Hello, this is Dr. Harriet Fraad on Capitalism
Hits Home: An Interpersonal Update.
This is a show about the intersection of capitalism,
class, and our personal lives.
This podcast today is called “Listen Up
Leftists, There's a Class Revolution in the
Household” and there indeed is a revolution
that's happened right under our noses and
that the left has not recognized even though
the right-wing has taken cognizance of it
and is using it.
What is that revolution?
Well, it's a revolution in home life and personal
relationships.
Those relationships have been transformed
in a revolutionary way.
The class structures in those relationships
have been transformed.
Now first of all, how do we know that?
What are the signs of this revolutionary change
in personal life?
Well, for the first time in US history the
majority of women are single and by choice.
Anyone could look that up.
It's on the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The majority of women work outside the home
as well as in it, and even for the first time,
75%—the majority—of women who have children
are also in the labor force.
These are all firsts.
The majority of women and men reject marriage
until much later or completely.
For the first time in US history, the majority
of people who they call of prime fertility
age—18 to 35—are not married.
More about this later.
This is just a taste of what's to come.
What happened?
Why have these changes happened?
Well, most importantly I think—although
there's many factors, of course—US men who
are white don't get a family wage anymore.
In the 60s and 70s—in fact, between the
1820s and the 1970s—white men got a family
wage, and we have to remember that, even in
1965, America was an 87.5% white country.
Also, there was a scarce labor market and
competition for workers.
Therefore, wages could be pushed up—particularly
if people unionized—and the United States
manufactured its needs at home until the mid-70s
or largely at home.
Well, what happened to change it?
One of the things was that computers came
into being; another was jet travel; another
was multinational sophisticated communication
systems that would allow people to communicate
back and forth who had outsourced their plants;
another was obviously outsourcing.
Now, those things were possible technologically
in America at that time, and they've been
more and more economically and politically
possible ever since.
They weren't possible in Europe.
We haven't had the massive outsourcing of
American jobs that we have in America.
They didn't have that in Sweden, Denmark,
all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and
even France.
Why not?
Well, they had powerful communist and socialist
labor movements that were militant so that
in those countries like Sweden, for example,
if you want to stop making a product and outsource
it, you first have to get everyone by union
agreement, everyone in your factory has to
have an equivalently paid job, and you need
to consult with the ecological authorities
about closing your plant.
You need to consult with the community about
what would be the impact on the community,
and it's so expensive that most people who
decide not to manufacture something decide
to manufacture something else right there
in Sweden because it's so expensive to think
of outsourcing.
They have a very powerful labor movement,
which is why the German metal workers recently
got an agreement where they have a twenty-two-hour
work week for the same salary and that's so
that they could have work-home balance—something
almost unheard of in the United States.
Also, why was that possible?
Well, the anti-communism in the 1950s—the
McCarthyism—made that possible.
Why was it possible here and not in Europe
in addition to their strong communist and
socialist unions?
Well, let's look at what gave us the New Deal
which raised wages and expectations and lives
for the massive American people.
The New Deal was possible because the CIO
was a powerful union and a lot of its most
militant and devoted organizers were in the
Communist Party or either of the two socialist
parties that exerted a huge influence.
In the McCarthy period in the 1950s, the Americans
unions threw out their socialists and their
communists.
They threw out the communists first then they
threw out the two socialist parties and gutted
their union of some of their most militant
members.
That was a huge mistake in terms of union
militancy, and it was quite different.
Americans also believed in exceptionalism,
that the United States was different from
other countries, that if you worked hard—which
was true at that time because of the gains
in the unions and because of the scarcity
of labor—if you worked hard and were white
and male you could do better than your forbearers
did, and every generation could do better
than the last.
Even in the Great Depression, those people
who had work did better than their predecessors,
and prices didn't rise while wages fell.
Prices fell even faster than wages then so
that in the 1950s when they gutted the labor
movement of its militants, they could outsource
and they could use computers and robots and
heavy mechanization and international communication
systems and computers to allow them to overseas
and to replace white male worker jobs because
those were the best paid jobs in manufacturing.
That ended.
Also, if we're looking at the changes for
women, one of the things that happened when
that ended in the late 60s and early 70s…
And I should say also that the McCarthy era
was possible because at the end of the war
the industrialists—those people who owned
the most in America—were sick and tired
of FDR's 96.4% capital gains tax and taxes
on their profits, and they wanted to defeat
the New Deal.
So, when FDR died, they started the Red Scare.
Don't forget before that Uncle Joe—Joseph
Stalin—by the way was our close ally during
World War 2 and people didn't have a feeling
that the Russians were the enemy.
That was deliberately cultivated as part of
a possibility of gutting the New Deal and
it worked.
There were other things that happened that
changed the household at that time.
In 1965, the birth control pill was invented
and by 1972—which was rather late—but
birth control was available even for unmarried
women.
In 1963, abortion was legalized.
Now what happened after the birth control
pill was legalized: college education for
women went way up because the thing that changed
college education for women most was not getting
pregnant in college and having to drop out.
So, that changed the household and relationships
between men and women.
Also, the women's movement started and was
subverted because it started out of women's
frustration at having an education and being
unable to access jobs in the economy, in wider
society, and in the professions and in academia;
not to have economic independence.
That movement was very class-oriented in its
inception.
The first movement periodical of 1968 Notes
from the First Year had many articles about
class and how gender and class go together.
But the CIA funded an operation called the
Great Wurlitzer in which they financed CIA
agent Gloria Steinem and gave her hundreds
of thousands of dollars to use to make the
women's movement a gender only movement, and
they appointed someone who was black to make
the civil rights movement a race only movement
so that their class interests were not disturbed.
So that there was a women's movement which
for all its problems of class blindness—blindness
cultivated by the CIA—was a powerful movement
showing women we can and should have an alternative
and pushing for change.
All of those things together worked to change
what happened in the household.
The household of the vast majority who were
white at that time—this was not true of
minorities but white people—consisted of
a wage-earning male and a dependent wife and
children.
The man was the lord of his household manner.
The woman worked for him creating use values—cooked
food, cleanliness, order, childcare, after-school
care, basic but not advanced medical care,
emotional labor, sexual labor.
That was her first full-time job and so that
men could be relative lords in their manner
at home with a full-time servant working to
help them.
There were jokes that illustrate this because
jokes really do capture often the feeling
of what's going on and the joke for men was
“There's a handy little thing called a wife.
You screw it on the bed, it does all the childcare,
the housework, and
takes care of you, A to Z; handy little thing.
Women were dependent and needed to serve their
husbands.
But of course, men were also trapped in this
arrangement, trapped with the support of a
woman and children that they may not even
like anymore.
They were financially trapped and also emotionally
trapped because getting a divorce was a big
deal at that time.
It wasn't no-fault divorce.
So, the women's joke which was comparable
was “Men are like linoleum.
You could lay him right once you can walk
on him for twenty years and they support you.”
Because men too were imprisoned by that and
parenthetically so were children.
They were often the vehicle on which their
parents’ frustrations and rage were acted
out, and it wasn't until 1974 that the first
battered child legislation was passed.
I'm not saying that was an ideal family, but
that was the family then—the family of the
majority who were white of the wage-earning
male and the dependent wife and children.
Women didn't like that arrangement particularly
and so, that's why Betty Friedan's book—published
first in ‘63—The Feminine Mystique exposed
this mystique of how women who were married
and had children and the utterly fulfilling
lives of taking care of the house and kids
and husband were not fulfilled; were dissatisfied
and upset and angry and taking tranquilizers.
She was trying to introduce that problem which
took fire in the women's movement.
Therefore, you have men whose jobs are outsourced
and mechanized and robotized and you have
women who are dissatisfied and angry and have
a movement behind us.
And men are perplexed, and women are liberated,
because a woman then has to work because her
husband's job is outsourced, and he doesn't
make enough to support her.
White women joined their black sisters and
had to work outside the home and got much
less content to work inside the home after
a long day of working outside the home.
Women en masse demanded that if they were
going to share the wage-earning power of men,
they would have to adjust the men's labor
in the house as well to create some kind of
equality, and men's and women's relationships
changed radically.
That's what started that class revolution
in the household.
Women were dissatisfied for having to work
outside the home and then come home and do
all the household labor and that is still
a major problem.
According to Leonhardt of the New York Times,
the average unemployed man does less housework
than his fully employed wife.
So, women were incredibly dissatisfied with
that and basically decided this is not worth
it.
Marriage isn't worth it.
So, for the first time it's women who are
refusing marriage and it's 80% of women who
are those who initiate divorce for the first
time in our history.
These are sea changes in personal life in
America, and it's important to note them because
they are the preface to the class transformation.
Men whose wages were suddenly reduced or who
were out of jobs amassed.
Millions of men were upset and angry.
They often wanted their wives to compensate
with comfort—an extra emotional labor—to
soothe them rather than demand that they help
out.
They could no longer forbid their wives to
work outside the home in order to bolster
their manhood.
They stopped getting the bonus that they got
for being white and for being male.
Their jobs were outsourced and exported.
Women not only didn't want to compensate but
wanted help.
So that the old deal that women do the housework
and our dependence and men our wage earners
that support a family, that was over.
Now in class terms, what kind of family was
that?
Well if we're looking at it with a class perspective,
what is class?
Class answers these questions: who produces
the goods and services of the society?
Who gets to profit off of that?
Who gets the proceeds off of selling those
goods and services or giving them?
Who gets to allocate them—to decide where
they go and to whom and how are the decisions
made all together?
It’s about who's in charge, who produces,
and who receives?
Well in the household, women's labor of cooked
food, cleanliness, emotional solace, child
care, emotional care, and social connectedness
were produced by women and received by men
and their children.
When women had to leave home and work outside
the home, they didn't want that second shift.
As Arlie Hochschild’s book The Second Shift
so nicely illustrates, it was no longer acceptable.
And men were outraged because they had lost
their prime position in the labor force and
now, they were losing their primary and lordly
position at home too.
In terms of class, women produced all those
things for men and children, and those were
use-values.
They weren't things that men sold on the market;
they were things that women performed that
everyone used in a certain portion.
Women perform for themselves a certain proportion
of the food they produced, they ate a certain
portion of the cleanliness, and order in the
house they benefited from; a certain portion
of the childcare they wanted to do anyway.
However, a certain portion of the emotional
work they wanted in return—in terms of being
cared for and of the sexual labor.
They wanted to be pleased and the social connection.
They wanted other people to bring friends
and relatives in as well, so they didn't have
to do all that labor.
Men were at a loss.
They lost their bonuses, they lost their servant,
they lost their family wage and their position,
and they lost the ability to forbid their
wife to work because the family couldn't survive
on their wage alone.
That was a tremendous loss for men.
I will expand on that in the part 2 of this
podcast which is “Listen Up Leftists, There’s
a Class Revolution in the Household”.
Thank you for listening.
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