Radical Political Economy

12.4.1. The monetary circuit and structural change theories

The post-modern condition has had invigorating and liberating effects on Marxism. The collapse of ontological certainties, even before the walls collapsed, has led to the eclipse of orthodox thought and rejection of the conviction that “scientific Marxism’’ gives absolute truth.

The research streams we present in this paragraph are the most traditional. They consist in two new approaches to the analysis of capitalism which were developed in the ‘eighties: the theory of the monetary circuit and the analysis of structural change.

The theory of the monetary circuit develops the special Marxian view of the circular flows, according to which a ‘circuit of commodity capital’ and a ‘circuit of productive capital’ are encompassed by a wider ‘circuit of monetary capital’. The latter begins with the creation of purchasing power, by means of credit, and ends with its destruction, by means of payment of the debt. Money plays an essential role in the process of capitalist production: as it is non-produced purchasing power (unlike real goods), it allows the production process to be begun ‘from nothing’. Credit is not accessible to all the economic agents, but basically only to the capitalists, who, therefore, are enabled to acquire labour and means of production without first having produced an equivalent amount in real terms. The workers, on the contrary, who have a limited access to credit, can buy goods only after having pro­duced them. This social asymmetry is considered by some to be an essential characteristic of the capitalist production system, and even more important than the institutional structure itself which regulates the ownership of means of production.

On the other hand, the money supply is endogenous, and the sector which ‘deals’ with it is considered an authentic productive sector: its output is liquidity, and expands and contracts in synchrony with the demand, i.e. with the overall level of economic activity. It does not, however, move in perfect synchrony. This may lead to realization crises and, more generally, to a strong cyclicity in the accumulation process. Crises are explained, not only by the reserve function of money and the consequent possibility of excessive accumulation of liquid balances, but also, and above all, by the double asset-liability nature of money and the consequent necessity for debtors to repay, sooner or later, their debts. Due to the concatenations of the debt­credit relationships, in fact, financial crises often assume the characteristics of chain bankruptcies. Here there is a strict relationship with some post­Keynesian theories. More generally, it is possible to say that the post­Marxian theories of the monetary circuit are derived from the attempt to assimilate into Marxism the theories formulated by some of the anti-neoclassical followers of Keynes; but there has also been constant reference to other heretical theorists of money, such as Tooke, Wicksell, and Schumpeter. At any rate, we must point out that, even if the predominant doctrinal reference, among theorists of the monetary circuit, is Marx, not all the economists who follow this line of research, especially in France, consider themselves Marxist. An enlightening formulation of the monetary circuit approach is provided by A. Graziani in The Theory of Monetary Circuit (1989).

Another set of theoretical problems which interests us here has arisen from recent debates on long cycles.

In fact, the theory of structural change aims at endogenizing a series of economic phenomena that orthodox theory has tended to treat as para­meters: technology, institutions, class relationships, etc. To the degree to which the ability of the capitalist system to maintain a certain accumulation ‘regime’ in a stable and permanent manner is denied, the necessity of drastic structural changes is acknowledged. But to the degree to which one denies any intrinsic tendency towards a final collapse, one also acknowledges the possibility of using structural change to re-establish the conditions of accu­mulation. This leads directly to some sort of cyclical theory of structural change; and, as we are concerned with the fundamental forces of change, we must be dealing with long cycles. Moreover, the particular length of the period attributed to the cycles, thirty years, half-century, or whatever, is irrelevant, as is the idea of a regular periodicity.

The new methodological approach is present, in differing degrees of awareness, in all the contemporary theories of the long cycle. The differences among them concern only the type of structural change on which attention is focused and the type of parameters which are endogenized. In this way it is possible to distinguish two large groups of theories. On the one hand are the neo-Schumpeterian theories (accepted, in recent times, also by many post-Marxist economists), in which the emphasis is placed on technological change, on the waves of ‘fundamental innovations’, on the changes in ‘technological paradigms’. On the other hand are the post-Marxist theories in the strict sense, in which it is the changes of the institutional structures, social relations and class conflict, that are endogenized. We will include in this group some versions of the ‘regulation’ theory. Some of these developed a notion of the capitalist mode of production that attributes much import­ance to the functional nature of the set of norms and institutions which ‘regulate’ certain regimes of wage determination and surplus extraction. In some of these theories there is a marked emphasis on the historical and transitory nature of such regulation systems. For the importance they attribute to the tendency of ‘regulation regimes’ to create the conditions for their own change of form in the long run, it seems to us that these approaches belong more to the theories of the long cycle than to that of growth stages.

12.4.2. Analytical Marxism

One of the reasons (or excuses) why the academy has always tended to isolate Marxist economists can be traced to the very modest level of analytical instrumentation used in radical economic theory.

Cohen’s research programme came to fruition in 1995 with the publication of Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, an important work in which, starting from a critique on Nozick’s theory of freedom, he brings to light a serious shortcoming in Marxist theory. He argued that, if one accepts the self-ownership axiom, that is, the idea that individuals own themselves, then the illiberal and anti-egalitarian conclusions of Nozick’s ‘libertarianism’ must also be accepted. If individuals are not to be exploited, they must be able freely to use their own human resources. If they are considered free because they own themselves, they must be able to use their own human capital as they wish, and if this leads to better endowed individuals ending up wealthier and freer than those less endowed, then nobody can complain.

But the self-ownership axiom is either ungrounded or contradictory. A person’s freedom must be defined by the set of inalienable rights with which he is endowed, therefore it cannot be grounded on right of ownership, which is alienable by definition. If the goods of which an individual is considered the natural owner consist in personal talents and human capital, then one of two alternatives holds: either the individual has no right to sell his stock of those goods, that is, to sell himself as a slave, in which case he does not have true self-ownership; or he has this right, in which case a contract of slavery must be accepted as a basic condition of human freedom. In the former case, the axiom of self-ownership as the basis of freedom is ungrounded, in the latter, it is contradictory.

Cohen transferred this critique to the Marxist approach, pointing out that the notions of exploitation and socialism, presuppose the self-ownership axiom. There is indeed exploitation when the worker, who is the owner of his own labour power and his own labour capacities, in other words, of himself, is expropriated of a surplus-value which should belong to him alone, being a product of his own human capital. On the other hand, socialism decrees that everyone should be paid according to his own personal abilities. If these abilities are unequally distributed, then socialism is a system that turns inequality into a principle of justice. Cohen proposed that Marxism should be purged of all reference to the self-ownership axiom, so that a theory of justice and freedom can be constructed on which a communist society can be founded. Only if individuals are not endowed with self-ownership is it possible to conceive a social system in which maximum individual freedom and maximum social equality are ensured by the allocation criterion: ‘to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability’.

In 1978 Cohen published a book in which he proposed a neo-positivist interpretation of historical materialism. He maintained that history had been moved by the human drive to expand productive forces—a drive caused by the individuals’ natural rationality and desire to improve their conditions of life. Social production relations, that is, the institutional forms within which the production process takes place and is organized, can either hinder or encourage the development of productive forces. However, those that hinder it will be wiped out by history, whereas those that promote and favour it will prevail. Accordingly, it can be said that the evolution of social relations is functional to the development of productive forces in the long run. This functionalist explanation has given rise to much criticism and fuelled debate on the role of functionalism in social sciences, enabling analytical Marxists to clarify their methodological positions.

Elster offered a decisive contribution to the debate by asserting, in an article written in 1982, that functionalist type ‘explanations’ are largely present both in Marx’s method and in that of many Marxists. But the functionalist ‘explanation’ of a phenomenon is wrong in that it boils down to explaining the cause by means of its consequences. Many Marxists tend to make this kind of mistake when making a holistic study of collective beha­viour, class struggle, class consciousness, etc. According to Elster, to avoid this error, the study of collective behaviour must be microfounded. Lapsing into holistic mysticism must be avoided and society must be studied starting from individual behaviours, assuming that these are determined at least by potentially rational choices. The methodological individualism proposed by Elster is not, however, the strong type prevailing in the neo-Walrasian approach. People take decisions in situations of intense social interaction, heterogeneity of objectives, widespread externalities, incomplete informa­tion, and their rationality is also imperfect. Elster suggested that game theory is an useful analytical instrument in such a philosophical context, particu­larly in analysing class conflict. This type of analysis is in fact able to account for both the complex individual interdependencies from which collective behaviour, group action and class consciousness originate, and the strategic interactions among different classes that relate to each other in situations of conflict and co-operation. In 1985 Elster published a book in which he carefully pondered Marxian thought. Seen in the light of methodological individualism and the theory of rational choice, many of Marx’s theories, as was to be expected, failed to pass the test, turning out to be either wrong or irrelevant. Nevertheless, some of the fundamental aspects of his analysis of capitalism, namely the theories of alienation, exploitation, class struggle and ideology, still appear to be valid.

In parallel with Marxological exegesis and debate on the method, Elster made further studies of the theory of rational choice in some of his works (1979, 1983), from which an extremely refined and articulated vision of human reason and its behavioural implications emerges. Rationality is imperfect because it is constantly exposed to the pressure of changing desires and strong passions. Individuals are aware of these weaknesses and therefore often allow themselves to be limited and constrained by social norms. Many behavioural constraints are imposed and accepted precisely because they contribute to the ability to made predictions, thus enabling individuals to act in accordance with an analysis of the consequences of their actions. But though social agents choose their constraints, they often do so irrationally. Human reason has serious limits and may produce failures. This is why the theory of rational choice is inapplicable. Elster showed rare philosophical virtuosity in using this theory to shed light on its failures.

In another work of 1989, the theory of rational choice was used together with the theory of social norms to tackle the problem of social cement, that is, the conditions that make a co-operative social order possible. Elster’s idea is that some types of co-operation are achieved by collective action aimed at controlling the free-rider problem; others are achieved through bargaining. The two methods are strictly interdependent, so that collective action may fail if bargaining is interrupted. Social choice, for example, decides which goods must be publicly provided. Since citizens cannot be made to pay taxes in proportion to the utility they derive from public goods, it is necessary to resort to bargaining to establish how to divide up the tax burden. The point is that if bargaining fails because the tax-payers do not come to an agreement, then collective action will fail and the public good will not be produced.

Unlike Elster, who started from the theory of rational choice to demon­strate its limits and absurdities and used game theory to show up the incon­gruities of general equilibrium, the invisible hand and Homo oeconomicus, Roemer unhesitatingly embraced all the neoclassical theories and beliefs. Influenced by Michio Morishima, the American economist was particularly fascinated by the finest of neoclassical virtues, the generalizing strength. He began, in 1977, by generalizing Okishio’s theorem on the falling profit rate, showing that there is no such tendency, even in the presence of fixed capital. Then, in 1980, he used a model of general economic equilibrium to refor­mulate Morishima’s ‘Fundamental Marxian Theorem’ (the profit rate is positive if and only if wage-workers are exploited) and to show that this does not apply to convex technology in general.

Lastly, in an ambitious work on mathematical economics in 1982 he generalized Marx en bloc. He assumed that all agents are rational, in the prosaic sense that they maximize utility. He then defined five social classes on the ground of their position in the employment relationship: proletarians (sellers of labour power); capitalists (purchasers of labour power); self­employed workers; semi-capitalists (self-employed workers who employ wage-workers); semi-proletarians (self-employed workers who also work as wage-workers). By interpreting Marx’s theory of exploitation as based on an unequal exchange of labour, he redefined surplus labour as the rent the wage-earners pay to capitalists in order to use their capital. Finally, he demonstrated the following theorem: capitalists and semi-capitalists are exploiters; proletarians and semi-proletarians are exploited. After general­izing the theorem to the case of convex technology, still not satisfied, he generalized the generalization by extending the analyisis to the case in which labour values cannot be defined. By adopting the notion of the core of co-operative games, he showed that there is not only capitalist exploitation, but also feudal and socialist exploitation. The whole of this tangle of generalizations has caused much perplexity among Marxists. It has also given rise to sharp criticism of Roemer’s concepts of exploitation and class, especially because they are based on ownership relations, distribution of endowments, agents’ preferences and unequal exchanges, rather than on relationships between social classes in the production process.

Roemer subsequently turned to theories of justice in the attempt to go beyond the very concept of exploitation. In point of fact, the Marxian theory of exploitation is not a theory of justice: it accounts for exploitation but does not claim to show that it is unjust. Marx refused to bother with the ethics of justifying or morally condemning any particular distribution system. For the same reason, he did not conceive the communist society as a just society. Instead he saw it as the outcome of a historical process and a political movement aroused by well-defined and concrete social interests, rather than the realization of an abstract model of justice. Here Romer finally took his leave from Marx by elaborating his own model of a just society from an egalitarian point of view. In Roemer’s good society, an opportunity levelling mechanism is at work on the basis of which: the advantages deriving from equal commitments and individual responsibilities are equalized, albeit in the presence of unequal circumstances and endowment of resources; con­versely, the disparities deriving from different commitments and individual responsibilities are maintained.

Lastly, Romer studied the problems of market socialism and public ownership. Together with J. Silvestre, he made a particularly interesting contribution in this field, by showing that in a situation of asymmetric information (in which the public authority does not know the cost function of a firm operating in a natural monopoly), public regulation of a private monopoly is not necessarily more efficient than public ownership.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have developed an approach which exhibits some similarities with analytical Marxists, especially in their attitude of cautious sympathy and critical detachment to Marxism; they too are stimulated by the myth of microfoundations and the allure of the individual choice theory; they too tend to start from Walras rather than Marx. But they start from Walras in order to break away from him. And they do this by rejecting the hypothesis that contracts can be exogenously enforced without costs, an hypothesis that appears particularly impracticable in labour and capital markets. In reality, the enforcement of contract clauses must at least be ensured endogenously by the contracting parties, who have to bear the costs of enforcement. This implies that markets never clear even in the presence of competition. Post-contractual relations may be systematically exposed to redistribution conflict, a situation which Bowles and Gintis define as contested exchange. It may happen that the party on the short side of the market also acquires special power, called ‘short side power’, which is pre­cisely what he will use to make the contract endogenously enforced.

In labour markets with systematic unemployment, capitalists obviously have the upper hand. By brandishing the threat of redundancy, they build up the necessary power to force workers to observe the contract rules. On the other hand, in financial markets, risk situations make rationing of demand inevitable. And this occurs because lenders are unable to assert their rights over defaulting borrowers without incurring costs. In a capitalist economy, financial markets and banks evaluate worker-managed firms as extremely risky, so that these are subject to greater rationing than capitalist firms.

The theory was used to criticize capitalism and to build an alternative model of democratic economy. For Bowles and Gintis the alternative to capitalism is neither socialism nor communism; it is economic democracy, in the sense of a decision method, applicable to both markets and organizations, which enables maximum development of human personality and maximum free­dom of individual action.

12.4.3. Post-Marxism

The Post-Marxists have re-read and developed Marx in the opposite direc­tion to that pursued by analytical Marxists. They have rejected en bloc the modernist language and concepts typical of the theory of microfoundations and rational choice, developing instead ideas and suggestions of the post­modern koine. Many dogmatic Marxists were hostile towards post­modernism. Some even interpreted it as the ideology of late capitalism, others as the culture of globalized and dematerialized capital. In their opinion, the recent revolution in transport, communication, and information technology has led to a worldwide contraction of space-time, dematerial­ization of production and consumption and a crisis in the Fordist regulation system. These processes, in turn, have given rise to a weakening and a crisis in those rationalist certainties on which nineteenth and twentieth-century ideologies were founded. Post-modern thought is taken to be the result of this crisis.

Others have observed, however, that such an interpretation is not only guilty of technological determinism—a serious deficiency in the eyes of Marxists—but also reveals a simplicistic interpretation of post-modern thought. This is not a philosophical system, with a well-defined political stance and clear-cut class position, but a widespread cultural revolution in which widely differing positions have crossed paths and clashed. Many Marxists who took part in the post-modern revolution believe that radical critique played a fundamental role in triggering it. Others emphasize the post-structuralist and anti-humanist roots of the 1968 movement, which has been interpreted as the first post-modern cultural revolution—a revolution that contributed not only to demolishing the metaphysical bases of the liberalist ideologies of market capitalism but also the Marxist-Leninist ideologies of State capitalism.

At a deeper-rooted level, it has been observed that post-modern radical thought consists in overcoming (in the sense of Aufhebung) orthodox Marxism: by negating its historicist and positivist components while affirming and bringing to light its materialist and pragmatic premisses. The Marxian theory of ideology, for example, has evolved in Althusser’s theories of ‘modes of knowledge production’ and in Foucault’s theories on the use of science as a means of power. Moreover, the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach— where Marx claims that philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, whereas it is really a question of changing it—is the basis for two extremely important theoretical advancements. On the one hand it provides the foundation for the conception of critical, scientific and political thought as a ‘philosophy of praxis’, a concept already elaborated by Gramsci. On the other, it substantiates the view of those who see Marxism as a form of hermeneutics of capitalism, a science that aims to interpret reality from a class point of view, thus preparing its change, rather than reflecting it as though in a mirror.

In economics, post-modern implications can be traced back to various currents of radical research. Sraffian Marxists’ criticism of the theory of labour value, for example, clearly dissociates from a certain mysticism of value which is still in vogue in some contemporary Marxological circles. The many recent studies on regulation, institutional change and long waves, on the other hand, would be unconceivable without an overcoming of the historicistic metanarratives implicit in the laws of tendential movement. Even in analytical Marxism it is possible to find traces of post-modernism; and not only in the sense of a manneristic deference to neoclassical language. The point is that the appeal of methodological individualism and the theory of rational choice clashes sharply with the holistic metaphysics of ‘class for itself ’ and ‘general intellect’.

Perhaps the most interesting contributions, certainly the most cognisant, to the development of post-modern Marxism, have come from a group of students who collaborate with the journal Rethinking Marxism. But now, besides this group, a vast worldwide movement uses the journal as a prestigious pulpit. Some of the most representative authors who follow a post-Marxist approach, are: J. L. Amariglio, R. F. Garnett, B. Hindess, D. F. Ruccio, S. Resnick, and R. D. Wolff.

Post-Marxist thought rejects the idea of a ‘subject of history’. In real history, decentralized and over-determined individuals operate, that is, persons who are structurally exposed to the pressures of society. Collective agents are continually constructed, destroyed and reconstructed in a process of social interaction that unfolds historically, but whose course remains open and non teleological. Social relations are formed through institutionalized behaviour. Individuals have conflicting interests, beliefs, aspirations, and heterogeneous preferences. Moreover, they are endowed with bounded rationality and their actions are dominated by habitual behaviour and social learning processes. Institutions and consolidated routines are, nevertheless, unable to stabilize society enduringly, since the heterogeneity of individuals and their different interests are such that social relations are always char­acterized by an antagonistic component and therefore exposed to continual change.

Markets are seen as neither essentially anarchical, nor essentially ordered. ‘Essentially’ markets are nothing, since they have no essence. In reality, they are founded institutionally and their structure and working depend each time on compromises among the individuals, groups, classes and organizations taking part in the market process. They may be chaotic and changeable, but they are not dramatically unstable or inefficient, and therefore, broadly speaking, they enable individuals to achieve their objectives in a fairly satisfactory way. On the other hand, centralized planning is not seen as intrinsically superior to competitive co-ordination. Post-Marxists reject the idea of a political body endowed with a conscience that is qualitatively dif­ferent from that of social subjects, just as they reject the idea of a central authority that is neutral and independent of the social forces that confront and clash with each other in civil society. Planning is therefore seen as the result of social struggles and group pressures. This applies to capitalism as well as socialism. Both systems in fact are considered decentralized and chaotic, as well as liable to uncertain outcomes. Nor is socialism identified with centralized planning. Rather, it is interpreted as a system of social relations in which some forms of over-determination, like capitalist power, are substituted by others, like bargaining among organized groups. According to post-Marxists, a better world than capitalism is possible, although not inevitable: historical processes are open and the advent of socialism is not written in the laws of movement of the economy.

12.4.4. The feminist challenge

Feminist thought has contributed perhaps more than others to disintegrating modernist scientific orthodoxies in economics. From the early 1970s, the feminist movement played an authoritative role in many fields of action and human knowledge traditionally reserved for men, creating disorder and disputing commonplaces, truths, principles, and consolidated methods. Political economy was not exempt from attack and, particularly in the neoclassical citadel, was forced to suffer its disruptive and deconstructive onslaught. But Marxist orthodoxy, too, was roused by the incursions of feminist deconstruction and there is no doubt that this in some way contributed to the birth of post-modern Marxism.

One of the first debates of feminist economics in the 1970s focused on the role of housework in capitalist accumulation. The contribution of J. Gardiner is representative of a widespread position in socialist feminism of those years. In the Marxist approach, the family is seen as a productive process that creates labour power using wage goods and housework as inputs. Women account for almost the totality of this latter input. They produce use values by transforming consumption goods and looking after their children and husbands. Nevertheless, they do not produce exchange values, since their products are not sold on the market. Therefore they do not directly create value and surplus value (although various students dispute this). However, they certainly participate in creating overall surplus value. In fact, their services contribute to raising the productivity of wage workers and lowering their wage. In this way, the direct exploitation of workers in the factory ends up by also being an indirect exploitation of domestic labour. Women who carry out this kind of work are exploited if the value they produce, or contribute to producing, is higher than the value of the goods they consume. In the Marxist approach, the exploitation and oppression of women are functions of a capitalist production relation, in other words, they are functional to it. In this perspective, class conflict prevails over gender conflict, therefore the overcoming of capitalism is seen as a fundamental condition, though by no means the only one, for women’s liberation.

Not all feminists, however, share this opinion. Many of them developed a current of thought which is even more radical than the Marxist one. They have observed that the history of the exploitation and oppression of women goes further back than capitalism. In this theoretical perspective, the new conceptual category of ‘patriarchy’ has been forged to denote the political- cultural system where the conditions for men’s domination of women are generated. This system regulates not so much the sphere of economic rela­tions as that of personal and family relations. Thus it happens that ‘personal is political’, and that revolutionary change must involve everyday experi­ences, sexual relations, personal power, and all forms of apparently indi­vidual violence and oppression by which men exercise social control over women. H. Hartman developed this approach by arguing that analysis and criticism of patriarchy do not contrast with the Marxist theory of capitalism. In the capitalist mode of production, patriarchy bends to serve the accu­mulation of capital so that women turn out to be exploited more than men: they carry out a greater amount of domestic labour in the home and are obliged to accept worse paid jobs in capitalist factories. S. Walby further developed this analysis by introducing a distinction between ‘public patri­archy’ and ‘private patriarchy’. Men not only exercise individual power over women, in their role as husbands and fathers, they also exercise collective power over women in the labour process and in public life, by segregating them in subordinated positions and in underpaid and unskilled segments of the labour market.

Feminist thought has not confined itself to criticizing patriarchy and capitalism. It has also made important contributions to the critique of modernist economic science. With great clearsightedness, Sandra Harding has worked on the deconstruction of the positivist epistemology on which much of economic orthodoxy is founded, showing the influence of the gender division hidden behind the criteria of objectivity and scientific truth. Not only the metaphors used by scientists invariably reveal a strong sexist content, but the distinction between positive and normative economics is in itself sexist, in the same way as is that between rational explanation and intuitive com­prehension. Science, moreover, is not ‘value-free’ as realist epistemologies claim. All theories are impregnated with values and the very aspiration to rational and universalizing thought, combined with rejection of emotions and subjective influences in scientific research, expresses a strongly sexual conceptual dualism. Reason and universality are in fact associated with men, whereas women are typically attributed the limits of intuitive, emotional, and particularistic thought. Rationally and universally developed theories are then assumed as true and value-free, while methods of thought attributed to women are considered non-scientific.

In a decidedly post-modern approach, some feminist thought has criti­cized much more than just the positivist methodology of orthodox science and the idea that an objective truth exists. The conviction that social reality exists independently of the subjects that study and operate it has also been debated. Reality is socially constructed and science has contributed to this construction. Methodological-type conceptual dualisms, as for example, rational/intuitive, universal/particular, objective/subjective, facts/values, are conceived as isomorphic to dualistic ontological schemes: public/private, mind/body, reason/emotion and, last but not least, man/woman. This is how sexist thought, i.e. a science steeped with male values, contributes to constructing a reality based on gender discrimination. Ann J. Jennings went further by following a radical institutionalist approach. Her analysis and critique centred on Veblen’s ‘pecuniary culture’ rather than Marxian ‘cap­italism’. In pecuniary culture a double dualism operates: public/private and economy/family. The process of industrialization has encouraged and has been encouraged by the establishment of competitive market rules, which have allowed economic relations to take priority over social relations, private interests over public policies. This has given rise to a concept of the social good, intended as economic welfare, which universalizes the male values of power and competition and depreciates the female values of solidarity and equality. Thus the circle closes in: women’s confinement to the private sphere and to subordinated roles is the result of an interpretation of the world in which the female side of conceptual dualisms is systematically discredited; this interpretation, in turn, which is presented as the result of a universal and value-free science, is in fact the product of power exercised by men in society.

12.5.