The War on Women, Coercion, and Capitalism: From the Transition to Contemporary Times (original) (raw)

Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation

2020

This chapter connects witch hunts with the emerging capitalist economy. In this chapter we first take up the connections of indigenous peoples and peasants in developing economies with the market economy. This is followed by an analysis of how witch persecutions play out within the context of struggles over the change from subsistence to accumulative economies. At different points we make comparisons with situations in early modern Europe to show where similar processes of change and witch persecutions were taking place. Looking at witch persecutions in contemporary indigenous and peasant societies and comparing them with witch hunts in early modern Europe brings out one important factor in common between these contexts-they are both situations of structural change and intense conflict. There are both those who opposed the changes from subsistence to accumulative economies and those who were in favour of such change. In this context, witch persecutions and hunting can take on the shape of both promoting accumulation or opposing accumulation. There are different moral economies, or even cultures, in conflict over here, and witch persecutions can play both brutal levelling and accumulating roles.

The Violence of Capitalist Relations

Storica Special Issue on Jairus Banaji, 2023

This article builds upon Banaji’s recovery of the unfree- dom of capitalist relations in conditions of debt bondage to foreground the violence inherent in capitalism, violence that is not "extra-economic" but fundamental to economic life. This article also examines how reintegrating violence into our understanding of capitalist relations can help us understand how caste relations are coded or "framed out" of what is called "the economy" in capitalist societies.

Rethinking the Archaeology of Capitalism: Coercion, Violence, and the Politics of Accumulation

Historical Archaeology (Special Issue), 2019

Long an analytical staple of historical archaeology, capitalism in recent years has found itself under renewed scrutiny, due in part to the repercussions of the 2008 global economic crisis. Questions about the failings of the “free markets” self-regulation and the proliferation of predatory practices and value manipulation instruments fostered discussions about what in fact the “true” nature of capitalism was and whether such practices drawing on extra-economic power, violence and various forms of coercion in the name of unequal accumulation were aberrational or foundational. A space emerges within these discussions for a critical rethinking of Capitalism through the emerging contributions of feminist, new materialist, Actor-Network and (post)marxist perspectives that emphasize the diverse mechanisms and practices generative of the effects attributed variously to an abstract, monolithic, epoch-defining capitalist system. The approaches articulated in this issue push for a move away from limiting and inconsistent definitions of capitalism, and towards a more supple suite of analytical threads for the cross-context analysis of diverse assemblages, with diverse histories of emergence, that generate parallel capitalist effects. In turn, the contributors to this issue illustrate the broader relevance of the contributions of historical archaeologies of capitalism to other archaeological contexts and subdisciplines by providing common ground for the comparative analysis of contexts generative of similar human/nonhuman experiences and effects that have remained categorically segregated in our analyses.

Anti-Feminist Backlash and Violence against Women Worldwide

Although globalization, through the communications revolution and international law, brings the promise of progressive social change, the concern of this paper is with the backlash against women's increasing emancipation, a backlash that is evidenced in the United States through making a mockery of women's bid for equality by turning the principles against some women whose lives are troubled while rewarding others. Meanwhile across the world the victimization of women, personal and cultural, is taking place in both democratic and totalitarian regimes. Two related forms of backlash are institutional and personal. That forces from the global market and the corporate media help fuel this backlash is a major contention of this paper.

Global Social Fascism Violence, Law and Twenty-First Century Plunder

The intellectual authors of neoliberalism were aware of the lethal implications of what they advocated. For ‘the market’ to work, the state was to refuse protection to those unable to secure their subsistence, while dissidents were to be repressed. What has received less attention is how deadly neoliberal reforms increasing come wrapped in social, legal and humanistic rhetoric. We see this not only in ‘social’ and ‘legal’ rationales for tearing away safety nets in Europe’s former social democratic heartlands, but also in the ‘pro-poor’ emphasis of contemporary development discourse. This includes contexts where colonial legacies have facilitated extreme armed violence in service of corporate plunder. To expose these dynamics, I juxtapose the everyday violence of austerity in Britain with neoliberal restructuring in Colombia. The latter is instructive precisely because, in tandem with widespread state-backed terror, Colombia has held fast to the language and institutions of liberal democracy. It has, as a result, prefigured the subtle authoritarian tendencies now increasingly prominent in European states. The reconceptualization of law, rights and social policy that has accompanied neoliberal globalization is deeply fascistic. Authoritarian state power is harnessed to the power of transnational capital, often accompanied by nationalistic and racist ideologies that legitimize refusal of protection and repression, enabling spiraling inequality. Nevertheless, extending Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s discussion of ‘social fascism’, I suggest that widespread appeal to the ‘social’ benefits and ‘legal necessity’ of lethal economic policies marks a significant and Orwellian shift. Not only are democratic forces suppressed: the very meanings of democracy, rights, law and ethics are being reshaped, drastically inhibiting means of challenging corporate power.

Gender, Capitalism and Globalization

Feminist scholars have been producing research and theoretical reflections on women, gender, and global transformations at least since 1970, the date of publication of Ester Boserup's ground-breaking Woman's Role in Economic Development. In this essay, I discuss some aspects of the mostly Western feminist scholarship on gender and globalization to provide a context for the papers in this volume. Although I do not attempt to summarize what is now a very large literature, 1 I briefly look at how gender is implicated in globalization processes, asking whether and how these processes are gendered and what gendered effects result from these processes.