Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale
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MARIA MIES Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale WO M E N IN THE INTERNATIONAL DIVISION O F LAB O U R Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale was first pub lished by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London NI 9JF, UK, and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA, in 1986 This edition was published by Zed Books Ltd, London and New York, and by Spinifex Press, PO Box 212, North Melbourne, Victoria 5051, Australia, in 1998 Distributed exclusively in the USA by St Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Copyright © Maria Mies, 1986, 1998 Cover designed by Andrew Corbett Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Redwood Books, Trowbridge Sixth impression, with new Preface, 1998 The right of Maria Mies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library US CIP data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 1 85649 734 8 (hb) ISBN 1 85649 735 6 (pb) In Australia and New Zealand ISBN 1 875559 58 2 (pb) Contents Preface to new edition Vll Foreword 1 W hat is Feminism? 6 Where are we today? 6 Fair-weather Feminism? 14 What is New About Feminism? Continuities and Discontinuities 18 Continuities: Women’s Liberation - A Cultural Affair? 18 Discontinuities: Body Politics 24 Discontinuities: A New Concept of Politics 28 Discontinuities: Women’s Work 31 C oncepts 35 Exploitation or Oppression/Subordination? 36 Capitalist-Patriarchy 37 Overdeveloped-Underdeveloped Societies 39 A u to n o m y 40 Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour 44 The Search for Origins Within a Feminist Perspective 44 Biased Concepts 44 Suggested Approach 47 Appropriation of Nature by Women and Men 49 Women’s/Men’s Appropriation of Their Own Bodies 52 Women’s and Men’s Object-Relation to Nature 53 Men’s Object-Relation to Nature 56 Female Productivity as the Precondition of Male Productivity 58 The Myth of Man-the-Hunter 58 Women’s Tools, M en’s Tools 61 ‘M an-the-Hunter’ under Feudalism and Capitalism 66 Colonization and Housewifization 74 The Dialectics of ‘Progress and Retrogression’ 74 Subordination of Women, Nature and Colonies: The underground of capitalist patriarchy or civilised society 77 The Persecution of the Witches and the Rise of Modern Society. Women’s productive record at the end of the Middle Ages 78 The Subordination and Breaking of the Female Body: Torture 82 Burning of Witches, Primitive Accumulation of Capital, and the Rise of Modern Science 83 Colonization and Primitive Accumulation of Capital 88 Women under Colonialism 90 Women under German Colonialism 97 W hite W om en in A frica 100 H ousew ifization 100 4. Housewifization International: Women and the New International Division of Labour 112 International Capital Rediscovers Third World Women 112 W hy W om en? 116 Women as ‘Breeders’ and Consumers 120 Linkages: Some Examples 127 C onclusion 142 5. Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Primitive Accum ulation of Capital 145 Dowry-Murders 146 Amniocentesis and ‘Femicide’ 151 R ap e 153 Analysis 157 Are men rapists by nature? 162 Conclusion 168 6. National Liberation and Women’s Liberation 175 Women in the ‘Dual Economy’ 180 The Soviet Union 180 C hina 181 Vietnam 188 Why are women mobilized for the national liberation struggle? 194 Why are women ‘pushed back’ again after the liberation struggle? 196 Theoretical blind-alleys 199 7. Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society 205 The case for a middle-class feminist movement 205 Basic Principles and Concepts 209 Towards a feminist concept of labour 216 An alternative economy 219 Intermediate steps 224 Autonomy over consumption 225 Autonomy over production 228 Struggles for human dignity 229 Bibliography 236 Index 247 Preface to the new edition Hooks Have Their Fate When I started writing Patriarchy and Accumulation in the early 1980s my intention was not to produce a grand theory on the functioning of capital ist patriarchy. My limited aim was to find answers to a few burning questions which kept cropping up both in the struggles of the new women’s movement and also in my classes in the department of Social Pedagogy in C ologne, Germany, and later in the ‘Women and Development’ programme at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, where I had been teaching since 1979. The participants in this programme were women from the South. For many of them ‘feminism’ was a strange phenomenon, something rele vant to Western middle-class women. But they did not yet understand that the ‘Woman Question’ was their question too. Women’s Work under Capitalism: New Questions about an Old Problem Against the backdrop of this context and of my own experience in India, where I had lived for five years, it was obvious that I could not restrict my theoretical quest to a Eurocentric perspective. When feminists in Europe and North America began to ask why housework was not paid under capitalism - a question which challenged both liberal and Marxist eco nomics - I could not limit this question to housewives in the industrialized North. What about women in the South? What about rural women there? What about small peasants in general and their relationship to capitalism? Obviously there was a lot of work being done in this world that was not covered by the category economists use to define the relationship of workers to capital. This category was restricted to waged employment only, and to so-called ‘free’ waged employment at that, because it was protected by unions and labour laws. I was not the only one to ask similar questions around that time, Since the early 1970s, I had been working with two German friends, Claudia von Werlhof and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, who like me had lived and worked in the Third World and tried to link this experience to the new feminist questions regarding women’s work under capitalism. The result was that this questioning, which we shared with many feminists at that vii Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation time, automatically led to a much broader horizon than is usually found in social research. But then, when one wanted to understand why women’s reproductive work - as it was then still called, following Marxist terminology - had no value under capitalism, one was immediately faced with another theoretical problem. Either one had to explain this devaluation by the anatomical difference between men and women, as was done by biological determinists, or one had to find a social and a historical explanation for the phenomenon. The problem was not simply difference between the genders; there was obviously a dominance relationship, based on a long history of exploitation and oppression, which had to be taken into account. It was in this context that the concept of patriarchy became relevant for me. I had discovered patriarchy as a system during my Ph.D research on Indian women’s role conflicts. When I came back I discovered German patriarchy, which was structurally not as different as I had thought. I began to understand that the exploitation and oppression of women are not just accidental phenomena but are intrinsic parts of a system, a system which, moreover, has existed for at least five thousand years and which has penetrated and structured all ‘great civilizations’ and cultures of the globe. The historical depth and geographical breadth of this system also became manifest in the course ‘Women and Development’ at the ISS, where women from different cultural and religious backgrounds had come together. Although this system had developed many different cultural manifestations, some more brutal than others, it was structurally still the same. As soon as the students on the course understood this they coined the slogan ‘Culture divides us. Struggle unites us!’ Hence, the issue of patriarchy not only immediately transcended the usual horizons of time and space, begging the question of its origin and expansion, but also gave rise to the question ‘What can we do to change this anti-woman system?’ Most women were not satisfied by a mere academic analysis and the statement that such a system prevails even in our modern era. They wanted to know how it all started, when and where, and how we could fight it. My own questioning went further and deeper. Apart from the question of its origin, I wanted to know why such a brutal system did not disappear with modernity, or with capitalism, as both Marxists and liberals had predicted, What was, what is, the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism? Are they two systems? Are they one system? Is patriarchal exploitation and subordination necessary for an economic system based on extended accumulation? Or could this accumulation also happen without hierarchical, exploitative gender relations? It was obvious that we could no longer be satisfied with the classical Marxist explanation, that this relation was only a secondary contradiction whose solution would come after the primary contradiction - the class antagonism between labour and capital - had been resolved. There was consensus at that time among feminists about this understanding, even among feminists of the left, the Marxist and socialist feminists. No feminist accepted any longer that we women were only a ‘secondary contradiction’. viii Preface But we were still left with the question of the intrinsic relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. We all knew, of course, that patriarchy preceded capitalism. Was it then correct to say that it simply continued as a kind of substructure? Why was the great promise of modernity to abolish all feudal, patriarchal, backward relationships not fulfilled when it came to women? After all, feudalism had been abolished, at least in the industrial ized world.