Family values capitalism, the marriage contract, and...the blockchain?

contracts all the way down

“Family values” is Melinda Cooper’s term for the contemporary alliance between American neoliberals and neoconservatives over private family responsibility: for different reasons, both sides agree that the nuclear family is the mechanism for organizing society and making sure everyone’s needs are met. In her new piece in Dissent, Cooper argues that this family values ideology has motivated “a shift in the center of gravity of American capitalism, which has elevated the once marginal figure of the family-owned business to a central place in economic life at every scale.” From ma and pa shops to huge organizations like the Trump Org, the DeVos-owned Amway, or Koch Industries, the model of the private family business is coming to eclipse the publicly-traded megacorporation like GM or Amazon. As Cooper puts it, “if the large publicly listed corporation was still the uncontested reference point for American business at the turn of the millennium, it is now being increasingly challenged by a style of family-based capitalism whose reach extends from the smallest to the most grandiose household production units.” In its march to eviscerate the public in favor of private family responsibility, family values-ism must eliminate even the relative publicness of the stock market.

Traditionally the backbones of private industry, publicly-traded corporations don’t meet the family-values definition of “private” because their governance structure doesn’t take the form of the patriarchal nuclear family. Instead, they have boards of directors, shareholders, etc., and none of these relations are governed by the contractual rules of legitimate inheritance. In other words, family values capitalism wants to replace the traditional contractual relations among businesses and employees with contractual relations among family units grounded in the patriarchal marriage contract. Family values capitalism structures private industry as “network[s] of subcontracted family businesses”--the family unit is grounded in the marriage contract, and family values capitalism uses that contract as a model for the contractual relations among family businesses. For example, as Cooper explains, these networks are “more akin to a Russian doll than a pyramid scheme…[where] dynasties subcontracts [their] labor to a circle of smaller family entities, who in turn preside over their own family tree of progressively smaller contractors.” The marriage contract both creates a relation of patriarchal subordination and legitimates the transfer of wealth and property. In family values capitalism, such contracts create relations of subordination between family businesses themselves and between individual businesses and their employees, and establish routes for the legitimate transfer of wealth. Because they do not structure wealth and property ownership in terms of patrilineal inheritance, publicly traded corporations thus appear to be illegitimate forms of wealth distribution. 

Collapsing the realm of private industry into the domestic private sphere, family values capitalism extends the patriarchal authority the marriage/sexual contract grants men over women to all contractual relations. For example, as Carole Pateman explains, in the traditional employment contract the disjunction between the realm of private business and the domestic private sphere, “the worker who is subordinate to the employer is also master at home” (142). The traditional family wage earner may be subordinate to his boss, but in the domestic sphere he is king--and, importantly, the fact that the employee supposedly has freedom/dominion at home is used to disguise the coercive character of the employment contract behind the idea that the employee freely entered that contract. So, traditionally, the separation between the corporate private and the domestic private was what enabled the fiction that contractual relations in private business are really free. But as Cooper points out, the family values biz model collapses these two spheres together so that “the worker is subject to the same kind of paternalist authority as is next-of-kin.” Folding the corporate private into the domestic private, family values capitalism eliminates an ideological buffer and says the quiet part loud: this is a (white) patriarchal private property relation.

Though this collapsing of the two private spheres into one another might seem like a radical change, it’s really an intensification of an already-established practice. According to Pateman, the “private business vs public state” formulation re-creates the patriarchal, gendered division between the domestic sphere and civil society as a class-based distinction between two different entities in civil society. As she explains, “the private [domestic] sphere is ‘forgotten’ so that the ‘private’ shifts to the civil world and the CLASS division between private and public. The division is then made within the ‘civil’ realm itself, between the private, capitalist economy or private enterprise and the public or political state” (12). Liberalism establishes civil society as a realm of equality by separating it out from “nature,” which it views as a realm of inherent inequality: everybody is (nominally) equal before the law, even though people are of different races, genders, intelligences, heights, strengths, etc. And, as Pateman explains, “the private, womanly sphere (natural) and the public, masculine sphere (civil) are opposed but gain their meaning from each other, and the meaning of the civil freedom of public life is thrown into relief when counterposed to the natural subjection that characterizes the private realm” (11). The public sphere definitively lacks the “natural subjection” inherent in the private/domestic sphere. So while the original distinction is between the public sphere and the domestic private, Pateman argues that the “private business vs public state” rhetoric common in the 20th century obscures the domestic private by re-framing the private sphere as private markets rather than the private family. As Pateman puts it, “the antinomy of private/public is another expression of natural/civil and women/men” (11), just framed as a classed relation to markets rather than a gendered relation to personhood.

In its drive to replace publicly traded companies with what Cooper calls a “clientelist symbiosis of households,” family values capitalism just rolls the traditional re-framing of “the private” as a classed market relation back to its original formulation as a gendered domestic relation. That’s what I mean by “it says the quiet part loud”: the public/private split was a ruse designed to present civil society as a place where everyone was equal, and family values capitalism just gets rid of the ruse and explicitly frames contract as a mechanism for creating (white) patriarchal forms of inequality and subordination.

Understood in this light, a lot of recent events make a lot of sense: the imminent collapse of Roe v. Wade, the right’s increasing slide into authoritarianism, the rise of celebs that trade on their masculinity (think of that podcaster with the shaved head and the recently retired Canadian psychology professor, etc.), all of these are plausibly related to a shift towards a form of capitalism that naturalizes and valorizes patriarchal authority and patriarchal relations of subordination. On the neoliberal side of the family values capitalism coin, it’s still theoretically possible for women to girlboss their way to the top and for queer people to participate in this racket, but only if they are wealthy (and white) enough to access things like marriage, child care, and the other accoutrements of patriarchal privilege.

In Pateman’s 1988 book, the employment contract and the marriage contract are two similar but irreducible ways of misrepresenting coerced relations of subordination as freely-chosen relations. The rise of family values capitalism requires us to re-think Pateman’s classic analysis: what was traditionally the difference between men’s classed subordination (employment) and women’s gendered subordination (marriage) is now a form of gendered subordination wherein gender is even more fundamentally than before a racialized private property relation--structurally, ‘masculine” and “feminine” are statuses occupied by people of all genders, depending on their relationship to private familial wealth.

There’s a lot more to think about along those lines…but that’s for a different post or venue. 

Another thing worth thinking about--and I would love to read whatever’s already been written about this, if it exists--is the relationship between family values capitalism’s “contracts all the way down” and, uh, the blockchain. Both seem to be different aspects of the same move: remaking all relations as contracts among private individuals/families working outside the state’s purview. I know there’s already writing about blockchain/crypto’s reactionary politics, but if my intuition here about the relationship between blockchain and family values capitalism is right, thinking (and critiquing) them together further illuminates what’s bad about blockchain and why.