It is still a fact that these moves dealt a blow to women’s chances of overcoming their subordinate social position. Capitalism had presented the potential for equality, but that equality could not come to fruition within the system. In the interests of the reproduction of labour power, women were isolated and atomised in the home. Their work was seen as serving their husbands and their families. They were denied financial independence. This “ideal” was never the reality for all working class women; many always engaged in wage labour. But the ruling ideas propagated the notion of the family as sacred, projecting the stereotype of the bourgeois family on to the working class as a means of ensuring reproduction. And the stereotype was what working class women and men accepted as the “norm” even if it did not match their own personal reality. Even today, as the development of capitalism has drawn the majority of women into the labour market, this view of women has not disappeared although it has been severely eroded. Attitudes to women, and of women to themselves, have advanced enormously under the combined impact of control over contraception and entry into the workforce. The way changed material conditions have changed attitudes is itself an argument against seeing oppression as the result of some mystical male ideological hold that never changes.
(...) To suggest otherwise is to deny that material conditions can change ideas or structures of society. Sheila Rowbotham makes the same mistake when she argues that the capitalist family contains elements of feudal forms of production and so is a “mode within a mode”.19 Yet vestiges of pre-capitalist society that endure within capitalism do not remain at all the same as previously. The monarchy is a remnant of feudal society but has been so totally transformed by capitalism that it bears really little relation to its previous role. So with the family. It may look the same (although even that is dubious) but its role and functions, its foundations have been transformed by capital. Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system – a revolutionary overthrow of society – means that the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact.
(...) The Marxist theory of the family tries to explain women’s continued oppression in the context of women’s role as childbearer and rearer. Hartmann claims that Marxism is ‘sex-blind’; in other words can explain why people are in certain places but cannot explain why these people are women. Yet the theory does precisely that. It locates women’s oppression historically, or locates its continued existence in the individual responsibility for reproduction, which in turn structures the whole of women’s lives. It also puts a solution to that problem in terms of a socialism which would begin to break down both the material conditions which create women’s oppression, and the ideas which have arisen from them – ideas with which we are so familiar, about the family and childcare being natural, women in the home being natural. It can do so by switching responsibility for childcare from the individual to society as a whole. That on its own would open up a new world for millions of women and allow us to behave as equals in a new society.
(...) The feeling is that nothing can be done, so all we can do is sort out our own ideas. Consequently, arguments about changing the whole of society are replaced by exhortations to change our own lifestyles. Instead of activity we are confronted with an abstract moralism which demands that the small number of men (and women) who accept the ideas of women’s liberation purge themselves of ‘deviations’ as a substitute for changing society. The logic is that if we change the attitudes of men we can change the world – as though it were men, not capitalism, which is the problem. It is from these ideas that the theory of patriarchy has developed and which now in turn reinforces these ideas.

a history of economic thought, isaac ilych rubin (part one: mercantilism and its decline)

--- important quotes/excerpts and summary ---

(19-26): a brief history of the transition from feudalism to early capitalism in england (called the age of merchant capital by the author, standing for the period 1500-1700). insofar as this is the staple narrative against which all other history is tested, it makes sense to reconstruct this carefully.

1100s-1400s: the Later Middle Ages, characterized by a "town" or "regional" economy. Key is that "each town...comprised a single economic region, within whose confines all exchange between town and countryside took place." Rural economy involves peasants producing for their own consumption, giving some surplus to their lord as "quickrent", and selling whatever meagre portions were left on the market; also, of course, involved compulsorly labor that the feudals extracted from these peasants on their own manor. Urban economy organized into guild handicrafts--each master owns his own tools and instruments; as a member of the guild he is bound by its "strict code of rules on prices and output," even while he enjoys the monopoly that it affords him.

1500-1700: this social structure begins to break up as a result of three distinct, basic causes:

1. the rapid development of a money economy
2. the expansion of the market
3. the growing stregnth of money capital
   

colonial trade, in particular, was instrumental in bringing money capital and silver bullion to England, at this time. this caused the famous "price revolution" (which had the effect of depressing real wages for the majority of the population, but enriching the commercial bourgeoisie). peasantry begins to be displaced (and their land enclosed), as feudals look toward cash-crops, sheep, and larger/productive farmers. the guilds begin to break up under the pressure of this trade, as opportunities are sought beyond the bounds of the regional and eventually national economy (as a result of this transition, middlemen come to play an important role--these middlemen become primitive industrialists, of course, as the cottage industry takes off). an important point often elided in the apologists' history, of course, is that this nascent commercial bourgeoisie formed a ready alliance with the absolutist state, which shared their interest in undermining the authority of independent feudals.

(26): "The basic feature of mercantilist policy is that the state actively uses its powers to help implant and develop a young capitalist trade and industry and, through the use or protectionist measures, diligently defends it from foreign competition." Rubin further distinguishes between early mercantilism (which prioritizes the fiscal aims of the State--careful regulation of trade, ban on export of currency--and corresponds to period before 1600, when Britain in the main exported raw materials and lacked a native merchant class--for more, see pp 27-28) and developed mercantilism (which attempts to bolster capitalist trade and industry, defending it through protectionism).

(30): However, as "the basis of English exports shifted from raw materials (wool) to the export of finished products" (cloth) in the late 1500s and 1600s, a new merchant class is looking ever more anxiously for profitable markets in which to sell these products. "The country was now forced to purse an active colonial policy... The entire history of England from the 16th (1500s) to the 18th (1700s) centuries is a history of its struggles with these nations for commercial and colonial superiority. Its weapons in this struggle were the founding of its own colonies, commercial treaties, and wars."

(31): "And so, the money balance system, that old, outmoded set of restrictive, essentially fiscal measures, gradually gave way to the state's intervention on a broad front, as it actively fostered the growth of capitalist trade, shipping, and export industry with the aim of consolidating England's position on the world market and doing away with her foreign competitors."

(31-32): "Fully-fledged mercantlism was above all a policy of protectionism, i.e., the use of customs policies to stimulate the growth of native industry. It was protectionism which was to speed up England's transformation from an agricultural to a commercial and industrial nation. Customs duties now started to be used to further economic as well as fiscal ends. Previously, the government had, for fiscal reasons, levied duties indiscriminately on every type of export item; now, however, the state began to differentiate between raw materials and finished products. To provide English industry with cheap raw materials it required the governemtn either raised their duties or forbade their export altoghether. In the years when corn prices went up neither corn nor other agricultural products could be sent out of the country. On the other hand, when it came to finished goods, the state encouraged their export by every possible means, exempting them from duties or even offering an export subsidy... The import of wool, cotton, linen, dyestuffs, leather, and other raw materials was not only freed of customs levies, but even subsidized, and otherwise encouraged. Conversely, the import of foreign finished products was either banned or subjected to high tarriffs. Such a customs policy meant that native industry was to be shielded to the detriment of agriculture, which produced raw materials."

(32): Rubin distinguishes between mercantilist policy in England, which could only fleece agriculture so far because of the relatively speedy penetration of agriculture by the bourgeoisie, and France, where the State actively depressed trade in raw materials as part of its efforts to win the alleigance of merchants and industrialists in its fight with the feudals.

(32): Navigation Acts, issued by Cromwell in 1651.

(33): Summary of differences between early and developed mercantilism: in the former, (1) exports limited to 'staples,' (2) state exercises control over individual commercial transactions, (3) state regulates the flow of precious metals directly; in the latter, (1) policy is expansionist and colonial (aiming at maximum extension of foriegn trade and hegemony on the world market), (2) regulation is not individual but national in scale, and (3) it is understood that monetary health is acheived indirectly, by protecting the balance of trade.

(39): In the early 1800s, Rubin is saying, the bourgeoisie came into conflict with the landlords over the price of corn (the former favored a low price, because that would cheapen the price of labor-power). But in the 1600s, many English mercantilists were in complete agreement about the need for high prices of corn, since the operative problem was bringing people to work (this is the time of the maximum limit on wages, in other words).

(48-50): Thomas Mun is introduced as the first of the developed mercantilists (Hales was the represenative of the early mercantilists)--he, among other things,(1) strongly defends the carrying trade on the basis of which the East India company was making massive profits (and, in the process, losing hard currency, to the chagrin of the early mercantilists), (2) understands the link between monetary well-being and the balance of trade (so he argues that England will fix its metallic problems by crafting a strategy to export finished products, in effect).

(54-55): "The disproportionate value accorded to foreign trade by the mercantilists is to be explained not simply by its great potential for transforming products into money and attracting precious metals: the enormous profits derived from foreign trrade helped foster primitive capital accumulation by the merchant class... The process of transforming products into money was to be accompanied by the accumulation of the latter and its own conversion into profit-bearing money, that is, into capital. But for the most part, really large profits were only to be had in this period through foreign commerce, in particular through trade with the colonies... In this period the basic source of commercial profit was non-equivalent exchange. It was, then, natural that the mercantilists saw profit only in the net profit of trade, or 'profit upon alienation,' which had its source in the mark up that the merchant added to the price of the commodity."

(58): "The first person to develop a critique of the principles behind mercantilist policy was Dudley North... North is the first of the early prophets of the idea of free trade. He dedicates his tract to a discussion around two central themes: first, the restrictions which the state, in its desire to attract money into the country, has imposed upon foreign trade, and second, the legal limitation placed upon the level of interest. On both of these issues North consistently demands that the state cease its interference into economic life."

(65): Rubin takes note of a primitive labor theory of value during the age of craft production--Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught that the "value of a product depends upon the quantity of labor and the outlays expended upon its production. This, however, developed 'normatively,' and not scientifically, as the governing concern of that time was how to establish a just price for craftsmen. Beginning in the 17th century, as capitalist competition at the market congealed, these considerations ceded to a scientific appraisal of the price that was being established by supply and demand (John Locke being its pioneer)--the "process of price formation" as it occured on the market. "The normative formulation of the problem of value had given way to that of scientific theory."

(67): Similarly, as industrial capitalism became more ascendant in the 18th century, there arose a theory of price as corresponding to production costs--this was the work of James Steuart, who was one of the last mercantilists.

(69-74): William Petty, another of the last mercantilists, was developing the original insights of the labor theory of value at this time--"the magnitude of a product's value depends upon the quantity of labor expended on its production." But Petty, Rubin continues, confuses himself because of an inability to systematically distinguish between use-value and exchange-value (in the case of the former, he integrates labor and land into his argument for the source of value).

(74-75): Locke suffers from a similar confusion, though slightly inverted--for Locke, use-values are given by labor (valueless nature made valuable by labor), whereas exchange-values are determined by supply-and-demand. (Cantillon and James Steuart are insufficient in similar ways, Rubina adds)

(81): David Hume, in the 18th century, develops the "quantity theory of money" ("according to which, the value (or purchasing power) of money is determined by the latter's overall quantity"). He traces the mechanisms by which this will happen--a cascading series of consecutive increases in individual demand for various products (this introduces the temporal element into the theory, which is key).

(83-84): "Hume's theory of money is in turn a reaction against the mercantilist concept of money and a theoretical generalization fromt he price revolution of the 16th-17th centuries (when there had been a massive influx of silver and gold from America)." Yet, what is crucial, Hume doesn't understand the analytical importance of the other source of this price revolution--namely, the technological improvements in the extraction of silver/gold and the consequent fall in their value... His "nominalist conception of money as a simple token, with no value of its own but rather with a 'fictitious' value that derives from, and alters with fluctuations in the amount of money, proved to be profoundly mistaken when applied to metallic money."

(84-86): The preceding is the first revision to Hume's theory of money. The second is a complication of his understanding of causality. Hume understood that hoarded money would have no effect on prices. Rubin notes, therefore, that one obviously needs to consider what causes money to "enter circulation." One of the factors, clearly, is the price of commodities themselves. In that sense, it is not as simple as saying as "the quantity of money in circulation determines prices", is it? This was James Steuart's argument, in part: "Steuart denies that commodity prices are dependent upon the quantity of money in circulation; to the contrary, it is the quantity of money in circulation which is determined by the demands of commodity circulation, including the level of commodity prices."

(86): "The ideas that Steuart had put forward in contraposition to the quantity theory were extended in the 19th Century by Tooke, and then later on by Marx. These two theories--Hume's quantity theory, on the one hand, and Steuart's doctrine, on the other--represent in brilliant fashion the two basic tendencies in the theory of monetary circulation that even this day are vying for supremacy in economic science.

This populism helps explain not only the success of the revolution but also the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. The Republic's constitution -- with 175 clauses -- transformed these general aspirations into specific inscribed promises. It pledged to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, slums and unemployment. It also vowed to provide the population with free education, accessible medical care, decent housing, pensions, disability pay and unemployment insurance. "The government," the constitution declared, "has a legal obligation to provide the aforementioned services to every individual in the country." In short, the Islamic Republic promised to create a full-fledged welfare state -- in its proper European, rather than derogatory American, sense.

Henry Berstein, "V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward"
Journal of Peasant Studies, January 2009

And politics? The political economy in this paper is not deployed in any ‘antipeasant’ spirit or prescriptive stance on petty commodity production. Nor do any of my observations suggest withdrawing political sympathy and support for progressive struggles because they fail to satisfy the demands of an idealised (class-purist or other) model of political action. Rather, I have suggested that part of the problem with the ‘new’ agrarian question sketched is how it posits a unitary and idealised, and ostensibly world-historical, ‘subject’: ‘farmers’ or ‘peasants’ or ‘people of the land’. The point, then, is first, to recognise and, second, to be able to analyse, the contradictory sources and impulses – and typically multi-class character – of contemporary struggles over land and ways of farming that can inform a realistic and politically responsible assessment of them. This means rising to the challenges posed by a re-energised and radical agrarian populism, to engage both seriously and critically with the agrarian movements of the present time, and thereby to recover the spirit of Lenin’s ‘fresh and creative impulses’ of the early 1920s, and of Chayanov’s contributions to ‘practical theory’.

The first phase of the India’s relationship with Europe was one of mutual trade and prosperity. Until the East India Company began to establish a monopoly for itself in Indian trade, pushing out European rivals, notably the French, followed by conquest, that first phase from 1600 to 1757 was not really an unequal ‘colonial’ relationship. The East India Company had a large vested interest in promoting the export of cotton textiles and silks from India which soon began to militate against British industrial interests. Political agitation in Britain began to demand curtailment in the trading privileges of the East India Company and an end to imports of Indian textiles.
(...) The second phase of India’s relationship with Britain and the East India Company, opened with the beginning of the conquest of India in 1757. The main interest of the East India Company was still to maximise the export of Indian textiles to Britain and Europe. To that was now added the direct extraction of surplus from the Indian countryside in the form of land revenue and other taxes and impositions. Conquest and plunder joined hands with trade. In the collection of land revenue, the paternalism of Indian feudalism was replaced with the unmitigated avarice and greed of the faceless officials of the Company.
(...) [The third phase:] The East India Company had a major vested interest in the preservation and expansion of exports of Indian textiles. It obtained Indian textiles for resale in the Far East as well as Europe, where they fetched a profit of three times their cost. But there were rising pressures in England against that trade and for protection and promotion of the cotton textile industry in Britain. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that a cotton textile industry emerged in England. It is generally held that it was the development of the Manchester textile industry that triggered off the Industrial Revolution in England. As Landes pointed out, the ‘threshold’ of the industrial revolution in England was first crossed in cotton manufacture’. (Landes, 1970:82) It is little realised that the prior destruction of the Indian cotton textile industry was a necessary pre-condition for progress of the British Industry. It is a myth that is universally believed by economic historians (Marx among them) that it was the mechanisation of English textile production that killed the Indian textile industry. That was not so. Active steps had to be taken by the British government to suppress the flourishing Indian textile industry. The East India Company had a large interest in the continuation of Indian textile exports that conflicted with those of the rising British bourgeoisie and, especially, the British textile interests. Under pressure from them, the Company’s profitable trading monopoly was ended in 1813 and in 1833 it was required to stop its commercial operations altogether. It then became exclusively an organ of colonial government.

Even the "father of the GDP," Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets, recognized that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined by the GDP."

Bluntly put, he wants to warn us that there are too many angry young men outside the Euro-American world today—above all, too many Muslim young men. It is well known, of course, that world data on age cohorts reveal a higher proportion of the young—a ‘youth bulge’—in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, relative to overall population, in contrast to the higher proportion of the ‘working-age’ population in East Asia and Latin America, or the ‘age bulge’ of Japan and Europe. Heinsohn’s contribution has been to interpret this as one of the principal threats to the West in the first quarter of the 21st century. As he generously acknowledges, Heinsohn picked up this notion from the us Defense Intelligence Agency. Clinton’s dia Director, Lt-Gen Patrick Hughes, had described the ‘youth-bulge phenomenon’ as a ‘global threat to us interests’ and ‘historically, a key factor in instability’ as early as 1997. But like a good Teutonic theorist, Heinsohn saw how to embellish the threadbare empiricism of American military bureaucracy with a world-historical idea: ‘Surplus young men’—the German word is überzähligen, over-numerous—‘almost always lead to expanding bloodshed, and to the creation or destruction of empires.’
(...) On what to do about the angry young men ante portas, Heinsohn is almost as discreet as his masters in Washington and Virginia. The director of genocide research is cautious not to say that killing them off may be the cheapest, most rational solution. Instead, he refers to a us strategy of ‘win–hold–win’, which may be translated into everyday language as kill (by pre-emption)–keep (other enemies down)–kill (next enemy, before he moves). Heinsohn makes clear that the ‘war on terror’ is a long-term offensive—‘our whole life’—against waves of rebellious young men in the Islamic world. The book was written in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, of which Heinsohn was an ardent supporter, and contains its share of sombre meditations on ‘genocidal dictatorships’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In recent interventions, his perspective has become more policy-oriented—perhaps due to the fact that, on the basis of Söhne und Weltmacht, he is now a frequent guest speaker at the German Ministry of the Interior, Intelligence Service (bnd) and nato. Where possible, he argues, the angry young men should be left to kill each other, as in Somalia or Darfur. If that is not working, discreet military aid to the ‘more civilized’ side is suggested, with French arms for the Algerian regime against the Islamists a prime example. But should the angry young men become threatening to Western interests, a pre-emptive military strike will be necessary. No long-term occupations or attempts at ‘state-building’ should follow, however. These are not only costly but futile, as long as the numbers of angry young men continue to grow. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been a grave error, according to Heinsohn. He is strongly opposed to any un or eu aid to Gaza, as it merely finances Palestinians’ ‘demographic armament’. Yet his maverick views can equally disconcert established opinion from the other side—calling in the Wall Street Journal for Europeans to welcome a quarter of a million young Palestinians into their midst immediately, so as to relieve the pressure in Gaza.
(...) Like all other data, demographic statistics can become ridiculous when extrapolated from their broader social-historical context. Sweden, with virtually complete population figures going back to 1750, the oldest in the world, had a ‘youth bulge’ from the 18th century, and most likely before that, until the First World War. This has so far added nothing of any significance to our understanding of Swedish history. Demography, even when deployed in a scholarly manner, is not a moral science—which explains, in part, its attractiveness for military bureaucracies. The youth-bulge argument can tell us nothing of the oppressive character of the Shah’s regime in Iran, the terror of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the horror of the us wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the insults of the Islamophobes, the hypocrisy of capitalist liberalism, or the stifling closets of patriarchy. The conservative appeal of ideas such as Heinsohn’s is their debunking quality: you think you are protesting against this or that, but in fact you are only competing blindly for status in an overcrowded youth bulge. Yet Pentagon fears of angry young men, from whom a contingent of angry young women should not be a priori excluded, cannot simply be dismissed as irrational paranoia. This rebellious youth may indeed be a harbinger of social change; but the direction of that change will be decided by political struggle.
(...) There have been some strong arguments for a positive demography of economic development: mercantilism saw population growth as an asset, not a social problem. In the 20th century, the Danish agronomist Esther Boserup proposed a sophisticated theory of the positive significance of population growth. Its lived truth for agrarian economics is exemplified most eloquently in the Netherlands: densely populated from early on and the major pioneer of land reclamation and agricultural innovation. In recent years the Harvard economist, David Bloom, has stressed the ratio of working-age to dependent—young and old—population sectors: in this model, children and the elderly are seen as a burden, while ‘prime’ adults are an asset. Bloom and his colleagues have argued that the comparative weight of the working-age population is a major component of the East Asian economic miracle. The Irish bulge of working-age youth, together with a decline of the birth rate, has also contributed significantly to its—by European standards, extraordinary—rise of per capita income over the past two decades. The Arab world and Africa, meanwhile, can look forward to splendid working-age bulges in about thirty years’ time.
(...) The paradox of demography is that, while it informs us about human life, it also facilitates an instrumental view of human beings. Historically close to state-power concerns, it is a science of peoples, as well as of populations. Practised paradigmatically, demography, and historical demography in particular, is a demanding, impressive intellectual effort. The left’s focus on political and economic division and polarization has often missed the weight of sums and their effects. At the same time, demographic arguments have since Malthus been used as a club of raw biology, with which to batter down hopes of popular rights and coexistence. Today we are witnessing the rehabilitation of a neo-social-darwinist discourse, a demonization of extra-European youth on a circuit that feeds from cia and Pentagon strategy papers to Bremen research institutes, and from there into the liberal media, nato commands and Israeli public discourse, on the eve of the Gaza attack. In Gunnar Heinsohn, his reception and his ilk, the world is experiencing a vengeful return of ideas that flourished before 1945, with the same scorn for the uncivilized, for lesser breeds, for the rights of other peoples.