Capitalism and Definitions

We have argued that the essential element of capitalism as a system is not, as is often contended, proletarian wage labor or production for the market or factory production. For one thing, all of these phenomena have long historical roots and can be found in many different kinds of systems. In my view, the key element that defines a capitalist system is that it is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital. This is not merely a cultural value but a structural requirement, meaning that there exist mechanisms within the system to reward in the middle those who operate according to its logic and to punish (materially) those who insist on operating according to other logics.

We have argued that, in order to maintain such a system, several things are necessary. There has to be an axial division of labor, such that there are continuous exchanges of essential goods that are low-profit and highly competitive (i.e., peripheral) with high-profit and quasi-monopolized (i.e., core-like) products. In order to allow entrepreneurs to operate successfully in such a system, there needs in addition to be an interstate system composed of pseudosovereign states of differing degrees of efficacy (strength). And there also have to be cyclical mechanisms that permit the constant creation of new quasi-monopolistic profit-making enterprises. The consequence of this is that there is a quite slow but constant geographical relocation of the privileged centers of the system. (xiv)

These words are Immanuel Wallerstein's, from his new prologue to the 2011 edition of volume III of The Modern World-System: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s. I quote them here because definitions matter and we have too many of them for capitalism.

I have, in the last year or so, found myself embroiled in various online discussions here and there about capitalism and our current predicament, etc, in which the conversation can only go so far because we, the participants, are not operating under the same set of assumptions on what capitalism, in fact, is. I tend to avoid lengthy online back-and-forths, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the inadequacy of my available devices (which means the mechanics of it are unpleasant). But also, where once I was quick to write lengthy responses to people, usually via email, now I shy away from them. In part, I don't want to lose a piece of writing in the bowels of another blog's comments, and I write too slow to effectively respond here. It's also true that I'm simply not read deeply enough in the Marxist or liberal economic literature to respond to certain kinds of pedantry. So if someone cites a particular of a given debate, I'm often at something of a loss. However, though I would like to deepen my reading of such literature, the truth is I'm only going to get to so much of it, and things are happening right now. My gut tells me that most of it is unnecessary.

A few years ago I read Ellen Meiksins Wood's Origins of Capitalism, and I found it very helpful. She is, of course, a Marxist, writing in the aftermath of the Brenner debates of the 1970s. She helped me to see a number of different things much more clearly than I had seen them before (for just one example, the state's role in enforcing propertylessness). I was further helped along by essays from the Midnight Notes Collective, and then David Harvey's book-length study of Marx's Capital, The Limits to Capital, as well as a couple of Harvey's other books. Then came the first volume of Capital itself, along with Harvey's online lectures, and the feminist approaches of Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale) and Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch). The feminist works are crucial; they seem to take the analysis to its logical conclusions that too many Marxists seem unwilling to take it (so they said; but I had no trouble taking their word for it, given my own limited experience with the literature). Readers will notice that I've rehearsed this sequence before. All apologies. In any event, my point here is that something nagged at me. I was still having trouble understanding where it came from, and why, and it seemed really important that I do understand it, in order to wrap my head around the problems facing us today. Then I read Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, my first exposure to world-system analysis, and many things began to fall into place in my mind. This led me to Wallerstein. First to his slim World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, then to his now four-volume study, The Modern World-System. (David Graeber's work plays a big role here, too; I'm thinking a few of the essays in Possibilities, as well as the more recent Debt.)

I realized that what had troubled me were questions of focus and certain sets of assumptions. I had difficulty with the idea of a particular capitalist "state" (or "states" competing with each other) (though, indeed, Wood, in her Empire of Capital, had helped clarify for me the necessity of the state apparatus for capitalism), with the very focus on "mode of production", with questions and apparently long-running debates about such topics as whether or not slavery was capitalist, which seemed silly on their face (of course it was capitalist; for just one point, the feminist focus on how unpaid labor underpins the wage system is important here). I desired, and insisted, without knowing it, a longer view (somewhat ironic, considering the subtitle of Wood's book is, in fact, "a longer view"; it's not quite long enough), and a more detailed view. Arrighi's and then especially Wallerstein's books have helped me enormously, providing a framework in which things fit together much better (not like a puzzle, but like life, if you'll pardon the expression). Anyway, I provide the passage at the top of this post as a placeholder and reference point: this is the definition of capitalism I'm working from, the one that makes the most sense to me. Recent claims that we've already moved away from capitalism into a feudalism-like "rentism" seem to me to misunderstand both feudal arrangements and capitalism itself, and especially miss the ease with which the former historically shaded into the latter. There's nothing un-capitalist about monopolies or rent. Misplaced emphasis on wage labor and modes of production are distracting. Here Wallerstein continues:

Capitalism is a system in which the endless accumulation of capital is the raison d'être. To accumulate capital, producers must obtain profits from their operations. However, truly significant profits are possible only if the producer can sell the product for considerably more than the cost of production. In a situation of perfect competition, it is absolutely impossible to make significant profit. Perfect competition is classically defined as a situation with three features—a multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and universally available information about prices. If all three features were to prevail (which rarely occurs), any intelligent buyer will go from seller to seller until he finds one who will sell at a penny above the cost of production, if not indeed below the cost of production.

Obtaining significant profit requires a monopoly, or at least a quasi-monopoly, of world-economic power. If there is a monopoly, the seller can demand any price, as long as he does not go beyond what the elasticity of demand permits. Any time the world-economy is expanding significantly, one will find that there are some "leading" products, which are relatively monopolized. It is from these products that great profits are made and large amounts of capital are accumulated.

I could go on, but will not, not now. But consider this a re-beginning, of sorts, on this topic.

Notes on feminism and reproductive power

In part addressing my recent entry on technology and the classless society, Peter Frase (previously unknown to me) has written a post called "The Dialectic of Technology" (which also appears at the Jacobin site, here). Frase writes from a very Marxist perspective, which is helpful. I find much to disagree with, but it's useful to find such a perspective so clearly laid out. He begins by invoking Shulamith Firestone, author of the feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex. I'm going to use this post to riff on the Firestone reference (which is really only in the first paragraph); I hope to have time to write about the rest of Frase's thoughtful post at another time.

Firestone first came to my attention via Nina Power, through both her blogging (from which she seems to have retired and deleted most of the archives) and her book, One Dimensional Woman. Readers will recall that I wrote about Power's book just over two years ago, including Power's use of Firestone. I don't intend to repeat what I said in that post about Firestone. I will say that Power's use of Firestone did not make me inclined to read Firestone's book. The ideas about biology and technology as presented by Power strike me, still, as altogether unappealing and, oddly, retrograde. I do, however, now plan to read The Dialectic of Sex, primarily because of what Adrienne Rich says about Firestone in her classic, Of Woman Born. In her chapter "Alienated Labor", amidst a discussion of "natural childbirth", Rich writes this:

Shulamith Firestone, as an early theorist of the contemporary women's movement, was understandably skeptical of "natural" childbirth as part of a reactionary counterculture having little to do with the liberation of women as a whole.

Firestone sees childbearing, however, as purely and simply the victimizing experience it has often been under patriarchy. "Pregnancy is barbaric," she declares; "Childbirth hurts." She discards biological motherhood from this shallow and unexamined point of view, without taking full account of what the experience of biological pregnancy and birth might be in a wholly different political and emotional context. Her attitudes toward pregnancy ("the husband's guilty waning of sexual desire; the woman's tears in front of the mirror at eight months") are male-derived. Finally, Firestone is so eager to move on to technology that she fails to explore the relationship between maternity and sensuality, pain and female alienation.

Ideally, of course, women would choose not only whether, when, and where to bear children, and the circumstances of labor, but also between biological and artificial reproduction. Ideally, the process of creating another life would be freely and intelligently undertaken, much as a woman might prepare herself physically and mentally for a trip across country by jeep, or an archeological "dig"; or might choose to do something else altogether. But I do not think we can project any such idea onto the future—and hope to realize it—without examining the shadow-images we carry out of the magical thinking of Eve's curse and the social victimization of women-as-mothers. To do so is to deny aspects of ourselves which will rise up sooner later to claim recognition. (pp. 174-175)

This still wouldn't be getting me any closer to reading Firestone, except that earlier in the book, Rich had allowed that Firestone has, with respect to advances in birth-related technology, "observed that the possibilities are terrifying if we envision the choice of human types, gender, and capacities being controlled by patriarchy." This, and Rich's claim that Firestone's work includes, among other things, "powerful analysis of the nature and extent of patriarchy", have moved me closer to wanting to read her for myself.

Anyway, it's the stuff I don't like that is relevant here. Frase calls The Dialectic of Sex one of his favorite Marxist-feminist writings because of two things it does "exceptionally well":

The first is to extend Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize. The second is to see modern technology as an indispensable element of women’s liberation, going so far as to argue that “Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity.”

It should be clear that I think it's bonkers to "see modern technology as an indispensable element of women's liberation". This is in part because I see "modern technology" as inseparable from the society that produced it, and I have seen how the "advances" in modern birth-related technology have eroded both the choices available to women and the health of babies and children, our reliance on medical doctors and technology eroding the very ability for women to make informed decisions. Women are all too often pushed into interventions that are convenient for their doctors, and lucrative for insurance companies, rather than in the mother's or child's best interests. The decisions available to women and families are unavoidably "controlled by patriarchy". Introducing further and further interventions, and even removing birth from women altogether into the realm of machines and other advanced technologies is, first, not good for the well-being of children (so often an afterthought in the radical imagination, when it is, of course, the most important subject there is), and, second, not going to do anything to effect the liberation of women. What I see as indispensable to women's liberation is the retaking of reproductive power by women, organizing society around that power, that labor, rather than around production.

In another article at Jacobin (the back page article here), Frase writes about "working time and feminism", correctly focusing on time and unpaid labor, in the reproductive arena, paying much-needed attention to the problem of men being willing (or, rather, unwilling) to do a larger share of unpaid, reproductive labor (noting that, in countries which offer substantial family leave for male and female employees, males are considerably less likely to take the time off). Interestingly, in a separate post at his blog, Frase admits that he wished he'd spent more time discussing the nuclear family in that article, and by excerpting a paragraph from an LRB essay by Jenny Turner, ends up quoting some of the same Toni Morrison (again, by way of Nina Power) lines that I do in my review of One Dimensional Woman (note, also, that in this post, I take issue with Power's version of the Marxist assumption that "entering the workforce" was somehow "liberating" for the mass of women; here I'm grateful for bell hooks and other feminists of color who have continually reminded us that black women, and poor women, always worked outside the home, along with their unpaid work inside the home: it only came to be seen as liberating when middle/upper middle class white women did so). Morrison says, "Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child." The thing about capitalism is not only are we alienated from our labor, we are alienated from each other. Community is difficult to build or sustain, so the prospects of a community raising a child is daunting. As Morrison says, the nuclear family "isolates people into little units—people need a larger unit." And they need time to attend to those things that matter most, which are reproductive in nature. Without time, without larger units, one or two people are forced to try to do everything themselves and to make compromises in the areas of food, health, shelter, compromises which we ought to be working towards making unnecessary, or even unthinkable.

Let me return to Frase's praise of The Dialectic of Sex. He says that Firestone "extend[s] Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize". I find this interesting, because I've long felt that the feminist critique of Marxism, taking the critique of capitalism to its logical conclusions, is not only utterly necessary, but foundational. But my key figures are feminists such as Maria Mies and Sylvia Federici, authors of, respectively, Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. I wish I had written here more systematically about these books, since they couldn't be more important. I had intended to blog Mies' book, chapter-by-chapter, but failed to do so; the best I did was to offer a brief excerpt (here; that excerpt I had intended to in part comment on the discussion that resulted from my review of One Dimensional Woman) and to use part of her argument in my review of Roberto Bolaño's novel, 2666 (here). In Federici's case, I still intend to transcribe my notes from the Federici-led workshop I attended last Spring, and I did fairly effectively deploy her arguments from Caliban and the Witch in my review of Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? (here, see also a follow-up to that review here, also heavily relying on Federici's book; incidentally, I think the points raised in that Josipovici review are essential to this conversation, though all too often they are isolated from it). Anyway, Mies follows the logic to the very end and concludes that subsistence should be our focus (indeed, most of her subsequent work has been on "the subsistence perspective"). It's frankly difficult to argue with her. Federici, among many other things, brings our attention to the many powers women had in the pre-capitalist world, powers which were systematically stripped in the development of capitalism, and which had to be so stripped, in order for capitalism to unfold. Though I now fully intend to read The Dialectic of Sex, I believe Marxists, indeed all of us, would be much better off pursuing the arguments of Mies and Federici and the like, rather than in engaging in fantasies of technological liberation.

Notes on Bolaño, 2666, and "The Part about the Crimes"

I read Roberto Bolaño's enormous 2666 over the last two weeks, finishing the other night. It's an incredible read. The other Bolaño books I've read are, in order, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, Amulet, and Last Evenings on Earth. I'd say 2666 stands with the very short By Night in Chile as the best of these. I'd say further, among many other attributes, that both novels offer nice examples of viable political fiction, contrary to certain claims.

Backing up a bit: It's been difficult to avoid the Bolaño hype in recent years. The blog buzz was fairly deafening well in advance of the English translation of The Savage Detectives. For some readers, the appearance of that book likely marked the beginning of their awareness of the hype, but for me, wary of the hype itself, perhaps the main thing moving Bolaño onto my personal radar—as a writer I expected I would read, that is—was the fact that his shorter works were all being published by the excellent New Directions. My attention was elsewhere at the time, but my intention was to read some of these before tackling The Savage Detectives. But events dictated otherwise: a friend left her paperback at our house, and since I was between books, I picked it up and read. I was not immediately overwhelmed. I had great difficulty with the opening section of the novel—the diary of the 17 year-old poet Juan Garcia Madero, with all the tedium and exaggerated sexual exploits and so on: I was bored and was not looking forward to plowing my way through it, nor returning to that voice in the final section. But the middle section was something else. Here, with the testimony from many different characters who at one time or another knew our elusive poets, the Bolaño stand-in Arturo Belano and his partner Ulises Lima, there was much to like, plenty to love. Ultimately, though I wasn't quite convinced of Bolaño's genius, I saw enough there to continue reading. (Even looking back at the bookended diary extracts, I can see that that voice, like so many of the others, is expertly performed. I just didn't enjoy having him around, at least at that time.)

Then 2666 appeared and the hype was simply overwhelming. I still wanted to read the short stuff, but before doing so, I succumbed: I asked for and received the heavy hardcover of 2666 for Christmas 2008. Occasionally in 2009, I'd pull it down from the shelf and wonder why I didn't ask for the paperback. When was I going to want to be hauling this guy back and forth on the train? And my heart sank a bit as I'd read the not-very-exciting opening page of "The Part about the Critics", wondering if I'd ever get through this book. But then I read By Night In Chile, and I was impressed. I read Amulet, which is somewhat odder, a bit fantastic, a bit political, the novel fleshed out from one of the accounts in The Savage Detectives; I more or less enjoyed it. Then came Last Evenings on Earth, stories, some quite nice...

Ok, ok, so why this personal history with Bolaño? It occurs to me that there are numerous routes to any author, and Bolaño, with all of the misleading hype, can be difficult to read amidst it all. It can be tempting to dismiss an author with all of the attending noise. If your first awareness of Bolaño came with, say, a New York Times or New Yorker review of The Savage Detectives—perhaps you don't have any prior knowledge of New Directions—and you pick up that book and read it, and have more or less the experience that I did, or perhaps you liked it even less. Might not the urge to dismiss be strong? We have so much to read and selection is necessary and aren't we already subject to enough overrated writing?, isn't it true that the establishment controls enough as it is?, isn't Bolaño being pushed a bit too heavily? Maybe. But it happens that hype is fairly random and uncontrollable and sometimes the establishment favors something good, if perhaps for the wrong reasons (and anyway, hasn't it long been, um, established, that anything can be, and is, commodified?)—on this last point, take a look again at Edmond Caldwell's essay on James Wood's review. Caldwell's essay serves as both a brilliant critique, in political and literary terms—quite the same thing here—of Wood's characteristic domestication of Bolaño, as well as an invigorating interpretation of the novel, again, in political and literary terms.

Which, in fact, brings me back to 2666. As noted, as time wore on, I was rather dreading this novel, its size, the unpromising opening, and, especially, the notorious fourth book, "The Part about the Crimes". I heard so much griping about this portion of the novel—page after page, 300 pages, we were told, of flat, graphic police reports of dead women, most of whom were raped and tortured and then tossed aside like so much garbage. We were told variously that it was a bad joke, a tedious experiment, that it was offensive, that it's a big "fuck you" to the readers, that it was unreadable, indefensible, etc, etc and so on. I felt I was going to need to brace myself, if I ever bothered to start. But then two weeks ago I was unexpectedly home for a week (snow), and I picked it up and began reading.

I'm not planning to review the novel properly, or to write in any great detail about it—this post is already long enough, and I'm not really up for it—but I will offer some thoughts, in particular about that fourth part (I'm sorry to say I won't be providing any passages from the novel; with this book, I just read, taking no notes). Though I'd obviously been able to glean some details about the book over the several months since it appeared, in general I managed to avoid reading most reviews. Having now finished, I have gone back and read only Waggish's quartet of posts (1, 2, 3, 4). In addition, it happened that Adam Roberts was reading 2666 at the same time I was and posting his thoughts in a quintet of posts at The Valve, one for each of the novel's parts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5; actually, each post is a fairly detailed synopsis of the part under discussion, so I'm going to direct you there for the summaries, though I don't always agree with Adam's perspective); his posts elicited the usual combination of excellent, helpful comments and not-so-helpful comments (as well as several characteristically lengthy and impertinent comments from one reader in particular). I thought Adam had some interesting things to say about the novel, but I find I generally agree with Waggish's take. I, too, found the first book, "The Part about the Critics" comparatively boring. It wasn't bad—there are some amusing bits about academia, to be sure; the critics of the title are experts on a German writer named Archimboldi and attend various conferences and ultimately try to find their hero—but it turned out to be easily the least good part of the novel. The second, "The Part about Amalfitano", which follows a minor character from the end of the first part, was much better. "The Part about Fate" was a bit meandering, and I agree with Adam Roberts that it really picks up about fifty pages from the end, the momentum leading us right into the much-dreaded "Part about the Crimes". After which we come to "The Part about Archimboldi", which in part tells us the story of the writer who was the focus of the critics in book one. This part has some stunning writing, including some fascinating meta stuff about writing, but I admit that my attention flagged on occasion, in part, I think, because more than once, all of a sudden the story comes to a halt and we embark on another biographical sketch, from the beginning. This fifth book resolves virtually none of the major story elements raised in the other four.

But I want to talk, finally, about "The Part about the Crimes". Adam calls it "a thoroughly grueling read", "a horrible read", "monotonously intense and repetitive": "It is unpleasant to read; it must have been deeply unpleasant to write." He is not alone, and of course this is exactly what I feared, but it turns out that I strenuously disagree. I disagree, but I nevertheless think Adam's on to something when he wonders whether the repetitiveness "isn’t designed to say something about men":

The point is not just that they so often relate to women only in terms of sexualized aggression and hostility; but more precisely that there is something mechanical, a structuring monotonous repetition, about that violence. Men are like jack-hammers, banging away over and over and over (banging in a sexual sense; banging in a discursive sense—banging, in this man’s novel at this point, in a textual sense); and it is women who find themselves underneath the hammerhead. This vision, that the world is always and everywhere horribly the same dominates the section, and justifies its experimental form.

He notes that there are some passages that challenge this idea, but they are overwhelmed by "the masculine vision that everything is everywhere remorselessly the same; and that sameness is the repetitive monotony of male sexual violence, of hatred and suffering inflicted and death." I'll take this up in a moment. First I want to say that I agree with Waggish, and some of Adam's commenters, that this section is the key to the book. I also found it an incredibly powerful, and politically resonant, reading experience. I see an example of fiction's willingness to not look away, and yet this is not violence porn: the violence is not narrated, only reported forensically. And the traditional order of the detective novel is undermined, as no satisfactory resolution is found. Some other features that stood out for me: we are given several glimpses of some of the lives of the women, and it is invariably in the context of seeking work and the promise of a better life; nearly all of the women were employees of maquiladoras (the real-life murders are also known as the "maquiladora murders"); the period of time begins just prior to the implementation of NAFTA and runs throughout its first decade; maquiladora officials are completely indifferent, and cruel towards family members, in the manner consistent with faceless corporate managers—these women are workers, women in the workplace; at one point it is explicitly observed that these were workers. We hear from a few feminist organizations, large and small, publicly decrying the ongoing violence, outraged at the inability of the police to stop it.

In what way, then, does this resonate for me, beyond the brilliant piece of writing I believe it to be? I naturally don't know precisely what Bolaño intended, and I'm not convinced it matters, but as I was reading this book I had firmly in mind Maria Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale. If we link what Adam says about what "The Part about the Crimes" could appear to be saying about men with the kind of argument Mies makes in her book, I think something very interesting emerges, which I will only briefly discuss here. Among the many important points Mies makes is that periods of modernization and proletarianization are always accompanied by increased violence against women, as men in general seek to maintain some semblance of control in the drastically changing political and economic landscape, some power at home as relative power is reduced outside it. (For example, she discusses at length increases in rape and dowry murders during the modernization process in India since the late 1960s.) She describes various production relations, each "based on violence and coercion" in which "we can observe an interplay between men (fathers, brothers, husbands, pimps, sons), the patriarchal family, the state and capitalist enterprises." Of course, Bolaño does not pedantically mention NAFTA or American hegemony. And some might say I'm taking liberties. Perhaps, perhaps. But I think that, to the extent that art is politically resonant, it allows us to think not only in those terms only laid out in the text, and it provides us with unforeseen opportunities in which to do so. I would like to suggest that, in refusing to look away, in brilliantly structuring this part the way he did, at least one thing Bolaño accomplished is he provided a powerful aesthetic experience which allows us see what doesn't get seen in the push to progress, to structure the overwhelming and repetitive violence immanent in such processes, to finally bear witness to its unfolding.

Noted: Maria Mies

In light of the short discussion that occurred in the comments to my post on One Dimensional Woman, this excerpt from chapter 2, "Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour", from Maria Mies' brilliant Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour is, I find, enormously helpful:

What characterizes women's object-relation to nature, to their own as well as to the external nature? First, we see that women can experience their whole body as productive, not only their hands or their heads. Out of their body they produce new children as well as the first food for these children. It is of crucial importance for our subject that women's activity in producing children and milk is understood as truly human, that is, conscious, social activity. Women appropriated their own nature, their capacity to give birth and to produce milk in the same way as men appropriated their own bodily nature, in the sense that their hands and head, etc., acquired skills through work and reflection to make and handle tools. In this sense, the activity of women in bearing and rearing children has to be understood as work. It is one of the greatest obstacles to women's liberation, that is, humanization, that these activities are still interpreted as purely physiological functions, comparable to those of other mammals, and lying outside the sphere of conscious human influence. This view that the productivity of the female body is identical with animal fertility—a view which is presently propagated and popularized the world over by demographers and population planners—has to be understood as result of the patriarchal and capitalist division of labour and not as its precondition.

In the course of their history, women observed the changes in their own bodies and acquired through observation and experiment a vast body of experiential knowledge about the function of their bodies, about the rhythms of menstruation, about pregnancy and childbirth. This appropriation of their own bodily nature was closely related to the acquisition of knowledge about the generative forces of external nature, about plants, animals, the earth, water and air.

Thus, they did not simply breed children like cows, but they appropriated their own generative and productive forces, they analysed and reflected upon their own and former experiences and passed them on to their daughters. This means they were not helpless victims of the generative forces of their bodies, but learned to influence them, including the number of children they wanted to have.

We are in possession of enough evidence today to conclude that women in pre-patriarchal societies knew better how to regulate the number of their children and the frequency of births than do modern women, who have lost this knowledge through their subjection to the patriarchal capitalist civilizing process.

Mies goes on to discuss the numerous methods of contraception and abortion known to women in gatherer-hunter groups, plus evidence which shows that women lowered their fertility through such methods as prolonged breastfeeding. And though she here talks about pre-patriarchal women, later she discusses the types of knowledge formerly known by pre-capitalist women and the ways in which that knowledge, along with women's power, was destroyed in the transition to capitalism (this is a major theme in Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, too).