mies patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale

The latter are shoved into the realm of “nature” or called “precapitalist” it amounts to the same. The central constitutive relationship studied by Marx and Engels was wage labour and capital, and this excludes all non-wage labour relations. But, as argued in my book Patriarchy and Accumulation, Marxism did not offer an explanation. While trying to find a satisfactory explanation for the ongoing exploitation of women here, and the colonies “down there”, I began to read Marx. First came my experience in India, where I worked and lived for six years second, was my involvement in the German women’s movement since 1968. I did not gain these insights by reading Marxism. The dependent sector in each of these divisions I call “colonies”. What binds them together is a dependency relationship based on violence, commodity production and money. All these divisions are hierarchically structured and connected, although they appear as autonomous entities. Under capitalism, there emerges not only a sexual division of labour, but also a particular social division between private and public and an international division of labour. The divisions you mention are objectively part and parcel of the capitalist patriarchal “divide and rule” strategy.

Maria MIES: Well, I don’t think that feminism itself is in crisis. What experiences in your own life brought you to this insight? Or was it already deducible from your reading of Marxism? But your analysis in Patriarchy and Accumulation gives a new unity and coherence to women’s struggle world-wide. The feminists, in turn, are split between the socialists and those who would organize autonomously. Commodification and ViolenceĪriel SALLEH: Plainly, feminism is in crisis: Third World workers are divided from middle-class western housewives, and both of these from the feminist movement per se.

Ariel Salleh spoke with her in 1987 and formalized this interview by correspondence. Her concerns range from prescriptive essays on methodology in social science, to empirical studies of exploitation among Indian women lace-makers, campaigns against pornography and the reproductive technology industry in West Germany. But Mies is as much an activist as an academic sociologist. This has involved a heuristic reading of Marx’s text in the light of modern anthropology and what she calls “object-relations”. Mies attempts to bring Marxian theory face to face with the newly emerging political crises of the late twentieth century. The eco-feminism of Maria Mies stands at the crossroads of the feminist, ecological and colonial liberation movements.

Mies patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale