Labour, nature, and exploitation

Social metabolism and inequality in a farming community in mid-19th century Catalonia

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2285754
AutoresInés Marco (0000-0002-0537-498X, Department of Economic History, Institutions and Policy and World Economy, Faculty of Economics and Business University of Barcelona Barcelona Spain, autor correspondente), Roc Padró (0000-0001-7880-5026, Roc Padró, Barcelona Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies Autonomous University of Barcelona Bellaterra Spain), Enric Tello (0000-0002-4970-1524, Department of Economic History, Institutions and Policy and World Economy, Faculty of Economics and Business University of Barcelona Barcelona Spain)
Ano2020
Volume20
Fascículo3
Páginas408-436
Data de publicação2020-07-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Agrarian Change (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1471-0358 • E-ISSN: 1471-0366
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/joac.12359
OpenAlexW3009582995
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas61

Exploiting the labour of other people has historically been one of the main strategies to tackle the biophysical tension that always exists between the satisfaction of human needs and the labour required to fulfil them. Based on the insights of ecological, feminist, and Marxist economics, we disentangle the exploitation of the labour of women and labouring poor through a novel methodology that integrates energy, material, time, and cash balances. We apply it to the sociometabolic flows between household units endowed with different land and livestock resources in a traditional rural community in Catalonia (Spain) in the mid-19th century. The results show that land and livestock hoarding led to a process of accumulation through dispossession that increased the exploitative relationships through the labour market, which in turn relied on the patriarchal division of labour between men and women at home. Our estimates of energy labour surplus reveal that male wages represented 88% of the equivalent consumption basket that would have been obtained by carrying out the same amount of labour on land of one's own. However, in the case of female wages, the percentage was 54%. This shows that wage labour incorporated a significant amount of unpaid domestic family labour

Agriculture · Biology · Child labour · Commodity · Consumption (sociology · Division of labour · Economics · Hoarding (animal behavior · Inequality · Labour economics · Livestock · Market economy · Sociology · Wage · Wage labour · Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact · Ecology