menby

I haven't finished chapter 7 yet but chapter 6 really shows just how deeply connected the capitalist economic system is to patriarchy. It makes me want to finally read Caliban and the Witch. From the intro of that book we get the broad picture that primitive accumulation was in fact the process of domesticating women. Removing them from their established roles in society, stripping away their bodily autonomy, substituting men in their place as healers, and ultimately presenting them as the bargaining chip to the men enticed to work in the factories. It shows that this process is on going, not just one of the past. That capitalist markets perform this kind of violence against women even today.

I also want to read The Hidden Injuries of Class, which also touches on the way the capitalist system instills in men this idea of personal failure instead of systemic failure. Its author notes that:

This struggle was not only that they were trying to make sense of a complex society; a thread running through many of our interviews was the conviction that people should take responsibility for how they were situated in society. That is, being “lower down” did not just happen to them, it was internalized as who they were. These struggles with feelings of not being good enough, of personally failing, took place in an America that promised that everyone could rise if they made the most of themselves. “You are your own maker” the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola declared. Workers in Boston knew this was factually untrue but felt, personally, it was true.

Injuries to one’s sense of self-worth produce anger and resentment. For these White workers, Blacks who seemed to muscle in on their jobs and communities, and to capture the attention and sympathy of elites, were an obvious symbolic target, outside themselves, explaining why White workers were not doing well. But, in fact, matters were more complicated. Individual Black workers and neighbors were exempted from this scapegoating, and in the end people reverted to the fear that they had taken wrong turns or not made the most of themselves, rather than that their paths had been blocked by others. The very fact that some institutions were strong—stable corporations, strong unions—reinforced the sentiment that their fate at work was a matter of their own doing.

That anger and resentment is also talked about in Chapter 6, and we can see where the outlet for those feelings ultimately lay throughout the earlier chapters, it lay with the family. I think we can see the causality of these ideas today. Now more then ever young people are bombarded with this idea that you too can be independently wealthy. When the reality is, you'll just be caught up in this years rounds of layoffs and left economically abandoned. Your not going to make the next big app, you won't be the next Mr. Beast. There isn't enough attention for any of that. Young men are abandoning work and school altogether at very high rates.

There is a massive vacuum being created by young men seeking explanations for why their lives have turned out this way. Patriarchy stands ready to fill that void, as it always has.