The End of Capitalism? Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits

Alex Knight, The End of Capitalism

Interesting, but I don't agree with the author's gender politics:

This brutal violence against people of color was instrumental in the spread of capitalism across the planet. It was accompanied by a terrifying assault on women in the form of the witch hunts, which saw hundreds of thousands of women tortured and burned alive, according to Silvia Federici’s provocative and necessary book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation.

The book documents how the Church and state used the witch hunts to persecute sexually rebellious women, such as those having sex out of wedlock, committing adultery, abortion or infanticide. They also targeted women who held respected professions in peasant communities, such as that of midwife, healer, or fortune teller. Federici sees this as a broad attack on women that created a new kind of patriarchal order. She explains that by the time the witch hunts came to an end in the 17th century, women in capitalist society had largely become enclosed within the prescribed roles of mother pumping out new workers, or unpaid houseworker. These are exactly the female roles that the new system of capitalism required of women, argues Federici, because women’s unpaid reproductive labor boosted capitalist profits just like the unpaid labor of the African slaves. Keeping women confined as housewives and mothers meant their labor was never valued, although this labor is necessary for the entire society to exist.

Women have pushed back against this paradigm and made dramatic gains in the past 50 years, especially in the Global North. But in the Global South the position of women has largely deteriorated as capitalism has penetrated.

This is the feminist understanding of economic history -- instead, it should be that these supposed gains are actually the exploitation of women by first inducing them, and then forcing them into the industrial workforce, which undercut the family wage. The rest of the essay is probably spot-on. What does he think the post-capitalist future will look like, if not a renewal of the domestic economy, which he doesn't respect?

The author's website.