Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist and scholar on the subject of violence, asserts that such economic impediments are among the "avoidable limitations that society places on groups of people [which] constrain them from meeting their basic needs and achieving the quality of life that would otherwise be possible.
The viability of this economic format was contingent upon a labor force which was willing to work for low or poverty-level wages, with the majority of worker profits being returned to the owners of the means of production.
Scholar Sylvia Federici notes that the church, as the single-largest landowner in continental Europe during the 15th century, aligned itself with nobility to privatize lands and criminalize subsistence occupation by peasantries.
Federici asserts that these initiatives had three primary objectives: "(a) to create a more disciplined workforce; (b) to defuse social protest; and (c) to fix workers to the jobs forced upon them.
She offers contemporary examples of the forms seen in feudal Europe, such as land dispossession in India forcing farmers to abandon subsistence lifestyles for low-paying jobs under inhumane conditions.
Shiva notes that these changes are justified by the Indian government and trade entities such as the World Bank through assertions that agriculture has become nonviable due to plummeting crop prices, and the idea that India "must industrialize to [achieve] economic growth.
"[6] Shiva challenges these claims as specious, arguing that crop prices are low due to the trade reforms themselves, and that Indian farmers are overwhelmingly opposed to being dispossessed of their lands and forced to join the workforce.
Anthropologist David Graeber asserts that consent to violent economic structures must be contrived through bureaucratic mechanisms which serve to render their causes invisible.
[20] In this way, economic violence may be sanitized by reinterpreting the idea of "the economy" as an impartial force of nature, rather than a series of institutions making conscious policy decisions.