#primitive accumulation

[katchwreck]

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation."

— Karl Marx

[leftistfeminista]

UNDECLARED WAR: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Protest against gang rape, New Delhi, April 22, 2013. Photo: Xinhua/eyevine/Redux. SINCE THE BEGINNING of the feminist movement, violence ag

What are the driving forces behind this development, and what does it tell us about the transformations that are taking place in the global economy and in the social position of women? Answers to these questions have varied, but it is my objective to demonstrate that, while this new surge of violence takes different forms, a common denominator is the devaluation of women’s lives and labor that globalization promotes. In other words, the new violence against women is rooted in structural trends that are constitutive of capitalist development and state power as such, in all time periods.

Capitalist development begins with a war on women. The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and the New World led to the deaths of thousands. As I wrote in my 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, this historically unprecedented phenomenon was a central element of the process that Marx defined as primitive accumulation, for it destroyed a universe of female subjects and practices that stood in the way of the nascent system’s main requirements: the accumulation of a massive workforce and the imposition of a more constraining discipline of labor. The naming of women as witches and the persecution of them for their witchcraft paved the way for the confinement of women in Europe to unpaid domestic labor. It legitimated their subordination to men in and beyond the family. It gave the state control over their reproductive capacity, guaranteeing the creation of generations of new workers. In this way, the witch hunts constructed a specifically capitalist, patriarchal order that has continued into the present, though it has been constantly adjusted in response to women’s resistance and the changing needs of the labor market.

From the tortures and executions to which women accused of witchcraft were subjected, other women soon learned that they would have to be obedient and silent, and would have to accept hard labor and men’s abuses, in order to be socially accepted. Until the eighteenth century, those who fought back might be condemned to the “scold’s bridle,” a metal and leather contraption, also used to muzzle slaves, that enclosed the wearer’s head and, if she attempted to speak, lacerated her tongue. Gender-specific forms of violence were also perpetrated on American plantations where by the eighteenth century (per Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette’s 2015 study The American Slave Coast) masters’ sexual assaults on female slaves had turned into a systematic politics of rape, as planters attempted to replace the importation of slaves from Africa with a local breeding industry centered in Virginia.

Violence against women did not, of course, disappear with the end of the witch hunts or with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary: It was normalized. The sterilization of women of color, poor women, and women who practiced their sexuality outside marriage continued into the 1960s. Similarly, until feminists forced its recognition, rape in the family did not exist, as far as the state was concerned. As Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa pointed out in Un lavoro d’amore (The Work of Love, 1978), violence has always been present as a subtext, a possibility, in the nuclear family, because men, through their wages, have been given the power to supervise women’s unpaid domestic labor, to use women as their servants, and to punish their refusal of this work. This is why domestic violence perpetrated by men was, until recently, not considered a crime. In parallel with the state’s legitimation of parents’ right to punish their children, who must be trained in obedience so that they’ll be tractable workers, domestic violence against women was tolerated by the courts and the police as a legitimate response to women’s noncompliance in their domestic duties.

It’s essential to emphasize that violence against women is a key element in this new global war not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends, but also because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally importantly, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth. In Africa and India, for instance, until recently, women had access to communal land and devoted a good part of their workday to subsistence farming. But both communal land tenure and subsistence agriculture have come under heavy institutional attack, criticized by the World Bank as one of the causes of global poverty, the argument being that land is a “dead asset” unless it is legally registered and used as collateral to obtain bank loans with which to start some entrepreneurial activity.

[loneberry]

A sea lily marine animal on the sea floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone at a depth of 4,800m

“The deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean have rested undisturbed for millennia. But now creatures living thousands of metres beneath the surface may be confronted by new visitors: companies mining minerals key to the green energy transition.

“The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN-backed regulator, is preparing to consider the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining application as soon as July, despite many member states warning it is too soon for extraction to leap from land into water.”

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“Ecological treasures on the seabed include creatures such as the transparent ghost fish, dumbo octopus and giant sea anemone, as well as microscopic worms that scientists say could hold the key to understanding human evolution.”

“The Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, where most exploration has taken place, is ‘one of the most biodiverse sedimented marine habitats on our planet’.”

“Environmentalists say the plume of waste water emitted by deep-sea mining machinery could disturb ‘marine snow’, or carbon and nutrient-rich particles of biological matter, that usually settles on the seabed. Noise pollution may also disturb marine mammals.”

“Deep-sea ecosystems ‘take millennia to establish and can take seconds to destroy’, said Tony Worby, a marine scientist at Australian non-profit Minderoo Foundation. ‘We’re playing with fire to think we can go down to the deep sea and strip-mine it without massive repercussions.’”

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Capitalism is becoming post-terrestrial. The next stage of primitive accumulation is beginning—there’s currently a scramble for mineral resources in the deep seas…all in the name of the bullshit ideology known as “green capitalism.”

My heart breaks thinking about all the ways we abuse our precious oceans.

Rachel Carson has this to say about marine snow:

“When I think of the floor of the deep sea, the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer—a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of years, that will go on as long as there are seas and continents.

“For the sediments are the materials of the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the earth has ever seen.”

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

(Read the entire chapter “The Long Snowfall” in The Sea Around Us—it is breathtakingly beautiful.)

Now imagine, instead of that gentle silent accrual of marine snow, you have plumes of industrial waste and the infernal racket of machines in a world where so many creatures use sound to orient themselves. It makes me sick.

[mnemotechnicstoo]

Primitive Accumulation

A4 Collage cutout

[sataniccapitalist]

The “Innocence” of Early Capitalism is Another Fantastical Myth - CounterPunch.org

It is not unusual for critics of United States foreign policy, whether or not they feel free to use the term “imperialism,” to express regre

[vamchqud]

The common fate of Europe's witches and Europe's colonial subjects is further demonstrated by the growing exchange, in the course of the 17th century, between the ideology of witchcraft and the racist ideology that developed on the soil of the conquest and the slave trade. The Devil was portrayed as a black man and black people were increasingly treated like devils, so that "devil worship and diabolical interventions [became] the most widely reported aspect of the non-European societies the slave traders encountered". From Lapps to Samoyed, to the Hottentots and indoneians... there was no society" - Anthony Barker writes - "which was not labeled by some

Englishman as actively under diabolical influence". Just as in Europe, the trademark of diabolism was an abnormal lust and sexual potency. The Devil was often portrayed as possessing two penises, while tales of brutish sexual practices and inordinate fondness for music and dancing became staples in the reports of missionaries and travellers to the "New World."

16th-century representation of Caribbean Indians as devils from Tobias George Smollet [compiler], "A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages, Digested in a Chronological Series...", 1976.

According to historian Brian Easlea, this systematic exaggeration of black sexual potency betrays the anxiety that white men of property felt towards their own sexuality; presumably, white upper-class males feared the competition of the people they enslaved, whom they saw as closer to nature, because they felt sexually inadequate due to excessive doses of self-control and prudential reasoning. The definition of blackness and femleness as marks of bestiality and irrationality conformed with the exclussion of women and men in the collonies from the social contract implicit in the wage, and the consequent naturalization of their exploitation.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Primitive accumulation is not just a historical event, a period that precedes the formation of capitalism, although it is a necessary precondition. The continued separation between populations and their ability to sustain forms of social life and community that are not dependent on capitalist social relations is one that needs to be continually maintained and expanded and/or intensified. As capitalist production begins to come into its own, this separation is not only maintained, but is reproduced continually on an ever-expanding scale.

Stevphen Shukaitis, Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life

[zwischenstadt]

Therefore “Wages for Housework” activists aimed at re-uniting all the exploited, because this watchword “dismantles the whole social architecture that has been extremely powerful in keeping people divided…”13 The working class, as Autonomists put it, is not enough. Among other failings, it hardly cares about woman’s subordination. So politics must be inclusive: fighting for a “political wage” was tantamount to asking for the out-of-work, the housewife, the student, the sick or the hospital patient to be paid as the employed worker normally is. Since capitalism only gives the means to live to the minority it puts on the payroll, such a demand was meant to expose the system’s absurd and grinding logic. In fact, those who floated the idea never expected the demand to be met and, what’s more, did not want it to be. The plan was to launch an awareness campaign with the result that, as the capitalists are unwilling and unable to implement that claim, the social pressure to have it satisfied would explode the system. “With a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, I shall move the world,” Archimedes is quoted as saying. In the present case, the lever would be the all-embracing demand to wage the un-waged, and the practically unlimited proletarian mass would provide the fulcrum. The reasoning would be compelling if history functioned on the same principles as physics. The “wage the un-waged” campaign was based on the belief that revolutionaries could invent a demand that would be both felt as universal by the exploited (in the broadest sense) and deemed unacceptable by the rulers. This quest for the miracle cure is a constant of leftist politics: activists artificially graft their magic remedy onto rank-and-file struggles which usually remain unresponsive. The Italian social storm had brought with it the old obsession: how to give the exploited a push forward? how to free the locomotive of history from its rusty brake? A unifier, a force multiplier would do the trick. As it happened, activists failed to conjure this fiercely logical formula into reality. Unlike votes for women, birth control, abortion, equal job opportunity and equal pay, the “Wages for Housework” initiative was not really grounded on actual struggles, and in practice was tacked on to women’s collectives by political groups which had chosen this theme as a major part of their platform.

Gilles Dauve, Federici versus Marx

A worthwhile critique of Federici.  The biggest objection I have to her is her history rather than her theory, which I think even the author gives her too much credit for.  Most of Federici’s historical claims about the status of women are cherry-picked from outdated histories written in the early 20th-century.  There’s even a major argument in (actual) medieval historiography that women gained more rights and political autonomy in Northern Europe during the time span Federici was writing about, especially regarding control over their own work.