Good morning, HazMat. I agree and disagree with you at the same time. Personally, I think it’s a huge mistake to conflate capitalism with patriarchy. Since they are separate systems, I keep them separate in my mind.
Capitalism is nothing more than a savings account. I put money into a savings account, and you borrow that money to build something, then pay me back with interest out of what you earned off your investment.
The trouble with capitalism is corporations that borrow so much money, they cannot pay me back, let alone pay me some interest. Suddenly my savings is tied up in some corporations’ building or product that no one wants - including me. The corporation tells me, I can get my money back in 50 years when the investment matures and makes a big deal about all the interest, I will accumulate in 50 years. Trouble is the investor is a corporation and I am a person. The corporation uses glacial time which is a couple hundred years longer than my lifetime. In 50 years, the corporation’s CEO will still be in his forties or fifties, and I’ll be long dead.
Unfortunately, when it came to making corporations ‘people’ no one bothered to address the difference between glacial time and lifetimes. But that’s another discussion.
Patriarchy is NOT an economic, governance, or political system. Patriarchy is a social system in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line. Over time, patriarchs’ possession of their family name was expanded to include possession of all family members, then possession of all family wealth and power. Now that every man was a king, with a little kingdom of his own, society revolved around men.
I disagree with your assertion that “Capitalism, through its acceptance of Capitalism, through its acceptance of a hierarchical economic system, provides the financial means to keep low status labor in its place.” Capitalism is NOT a hierarchical system. Capitalism works in egalitarian, communist, democratic, and dictatorship societies. While China is a communist country using capitalism in a socialist society, America is a democracy using capitalism in a patriarchal society. Corporations, private investors, workers, children, drug cartels, illegal gun traffickers, kings, dictators and anyone else with excess money, are using capitalism in their organizations and families.
Stop accepting capitalism as a ‘hierarchical economic system’, and you might see things differently. Money makes money and that’s all it does. People do everything else. People decided to keep low status labour in its place – NOT capitalism. We can elevate low status labour anytime we want. In fact, doing so could increase productivity so substantially, low status labor might be elevated out of existence. More importantly, ending low status work is viewed by many as the solution to climate change.
HazMat, you write “Patriarchy, through the labor of low status men, makes the goods of our society (when they did this labor they at least had dignity--technology deprives them of even this small nobility) as you are suggesting.” You are not the only man who is worried about men’s dignity, self-respect, pride and sense of nobility and belonging. Let me answer this fear with a story.
This is a true story, about a man that I will call Joe. Joe finished high school, got a job at a nearby factory, got married, had four children, and bought a home. 47 years later, Joe was still working at the same factory and lived in the same home with the same wife, when he retired. All his life, Joe had been restoring old cars. He worked on them on weekends, and after work at night. Over the years, Joe restored a car for his wife, each one of his children and three of his siblings. After Joe retired, he started working on his cars full time and was happier than he’d ever been before. Joe finished one of his cars and his son put it up for sale (on-line). A man three states away called him up and they talked. A few days later, the man from Ohio arrived with a truck and trailer and a cashier’s check and hauled the car back to Ohio. Joe called his son, and this is what he said. “Son, I just made more money in three months than I made in a year working at the factory.” The two men, father and son, were so choked up with tears, they hung up the phone.
The next time they saw each other, Joe told his son the rest of the story. The man from Ohio had told Joe that he was not keeping the car, he already had a buyer for it up in Ohio where he was getting almost three times as much money as what he’d just paid Joe. A year later, Joe called his son to tell him he had more money in the bank than his house was worth, and was taking his wife to Hawaii.
My point in sharing this man’s story is this. Patriarchy – not capitalism – is holding men, women, and children down. Free people’s time and they will do much, much better - and so will our society and all the people in it.
