Radical social liberals like to portray themselves as the enemies of the corporate-oligarchic establishment named the Managerial Elites by writers like Burnham and Francis.
The purported conflict between radicalism (or leftism, or progressivism) and managerial neoliberal crony capitalism, however, is a false dichotomy, designed to channel people into pre-approved ideologies which are harmless to the ruling elites. Both groups are fundamentally aligned in a “left-hand/right-hand” paradigm. What this means is that the two sides collaborate to pursue the same objectives, while using the plausible deniability of blaming the other “hand” for the outcomes of their policies. Thus, the neoliberals blame the radicals for social disorder in society, and the radicals blame the neoliberals for spiraling inequality, yet both sides collaborate in the essential policies which create both outcomes.
This short essay will explain how the left hand washes the right, and vice versa, in terms of family policy.
The political economy of the family in the United States can be described in terms of two transformations: from the agrarian to the industrial, and from the industrial to the post-industrial paradigm of today. Andrew Lytle’s essay, “The Hind Tit,” describes the transition of the Southern farmer from the agrarian to the industrial paradigm and his consequential loss of independence and quality of life. The typical household of the pre-war period was a self-contained economy, wherein the labor of the household was divided to maximize the self-sufficiency of the farmstead. Sons went to work with the father in the field, daughters learned appropriate crafts under their mother. With Reconstruction and the growth of bourgeois dominance over the Southern economy at the end of the 19th century, however, this changed. Lytle describes the means by which the industrial bourgeois elites began to manipulate and control the household of the farmer through creating a dependency on the cash economy and then through the use of debt to ensure that the farmer could never attain self-sufficiency again.
Lytle uses the example of the tractor: once the farmer switches from mule-power to tractor-power, he can do more work with fewer hands. This has two effects. First, his sons now have less to do, and are more likely to leave the farm to work in the new factories, moving away from the family and becoming atomized aliens in the new, growing Southern cities. Secondly, the tractor replaces a renewable good, the mule, with a good that requires integration into the cash economy. Diesel fuel and spare parts cannot be grown on a farm like animals, so the farmer now has a regular need for influxes of cash to keep his farm running. When the crop fails, his only means to raise cash quickly is either debt or to send his daughters to work in the village as clerks, waitresses, or other cash jobs. This creates a situation where his daughters are more likely to meet a man from further away, marry, and leave the family behind.
In short, by integrating the farm into the bourgeois market economy, the farmer’s family is transformed into the bourgeois model: the nuclear, two-generation family isolated from extended relatives. The nuclear family is suited to the early-20th century industrial economy because the bourgeois firm is organized in terms of a founder-heir structure. The bourgeois father is the CEO, who both owns and manages the firm with an expectation of transferring the firm to his son upon his death. The nature of classical capitalist owner-manager leadership means that extended family, and even large numbers of children, are a nuisance. Bourgeois owner-management styles work best with a single, paternalistic leader vested with complete control of the firm. This is what Marx meant when he argued that the nuclear family was the foundation of the bourgeois order.
The great “robber-barons” of the First Gilded Age epitomize this form of elite economic leadership. This is economic governance by an absolute ruler, be it a Rockefeller, a Vanderbilt, or a Carnegie. The workers’ family is transformed into this model, as well, to better suit the economic structure of the elites. Workers are formed into nuclear family structures with a single bread-winner and an idle home-keeper because this keeps the worker dependent upon the firm for its living. If families were organized horizontally, it would be easier for workers to resist demands of management which kept up profits.
In small, rural towns, most everyone could call upon relatives to support them and to engage in collective action for their benefit. Take, for example, the feuding culture of the Appalachians. Both the Hatfields and McCoys could call upon a broad coalition of related families. Unionization was the inferior substitute for these ties. Instead of calling upon one’s kinfolk to stand together against management’s oppression, they created the artificial kin ties of the Knights of Labor.
This previous transformation then foreshadows the transformation of the family in the wake of the Managerial Revolution. The changes in the structure of the economy and elite lead to a change in the structure of the family promoted by these elite. Bourgeois owner-managers are replaced by employee-managers who govern a corporate firm whose leadership is divorced from absentee stock-holder rentiers. Likewise, in an economic system which prioritizes the free flow of capital over the continuity of individual firms, there is little or no need for stability or loyalty to institutions. CEOs do not care if their particular firm is bought or sold, as they are not tied to the fortunes of any one corporation. A CEO who guts his firm and makes a great deal of money doing so will get more and better job offers from other manager-boards who profit from similar deals. Thus, the old style of lifetime employment which defined the bourgeois firm is obsolete in the Managerial Economy.
An employee is valued for the short-term profits he or she may provide, and when the currents shift, that employee will be quickly cut off. Since there is no predicting the labor needs of the future, there is no reason to waste resources developing human capital. Employees become a disposable resource and the collapse of their personal lives caused by labor volatility is a cost which can be externalized on society as a whole. Rather than seeking to create a lasting institution, modern CEOs are interested in building networks of connections with institutions of power permitting them to rapidly climb the ranks of power in society, especially given the deepening connections between profitability and political connections in managerial capitalism. Managerial credentials and power cannot be directly transferred to children, so there is no reason to conserve resources within the family; to invert that line of thinking, without something to pass down, there is no reason to have children at all.
Therefore, unlike in bourgeois capitalism, there is no reason to promote the model of the nuclear family in managerial capitalism. In agrarianism, the labor of the wife contributes to the household. In bourgeois capitalism, the wife is purposefully kept idle to keep the husband dependent on his employer. In managerial capitalism, both of these conditions permit an inefficiency which reduces short-term profits. Managerialism squelches proprietorships because the resources of small businesses do not contribute to the corporate-managerial network. Likewise, women who do not work outside the household are in a similar position. When a wife works in a corporate job, the work she would have otherwise done must be purchased on a cash-basis: child care, food preparation, household care. This labor can be provided by corporations who again take a profit while government takes a tax off the top.
The fact that this model is exploitative is easy to demonstrate. Can a woman on an average wage afford to pay people to provide the various services which she would otherwise perform for her family if she did not work? She certainly cannot. The cost of a maid, child care provider, food preparation, proper education, and so forth are significantly more than most women earn minus their living expenses, thus creating a situation where the household is permanently mired in debt in an attempt to capture the necessities of life, reinforcing the cycle of dependency on the managerial elites and the cash-nexus they dominate and exploit.
Why has this system not collapsed, then, in its own contradictions? First, the ability of power to overcome the internal contradictions of a political economic system is underestimated by most, as Samuel Francis described. Secondly, however, as Marx described, managerial capitalism exports its negative externalities through expansion and colonialism. Immigration is the way that managerial elites import colonialism to support their exploitative systems. Immigrant labor artificially and temporarily reduces the costs of these various household labors, making the system float for a short time and permitting a few more years of exploitation. The problem is that this merely kicks the can down the road. The immigrant families are placed in the same situation, as the wife works outside the household in the households of others, for a wage that far underestimates the actual value of the work she could be doing for her own family, leading to a situation of debt and dependency which profits only the Managerial Elites.
Returning back to the original statement, the radical Left is instrumental in supporting and promoting this exploitation of the family by the neoliberal economic system through their attacks on traditional morality and family structure in the name of feminism and transgressive sexual expression. The threat to the managerial elite is found in families working together to provide resources for their members outside of the corporate-cash economy. The more work that is done on a non-cash basis, the more food that is raised outside of factory-farms, and the more child-care that is provided by blood relatives, the less income accrues to the managerial elites. It is in the interests of the managerial elites to keep people divided from their kin and to keep families divided and dependent on the corporate-cash economy.
Divorced couples consume nearly double the resources of a stable marriage, and never-married women with bastard children are perfect dependents on the corporate-managerial state, especially if the biological fathers are also kept in a state of extended consumerist childhood. By attacking the means of resource conservation within the family, the radical Left protects the ability of the neoliberal managerial elites to exploit the family for its own profit.
As Burnham described years ago, the managerial system is dependent on freeing up resources which were sequestered in civil society structures like churches, families, and small communities. Without these resources, managerial capitalism would have long run out of fuel. While the radical Left decries the exploitation of the people by crony capitalist corporations, it is their cultural attacks which pave the way to the most efficient paradigm of late-stage managerial capitalist appropriation. Charles Murray clearly described how the upper-middle class avoids the behaviors and patterns that extract resources out of the family and redistribute them to the corporate-state managerial network.
This shows an awareness, at some level, on the part of the American elites that the social, moral, and familial models they espouse are poisonous and designed for the purpose of economic exploitation. It is just an added irony that the people who claim to oppose all forms of exploitation, the radical Left, are the standard-bearers of managerial capitalist oligarchy.