WEEK 4 NOTES

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

What is capitalism?

● Our basic human needs are a need for food and shelter, which all comes from the land
● Marx says Some people assert ownership over the land and resources
● Using the ideas of private property
● Under capitalism some people have exploited ownership over the land,
● There is an unequal appreciation of workers labour in comparison to land ownership
● There is constant tension between landowners and labourers
● Asserting ownership over you labour
● Those who are asserting the means of production they are constantly trying to maximize
wealth
● Not everyone is seeing the return in their work
● It's about the maximization of wealth, for the minimization of cost
● Has created wants versus just needs
● Convinces you need the things that you want
● Unfair assertion of labour by owners due to their ability to regulate labour workers access
to basic human needs
● Between 1770 and 1830 - “6 million acres of commonly held lands, open fields,
meadows, wetlands, forests and unoccupied “waste” lands, until then the domain of the
public at large, were put into private hands and subsequently hedged and fenced and
farmed and herded and hunted for private gain” (Shiva, 21)
● “When the cottager was cut off from his resources … There was little else that he could
do in the old way. It was out of the question to obtain most of his supplies by his own
handiwork: they had to be procured, ready made from another source. That source, I need
hardly say, was a shop” (Shiva, 18)
● Alienation
 ○ We are alienated from our labour
○ We don't get decide what is considered “work” (what receives wages)
○ What is consisted as labour (“work”) are decided by others
○ Your work can have nothing to do with who you are as a human being
○ Can involve no creativity
○ Alienated from ourselves and each other
○ We are seen to see each other as competition
○ We are alienated from nature
○ Nature is not allowed to exist in its own right
○ Nature is only valuable if we can turn into raw materials

What is Globalization?

● Allison Jagger:
○ “Contemporary globalization is distinguished by its integration of many local and
national economies into a single global market, regulated by the World Trade
Organization”
● Silivia Federici:
○ “Globalization is an attempt to intensify the exploitation of labour through a
worldwide process of expropriation of workers (from their land, and acquired
entitlements), disinvestment in the process of reproduction, and warfare.”
● All labour is devalued by capitalism
● Martha Gimenez
○ Globalization is a de-politized, euphemistic way to refer to the spread of
capitalism over the globe. It is a … way of talking about the effects of capitalist
development without having to talk about capitalism itself. Using the term
globalization means that one does not have to acknowledge the capitalist material
basis of the phenomena lumped together under the globalization label. Trendy and
ubiquitous, globalization is … an inherently conservative way of thinking about
 and analyzing current processes of social, economic, political and cultural change
… The globalization discourse is itself a powerful ideology that obscures … the
roots, in the capitalist mode of production, of the deepening inequality and decline
in living standards that afflict the majority of the world's population, particularly
the female population

Thursday, September 30, 2021

“Thus began the racial logic underpinning slavery that postioned Black peopples lives and bodies
as inferior, usable, disposable chattel, and the instiutionalized belief that Black movement itself
needed to be carefully controlled and contained”

● Robin Maynard

White Supremacy

● Embedded in all our organizations and systems without us realizing

● Wealth is being passed down through generations
● The exploitation of black peoples bodies and indeginous land
● Black women’s reproductive rights were exploited for wealth
○ They had no control of who, where, when, or how they could have children
○ Everyone women should have the right to have or not have a child, and how to
raise their children in their own way
● “Captialism and racisim did not break from the old order but rather involved from it to
produce a modern system of “racial capitalism”
● Racial Capitalism
○ The process of deriving value from the racial identity (or racialization) of others.
It can be seen in the centuries long transfer of wealth from Black to White nations
through the exploitation of Black bodies and lands, the structurally mandated
poverty that defines and constrains a significant portion of the Black population,
and forms of exonomic violentce and racial discrimination.