Corporate capitalism too
Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.”
That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically:
The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.
The country is still imprisoned in an ideology, says Calarco, “explicitly manufactured to persuade us that we didn’t need a social safety net.” That system of thought was disrupted by the need for women to work manufacturing jobs during WWII. We provided low-cost childcare so they could. But that support did not hold. Free-market fundamentalism had better PR (market fundamentalism propaganda).
But rather than think, “Okay. So how do we restructure our economy to make it so that everyone who wants to have a paid job can do so,” we instead shuttered those childcare centers. We pushed women out of the workforce. We told them to go back home, told them it was their patriotic duty to give those jobs back to men because we didn’t want to expand the economy, and we didn’t want to continue paying for these kinds of social safety net programs. Meanwhile, many European countries used what they learned from those kinds of models during the war to build these national childcare programs that they still have today or to build national healthcare, to put in place universal paid family leave.
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One of the core reasons that we haven’t pushed back is that we’ve relied on women to fill in these gaps instead. The unpaid and underpaid labor that women do to fill in the gaps in our social safety net and in our economy makes us complacent, makes us feel as though we don’t maybe actually need a social safety net because we’re doing well enough with the minimal social safety net that we do have. And yet at the same time, this is crushing women. They’re the default caregivers for children, for the sick, and for the elderly. They’re the ones who fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy. 70 percent of our lowest-wage jobs are held by women.
And to your point that we need government to do this, there are jobs that are often too labor-intensive to be highly profitable. They just don’t work in a market model. Things like childcare, things like customer service, things like home healthcare, K-12 teaching, which we do fund with some government support, but not at a sufficient level to make that job as valued and as sustainable as it should be.
But any product or service the government might provide on a not-for-profit basis that the private sector might provide at a profit (even if only in theory) is an abomination, a crime against capitalism. That’s a big No from free market fundamentalists.
Plus, we socialize children to see themselves in roles defined by gendered hierarchy and sexist myths. It’s a way of thinking so baked into the culture, like structural racism, as to be all but invisible.
I know it well. Longtime readers may recall my decades-old take on capitalism:
We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands.
Corporate capitalism is a different animal, an invasive species, actually, and merely one model for organizing a capitalist enterprise. There are others. But corporate capitalism’s success and ubiquity convince us that there is no alternative. It is the water we swim in but cannot see.
Look around where you sit right now. There is likely nothing from the chair on which you sit to the screen on which you read this to the materials of the building around you that were not manufactured by a modern corporation. This artificial lifeform, a soulless creation possessing only appetite and instinct, has created a system in which the people no longer govern. They are ruled by those who would make serfs of us again, telling us only by their being kings can the rest of us flourish. Instead of holding corporate capitalism’s leash, humans wear the collar.
“We are not fated to live this way,” historian Steve Fraser once told Bill Moyers.
Neither men nor women.
There is much more at The Ink.
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