Economic violence

Last updated

Economic Violence is a form of structural violence in which specific groups of people are deprived of critical economic resources. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist and scholar on the subject of violence, asserts that such economic impediments are among the "avoidable limitations that society places on groups of people [which] constrain them from meeting their basic needs and achieving the quality of life that would otherwise be possible." [1] As with other forms of Structural Violence, Lee notes that it is typically inflicted by institutions to the effect of exercising power over vulnerable groups.

Contents

"Economic Violence" may also refer to Economic Abuse, a form of interpersonal domestic violence.

History of Economic Violence

The emergence of economic violence as a structural force can be traced to the development of primitive accumulation in medieval Europe. Economists Adam Smith and Karl Marx identified primitive accumulation as the means through which feudal lords and owners of the means of production, such as land, natural resources, or manufacturing equipment, could accumulate wealth by withholding a portion of the profits created by workers who produced goods in the owners' privately-owned lands and factories. [2] This enabled owners to stockpile wealth and monopolize the means of production, thus granting them unprecedented control over wealth distribution and the labor force.

The viability of this economic format was contingent upon a labor force which was willing to work for low or poverty-level wages, with the majority of worker profits being returned to the owners of the means of production. To prevent the peasantry from abandoning work and subsisting off the land, a process of commons enclosure ensued across Europe. Scholar Sylvia Federici notes that the church, as the single-largest landowner in continental Europe during the 15th century, aligned itself with nobility to privatize lands and criminalize subsistence occupation by peasantries. Federici asserts that these initiatives had three primary objectives: "(a) to create a more disciplined workforce; (b) to defuse social protest; and (c) to fix workers to the jobs forced upon them." [3] Violent enforcement of this economic restructuring process was required to ensure its success, eventually culminating in the Holy Roman Inquisition which purported to wage war on heretics who opposed its social and economic reforms. [4] Without such reforms and the violent mechanisms used to administer them, Federici posits that contemporary forms of growth-oriented capitalism could not have evolved from the bounded economy of feudalism. [5]

Economic Violence as a Structural Force

Environmental scientist Vandana Shiva stresses the point that economic violence is inherent and essential to the structural integrity of capitalism. She offers contemporary examples of the forms seen in feudal Europe, such as land dispossession in India forcing farmers to abandon subsistence lifestyles for low-paying jobs under inhumane conditions. Shiva notes that these changes are justified by the Indian government and trade entities such as the World Bank through assertions that agriculture has become nonviable due to plummeting crop prices, and the idea that India "must industrialize to [achieve] economic growth." [6] Shiva challenges these claims as specious, arguing that crop prices are low due to the trade reforms themselves, and that Indian farmers are overwhelmingly opposed to being dispossessed of their lands and forced to join the workforce. She notes that land dispossession has been met with fierce resistance, which in turn has led to violent state repression. Examples include the Jaitpur Nuclear Power Park protest in 2011, in which police open fired on Landless Movement protesters, killing one and critically injuring eight others. [7]

Anthropologist David Harvey cites "considerable evidence that the transition to capitalist development was and continues to be vitally contingent upon the stance of the state." [8] In this sense, he claims that the economic reforms of feudal Europe which enabled its eventual transition to capitalism should not be understood as an isolated historic event, but as a seamless and ongoing process which spread from Europe through global colonial conquest and which continues to assert itself through contemporary neoliberal trade policies, financial entities, and state actors. He notes that infinite growth is a central tenet of capitalism, requiring an infinite supply of natural resources and human labor which must be acquired through violent force and economic coercion of those who may oppose it. He calls this process accumulation by dispossession. [9] [10]

Contemporary examples of structural economic violence include the United States' involvement in regime change in Latin America. Harvey cites the role of the CIA in the violent overthrow of democratically-elected Venezuelan president Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. According to Harvey, Pinochet was backed by the United States government in an effort to open the socialist government's oil reserves to American markets. [11] This motive is evinced through a CIA cable documented in the State Department archive:

"It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup... We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden." [12]

While economic violence may ultimately be enforced through police, military, or paramilitary action, it is not solely administered through state actors, nor is it restricted to overt physical violence. Financial and industrial interests may be responsible for business practices and policies resulting in corporate wealth aggregation at the expense of the poor, including the oil industry's apparent collusion with state militaries as seen in the CIA's military coup in Venezuela. However, it may also occur without military intervention, such as Monsanto's genetic patenting of agricultural seeds and the lawsuits it instigated globally against farmers whose crops became cross-pollinated by Monsanto products. This resulted in the economic ruin of targeted farmers, with strong evidence of a correlation between these lawsuits and the emergence of widespread farmer suicides in India. [13] Because there is no single entity with explicit control over these events, Economic Violence may best be understood as a phenomenon which is obfuscated through decentralized initiatives in which powerful actors fundamentally take advantage of preexisting inequalities present in global economic and social hierarchies.

Economic Violence and its Relationship to Capitalism

Economic orthodoxy holds that free markets represent the "will of the people;" that is, prices and production are determined by consumer demand, which in turn is purported to mediate the distribution of material needs with maximum efficiency and what Adam Smith called a "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people." [14] Central to this theory is the concept of the invisible hand, which Smith claimed would "make nearly the same distributions of the necessaries of life" between rich and poor. [15]

Critics of free market and neoliberal trade practices point to economic indicators suggesting severe wealth disparity between rich and poor in the US, such as the Pew Research Center's findings that the wealth gap between America's rich and poor families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016. [16] Heterodox economist John Munkirs' study of "138 major industries and 5 major market areas" in The Transformation of American Capitalism suggests that "industries are both structurally and functionally interdependent," tracing the development of a "series of economic planning instruments... that both allow and may even necessitate regional, national, and international private sector planning." [17] This would contradict Smith's orthodox understanding of free markets, suggesting instead that markets are governed by financial interests rather than firms responding to the collective will of consumers.

Economic Violence as Invisible Violence

Political scholar Wendy Brown writes that market rationality has the effect of "disappearing" the agency of its subjects and the credibility of their criticisms. She writes that contemporary liberalism "disavows structural powers of domination--'if women want to be engineers and Latinos want to be philosophers, nothing and no one is stopping them!'" [18] Brown claims such attitudes mask invisible, structural barriers against equality by appealing to technicalities which are decoupled from their contextual realities; i.e., there are no laws preventing women from becoming engineers, but the social and economic barriers faced by women may render the pursuit of an engineering degree socially or financially impossible.

Anthropologist David Graeber asserts that consent to violent economic structures must be contrived through bureaucratic mechanisms which serve to render their causes invisible. According to Graeber, the language of economic rationality "becomes a way of avoiding talking about what the [rationality] is actually for; that is, the ultimately irrational aims that are assumed to be the ultimate ends of human behavior." [19] Economist William M. Dugger suggests that the mystification of economic ideas, such as the "economic rationality" described by Graeber, is deployed by institutions to the effect of confusing individuals' personal interests with the interests of corporate entities. [20] In this way, economic violence may be sanitized by reinterpreting the idea of "the economy" as an impartial force of nature, rather than a series of institutions making conscious policy decisions.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Capitalism</span> Economic system based on private ownership

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The defining characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, recognition of property rights, self-interest, economic freedom, meritocracy, work ethic, consumer sovereignty, economic efficiency, limited role of government, profit motive, a financial infrastructure of money and investment that makes possible credit and debt, entrepreneurship, commodification, voluntary exchange, wage labor, production of commodities and services, and a strong emphasis on innovation and economic growth. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.

Laissez-faire is a type of economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism. As a system of thought, laissez-faire rests on the following axioms: "the individual is the basic unit in society, i.e., the standard of measurement in social calculus; the individual has a natural right to freedom; and the physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system." The original phrase was laissez faire, laissez passer, with the second part meaning "let (things) pass". It is generally attributed to Vincent de Gournay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Market anarchism</span> Branch of anarchism advocating free-market systems

Market anarchism is the branch of anarchism that advocates a free-market economic system based on voluntary interactions without the involvement of the state; a form of individualist anarchism and libertarian socialism.

Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. It defines neoliberal capitalist policies that result in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land. Such policies are visible in many western nations from the 1970s and to the present day. Harvey argues these policies are guided mainly by four practices: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Capital accumulation</span> Dynamic that motivates pursuit of profit, central tenet of capitalism

Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form of profit, rent, interest, royalties or capital gains. The aim of capital accumulation is to create new fixed and working capitals, broaden and modernize the existing ones, grow the material basis of social-cultural activities, as well as constituting the necessary resource for reserve and insurance. The process of capital accumulation forms the basis of capitalism, and is one of the defining characteristics of a capitalist economic system.

A theory of capitalism describes the essential features of capitalism and how it functions. The history of various such theories is the subject of this article.

The culture of capitalism or capitalist culture is the set of social practices, social norms, values and patterns of behavior that are attributed to the capitalist economic system in a capitalist society. Capitalist culture promotes the accumulation of capital and the sale of commodities, where individuals are primarily defined by their relationship to business and the market. The culture is composed of people who, behaving according to a set of learned rules, act as they must act in order to survive in capitalist societies.

In Marxian economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation of capital concerns the origin of capital and therefore how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of capitalism</span> Arguments against the economic system of capitalism

Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communization</span> Term describing mixing of radical anarchist and ultra-left tendencies

Communization theory refers to a tendency on the ultra-left that understands communism as a process that, in a social revolution, immediately begins to replace all capitalist social relations with communist ones. Thus it rejects the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it sees as reproducing capitalism. There exist two broad trends within communization theory: a ‘Marxist’ one and an ‘Anarchist’ one.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silvia Federici</span> Italian American scholar, teacher, and feminist activist

Silvia Federici is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984 to 1986. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade. She was also a member of the Academic Association of Africa Scholars (ACAS) and among the voices generating support for the struggles of students across the African continent and in the United States. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition. From 1979 to 2003, she was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.

The commodification of nature is an area of research within critical environmental studies that is concerned with the ways in which natural entities and processes are made exchangeable through the market, and the implications thereof.

<i>Debt: The First 5,000 Years</i> 2011 book by David Graeber

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a book by anthropologist David Graeber published in 2011. It explores the historical relationship of debt with social institutions such as barter, marriage, friendship, slavery, law, religion, war and government. It draws on the history and anthropology of a number of civilizations, large and small, from the first known records of debt from Sumer in 3500 BCE until the present. Reception of the book was mixed, with praise for Graeber's sweeping scope from earliest recorded history to the present; others criticized Debt due to the book's lack of accuracy.

Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift ownership and decision-making power from corporate shareholders and corporate managers to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, consumers, suppliers, communities and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.

In Karl Marx's critique of political economy and subsequent Marxian analyses, the capitalist mode of production refers to the systems of organizing production and distribution within capitalist societies. Private money-making in various forms preceded the development of the capitalist mode of production as such. The capitalist mode of production proper, based on wage-labour and private ownership of the means of production and on industrial technology, began to grow rapidly in Western Europe from the Industrial Revolution, later extending to most of the world.

Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences. An example of this can be found in the works of Soviet economists like Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet Political Economy.

Various feminist interpretations of witch trials in the early modern period have been made and published throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These interpretations have evolved with popular feminist ideologies, including those of the first-wave, second-wave feminism, and socialist feminist movements.

<i>Caliban and the Witch</i> 2004 book by Silvia Federici

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation is a 2004 book by Italian-American intellectual Silvia Federici. Responding to both feminist and Marxist traditions, the book offers a critical alternative to Karl Marx's theory of primitive accumulation.

References

  1. ↑ Lee, Bandy (2019). Violence: an interdisciplinary approach to causes, consequences, and cures. Hoboken (N.J.): Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN   978-1-119-24067-9.
  2. ↑ Marx, Karl (1887). "Capital Volume I" (PDF). Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  3. ↑ Federici, Sylvia (2014). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2nd ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. p. 83.
  4. ↑ Federici, Sylvia (2014). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2nd ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. p. 63.
  5. ↑ Federici, Sylvia (2014). Caliban and the Witch (2nd ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. p. 62.
  6. ↑ Ross, Alexander Reid; Shiva, Vandana; Chomsky, Noam; Rameau, Max; Boggs, Grace Lee, eds. (2014). Grabbing back: essays against the global land grab. Oakland, CA: AK Press. p. 40. ISBN   978-1-84935-194-2. OCLC   859192389.
  7. ↑ Ross, Alexander Reid, ed. (2014). Grabbing back: essays against the global land grab. Edinburgh: AK Press. p. 43. ISBN   978-1-84935-194-2.
  8. ↑ Harvey, David (2003). The new imperialism. New York: Oxford University press. p. 145. ISBN   978-0-19-926431-5.
  9. ↑ Harvey, David (2003). The new imperialism. New York: Oxford University press. p. 137. ISBN   978-0-19-926431-5.
  10. ↑ Chertkovskaya, Ekaterina; Paulsson, Alexander (2021). "Countering corporate violence: Degrowth, ecosocialism and organising beyond the destructive forces of capitalism". Organization . 28 (3): 405–425. doi: 10.1177/1350508420975344 .
  11. ↑ Harvey, David (2003). The new imperialism. New York: Oxford University press. p. 8. ISBN   978-0-19-926431-5.
  12. ↑ "154. Telegram From the Central Intelligence Agency to the Station in Chile1". US State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXI, Chile, 1969–1973. 16 October 1970. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  13. ↑ Thomas, Gigesh; De Tavernier, Johan (2017-05-11). "Farmer-suicide in India: debating the role of biotechnology". Life Sciences, Society and Policy. 13 (1): 8. doi: 10.1186/s40504-017-0052-z . ISSN   2195-7819. PMC   5427059 . PMID   28497354.
  14. ↑ Smith, Adam (1981). The Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics. p. 16. ISBN   978-0-86597-008-3.
  15. ↑ Smith, Adam (1981). The Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics. p. 22. ISBN   978-0-86597-008-3.
  16. ↑ Schaeffer, Katherine (7 February 2020). "6 facts about economic inequality in the U.S." Pew Research Center. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  17. ↑ "Transformation of American Capitalism". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  18. ↑ Brown, Wendy (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: the rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. The Wellek library lectures in critical theory. New York: Columbia university press. p. 41. ISBN   978-0-231-19384-9.
  19. ↑ Graeber, David (2016). The utopia of rules: on technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy (First Melville House paperback printing ed.). Brooklyn, NY London: Melville House Publishing. p. 39. ISBN   978-1-61219-518-6.
  20. ↑ Dugger, William M. (1988). "An Institutional Analysis of Corporate Power". Journal of Economic Issues. 22 (1): 79–111. doi:10.1080/00213624.1988.11504734. ISSN   0021-3624. JSTOR   4225958.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.