Talking to My Daughter C.2 -- The Birth of the Market Society (Capitalism)

When something becomes a commodity, what will it have acquired?

• A market price (the specific amount of money at which something is sold)

• An exchange value: (what something is worth in a market in exchange for something else)

What is the difference between how goods were produced 300+ years ago and how they are produced/bought today?

• Work similar to household labor division: most goods were produced outside the market and closer to how we divide our labor within the home (women were given the worst tasks, along with the serfs and slaves)

  • A farming family would produce its own bread, cheese, meat, clothes, etc. and exchange surplus produce made by other farmers that they were unable to produce themselves

• The commodification of everything: instead of producing their own raw materials, farmers mostly buy their raw materials from MNCs that do everything faster

  • Guaranteeing profits through patents: in order to guarantee their profits, companies now use patents to assert legal ownership of something new that they have engineered

What three basic elements does the process of production require?

• Capital goods (raw materials, tools/machines with which to work raw materials, fences/buildings to house it all)

• Land or space where production takes place

• Labor to breathe life into the product

What are some things one needs to know about previous, non-market societies (esp. feudal societies)?

1. Slaves and serfs worked hard but didn't sell/rent their labor to their masters; masters simply took a large percentage of their harvest by force

2. Exchange of tools and food: Tools were manufactured by serfs or by craftsmen on the same estate of land who were fed by the serfs in exchange for the tools they created

3. Landowner or serf: You were either born a landowner (and you couldn't even sell your ancestors' acres) or a serf

How did the Great Transformation of the three factors of production into commodities happen?

• Increased international value and wealth of merchants: as exported products became goods with international value and merchants selling those goods became crazily wealthy, landowners were appalled

• What the landowners did (enclosure of the commons):

  • Got rid of all the perishable crops that offered no access to the emerging global markets

  • Built fences around their estates, creating sealed-off areas

  • Evicted serfs while replacing them with submissive sheep whose wool could be sold for a mint internationally

What was the result of this Great Transformation?

• More than 70% of the peasants were thrown out of their homes and ancestral lands

• Kicking out the serfs turned labor and land into commodities: it created a market in which humans lacking access to land or tools must survive by auctioning off their labor

What, for the landowners, was an alternative to overseeing the production of wool?

To rent out their land to someone else at a price determined by the international market value of the wool it was capable of producing

What happened to the working status of the population after the serfs were evicted?

• Most of the population had to participate in some kind of market. Some of them kept working the lords’ lands as:

  • 1. Renters whose rent was determined by the price of wool

  • 2. Entrepreneurs terrified of the fluctuations in the market value of that wool (“can we sell our wool on the market for enough money to pay our rent and to buy enough food to nourish our children?”)