Feminism and Capitalism
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 22nd, 2009 • Category: Marxist Theory, Political Economyha. Is capitalism a feminist issue? Or, is it an issue feminists should care about?
Yeah, I’m being snide. Reading Postone last week, and then diving into The Great Financial Crisis (TGFC) by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, it’s on my mind. A little. As I read TGFC, my mind sometimes wanders to a blog post by Octogalore in which she pulled one of those typical moves pulled by Milton Friedman, John Mueller, and various fans of Ayn Rand: the assertion or assumption of a universal human nature which founds capitalism as inevitable. See, we all behave this way, throughout history and in spite of great pressure not to behave this way, therefore capitalism is natural. We just can’t help ourselves, see. It just oozes out of our being, shaping the way we think and behave, no matter what. Thus, to curtail this natural behavior - a tragedy!
You can read what I mean here: http://octogalore.blogspot.com/2009/02/are-feminist-bloggers-capitalists.html
In this blogpost, the special little twist on the standby rhetorical strategy is to say something like this, “Huh. Well lookee. Feminists usually say they are opposed to capitalism, but isn’t it weird how most of them behave? Why, yanno, I think most of ‘em are probably not so anti-capitalist as they suppose. In fact, I kinda think they are actually capitalists.”
It is such luscious logical fallacy innit?
I don’t know why my mind keeps wandering to that bit of assholery. Probably because it’s just irritating that so much of the conversation consisted of such thundering ignorance. I mean, let’s mosey on over to the mouthpiece of capitalist ideology, capitalism.org where we learn that, while competition exists transhistorically and cross-culturally, there is something special about capitalism and competition, to wit:
What is the difference between competition under capitalism and competition under all other kinds of societies (collectivist societies)?
All social systems have competition, the only difference is that in capitalism, all such competition for economic power results in the creation of wealth, whereas in collectivist societies such competition for political power results in the destruction of wealth.
Under capitalism, competition is an economic process where men do not compete to put down others, but to raise their self up by creating values which are potentially unlimited, and raising their competitors up in the process.
While that blurb is so idiotic as to bring tears of hilarity to my eyes, at least on its own justification it is not so foolish as to equate competition with capitalism.
I have not done a search on that site. Does any of the lit there use “capitalistic”? Because, truly?, I despise that word. Whenever someone uses it it seems clear that they are klewless.
Meanwhile, I’ve been pondering of the cover of TGFC, which I paid little attention to at first. It was rather cartoony and it reminded me of a book I used to teach a course on citizenship, billed as “current issues in the u.s.” At the time, the book was about the spectacular rise in inequality throughout the 80s and 90s.
But I was sitting outside reading last Friday and noticed the cover credit on the back of the book, “COVER IMAGE: ‘Wall Street Bubbles: - Always the same,” Puck magazine, 1901″. It was interesting, the illustration, because it showed a bull blowing bubbles each with a name, “Inflated Values,” and a crowd of people gathered round to try and catch the bubbles of inflated value. The people are men in fancy suits, women in fancy dresses and hats, men and women in more ordinary working clothes, as well as what looks like farmers in wide-brimmed straw hats and overalls.
I sat there and thought, “Huh. Who woulda thunk: women chasing after inflated value bubbles in 1901.” I mean, not that women weren’t on the scene, engaging in such activities, but surprised to see women represented doing so.
I read Matt Taibbi’s rantage about AIG, the financial crisis, and the bailout http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print
The thing about Taibbi and a lot of commentary on the topic is that they tend to be outraged at the excess, the over-the-topness, the corruption of it all. But reading TGFC reminds you that this is the way things are. What happened isn’t an accident. It isn’t the fault of a special group of greedy, entitled bastards with no moral sense. It is the result of the capitalist system itself. The rise of and dominance of the financial markets is about the fundamental tendency of capitalist economies to reach a crisis of overproduction followed by stagnation.
As Foster and Magdoff write:
The best known work to make this argument explicitly in the 1960s was Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s 1966 book, Monopoly Capital, which argued that “the normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy is stagnation.” … The problem, as they explained it, was that the enormous productivity of the monopoly-capitalist economy, coupled with oligopolistic pricing, generated a huge and growing surplus, which went beyond the capacity of the economy to absorb it through the normal channels of consumption and investment. Effective demand remained insufficient even when civilian government spending — which was politically constrained under monopoly capital because of opposition to its intrusion in the sphere of private profits — was added in. The system therefore became dependent on the generation of larger and larger amounts of waste in the form of military spending the expansion of the sales effort, speculative finance, etc., which functioned as external stimulants boosting production. All of these stimulants, however, were bound to prove inadequate to support the economy over time, since bigger and bigger injections were needed just to keep it going.
The rise of finance markets — financialization of capital — has been the place where investors, chasing after money, have put their investments. If putting their money into productive capital investments — new businesses or revamping old ones — was risky because the market was saturated with goods and it was too difficult to make a profit — too risky — then the place for their investments increasingly became a market in money.
If Marx uncovered M-C-M’, what critical political economists in this tradition are writing about is M-M’.
More later.
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well i thought the magic, i mean Marx does a good job of illustrating it without defining it (and that may be a good thing so don’t get me wrong you ‘ll see why I am using the word in a second if I can get out of this parenthetical statement), but the magic is that capital is self-valorizing. Marx certainly was describing the result of the process of exchange. But the neoclassical economists seem to believe it’s magic, or for folks like Hayek, Rand, von Mises, and even Kant, it’s Nature.
I just put on my Facebook profile a link to Kant’s Theses concerning his idea about Universal History. And dude believes that we are guided by Nature towards a more civil society and so on. I use the essay in my Business Ethics classes. What is the market? We certainly don’t know much, do we? Isn’t this current economic “crisis” evidence (just the fact that it is un-namable should say a lot) that we don’t know what the market is; i mean, we don’t understand it. OR, as I tend to insist when speaking with business majors, that we choose to believe that all we can say about the market is that it is a natural social-organizing force and then all we can say about business is that is a series of actions we organize ourselves with the goal of making profit, ideally over a long-term period.
Kant aside, all the classic texts (see Hayek, Rand, von Mises) are not about the capitalist market economy as much as they are screeds Against Socialism. We haven’t done much to examine the science of Capital since Das Kapital.
I think the western examination of Capitalism is bound up in Religion. I mean this to be taken seriously. Christians appear only able to critically examine issues, processes, and institutions half-way. “It’s just the way it is”, is a Christian apparatus as much as it is a Capitalist ideal. Rich people are supposed to be rich, for example. And poor people are poor for a reason. And now we will begin hearing about how the market will take care of itself. Of course, the market is not A Social Organizing Force, the market IS USED as a social organizing force by People With Power.
(Oh wow, Killers of the Dream, the Chapter entitled Two Men and a Bargain.)
I think we should be asking why do we permit teachers, journalists, politicians, really anybody who has the public’s ear to insist that THIS is the way things are (supposed to be.)
I dunno why I have Rambled On, but I have been thinking about this, too. I love it when we’re in tune. Only happens with a few people I know. Anyway, great reading.
Adam Smith warns about how we’ll warp the gift of capitalism when we choose not to regulate the market because we heap unearned ambition on the wealthy and equal amounts of unearned scorn on the poor. Of course, Taibi reiterates the ideal: That’s the way things are.
After all, for IT–capitalism–to work properly, we all need to cooperate. It’s the one constant. And we are so good at convincing ourselves about the importance of the greater good. We don’t know what it is, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
For me Thoreau is instructive about this blind ambition to be somebody successful. I mean he whines about it in the beginning of Walden, about wanting to be a doctor or lawyer–you know, successful–and then he claims he ran away. I love Thoreau’s work, but there is a bit of kidding-yourself going on. I mean, he didn’t escape to Walden. He was always just right down the street from everything else. He could always take a leisurely walk into town and purchase supplies. I mean, in Brute Neighbors, you get the idea that he is doing some major beholding of nature in the woods and his shack, but all of sudden a microscope appears. There’s no microscopes in nature, dude.
We want to examine Nature or The Market but then we forget metaphysics and we get lost in revelation. What will the market reveal today? I don’t know, let’s speculate.
(btw, the longer I am in Korea, the worse my English gets. Usage is so important. So I apologize for the stunted notes above.)
gary wrote: “What will the market reveal today? I don’t know, let’s speculate.”
good one. :)
“(btw, the longer I am in Korea, the worse my English gets. Usage is so important. So I apologize for the stunted notes above.)”
I read you say this on your blog, but i didn’t see anything stunted about this or your blog. maybe it just feels like you have to work at it? i feel like that when i write after working all day. my mind: can’t get it clear enough to write sometimes.