Showing posts with label property. Show all posts
Showing posts with label property. Show all posts
Friday, September 23, 2011
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 219
They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 178-182
A couple of men were determined to talk physics with him. One of them was well mannered, and Shevek managed to evade him for a while, for he found it hard to talk physics with nonphysicists. The other was overbearing, and no escape was possible from him; but irritation, Shevek found, made it much easier to talk. The man knew everything, apparently because he had a lot of money. "As I see it," he informed Shevek, "you Simultaneity Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes."
"Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls 'facts.' It is different from business," Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one."
"Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk," Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.
"Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers."
"But the fact is," said Dearri, "that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what's the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!" he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.
"But we don't experience the universe only successively," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?" He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone 'Mr.'
"What's that got to do with it?"
"It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return."
"Yes, the mystics," the shyer man said, eagerly. "Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe."
"But we're not babies," Dearri cut in, "we're rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?"
There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.
"Maybe you could see it," he said, "as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time--never of the circle of time."
"The circle?" asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. "Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly--an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises."
"You can't assert two contradictory statements about the same thing," said Dearri, with the calmness of his superior knowledge. "In other words, one of these 'aspects' is real, the other's simply an illusion."
"Many physicists have said that," Shevek assented.
"But what do you say?" asked the one who wanted to know.
"Well, I think it's an easy way out of the difficulty. . . . Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. . . . If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood."
"But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,'" Dearri said, "if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it."
"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, "I don't really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book--that everything really all exists now--then couldn't we foretell the future? If it's already there?"
"No, no," the shyer man said, not at all shyly. "It's not there like a couch or a house. Time isn't space. You can't walk around in it!" Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, "It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?"
"Ethics? Well, I don't know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior."
"Why not?" said Dearri.
Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there mortality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."
"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that's already written? All you can do is read it. There's no choice, no freedom of action left."
"That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture--you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both."
"How--how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked earnestly.
Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. . . ."
"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said Dearri.
Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.
"Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls 'facts.' It is different from business," Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one."
"Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk," Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.
"Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers."
"But the fact is," said Dearri, "that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what's the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!" he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.
"But we don't experience the universe only successively," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?" He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone 'Mr.'
"What's that got to do with it?"
"It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return."
"Yes, the mystics," the shyer man said, eagerly. "Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe."
"But we're not babies," Dearri cut in, "we're rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?"
There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.
"Maybe you could see it," he said, "as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time--never of the circle of time."
"The circle?" asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. "Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly--an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises."
"You can't assert two contradictory statements about the same thing," said Dearri, with the calmness of his superior knowledge. "In other words, one of these 'aspects' is real, the other's simply an illusion."
"Many physicists have said that," Shevek assented.
"But what do you say?" asked the one who wanted to know.
"Well, I think it's an easy way out of the difficulty. . . . Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. . . . If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood."
"But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,'" Dearri said, "if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it."
"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, "I don't really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book--that everything really all exists now--then couldn't we foretell the future? If it's already there?"
"No, no," the shyer man said, not at all shyly. "It's not there like a couch or a house. Time isn't space. You can't walk around in it!" Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, "It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?"
"Ethics? Well, I don't know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior."
"Why not?" said Dearri.
Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there mortality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."
"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that's already written? All you can do is read it. There's no choice, no freedom of action left."
"That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture--you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both."
"How--how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked earnestly.
Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. . . ."
"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said Dearri.
Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 106-107
[A]t his request Pae had taken him to Saemtenevia Prospect, the elegant retail street of Nio Esseia, to be fitted by a tailor and a shoemaker.
The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting--all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. "The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year. "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.
And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting--all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. "The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year. "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.
And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 170-171
Economically this violence is always necessary when people still have some access to means of production. For example, peasants do not voluntarily begin to produce things which they do not consume themselves. Or they are evicted by force from their fields, or tribes are driven by force from their territory and re-settled in strategic villages.
Women's first and last 'means of production' is their own body. The worldwide increase in violence against women is basically concentrated on this 'territory', over which the BIG MEN have not yet been able to establish their firm and lasting dominance. This dominance is not only based on narrowly-defined economic considerations, although these play an important role, but the economic motives are intrinsically interwoven with political ones, with questions of power and control. Without violence and coercion, neither the modern men nor the modern states would be able to follow their model of progress and development which is based on dominance over nature.
Within the capitalist market economies, violence against women can, therefore, be explained by the necessity for 'ongoing primitive accumulation' which, according to André Gunder Frank, constitutes the precondition for the so-called 'capitalist' accumulation process. In a Third World country like India, the people who have become 'free' subjects in the sense described above is rather small. The fact that civil rights are enshrined in the Indian Constitution does not affect the de facto production relations which are, to a large extent, based on violence and coercion. We have seen that violence against women as an intrinsic element of the 'ongoing primitive accumulation of capital' constitutes the fastest and most 'productive' method if a man wants to join the brotherhood of the 'free' subjects of owners of private property.
Violence against women and extracting women's labour through coercive labour relations are, therefore, part and parcel of capitalism. They are necessary for the capitalist accumulation process and not peripheral to it. In other words, capitalism has to use, to strengthen, or even to invent, patriarchal men-women relations if it wants to maintain its accumulation model. If all women in the world had become 'free' wage-earners, 'free' subjects, the extraction of surplus would, to say the least, be severely hampered. This is what women as housewives, workers, peasants, prostitutes, from Third World and First World countries, have in common.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 61-62
The earliest tools of mankind, the stone axes, scrapers and flakes, were of an ambivalent character. They could be used to grind, smash and pulverize grains and other vegetable food, and to dig out roots, but they could also be used to kill small animals, and we can assume that they were used by men and women for both purposes. However, the invention of arms proper, of projectiles, of the bow and arrow, is an indication that the killing of animals had become a major specialization of one part of the society, mainly of men. The adherents to the hunter hypothesis are of the opinion that the first tools were invented by men. They ignore women's inventions connected with with their subsistence production. But, as was previously discussed, the first inventions were most probably containers and baskets made of leaves, bark and fibres and later jars. The digging stick and the hoe were the main tools for gathering as well as for early agriculture. Women must have continued with their technology while some men developed specialized hunting tools.
What is important here is to note that women's technology remained productive in the true sense of the word: they produced something new. The hunting technology, on the other hand, is not productive, that is, hunting equipment proper cannot be used for any other productive activity--unlike the stone axe. The bow and arrow and spears are basically means of destruction. Their significance lies in the fact that they cannot only b used to kill animals, they can also be used to kill human beings. It is this characteristic of the hunting tools which became decisive in the further development of male productivity as well as of unequal, exploitative social relations, not the fact that hunters as providers of meat were able to raise the standard of nutrition of the community.
Hence, we conclude that the significance of hunting does not lie in its economic productivity as such, as is wrongly assumed by many theoreticians, but in the particular object-relation to nature it constitutes. The object-relation to nature of man-the-hunter is distinctly different from that of woman-the-gatherer or cultivator. The characteristics of this object-relation are the following:
a. The hunters' main tools are not instruments to produce life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings.
b. This gives hunters a power over living beings, both animals and human beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.
c. The object-relation mediated through arms, therefore, is basically a predatory or exploitative one: hunters appropriate life, but they cannot produce life. It is an antagonistic and non-reciprocal relationship. All later exploitative relations between production and appropriation are, in the last analysis, upheld by arms as means of coercion.
d. The object-relation to nature mediated through arms constitutes a relationship of dominance and not of cooperation. This relationship of dominance has become an integral element in all further production relations which men have established. It has become, in fact, the main paradigm of their productivity. Without dominance and control over nature, men cannot conceive of themselves as being productive.
e. 'Appropriation of natural substances' (Marx) now becomes a process of one-sided appropriation, in the sense of establishing property relations, not in the sense of humanization, but in the sense of exploitation of nature.
f. By means of arms, hunters could not only hunt animals, but they could also raid communities of other subsistence producers, kidnap their unarmed young and female workers, and appropriate them. It can be assumed that the first forms of private property were not cattle or other foods, but female slaves who had been kidnapped.
At this point it is important to point out that it is not the hunting technology as such which is responsible for the constitution of an exploitative dominance-relationship between man and nature, and between man and man, man and woman. Recent studies on existing hunting societies have shown that hunters do not have an aggressive relationship with the animals they hunt...
This means that the emergence of a specialized hunting technology only implies the possibility of establishing relationships of exploitation and dominance. It seems that, as long as the hunters remained confined to their limited hunting-gathering context, they could not realize the exploitative potential of their predatory mode of production. Their economic contribution was not sufficient; they remained dependent for their survival on their women's subsistence production.
What is important here is to note that women's technology remained productive in the true sense of the word: they produced something new. The hunting technology, on the other hand, is not productive, that is, hunting equipment proper cannot be used for any other productive activity--unlike the stone axe. The bow and arrow and spears are basically means of destruction. Their significance lies in the fact that they cannot only b used to kill animals, they can also be used to kill human beings. It is this characteristic of the hunting tools which became decisive in the further development of male productivity as well as of unequal, exploitative social relations, not the fact that hunters as providers of meat were able to raise the standard of nutrition of the community.
Hence, we conclude that the significance of hunting does not lie in its economic productivity as such, as is wrongly assumed by many theoreticians, but in the particular object-relation to nature it constitutes. The object-relation to nature of man-the-hunter is distinctly different from that of woman-the-gatherer or cultivator. The characteristics of this object-relation are the following:
a. The hunters' main tools are not instruments to produce life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings.
b. This gives hunters a power over living beings, both animals and human beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.
c. The object-relation mediated through arms, therefore, is basically a predatory or exploitative one: hunters appropriate life, but they cannot produce life. It is an antagonistic and non-reciprocal relationship. All later exploitative relations between production and appropriation are, in the last analysis, upheld by arms as means of coercion.
d. The object-relation to nature mediated through arms constitutes a relationship of dominance and not of cooperation. This relationship of dominance has become an integral element in all further production relations which men have established. It has become, in fact, the main paradigm of their productivity. Without dominance and control over nature, men cannot conceive of themselves as being productive.
e. 'Appropriation of natural substances' (Marx) now becomes a process of one-sided appropriation, in the sense of establishing property relations, not in the sense of humanization, but in the sense of exploitation of nature.
f. By means of arms, hunters could not only hunt animals, but they could also raid communities of other subsistence producers, kidnap their unarmed young and female workers, and appropriate them. It can be assumed that the first forms of private property were not cattle or other foods, but female slaves who had been kidnapped.
At this point it is important to point out that it is not the hunting technology as such which is responsible for the constitution of an exploitative dominance-relationship between man and nature, and between man and man, man and woman. Recent studies on existing hunting societies have shown that hunters do not have an aggressive relationship with the animals they hunt...
This means that the emergence of a specialized hunting technology only implies the possibility of establishing relationships of exploitation and dominance. It seems that, as long as the hunters remained confined to their limited hunting-gathering context, they could not realize the exploitative potential of their predatory mode of production. Their economic contribution was not sufficient; they remained dependent for their survival on their women's subsistence production.
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