What struck me about Shag's comment, however, is that it resonates with the Polanyi query - particularly the Neil Smith component - I'd posted to no response. The development of capitalism transforms, differentiates and homogenizes relations of all sorts. As part of the process of defining the boundaries of reified phenomena like (but not limited to) "the economy", "the state," "civil society" (where you can see parallels with ahistorically idealist conceptions of "nature", "labor" and "space") - these metacategories, their qualitative differences and their subcomponents are naturalized. That process of naturalization generates practices predicated on the idea that the reproduction of nature, labor and space, of resources, workers and society, occurs independenly of capital and capital has no responsibility for it. A huge portion of the growth of the state is then tied not to social control but to the mediation of public and private access to and the more or less healthy reproduction of the ecological, personal and communal conditions of production and life.
What Polanyi gets wrong, and I've neither made this argument before nor seen it elsewhere (anyone know of an instance - focused on Polanyi?) is that these phenomena and relationships have to be produced before they can be abstracted. There were families before capitalism but they were families with very different sex/gender/generational relations; ties between production, reproduction, use- and exchange-value; and relationships to the means of re/production - including control over "relations" and "forces" of production as well as the dynamics of productive cooperation (both a force and relation).
Too many agrifood and environmental studies folks love Polanyi and the argument that capitalism's OK, it just has to be kept in check so that it doesn't get moving so fast that it ooutstrips the ability of nature and labor tpo adjust...
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm pretty sure this family/state distinction is central in Roman Law, so
> it cannot be (only) a result of capitalism. Rather it is likely a result of
> people living in families.
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Joanna <123hop at comcast.net>
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Sent: Fri, February 12, 2010 6:50:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] DC blizzard dooms cap and trade
>
> shag writes
>
> "The family as a sphere that can't be commodified, likewise, the ideology
> central to Victorian ideology which pedaled the notion of separate spheres
> where the family was a haven in a heartless world, a bulwark against the
> forces of the market and the state, a haven that must be preserved in order
> to prevent the excesses of the market and state. The latter, a position also
> promoted by Smith, which emerged from ideas circulating among Scottish
> Englightenment thinkers."
>
> There's a fantastic bit about this in Dickens' /Great Expectations/,
> wherein a legal clerk literally goes home to his "castle," divided from the
> street by an actual moat. The book itself is a wonderful anatomy of
> capitalism.
>
> Joanna
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319