequency; single adults, high income, and certainly no kids...abortion, adoption, desertion and abandonment are the values which drive both dinks and sinks. These can be either male or female; count two more forms even if there is little intimacy inside them.
Simaks, single mothers and kids are more common than..
Madaks; mom and dad and kids...aka, the nuclear family of most sociology texts and tests.
Yinks: young people living alone or in small groups on the streets in what ever small and brief intimacies they can manage.
Then there were:
Minks: two or more males living together with no kids. Sometimes they are gay; sometimes not. Count two more forms of intimacy.
Finks: two or more females living together with no kids. Sometimes they are lesbian; most of the time, not.
There are a lot of we Winkies around; widowed people living alone and unable to hear children weeping in the playtime of others...too much caught up in our own grief and
Now I know that poetic justice demands that minks be females and finks be males but these are only acronyms, not ontology.
Prisons, asylums, armies, navies, seminaries, convents, and schools offer
up Tinks; masses of men and women living en bloc with no
kids...in Total institutions. Count
as high as you can find total institutions.
Bars for singles give us Links; lonely singles coming together for a night or so then returning to sinkdom are found in single bars everywhere....if there are any kids, they are well hidden for the time together.
And what of Tomorrow?
As I am a hopeless romantic, I vote for fairly stable forms of intimacy within which children can find lots of love, lots of guidence, lots of pro-social work to do on their way to becoming an adult.
I want a family form in which children are protected from violence, from sexual predation, from poverty and in which interactively rich forms of affection can bring them to the fullness of their morality.
I can't see patriarchy doing this. I can't see capitalism providing the larger contect for well loved and well protected children.
I can see forms of socialism doing so; market socialism, worker owned and operated socialism, community based socialism, craft based and regional forms of socialism could provide the political economy in which people and family are more important than profits and market share.
But social democracy of the form found in Europe or communism of the form found in Cuba or Kerala might suffice...although, as Cuba becomes dollarized, sexual exploition of young men and young women expands.
But my imagination is limited to yesterday and today. Tomorrow is the legacy of generations to come...there will be ideas and inventions not yet imaginable by those of us with lesser genius.
But I have hopes. I have hopes that sociology; an affirmative postmodern and activist sociology can and will play a large part in creating these news and more enabling forms of intimacy.
Do you hear the children, O my sisters?
Do you hear the children?
They are weeping, O my sisters,
They are weeping in the playtime of others.
EBBrowing