I mean, if "primitive accumulation" isn't a thing you're curious about, then her work is just gonna not make a lot of sense... but I personally find her ideas quite convincing. So I am not surprised when folks who aren't in that political discussion reject theses like those out of hand.
So, yeah, I think it's relevant. Sorry you got folks who don't seem familiar with the material responding as if they were.
The idea here is that Romans, with their pater familias, or the Confucian Chinese, for whom the father was a mini-emperor, were just preparing the way for capitalism, 2000+ years before the fact?
Marriage and home-bound women were not an invention of the late medival world. Women may well have been more free in the preceding period, but that was the exception, not the norm.
Her’s is specifically that the conditions of European feudalism created an emergent communalism that was then subjugated through witch trials and their mythology in service to the new, Capitalist ordering.
She doesn’t argue that gendered forms of subjugation have no prior context in history. And whether or not the changes in women’s social/economic conditions were “temporary” depends on a rationalization of the violence that was used to reorder society and a fallacious appeal to nature that makes little sense in terms of how Capitalism otherwise radically transformed societies.
It's really not; historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers generally point to a few key features of capitalism, and can date it quite well. Federici draws from that argument.
But point is, that question is far from settled. Especially if you consider the key features being the free market and private property, then capitalism goes far into BCE.
Also, just FYI: the term "capital" as used by economists doesn't mean money. It means ownership of means of production.
But also things like olive oil presses. There's this example of an ancient Greek philosopher Thales essentially inventing the option derivative contract by buying the rights to use oil presses before the harvest for cheap, and charging a high price to use those presses once the harvest proved to be bountiful.[1]
The dip in banking during the Dark Ages in Europe is mostly the effect of Christianity banning usury. But globally the practices didn't stop.
I'm not sure, why it's important to show that capitalism a) equates to banking, and b) is some relatively late invention of the Western civilization. Because it's not in both cases.
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[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-the-first-ever-...
This is not what "means of production" means in political economy.
>I'm not sure, why it's important to show that capitalism a) equates to banking, and b) is some relatively late invention of the Western civilization. Because it's not in both cases.
Capitalism does not equate to "banking", but it is, historically speaking, late in Western civilization.
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What do you mean? It is a late phenomenon in the Western civilization or it is equatable to banking lately in the West?
Political economy is the predecessor to economics, and is (in some places) still alive today as modern/radical political economy.
> It is the ownership and dehumanization of people. There is no choice, no labour market.
"Human capital" is excluded precisely because it is "living labour" as opposed to "dead labour" (machinery etc.) and can therefore be exploited to extract more value than what was paid. This is the same principle with both slavery and wage labour - living labour.
Besides this, twe're talking beside the point. Capitalism is no more of an abstract transhistorical concept than "the Reformation" or "the medieval period" or "the Rennaisance" are; even if ancient Roman slavery had most of the features of capitalism, it would not constitute capitalism in the sense of the period of human history where these features reach their heights. For example, Marx points out that there was production and trade in commodities in non-capitalist societies, but only in capitalist society does trade in commodities become generalized and pervasive.
I know that. What I still don't know, is whether you've meant Adam-Smith-proto-economics or LTV-inspired ideology. Because those things aren't interchangeable.
Not to mention why two schools of thought which are on their own obsolete at this point matter here.
> "Human capital" is excluded precisely because it is "living labour" as opposed to "dead labour" (machinery etc.) and can therefore be exploited to extract more value than what was paid. This is the same principle with both slavery and wage labour - living labour.
What about live stock? What about seed stock? What about IP? What about machinery that was bought under market price?
The only reason I can see why this separation might be important is if we remember that labour and employment affects aggregate demand through wages. Obviously that doesn't apply to slave labour.
> Besides this, twe're talking beside the point...
Glad you agree.
But if we redefine "capitalism" as "historic period" now, we might as well define it as a form of music and compare to Frank Zappa songs...
I mean, if we take the features of society which were dominant the most to define the historic period, we might as well call ourselves primitive humans, since out of our ca. 2 billion years of history, that was the most dominant features of our society.
All of this partitioning is arbitrary and has nothing to do with economics. It is more about setting a political narrative. But that isn't tethered to reality and we might as well be using astrology.
They're alive enough for heterodox economists and philosophers of economics, and I think that's quite important, in the same way nobody would like Google Chrome to be the only browser.
>What about live stock? What about seed stock? What about IP? What about machinery that was bought under market price?
These are complications (especially with regard to IP), but in the long run, things like buying machinery under the market price tend to even out, and there is no change in the economy as a whole, in which the capitalist's gain is the same as the machine vendor's loss. It doesn't explain the creation of new value.
>But if we redefine "capitalism" as "historic period" now, we might as well define it as a form of music and compare to Frank Zappa songs...
My point is that it's not a redefinition, that's literally the way it's defined by mainstream economists and everyone concerned in its study. It is specifically historical, not merely a set of abstract principles. Marx thought the same about communism, for that matter.
It has everything to do with economics - not only are trends and terms in economics defined and set by those looking to set a particular political narrative (accidentally or not), but political narratives are important. It's no less of a political narrative to say that ancient Roman society was "capitalist" to pull the favorite trick of the old political economists and indeed many of the neoclassicals - to convince us that capitalism really is a kind of human nature. You don't need a Marxist to claim otherwise, since there's lots of research on ancient society and their modes of production.
I think that an abstract ahistorical definition of capitalism is even less tied to reality than the anthropologist's one.
Arguably because it's their job to examine the ontology and other features of poilitical philosophy, and formerly political economy.
>But point is, that question is far from settled.
It's is settled. Read mainstream sociologists, anthropologists and historians on this topic.
Could you flesh out that argument because I'd imagine that co-operative ownership was essential to the rise of civilisation.
Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history so it doesn't make sense to pin down witch paranoia on a changing of gender roles or attitudes that never changed in the first place.
The better explanation is the one offered by the OP, that a pre-existing desire by religious authorities to root out heresy found fertile ground in the fervor of the reformation era. The result was witch hysteria.
I've generally heard the inverse statement. Compare the women in Chaucer to the women in Shakespeare, and you'll immediately notice a huge difference in behaviour.
Usually, people say that women's rights took a precipitous dive in the 1600s, with the invention of things like brutal punishments for 'nagging', and so on. Which would fit with the idea it was related to primitive accumulation.
I don't really agree with the grandparent thesis, but I think the chronology is correct.
But for reasons others give here I think this is a rather weak analysis to explain the rise of the modern patriarchal family form. And in reality in working class homes women continued to work outside the home anyways, in factories and the like.
The ideological foundation for patriarchy runs much deeper, pre-capitalist, pre-feudal, and goes back to pre-Roman times, but in the context of later Europe it was accentuated by the early Christian church, which was positively _obsessed_ with issues like abortion, pre-marital sex, and women with any kind of power.
Very high mortality rates associated with child birth meant that ability to birth and care for children used to be a highly selective trait. It's modern medicine that has made child birth and caring for children a much easier and safer endeavor, and allowed women to prioritize other roles in their life.
It's not controversial, but it's missing the point. Nobody is arguing that ever single woman in our history preceding capitalism had to prioritize child care over leadership or labor.
If you're talking about the role of women over time, you're talking about how it applies to averages. It'd be impossible to discuss this with any sort of scale if you had to reconcile every generality with it's various exceptions.
>For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21592/capitalism-witches-wom...