https://compactmag.com/article/why-we-need-the-patriarchy
The new magazine Compact has arrived with a flurry of unlikely publicity, including a feature in the New York Times, perhaps because its founders are two Catholic conservatives—one the alumnus of the New York Post, the other of First Things—and an avowed Marxist. It sounds incoherent if not impossible unless you remember that Alexandre Kojeve called himself a “right-wing Marxist,” and that distinguished Marxist historians (Eugene Genovese and Martin Sklar come to mind) have ended their scholarly careers as outspoken reactionaries.*
Or unless you recall that the US Catholic Bishops’ strident statement of 1982, which called for vigorous state intervention in the name of economic equality, was perfectly consistent with official Church doctrine going back at least to the 1960s—doctrine that came close to reproducing the radical language of liberation theology. For example, the Second Vatican Council, convened in 1965, denounced the “immense economic inequalities” still separating rich and poor nations as well as people within nations: “For excessive economic and social differences between the members of the one human family or population groups cause scandal, and militate against social justice, equity, the dignity of the human person, [and] social and international peace.”
This Vatican Council went on to state that the proper purpose of economic production was “to be at the service of humanity in its totality.” So it concluded that the Church’s ancient, original criterion of need had a modern application: “Therefore everyone has the right to possess a sufficient amount of the earth’s goods for themselves and their family. This has been the opinion of the Fathers and Doctors of the church, who taught that people are bound to come to the aid of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods.” Indeed, “Persons in extreme necessity are entitled to take what they need from the riches of others.” (Memo to refugees: steal this yacht!)**
But then you’d go to Compact’s inaugural issue and find the Marxist founder, Edwin Aponte, saying incomprehensible things about free speech. The contemporary debate about it is phony, he declares, citing the authority of de Tocqueville, because it all goes back to the leveling of opinion inherent in the imperative of consent, the only principle of political obligation adequate to modern democratic governance (if “all men are created equal,” your exercise of state power is legitimate only insofar as you obtain the consent of the governed). Is he complaining about democracy as such, as Tocqueville was prone to do, or the emptiness of free speech in the current marketplace of ideas? It’s hard to tell. He does say that speech codes, then as now, are results of the soft censorship residing in the “oblique application of ruling-class ideology.” But this ex cathedra pronouncement sounds anachronistic or irrelevant when ruling classes, here as elsewhere, are deeply divided or at least embattled.
Ah, and then you would notice that Nina Power, a contributing editor, has a featured article with a title you’d expect from the Oath-Keepers’ in-house magazine (is there one?): “Why We Need the Patriarchy.” Don’t laugh. That first-person pronoun doesn’t stand in for backward women married to MAGA morons from Alabama, although her argument does explain why some females have a vested (i.e., rational) interest in the maintenance of male supremacy. Power believes she is speaking on behalf of adults who would like.to entertain some alternative to the reckless hedonism, feckless sexuality, and moral idiocy of our time—“an infantilized culture” which she correlates with “consumer capitalism.”
But how do these things go together, and why is the solution a restoration of patriarchy?
“Despite claims to the contrary, we do not live in a patriarchy,” Power begins, echoing what used to a commonplace among feminist film-makers and theorists: “A patriarchy would require men taking responsibility for their families and for society at large,” a cultural regime wherein “the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude” flourish—and with them a sturdy social ethic that insulates the family against both the commands of the state and the forces of the market.
Instead we inhabit the decadent Regime of the Brother, wherein “sexual difference is eliminated, and men and women are assimilated into a masculine ideal of fraternity”—wherein power is exercised without responsibility. (Power borrows the capitalized designation from Juliet Flower MacCannell’s quirky, brilliant book of that title, which, among other intellectual achievements, explains why the Phallus becomes a mystery in the 20th century, as patriarchy gives way to bureaucracy in the allocation of resources, including the force of production we call Desire.)***
This erasure of sexual difference has something to do with a modern-industrial stage of human development: “As men and women become indistinct—a tendency created by the desegregation of sex-based spheres amid the rise of industrial society—the two sexes largely perform the same jobs, enjoy the same types of culture, and compete along similar lines in sex, military life, and other physical activities.” Consumer capitalism, presumably the successor to industrial society, installs the Regime of the Brother and completes the erasure of sexual difference.
MacCannell’s psychoanalytically informed periodization, which Power deploys to mourn the end of patriarchy, may sound fanciful to those who think that male supremacy has no internal history worth our attention. But like racism, which persists even though slavery and Jim Crow have been abolished, male supremacy has survived the eclipse of patriarchy. How so?
The social foundation of patriarchy is a household economy, wherein the basic unit of goods production is the family—the oikos of anriquity, an extended family that included slaves and servants, then the small farm or central shop of early modern Europe, whose work force included family members and apprentices. This “petty mode of production,” as Maurice Dobb called it, was exported to North America in the 17th century, and, in what became the United States of America, it was understood as the necessary groundwork of popular, republican government. As such, its instantiation or restoration was the goal of social movements from the 1740s (the Great Awakening) to the 1840s and 50s (anti-slavery), on into the 1890s (the Knights of Labor, the People’s Party). From the standpoint of its partisans, self-determination meant self-employment, and wage labor signified servility.
The self-mastering individual idealized from this standpoint was the male head of household who almost literally owned his wife—her personal identity, her very standing at the law, were folded into her husband’s upon marriage, according to the legal doctrine of femme couverture—and who had virtually unlimited control of his children’s fortunes. He was a protective father, as Power claims, because he had to be: he had to make sure his property was conveyed to the next generation without legal challenge. And this fatherly vigilance meant, above all, that he had to police the sexuality of his wife and children, particularly the females, so that no bastards would appear in court as rightful heirs to his property. Misogyny fueled by fear of unbound female sexuality was baked into the culture of the petty mode of production.
A household economy and its patriarchal entailment shaped and characterized ancient, Hellenistic, feudal, and modern bourgeois societies. It took a trans-Atlantic industrial revolution, ca. 1780-1890, to empty most households of their economic functions by exporting goods production to factories, and to create a propertyless, proletarian majority that worked for wages. At that point, in the 19th century, bourgeois society based on the petty mode of production gave way to capitalism—”industrial society,” as Power names it, following the example of sociologists from Emile Durkheim to Daniel Bell. At that point, simple commodity circulation, as Marx called it, or simple market society as per C.B. Macpherson, gave way to capitalism, a mode of production geared to the unlimited accumulation of wealth rather than “safety first,” that is, the preservation of the property that guaranteed familial integrity over time, from one generation to the next. (This is the difference between “Billions” and “Succession,” by the way.)****
But bourgeois society, so conceived, was never obliterated by capitalism. It survives, though barely, in the social groundwork of small business—where the self-made man, the entrepreneur, the garage band, the algorithm section, the family farmer, and the proverbial Mom & Pop subsist—and, much more significantly, as an ideological imperative, in the image of the rugged, rights-bearing individual who works for himself and thus answers only to himself. This man is his own boss, so his will is free of any encumbrance except adherence to the bourgeois virtues, particularly the compulsion to work and its corollary, the willingness to defer gratification. He’s aware of manhood’s price, unafraid of masculinity, and, above all, able to accept responsibility for his family’s welfare. He is neither stylish nor hip, in fact he’s old-fashioned—he plays by the rules, lives within his means, and he expects you to. He is not a hedonist.
This man, this pale image, this miniature patriarch, permeates all “conservative” speech, whether in sounds bites that ridicule “woke” corporations or in legislation that bans books and abortions. When conservative ideologues and politicians say “family” or “family values,” they mean male-headed households that are still animated and regulated by the bourgeois virtues. In their view, only such families can resist the temptations of the market (a.k.a. “consumer capitalism”), the seductions of the city, and the commands of the state.
The practical question for such “conservatives” is how to restore those families to their rightful, protective place between the market and the state. They can’t very well take us back to a household economy, no matter how anti-corporate they sound. They can’t undo the economic events of the last century, or even the last 20 years, without renouncing what they constantly celebrate—modern, corporate-industrial capitalism. In short, they have no way of reinstating the social groundwork of bourgeois society. But they can impose its virtues, including male supremacy in the threadbare costume of patriarchy, by political means, as authoritarian regimes elsewhere—you know where they are—have done, and as Republican state legislatures are doing in the US.
The first step is to reassert paternal control of female sexuality, by restricting or abolishing access to abortion. In an uncanny twist on Robert Fulmer’s argument with John Locke, and Carl Schmitt’s argument against modern liberalism, the state will now stand in for the paterfamilias. The second is to reestablish heterosexuality as the binary norm that must govern everyday social life as well as marriage contracts. The gender troubles created by industrial society and then consumer capitalism, which is to say the choices enabled by the passage from bourgeois society to capitalism—”Sexual difference has been recoded as an ‘identity’ unmoored not only from biology, but also from established patterns of heterosexual courtship,” as Power explains it—are to be adjourned by legislation.
She notes that “masculinist writers” who extoll the bourgeois virtues are “dismissed by liberal critics as ‘right-wing’ or worse,” and in concluding urges us to ignore such charges because we need “to fully reconfigure a form of life that permits the celebration of the beauty of sexual difference.” But isn’t the recent proliferation of gender identities just that? Not if you assume that marriage is a bond that unites only males and females, for whom sexual pleasure is a means to social—familial, reproductive— ends, not an end in itself, and for whom birth control by any method is, therefore, inconceivable.
Power never acknowledges that assumption as her own unstated premise, but her overall argument makes no sense in its absence. Nor does her pitch to progressives who doubt the moral content of consumer capitalism—to those adults in the room who want an alternative to the feckless sexuality and reckless hedonism of our time. What then?
To my mind, her argument contains the same centrifugal elements displayed on Compact’s masthead, which are the commitments residing in and flowing from Catholic social teaching—on the one hand, a deep faith in marriage, family, and the sacred lives created through heterosexual intercourse, and, on the other, an abiding promise to act on the ancient Christian and modern socialist criterion of need (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), if necessary by statist command of civil society.
It’s an unstable, isotopic compound that tends toward authoritarian, even reactionary politics—hence “Why We Need the Patriarchy”—but as Karl Lowith and Alasdair MacIntyre claimed many years ago, Marxism and Christianity aren’t incompatible. Not anymore than capitalism and socialism, individualism and community, husbands and wives, or heaven and earth. Just different.
__________
*Like socialism, and for that matter Christianity, Marxism has no predictable political valence: it can be deployed as an instrument of oppression or liberation, and of everything in between. On Genovese, see James Livingston, “‘Marxism’ and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese,” Radical History Review 88 (2004): 33-48; on Sklar, see James Livingston, “Vanishing Act,” The Nation October 15, 2014. Full disclosure: I was a student of and a friend to both of them.
**Two basic primers on liberation theology are Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (trans. 1973) and Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology (1987), which are addressed along with the Second Vatican Council in James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009), chap. 1.
***See Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (1991). In the late-20th century, feminists were preoccupied with the persistence of male supremacy in the absence or decay of patriarchy, as historians of African America were preoccupied with the persistence of racism in the absence or decay of slavery and Jim Crow. See, for examples, Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” (1975); Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1986); Linda Nicholson, Gender and History (1986); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990); Janes Flax, Thinking Fragments (1990) ; Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent (199); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992). Psychoanalysis informs these landmark works, as it does Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (1968), Joel Kovel, White Racism (1970), and the growth industry of “whiteness” studies.
****The distinction I make between bourgeois society and capitalism is crucial, because without it we can’t explain the anti-capitalist attitudes and actions of those who nonetheless accept private property, free markets, hard work, and a money economy as given features of modern life, from the Levellers and the Puritans of the 17th century to the Knights of Labor and the Populists of the 19th—and now on toward that substantial part of the MAGA crowd which hates “woke” capitalism. In what is still the best book on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), Maurice Dobb is careful to differentiate a “petty mode of production” from capitalism as such (see esp. chaps. 1-2). I’m following his lead, and those provided by Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles 2 vols. (1939); Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976); C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962). See also the big event itself, Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (Kerr ed., trans. 1906-09), esp. 1: 106-96, 644-711, 784-816 and 3: 515-610. In these pages, Marx explains the difference between “simple commodity circulation” (C-M-C), where money (M)—wealth in the abstract—is only a means of exchange, not the goal of goods production and the “formula for capital” (M-C-M^), where the accumulation of wealth in the abstract, money itself, becomes the goal of goods production. This is the difference, in a nutshell, between bourgeois society and capitalism. In the former, production presupposes a certain level of consumption because the point of producing goods for the market is to maintain one’s social standing as a self-determining small holder, not to get rich; in the latter, production expands ad infinitum because the point is to serve the “somewhat disgusting morbidity” (that’s Keynes talking) of ever-increasing profits, more wealth in the abstract, not to be content with what one has.
I wish I'd read this before writing my latest piece--you bring a superior historical perspective--but am pleased to recognise the specific points of agreement as well as the overall thrust.
typo(?): "the oikos of anriquity" (antiquity?)