Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

Strategies for a New World System

Although capitalism is quite definitively the most dominant economic

system in our modern world and has been so for at least the past several

hundred years, insights from Nancy Folbre, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Maria

Mies, Immanuel Wallerstein, and many other scholars strongly indicate that it

is intensely flawed and directly responsible for all forms of systematic

oppression and anti-universalism. At its root, capitalism is an amalgam of

hierarchies that allow all peoples some space for successful mobility, but

ultimately it strictly reserves the most privileged positions for wealthy

heterosexual European men. This is largely because capitalism began its

most critical stages of growth around the era of Western imperialism as a

predatory method of production by which the success of one group of people

would only be possible through the subjugation or exploitation of another1. In

light of the aforementioned scholars observations, it becomes evident that

the most reasonable and efficient strategy to fostering social, economic, and

overall structural equity on a global scale would be to work toward a total

eradication as opposed to an attempt at reformation of capitalism as a

means of production.

1 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World

Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986. N. pag. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

While many Marxist theories based on the titular political analysts essay

Capital generally advocate for the organized resistance of the oppressed

class against a distinct bourgeoisie class of oppressors, Immanuel

Wallersteins World-Systems Analysis suggests that capitalism is so

intrinsically unsustainable that under the proper amount of unified pressure

it might actually self-liquidate. Wallersteins outline of the methods through

which quasi-monopolies dominate the financial markets explains that all of

these corporations eventually wane and are replaced, whether by their

failure to continue competing with other firms, or as a result of an

insurmountable slump in the business cycle that forces the company into

self-liquidation. As these quasi-monopolies are largely analogous to the

greater capitalist system particularly in their inequitable hierarchies, their

privileging of individualism and discouragement of altruism and their

predatory means of expansion it is reasonable to hypothesize that

capitalism can be conquered if its opponents approach it with the

understanding that it is impermanent, rather than with the assumption that it

is the only viable structure for humankind.2

2 Gibson-Graham, J. K. "Chapter 1: Strategies." The End of Capitalism (As We Knew

It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 2.
Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

This hypothesized change in perspective leads to the optimistic possibility of

working toward replacing capitalism with a more equitable and sustainable

economic model. Folbres book The Invisible Heart and Hochschilds chapter

Love and Gold both offer radical and inspiring insights into the immense

worth and potential of the ever undervalued sector of care work. Considering

that the basis of capitalism is the endless accumulation of wealth for the

sake of maximizing profits, the reproduction and sustenance of the human

workforce is critically important to the continuous production of marketable

material goods. Nevertheless, capitalist hegemony has historically led to the

exploitation of women particularly women of color after the advent of

neoliberalism by means of relegating the majority of productive labor and

care work to women, branding this labor as inherently feminine and inferior.

This results in the alienation of women from the supposedly masculine

sphere of material production, the consequential alienation of women from

the products of their labor, and ultimately the perpetuation of the

assumption that human reproduction is a natural resource that the male

inhabitants of the sphere of material labor are entitled to take advantage of

without recompense. This is one of the most significant contributing factors

to the systematic oppression of women. Therefore, the transition to a more

egalitarian world system would most assuredly necessitate a unification of

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

care work and material production as inseparable, codependent components

of an efficient economy.

In Colonization and Housewifization, Maria Mies exhibits extensive

and revolutionary evidence which indicates that the violently patriarchal and

racially hierarchical nature of capitalism is neither a coincidence nor a

natural inevitability, but rather the consequence of a complex cycle of

interconnected systems of oppression that were deliberately constructed to

secure the majority of wealth, agency, and authority for upper-class

European men alone. The inner details of this revelation combined with Luc

Boltanskis and Eve Chiapellos theory that capitalism is artificial and

extremely counterintuitive to human nature3 proves that our current world

system is intrinsically flawed, wholly irredeemable, and a pure and direct

impediment to all forms of equality. While many anti-capitalists aim to reform

this problematic system, and while increasing the number of women

occupying traditional positions of power is beneficial in the short term to the

struggle for gender equality, Miess work suggests that a complete rejection

of the existing social and economic structures is the only feasible,

sustainable option.

3 Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso,
2005. 8. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

Colonization and Housewifization delivers the highly relevant moral that

practically every element generally considered to be a marker of progress for

western society from the practice of law to the advent of modern science

was made possible through the unwilling sacrifice and violent subjugation of

women and colonized people of color. One of the most prominent examples

is the era of witch persecution that persisted in Europe from the 12th to the

14th century. Primarily, the practice was developed to simultaneously

discourage the waxing economic and sexual independence of a significant

percentage of lower class women and to sustain the government controlled

exclusively by wealthy men with the monetary fees collected from

suspected witches torture, execution, and confiscated property.

Furthermore, the trials that suspected witches were subjected to, the

physical torture they endured, and the specific processes of relentless

interrogation unambiguously informed the development of law as a distinct

field, the advancement of medicine, and the structure of the scientific

method respectively4. As European influence expanded to foreign continents,

the colonizers deliberately combined the plunder of material wealth with the

enslavement of native peoples to sustain the wealth of the upper class and

4 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on a

World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986. 87.
Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

to amplify the supremacy of white Western Europeans at the same time5. As

a result, the entire concept of advancement as we understand it today is

absolutely inalienable from the forced repression of a separate group of

people. For this reason, the objective of advancing all groups of oppressed

people will remain a complete impossibility until the current recognizable

methods of progress that humankind subscribes to are at least

problematized and ideally replaced.

Contemporary anti-capitalist theorists such as J.K. Gibson-Graham, Luc

Boltanski, and Eve Chiapello provide a considerable foundation for the theory

that the hypothetical dissolution of capitalism would not necessarily require

the proletariat uprising that Karl Marx may have envisioned. Assuming the

validity of Immanuel Wallersteins conjecture that the current capitalist world

economy simultaneously guarantees both the sovereignty of monopolizing

institutions and their eventual self-destruction6, the world economy itself as a

macrocosm of these monopolies may also be destined to self-liquidate as the

cycles of expansion and contraction become increasingly frequent and

5 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on a

World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986. 90.
Print.

6 Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. Chapter 2: The Modern World-System as a Capitalist

World-Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization. World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 27. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

ultimately conclude with an insurmountable and final stagnation 7. At this

point of speculation it becomes particularly important that one heed J. K.

Gibson-Grahams admonition that critical discourse about the state of the

current world system should problematize the idea of capitalism itself as a

social and economic descriptor8. This authors concern is that an anti-

capitalist movement that is incapable of visualizing or defining a more

progressive world-economy beyond its relationship to capitalism will

inadvertently retain the essentialist assumption that capitalism is

unquestionably standard and in due course reproduce the problematic values

of capitalism in any new model that emerges9.

Miess Colonization and Housewifization not only demonstrates through

historical context the overwhelming anti-universalism inherent in capitalist

structures, but also supports Gibson-Grahams assertion that capitalism is

not and should not be considered as the optimal pinnacle of human social

7 Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. Chapter 2: The Modern World-System as a

Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization. World-
Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 30. Print.

8 Gibson-Graham, J. K. "Chapter 1: Strategies." The End of Capitalism (As We Knew

It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 2.
Print.

9 Gibson-Graham, J. K. "Chapter 1: Strategies." The End of Capitalism (As We Knew

It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 6.
Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

evolution10. Her overview of the rise of capitalism in Europe circa the 16th

century includes numerous historical documents exposing the true motives

behind this economic movement which almost exclusively served the

interests of the privileged upper class male. This era of imperialism led most

conspicuously to the enslavement and exploitation of foreign peoples, as well

as to the normalization of racial hierarchies that privileged white colonizers,

but it also more surreptitiously led to the compounding of these racial

hierarchies with existing gender hierarchies that further weakened all

oppressed peoples. For example, as British economic and military interests in

African nations developed, formerly amicable relationships with prosperous

African merchant women were corrupted as the English took advantage of

them both economically and sexually through prostitution and other

practices, effectively promoting the belief that African women were racially

inferior. Mies asserts that the colonial process, as it advanced, brought the

women of the colonized people progressively down from a former high

position of relative power and independence to that of beastly and

degraded nature. This naturalization of colonized women is the

counterpart of the civilizing of the European women.11 This hegemony was

bolstered by the introduction of the aforementioned European women to

10 Gibson-Graham, J. K. "Chapter 1: Strategies." The End of Capitalism (As We Knew

It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 9.
Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

colonized African nations for the express purpose of marrying white

colonialists, begetting white offspring, and in sum cementing Europes

unambiguous dominance over these countries. By paradoxically elevating

white women above Black women in terms of civilization yet continuously

repressing womens economic and sexual autonomy in Europe, wealthy

white male imperialists made all classes of white women partial beneficiaries

of and accomplices to patriarchal authority12.

A similar strategy the rise of the nuclear family was employed in Europe

as the age of imperialism progressed13. The abolition of land ownership

requirements and other measures that previously restricted the possibilities

of marriage among the working classes was responsible for making lower

class men complicit in the interests of the dominant patriarchy despite the

fact that its wealth-based hierarchy also disenfranchised these men in many

ways. Working class men were nevertheless rewarded through the nuclear

family model with enhanced patriarchal authority at the expense of lower

11 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on

a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986.
95. Print.

12 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on

a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986.
100. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

class women who were increasingly confined to the domestic sphere,

alienated from the burgeoning capitalist market, further deprived of

economic agency, and devalued as producers of non-material wealth 14.

Colonizers abroad even attempted to translate this strategy to foreign

nations by promulgating the idea that gender equality was the mark of

primitive, underdeveloped societies and that men in more egalitarian

colonized countries would only be able to evolve toward civilization if they

restricted womens autonomy. This regime change was notably met with

resistance from the Burmese people who the British persuaded with limited

success to adopt militarism and male supremacy as improved ideals 15 and

the African women enslaved in the Caribbean who developed a formidable

culture of anti-maternity and defensive sexual autonomy that significantly

impacted the European plantation economy16.

14 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on

a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986.
104. Print.

15 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on

a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986.
93. Print.

16 Mies, Maria. "Colonization and Housewifization." Patriarchy and Accumulation on

a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986.
92. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

The chronicling of these various injustices adds weight to Wallersteins and

Gibson-Grahams shared contention that capitalism is far from the only or

even the ideal option for an economic system. Miess research clearly

demonstrates that capitalism was fabricated with the nefariously avaricious

intentions of financially insulating the dominant male upper class and

proliferated by brutal and deceitful means. From the very beginning of the

imperial age, capitalism thrived and flourished as multiple classes and

groups of oppressed subjects cannibalized one anothers agency in the

desperate pursuit of some form of superiority. Conversely, early capitalists

that had the luxury to continuously amass wealth for profit instead of

subsistence indefinitely reaped the maximum amounts of privilege from the

rapidly expanding economic system. Such an understanding is crucial to the

advancement of anti-capitalist discourse and the pursuit of a more equitable

and sustainable noncapitalist world system.

A large root of capitalisms many systems of oppression can be

attributed to the strict alienation of the private sphere of production and the

public sphere of production, and the consequential alienation of women from

their labor power and the products of their labor. Arlie Russell Hochschilds

Love and Gold clearly articulates the complex detrimental effect the

devaluation of care work still has on women in the contemporary first world

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

as well as the subsequent indirect consequences borne by poor women of

color largely from the global south. The valorization of individualist capitalist

labor surreptitiously restricts Western womens agency while buttressing

patriarchal hegemony because women can only pursue significant economic

autonomy in this economic system at the expense of women in lower status

groups. The outsourcing of care work may help to narrow the gap between

Western men and women, but in return it contributes to the widening rift

separating more privileged classes and races of women from the migrant

women who must sustain the Wests resources of human capital in their

stead17. It is therefore essential to the successful development of a

replacement to the capitalist world system for society to ascribe due credit

and value to care workers.

In Love and Gold, Hochschild expertly analogizes the problematic

importation to love and care to certain elements of critical economic theory

and thereby clarifies the correlation between transforming the economys

relation to care work and mitigating social systems of oppression. She likens

migrant womens maternal care to tangible resources that children in

peripheral countries are being deprived of through this neoliberal

17 "Love and Gold." Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy.
Ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Hochschild Arlie Russell. N.p.: Macmillan, 2004. 17. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

reincarnation of imperialist plunder18. The children left behind suffer in

physical and mental health as well as academic performance due to

deprivation of love as a resource. Western women participating in capitalism

to improve their economic station therefore acknowledge the indispensability

of care work to their society without considering the economys responsibility

to renewing this resource. This greatly echoes the way that male capitalists

have historically and relentlessly acted on their perceived entitlement to

appropriate the products of womens contributions to the economy without

due recompense19. This comparison ideally should dispel any uncertainty

about the unsustainability and injustice inherent in any updated world

system that would repeat the grave mistake of devaluing care work.

In the second chapter of The Invisible Heart, Folbre advocates for the

investment in development of economical niches of altruism enforced with

reciprocal bonds of trust and respect.20 This proposal represents a highly

constructive solution to the current dominant capitalist functions that reward

18 "Love and Gold." Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
Economy. Ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Hochschild Arlie Russell. N.p.: Macmillan,
2004. 22. Print.

19 Folbre, Nancy. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: New, 2001.
xx. Print.

20 Folbre, Nancy. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: New, 2001.
21. Print.

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Kaila Cauthorn WGST 80: Final Essay November 20, 2014

those with the privilege to act on individualism and relentlessly disadvantage

those who act selflessly. The resulting economy would maintain elements of

competition that are essential to the balanced allocation of limited resources,

but this competition would uniquely serve to foster the evenly distributed

cooperative efforts of communities of people rather than individuals

against one another.21

An understanding of the interconnections between hegemonic capitalist

structures and hierarchies of race, gender, wealth, and imperialism such as

that which this essay has attempted to facilitate is verifiably critical to

foundational efforts toward propagating noncapitalism. In heeding the

revelations present in World Systems Analysis and The End of Capitalism as

We Knew It, one discovers that the capitalist world system is much more

arbitrary and counterintuitive than it is widely considered to be. Only with

this understanding is it then possible to synthesize the many historical

intersections of domination and oppression on which capitalism has been

explicitly intended to thrive. Isolating the structural debasement and

exploitation of care work is arguably one of the most essential conditions for

the development of a model global economy.

21Folbre, Nancy. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: New, 2001.
31. Print.

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