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.
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.
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.
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.
Theorizing women's oppression - Part 1 | International Socialist Review
This is part one of a two-part series, "Theorizing women's oppression," which includes excerpts from Sharon Smith's forthcoming book, Marxism, Feminism, and Women's Liberation, to be published later this year by Haymarket Books. The first article focuses on the role of women's domestic labor as fundamental to their oppression far beyond family relations under capitalism. The second article, "Black feminism and the interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender," will appear in a future issue of the ISR.
Gender Hate Online, 2019
Focusing primarily on the European and ‘Western’ context, this chapter will address the question of online misogyny and anti-feminism from a materialist dimension. To begin with, I use the term online misogyny as an umbrella term for all kinds of negative experiences that women go through online because of their gender, ranging from harassment and name calling to doxing and rape threats. I refer to anti-feminism as a position that is explicitly against gender equality. While there is a tendency to understand these phenomena in terms of the online culture wars, I want to argue here that it may be more useful to understand them in terms of their material dimensions, and especially in terms of their political function of continuously excluding or seeking to exclude women from accessing and controlling the means of production and from full socio-economic participation in the emerging new formation, to which I refer as techno-capitalism. In pursuing this argument, I will begin with a brief overview of the culture wars and the liberal consensus and gender mainstreaming that emerged in the turn of the century. I will then examine the spread, forms and potential impact of online misogyny as emerging from various academic studies and civil society reports, arguing that viewing this as part of ongoing culture wars has created an impasse: on the one hand it underestimates the problem by locating at the level of culture and cultural values and on the other, it fails to provide any viable solution because in doing so it would run counter to the liberal values that underpin European and other Western systems. To resolve this, I propose to understand online misogyny as a question of distribution of material resources. Relying on the work of Engels (2010 [1884] and Federici (2004) I propose that online misogyny has a function similar to that of witch hunting in the turn from feudal to industrial capitalism, which used it in order to restructure society in a particular way. While witch hunts were used to violently and systematically coerce women to conform with the requirements of the then emerging industrial capitalism, online misogyny can be seen as seeking to prevent women from participating in building the forthcoming technological future. Any resolution of the digital violence to which women are subjected is likely to necessitate radical ways of redistributing power and resources rather than mere policy changes by social media corporations.
Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today
Witch-hunting did not disappear from the repertoire of the bourgeoisie with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own name and against their own members. (Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation)
Women’s Oppression through Capitalism: A Marxist Feminist Critique of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Journal of Education and Social Studies
Women have been subjected to oppression and marginalization on social-political grounds, but the economic reason is also an important one. Women are labeled physically incapable of performing tasks at the same level as males. In this context, women are confined to their homes and are not permitted to engage in paid employment outside the home. On the other hand, they are expected to carry out all aspects of domestication and, most significantly, they are responsible for the health and well-being of their husbands. In the first world, these problems have already been solved because of the various feminist movements that have resulted in women gaining equal rights. For example, on social grounds, women have been given equal rights to vote, right to properties, and a great deal of other rights. After some time had passed, women eventually gained access to equal jobs in which they were paid equally. On the other hand, women in the third world still have to fight for their rights, and ma...
A DIFFICULT WORLD EXAMINING THE ROOTS OF CAPITALISM (introductory sample)
Korstanje Maximiliano E (2015). A Difficult World: examining the roots of Capitalism. New York, Nova Science Publishers. Book Description: In this book, Maximiliano Korstanje explores the dichotomies of capitalism, continuing the legacy of Max Weber, Ulrich Beck, Richard Hofstadter and Giorgio Agamben. Undoubtedly, we are living in timing times, which merit reconsidering the current conception of sociological theories. From disasters to terrorism, Occident seems to be trapped in an illusory landscape where risk plays a crucial role in the configuration of a new tragic ethos. Although Weber did the correct thing in pointing out that predestination was a key factor in the capitalist genesis, he ignored the influence of Norse culture, which was already rooted in the thinking of Luther and Calvino. Whether in the battleground, Greeks and Romans were subject to an overt destiny which depended on individual actions (sacrifice) Norse mythology, on the other hand, offered the opposite context. The Walkyrias, Odin’s daughters, knew in advance who would be the fallen warriors (predestination). Complementary to what has been written, Korstanje established a new innovative thesis that explains why Anglo-Saxon culture was not only prone to develop a globalized capitalist system of production, but also prone to risk-perception. Combining a closed-conception of future (predestination) with a sentiment of excemptionalism given by the Reform, the US logically constructed a world of preemption that led to the dilemma of “preventive attack”. The role of government in posing threats to control the internal workforce, as well as how the principle of exception triggers fear, are fascinating themes discussed in this text. (Imprint: Nova)
2021
Globalization is also an external war that is waged against women’s bodies, rights, autonomies and livelihood through the continuation of dispossession and violence. It must be emphasized that the concepts of violence and dispossession are not limited to seen, forceful, physical activities that are exerted towards less powerful groups by more dominant groups but the concepts are also unseen and institutionalized into socio-cultural, economic and political spaces.
Feminism in the Logic of Late Capitalism
2017
This essay considers how Feminism might become a force for radical change as construed through two perspectives: the Marxist vision of Kathi Weeks and the Hegelian logic of Slavoj Žižek. I begin by enumerating the antinomies of late capitalism and the ways it has subsumed our identities and commodified our social relations. I then elucidate how Weeks’ Marxist utopia (her demands of basic income and less work) require a “hopeful subject” and positive freedom, while Zizek’s Hegelian logic and vision of a communist future require the negativity of freedom, a divided subject, and hopelessness. Weeks’ feminism posits a direct opposition to capitalism, setting boundaries to its external limits, while Zizek’s Hegelian logic would require the reconfiguration of capitalism’s internal limits. Finally, I propose how a feminism geared towards its own extinction might make a Marxian move by way of Hegelian logic, through the consideration of Fredric Jameson’s “An American Utopia.”
The Institutionalized Inequality of the Global Markets: A Socialist Eco-Feminist Analysis
Introductory note: This paper is an earlier version--now including a number of updates and revisions-- of what became a chapter in my 2010 book "Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues," Broadview. It's my view that these themes are more urgently in need of address than ever, and I will explore them in a slightly different context in my new book, "A Manifesto for an Eco-Feminist Post-Humanism," (Lexington, forthcoming 2016). Abstract: While Alison Jaggar’s contribution to the feminist analysis of heteropatriarchal capitalism offers key insight into the history and mechanisms of the oppressive economic conditions faced daily by millions of women, it may not be as well suited to the issues confronting contemporary theorists and activists. I think this is so for at least four reasons: First, while corporate exploitation, the export of Western standards of consumer culture, and the continuing exhaustion of environmental resources are hardly new to the 21st century, each in its own way has been transformed by the globalizing of labor in tandem with the advances of technology or, as Donna Haraway puts it, technoscience. Analyses of the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy must, then, include these factors particularly as they bear on the rapidly changing conditions of developing world women, and as the economic gap between Western and developing nations grows ever wider. Second, however perceptive, few writers in Jaggar’s 1980’s were in a position to foresee the consequences of the globalized market, and hence of the virtually exponential growth of the Westernizing culture industry into the 21st century. More than merely an instrument for the export of Western values, and revolutionized by the Internet, the culture industry appropriates the value associated with creative or praxis labor and transforms it into the desire to imitate the popular, well heeled, sexy, and powerful. Given the commodifying of sexuality and reproduction already deeply rooted in Western culture, it’s not surprising that the impact of the culture industry on women and girls is both disproportionately exploitive, and—contrary to the Internet’s liberating potential—that it may actually reinforce patriarchal institutions including the traditional family, prostitution, pornography, and masculinist (male-centered) religion. Third, although there’s little doubt that Western values permeate the culture industry, it would be naïve to suggest that these are the only values whose influence is felt at this scale. As the recent resurgence of religiously motivated terrorism amply illustrates, other systems of value—even systems purportedly anti-capitalist—have had significant impact on the ways in which Westerners understand their increasingly fragile cultural hegemony. Terrorism, moreover, may be “merely” the most extreme example of the possible effects of alternate and competing systems of value. As Chandra Mohanty argues in Feminism Without Borders, a number of other factors have begun to play crucial roles within the global exchange not only of currency and labor, but also of power realized in other (though enduringly patriarchal and racist) ways.
'Domestication " is the turning of Feminism into a discourse which, rather than challenging and transforming the existing status quo, and particularly the capitalistic mode of production and the whole of practices and ideologies connected to this latter, serves as its support. Why and with what results, such a turning towards Domestication has taken place? This article contributes to this largely debated issue by proposing to think that the Domestication of Feminism is linked to the domination of " Gender " as an analytical and political tool. Words (including footnotes): 5683 1. 'Domesticated' Feminism: roots and outcomes. Domestic is the dog: not only a friendly inhabitant, but the most fierce defender of the master's house, very aggressive in case of need. Accordingly, 'Domestication " is the turning of Feminism into a discourse which, instead of challenging and transforming the existing status quo, and particularly the capitalistic mode of production and the whole of practices and ideologies connected to this latter, serves as it support. However, nor the whole of Feminism is 'domesticated, neither is 'domestication' its destiny or fate. In its history however, Feminism has bore as well the creative mark of un-domestication, which means a profound and constant critique to the status quo. Why then, and with what results, such a turning towards Domestication has taken place? To this largely debated issue these pages modestly contribute by proposing to think that the Domestication of Feminism is linked to the domination of Gender as an analytical and political tool. Thinking like so implies that the bifurcation between domesticated and 'un-domesticable' Feminism(s) corresponds to two conflicting ways of interpreting the relationship between the 'Female' and the 'Natural'. And explains why Domestication results into a violent attack against the idea that being a women is a valuable and positive chance for humans. Due to the link between the female body-maternal, fertile-and reproduction, the relationship between Women and Nature is constitutively inherent to the capitalist structuring of our social world. Furthermore it is – I contend-at the core of the fork between un-political, domesticated Feminism, on the one hand, and un-domesticable political Feminism(s), on the other hand. The former, raising the shield of gender neutrality against the idea itself that humans are differently sexed beings, have aimed to hinder, conceal and extinguish the subversive force of the discourse about nature 1. 'Gender' is indeed nothing but the stipulation – typically 1 As a jurist, I am interested in the parallel between the trajectory of Feminism as discourse against Nature and the disappearance of the references to Nature in the juridical discourse. As the Italian Philosopher of Law Giuseppe Capograssi once wrote, if 'Nature' is the victim of modernity, and of the correspondent rational and formalistic understandings of law, it is because that word has historically played as the argumentative and imaginative tool bridging the ideas of personal liberty and societal autonomy (G.
Criminalisation and the Violence(s) of the State: Criminalising Men, Punishing Women
International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy
This special issue brings together a group of international researchers at different career stages with one common interest: the extent to which recourse to the criminal law as a means of addressing men’s violence(s) serves the interests of women’s safety. It further explores Goodmark’s (2018) criminalisation thesis across different vital topics to consider how and under what conditions the criminalisation of men results in the punishment of women. In bringing together these different substantive areas of investigation (from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War to debates concerning the criminalisation of prostitution, migration and the unintended consequences of criminalising coercive control), this collection provides a deeper analysis of the meaning of both criminalisation and punishment for women whose lives become entangled in and by this recourse to law.