Excerpt from “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale”
Excerpt from “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale - Women in the International Division of Labor”
Zed Books, 1986
By Maria Mies
FROM THE PREFACE
My own questioning wemt further and deeper. Apart from the question of its origin [patriarchy], 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 systembased on extended accumulation? Or could this accumulation also happen without heirarchical, 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, th Marxist feminists and socialist feminists. No feminist accepted any longer that we women were only a ’secondary contradiction.’
But we were still left with the question of the intrinsic relationship between partiarchy 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 industrialized world. Why has this not also happened with regard to the patriarchal relationship between the genders.
The more the feminist movement developed, the more we discovered new manifestations of patriarchal structures and ideologies. In particular, the movement against violence against women, against woman-battering, rape, pornography, sexual abuse in the work place, violence agaisnt women in the media and advertising, challenged the prevailing myth that modernity had ‘civilized’ the man-woman relationship, had ‘tamed’ the erstwhile aggressive, anti-women tendencies in men. No, these were not just ‘leftovers’ of a feudal past; this was the flesh and blood of modern, progressive capitalism; this was the heart of capitalism; it was capitalist patriarchy.
It as the analysis of the role of housework under capitalism that provided the first theoretical understanding of the political economy of capitalist patriarchy. This movement had started around 1980. It became clear that women’s unpaid caring and nurturning work in the household was subsidizing notonly the male wage but also capital accumulation. Moreover, by defining women as housewives, a process I call ‘housewifization,’ not only did women’s unpaid work in the household become invisible, unredorded in the GDP, and ‘naturalized’ — that is, treated as a ‘free good’ — but also her waged work was considered to be only supplementary to that of her husband, the so-called breadwinner, and thus devalued. The construction of woman as mother, wife, and housewife was the trick by which 50 per cent of human labor was defined as a free resource. it was female labour.
Jessica:
I was talking to a friend about this recently and they pointed out that at the time Marx was writing the family among the proletariat was dissintegrating. Women and children were part of the labour force and had more individual freedom (tho not necessarily better conditions) than ever before. The Victorian era included a drive to “implant” the bourgois family among the proletariat through campaigns against child and female labour, “immorality” etc. The purpose being to take care of the working class (ie make sure they diddn’t all suddenly die off from an epidemic or slowly starve to death) without shifting the burden on to factory owners etc. Of course the burden got shifted on to women and working-class men got the chance to have their own little stake in the system through power over their wives and kids.
10 May 2005, 8:30 pmcj sterritt:
In the 1980’s there were discussions among many women about whether or not it was necessary to “play the game” in other words - if you were a woman who had a shot at entering the managerial ranks - woul dyou use the same body language and other techniques to hold control over those you were managing.
For a lot of women, the answer was “Yes!” In other words, for some women it is okay to enter a patriarchal system as long as some of the power is delegated to someone whose gender in non-male.
3 August 2007, 12:54 pmoz:
accumalated money is not simply a claim over other peoples recources ,but a claim on the products of labour.
3 December 2007, 11:45 pmStan:
It’s both. More directly, it represents a claim on the labor(power) itself (this is why Marx called capital a social relation, concealed by commodity fetishism). From here, Hornborg — in applying this same notion of mystification to the machine itself — makes some very important points about money as “an ecosemiotic phenomenon.” It is a tool of appropriation, but the process and consequences of that can be seen more clearly from the additional presepctive provided by human ecology. He calls the logic of money “an algorithm of destrcution,” because “prices must be inverted related to the productive potential of the traded products [this includes the energy expenditure of labor that is the basis of the marxist account of material exploitation -SG]. This becomes apparent when we realize that production is dissipative rather than generative. It is simply a logical consequence of what the idea of money implies in a universe complying with the Second Law of Thermodynamics… An item produced from oil and metal ores must be priced as if it were more valuable than the oil and ores that were destroyed in making it, or the process could not go on. This in turn amounts to a constant rewarding of the continued destruction of oil and ores by giving industry access to increasing amounts of oil and ores to destroy.”
Mies account in PAWS — using the same global perspective (”world system”) that informs Hornborg later on — emphasizes the global division between metropolitan women and peripheral women as two aspects of the same patriarchal system, wherein the general power of men over women is adapted to and interfused with a system (faclitated by ever more abstract general purpose money) of inter-national (global North-South) extraction and exploitation.
4 December 2007, 6:32 am