Status-Subordination and Economic Power in Market Societies
Central to the new political economy is a commitment to understanding the interaction between economic inequality and other dimensions of domination, most prominently race, gender, and other forms of atavistic statussubordination.
As Dawson's Blacks in and out of the Left made eminently clear, the interaction between activists and scholars focused on racism and racial subordination and those focused on capitalism and economic exploitation has never been easy.64 Nor will any reader of the debates between Butler and Fraser,65 or of Williams's critique of how professional- and managerial-class feminists misunderstand the conditions and priorities of working-c lass women,66 miss the challenges associated with producing a gender-class narrative. And yet, as the section on intellectual antecedents made clear, there is a century of rich work aimed at exploring the articulation of these different dimensions of exploitation and subordination, seeking, in the words of the Combahee River Collective, to develop an “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” referring to “racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression.”67 I will not presume to offer an original intervention into these long-standing and rich debates. Rather, I sketch how such an integrated analysis could be used within the political economy model I outline here—built and synthesized from the framework that Du Bois, Hall, and Fields developed for race and racism, Davis for the intersection of racism and sexism, and Fraser and Folbre for gender—and extending it to immigration, the primary target of resurgent ethnonationalism in democratic market societies.Recall that we start from the premise that actors and organizations are always embedded in a material and social context: social relations inherited from prior rounds of political, social, and economic struggle.
At any given moment, therefore, there will be some people in society who occupy positions of status-subordination (borrowing, following Fraser, Weber's distinction between class (economically derived social hierarchy) and status (social hierarchy derived from noneconomic relations)). Status-subordinated people will have fewer and weaker political allies, and hence they will be more available for aggressive exploitation. This is, for example, Fields's explanation of why Black workers, wrenched from their social sources of counterpower, were unable to resist permanent enslavement in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, as compared to English indentured servants whose position was anchored in the successful battles against serfdom in prior centuries in England. Status- subordinated people will have fewer alternatives and fewer kinship resources to fall back on, and observe lower benchmark wages among peers, and will therefore have fewer means to resist exploitative work conditions and lower pay. Women in particular, on the background of patriarchal norms, are forced to accept positions of lower commitment and greater “flexibility” in market relations in order to fulfill embedded expectations for care and reproduction work in the home. As Folbre explained, love and an ethic of care need not be seen as false consciousness, but their articulation in contemporary society has shaped conflict and cooperation in patriarchal market societies.68 As Pinchbeck and Berg showed, this was as true for the different pathways of girls into service and boys into apprenticeships at the dawn of the modern era as it is for today's gender imbalance in “alternative work arrangements” typical of the fissured workplace.69Every major transformation in the history of capitalism has in large part depended on harnessing status-subordinated workers to occupy the new positions that higher-status workers resisted. In Britain, before the eighteenth century Parliamentary Enclosures men were already heavily engaged in wage labor in agriculture, but women produced roughly half of household budget relying on commons-based production for both subsistence and income: dairying, harvesting wood and peat for energy, gleaning, and similar direct production for the household.
Enclosure—the systematic use of lobbying to extinguish the legal use rights of the majority of workers in order to create exclusive rights in the hands of a minority of landowners—left women without productive opportunities and unmarried women and widows destitute. It rendered women the first fully proletarianized workforce.70 The first industrial revolution, driven by water-powered cotton textile manufacture, harnessed them. Women and children became the majority of the workforce in the new factories of the 1790s, usually operating in units managed through patriarchal authority, often violently, by a male spinner, sometimes a relative.71 As Berg showed, almost all labor productivity growth in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, the world's emerging industrial power, came from industries where women's work predominated. Men were better able to resist the exploitative working conditions in the factories and remained primarily in craft manufacturing sectors. In the American South, the surge in British industrial demand for raw cotton, coupled with Whitney's cotton gin, drove a slew of legal changes designed to deepen enslavement of Black workers, make manumission harder and domestic slave trade from the border states to the empire of cotton easier, while reinforcing status degradation of free Black Americans toward the ultimate denial of humanity in Dred ScottJ2 In New England after 1820, the American factory system depended on girls and young women for labor. When these women began to organize unions in the 1830s, they were soon replaced by Irish immigrants who did not have the options to go back to the farm, or the political solidarity built over two decades of work in the mills.73The classic case of the spinning mule offers an example of how technology too, like institutions and ideology, was oriented toward harnessing status- subordinated labor as a core workforce.74 Early mechanization of textile spinning took “women's work” in the household and turned it into men's work, because of the physical strength necessary to operate the early spinning mules and a perception that men have the skill to maintain and repair the mule and manage the several women and children employed in supporting roles.
By the 1790s, male mule spinners in England had organized into craft unions, and by 1810 they had become the most powerful craft union in England. Following strikes that decade, firms invested substantially to develop a “self-acting” mule—the first automated spinning mule. In 1834, a factory commissioner wrote of the self-acting mule that “[t]he introduction of this invention will eventually give a death blow to the Spinners' Union.” Andrew Ure wrote in his 1835 Philosophy OfManufactures that the invention of the selfacting mule “would put an end... to the folly of trades unions,” asserting that “when capital enlists science to her service, the refractory hand of labour will be taught docility.” The goal of mechanization was to displace unionized adult men with teenagers and women, whose pay by convention at the time was two-thirds to one-half that of men, and whom the firms believed were more docile workers, less likely to organize. A second dimension of investment was the configuration of spinning mules. In Glasgow, the second largest center of cotton mills in Britain, a relatively tight-knit group of industrialists was able to circumvent the unions by replacing larger mules, usually operated by men, with rows of smaller mules operated by nonunionized women and supervised by a male supervisor. The Lowell Mills, set up in the 1820s without a generation of males organizing to contend with, immediately hired girls and young women working rows of smaller mules.The pattern repeated itself throughout the history of industrial and postindustrial capitalism. In the US, the transition from cotton and water to coal, iron, and steam depended on Irish and German immigrants. Irish immigrants built the railroads from the East. Chinese workers built the railroads from the West.75 Wages for these immigrants were below those of native-born workers and exhibited lower growth.76 The next transition to high mechanization and unskilled labor associated with the second industrial divide depended on the mass migration from Southern Europe (Italians) and Eastern Europe (over 2 million Jews escaping pogroms in Russia).
As World War I and fear of communism led to immigration exclusions, the pull of the new assembly lines for status-subordinated workers combined with the push of the second Klan's terrorism drove the Great Migration. This mass internal migration, in turn, triggered sustained efforts to maintain a racial caste hierarchy in the new urban, industrial setting. Be it zoning and restrictive covenants, racialized denial of access to the foundations of middle-class wealth through redlining in federal mortgage insurance, exclusion of historically Black occupations from labor protections, discriminatory denial of access to postwar educational opportunities, or weakening labor through the Taft-Hartley Act and the power it gave states to pass “right to work” laws, taken up throughout the South, anti-Black racial ideology and institutionalized status-subordination from the 1920s through the 1950s continued to play a central role in maintaining status-hierarchy and depressing the wages of Black workers throughout the “Golden Age of Capitalism.”77 And, during and after World War II until immigration reform in 1965, the Mexican bra- ceros program filled the need for status-subordinated workers employed at substandard conditions in agriculture.78During the neoliberal transformation, status-subordination continued to play a major role in weakening labor and providing the glue for the new coalitions that shaped the divergent patterns of liberalization across various market societies. In the United States, women and immigrants, newly admitted after 1965, formed the primary workforce of the shift to the postindustrial services economy. Labor force participation of married women increased dramatically in response to the successes of the women's movement, but male- dominated unionized workplaces in industrial sectors were blocked and experienced decline. Instead, women entered the expanding services industries at lower wages and with lower security, packaged as flexibility for workers already differentially burdened with care work and reproduction.
At the same time, loose immigration enforcement contributed to a significant inflow of undocumented immigrants who filled the lowest rungs of agriculture and services with a steady flow of legally insecure workers with the least bargaining power. Both put downward pressure on wages and terms of employment in services. In Europe, as work by Esping-Andersen and Thelen suggests, patterns of integration of women and immigrants into the workforce during this transition were central to the divergence among the three major families of market democracies. By contrast to the broad insecurity that marked American labor, countries governed by coalitions anchored by Christian Democrats focused on maintaining the unionized male family wage in the industrial core of the economy and used Turkish and North African guest workers to create a dualized market system, one with a strong, protected native male industrial workforce and a periphery of insecure immigrant labor providing cheap services to that core. The Nordic social democracies, by contrast, adopted universal care programs that increased public-sector unionized jobs, filled mostly by women joining the paid workforce, and provided an expanded political foundation for strong unions. While work patterns were gendered, the class coalition strengthened and underwrote strong economic participation and political power for women by comparison to the other two models of market society.Arguably, the most important political role that anti-Black racism in America played during this period was as the foundation of the new Republican coalition that Organized Business funded. President Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, his “law and order” campaign, and the war on drugs legitimated white Southern backlash against the civil rights movement and made the GOP the new home for white identity voters. President Reagan's “Welfare Queen” bogeyman revived the racialized rejection of social safety net programs and underwrote the political coalition that eroded social welfare protection and rendered all workers more vulnerable79 and less able to bargain. Combined with the newly emerging religious political identity of the fundamentalist backlash against the women's and gay rights movements in the 1970s, dog whistle racial politics and patriarchal religious fundamentalism continued to bring out the voting base in support of policies that directly contributed to the economic devastation of those same voters. These also formed a new media market that made the outrage industry of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News big business, and the propaganda feedback loop these developments created ultimately transformed the dog whistle of Nixon, Reagan, and former presidents George H. W. Bush and, later, George W. Bush into Donald Trump's bullhorn.80
Distinct from the wrongs of misrecognition, we can say that atavistic status-subordination plays two primary economic functions in the political economy of market societies. First, it is deployed to divide and conquer efforts to mobilize economic or political labor power. Second, it is deployed to harness labor at lower wages and under more insecure and dominated terms of employment than higher-status workers are willing to accept at the time. This pattern is sustained during periods of stability but plays a particularly critical role at moments of transformation, when status-subordinated workers and animus toward them from more politically powerful workers were harnessed to introduce new institutions and technologies that shaped the social relations of production in ways detrimental to labor power in the long term.