Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Zed Books, 1986, 2014; pbk £12.99.
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A book can be a classic, and essential reading today, even if its principal argument is fundamentally wrong. So it is with Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, a text that is challenging, compelling, inspiring, puzzling and perverse in equal measure. The claim it makes regarding the necessary and therefore perennial reliance of capitalist accumulation on non-wage labour, and in consequence its dependence on the 'housewifization' of women, is a powerful one that still has resonance, and the same is true of its flat-out rejection of growth, trade, and capitalist consumption. As Silvia Federici suggests, in a foreword to this 2014 reissue, Mies 'speaks directly to the crisis that many are currently experiencing faced with the constant destruction of human lives and the environment, especially when the seeming inability of even powerful mass movements to bring about positive social change generates a quest for new paradigms'; and it 'recuperates, for a younger generation radicalised by the Occupy movement and the movements of the squares, the radical core of feminism, buried under years of institutional co-optation and postmodern denial of any ground of commonality among women' (ix). But although its critique of global capitalism is both radical and uncompromising, it is not radical enough. It misses its central dynamic, and so underestimates its transformative power, and it does so precisely because it interprets capitalism as a form of patriarchy, and places the notion of man-the-hunter/warrior at the centre of its analysis. At the same time, this takes it beyond the field of critical political economy, tapping into and also contributing to influential approaches to security studies, international relations, body politics and eco-feminist perspectives, the latter subsequently explored in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Eco-feminism (Zed Books, 1993; also re-issued 2014). All this, along with the picture it gives of feminist debates and movements at an important moment now four decades distant, make it essential reading.
Patriarchy and Accumulation develops and extends arguments first made in an earlier classic case study by Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982). The lace workers in question were home-based women, either creating individual pieces or assembling them into larger items such as garments, tablecloths and bedspreads (assembly, or athukupani, being the more skilled task). Although they mostly worked 6 to 8 hours per day they were identified as 'housewives', and did not appear in employment statistics. They produced for the world market, with the great bulk of the marketing and all the export trade controlled by men. Women from various communities were involved, but one particular group that moved into lace-making as a consequence of impoverishment caused by the concentration of land during the 'green revolution' and became the majority, the Kapu, were subject to a patriarchal regime of purdah and seclusion, which precluded manual work outside the home. Mies argues that:
'If pauperisation provides the material elements for the integration of the lace workers into a world market-oriented production system, the ideology of the housewife, the woman sitting in the house, provides the necessary subjective and socio-cultural element for the building up and maintenance of such a system. In fact, the ideology of the housewife has in the case of the lace workers assumed the character of a material force: it has found its institutionalisation in the sexual division of labour in society, in the exclusion of women from other productive activities and from trade, in the marriage system and caste system' (175-6).
Hence the important concept of 'housewifisation' as the 'necessary precondition for the extraction of super profits from the lace workers' (176):
'I define housewifisation as a process by which women are socially defined as housewives, dependent for their sustenance on the income of a husband, irrespective of whether they are de facto housewives or not. The social definition of women as housewives is the counterpart of the social definition of men as breadwinners, irrespective of their actual contribution to their family's subsistence' (ft. 2, p. 180).
These themes recur in Patriarchy and Accumulation, in which housewifization is identified as a central to the new international division of labour. After an introductory chapter, 'What is Feminism?', successive chapter headings convey the argument clearly: 'Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour', 'Colonization and Housewifization', 'Housewifization International: Women and the New International Division of Labour', and 'Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Primitive Accumulation of Capital'. In brief, the sexual division of labour is social, not 'natural'; colonization and housewifization are active processes by which (male) strategies of capital accumulation are imposed and furthered; the new international division of labour is itself underpinned by 'housewifization'; and violence against women maintains male predominance. The book then concludes with chapters on 'National Liberation and Women's Liberation' (a useful but less original chapter on the cases of Russia, China and Vietnam, pointing out that the first does not guarantee the second), and a look 'Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society'. It is only in the conclusion - which springs a couple of big surprises - that the reader can finally make sense of the book as a whole.
The first thing to notice is that there are two distinct and potentially separate aspects to the argument. One rests on the proposition formulated by Mies in discussion with Claudia von Werhof and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen in the wake of the housework debate, and following Rosa Luxemburg, that 'the capitalist mode of production was not identical with the famous capital-wage-labour relation, but that it needed different categories of colonies, particularly women, other peoples and nature, to uphold the model of ever-expanding growth' (35). Mies and her fellow theorists brought to Luxemburg's thesis on imperialism the particular insistence that 'capitalism cannot function without patriarchy, that the goal of this system, namely the never-ending process of capital accumulation, cannot be achieved unless patriarchal man-woman relations are maintained or newly created' (38). In short, 'women's oppression today is part and parcel of capitalist (or socialist) patriarchal production relations, of the paradigm of ever-increasing growth, of ever-increasing forces of production, of unlimited exploitation of nature, of unlimited production of commodities, ever-expanding markets and never-ending accumulation of dead capital' (23). And in fact Mies goes further. Not only is capitalism necessarily patriarchal, but as the reference to socialism suggests, it is only one form of a broader system of patriarchal dominance over women, being 'the latest development of this system' (38). This in turn leads Mies to two important principles that are signal strengths of her analysis. First 'production' and 'reproduction' should be treated as aspects of 'one intrinsically interconnected system', that she terms 'capitalist-patriarchy', rather than in terms of a 'two-system' theory in which 'women's oppression in the private sphere or in "reproduction" is assigned to "patriarchy", patriarchy being seen as part of the superstructure, and their exploitation as workers in the office and factory is assigned to capitalism (38). Second: 'If we say feminism has to struggle against all capitalist-patriarchal relations, we have to extend our analysis to the system of accumulation on a world scale, the world market or the international division of labour' (39). Here Mies adopted the thesis most prominently advanced by André Gunder Frank, that the developed West actively 'underdevelops' the rest of the world, making overdevelopment and underdevelopment 'the two extreme poles of an inherently exploitative world order, divided up and yet linked by the global accumulation process or the world market' (39). Overall, then, there is a clear rationale to patriarchy as a system. In line with the housework debate, the housewife produces the husband as a free wage labourer, so that 'the housewife and her labour are ... the basis of the process of capital accumulation' (31). And male violence against women is not just 'deviant behaviour on the part of some men', but a method of 'keeping women in their place' (27) - a method on which all men rely and from which they benefit even if they do not personally practice it, and on which continued capitalist accumulation crucially depends. At this level, the argument develops from the work of Rosa Luxemburg, and its key point is the insistence on the fundamental and perennial reliance of [male] capitalism on [female] non-wage labour. In summary:
'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which 'capitalist productive labour' can be built up and exploited. Without the ongoing subsistence production of non-wage labourers (mainly women), wage labour would not be "productive". In contrast to Marx, I consider the capitalist production process as one which comprises both: the superexploitation of non-wage labourers (women, colonies, peasants) upon which wage labour exploitation then is possible. I define their exploitation as superexploitation because it is not based on the appropriation (by the capitalist) of the time and labour over and above the "necessary" labour time, the surplus labour, but of the time and labour necessary for people's own survival or subsistence production. It is not compensated for by a wage, the size of which is calculated on the "necessary" reproduction costs of the labourer, but is mainly determined by force or coercive institutions. This is the main reason for the growing poverty and starvation of Third World producers' ... '[P]oor peasant and tribal societies are now being "integrated" into a so-called new national and international division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation. Both in the capitalist metropoles and in the peripheries, a distinct sexist policy was and is used to subsume whole societies and classes under capitalist production relations. This strategy usually appears in the guise of "progressive" or liberal family laws (for example, the prohibition of polygamy), of family planning and development policies. The demand to "integrate women into development" ... is largely used in Third World countries to recruit women as the cheapest, most docile and manipulable labour force for capitalist production processes, both in agro-business and industry, as well as in the unorganized sector'. This also means that we should no longer look at the sexual division of labour as a problem related to the family only, but rather as a structural problem of the whole society. The hierarchical division of labour between men and women and its dynamics form an integral part of the dominant production relations, that is, the class relations of a particular epoch and society, and of the broader national and international division of labour' (48-9).
Underpinning this, though, is a second argument, developed through pp. 49-71, that hinges on the fundamental claim that women and men appropriate nature in completely contrasting ways. Here the argument is structured not by a particular view of capitalism, but by a stark dichotomy in which woman literally equals production and life, and man literally equals destruction and death. So an initial focus on the political economy of global capitalism is followed by an explication of the underlying logic behind it built around the idea of man-the-hunter/warrior, and this latter perspective turns out to dominate the whole account of the new international division of labour and of contemporary capitalism. After a critique of Marx on the 'production of life', Mies starts from the point that 'men and women act upon nature with a qualitatively different body' (52). Insisting that maleness and femaleness 'are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process' (53), she goes on to argue that women 'can experience their whole body as productive' (ibid), and over history have acquired knowledge through observation and experiment, appropriated their own generative and productive forces, and 'analysed and reflected upon their own and former experiences and passed them on to their daughters' (54). As for their social role: 'Women's production of new life, of new women and men, is inseparably linked to the production of the means of subsistence for this new life. Mothers who give birth to children and suckle them necessarily have to provide food for themselves and for the children' (55). So the 'first division of labour by sex, namely that between the gathering activities of the women and the sporadic hunting of the men, has its origin most probably in the fact that women necessarily were responsible for the production of the daily subsistence'; and this led women to invent tools and artefacts for the production, collection and storage of surplus - containers, baskets, digging tools and hoes (ibid). So it was women who developed 'the first truly productive relationship to nature': 'Women did not only collect and consume what grew in nature, but they made things grow' (ibid). And, expanding on this:
'Women's object-relation to nature was not only a productive one, it was also, right from the beginning, social production. In contrast to men, who could gather and hunt only for themselves, women had to share their products at least with their small children. This means, their specific object-relation to nature (to their own bodily nature as well as to the external nature), namely, to be able to let grow and make grow, made them also the inventors of the first social relations, the relations between mothers and children' (55-6).
Of course, despite the claim to the contrary, this is as biologically determinist as you can get - it simply puts a new spin on the way in which biology shapes social being, by insisting that women, in addition to giving birth, have to suckle their children and provide food for them thereafter. You can guess already that men are not going to come out of this well - the reference to the man's ability to hunt and gather for himself hints at what is to come. First,
'They [men] cannot experience their own bodies as being productive in the same way as women can. Male bodily productivity cannot appear as such without the mediation of external means, of tools, whereas women's productivity can. Men's contribution to the production of new life, though necessary at all times, could become visible, only after a long historical process of men's action on external nature by means of tools, and their reflection on this process' (56).
So 'before men could conceive not only of their own bodies as more productive than women's, but also establish a relationship of dominance over women and external nature, they had first to develop a type of productivity which at least appeared independent of and superior to women's productivity' (57). But standing in the way of this was the fact that 'female productivity is the precondition of male productivity and of all further world-historic development', as 'women at all times will be the producers of new women and men, and ... without this production all other forms and modes of production lose their sense' (58). This is the cue for the notion, crucial to the overall argument, of man the hunter/warrior. First, food obtained from hunting only ever supplemented the principal source of subsistence, gathering and cultivation by women, making man-the-hunter as provider a myth, despite its influential contribution to the later idea of man the breadwinner. Second, the 'man-the-hunter model is ... the latest version of the man-the-toolmaker model. In the light of this model, tools are above all weapons, tools to kill' (61; cf. p. 211). This leads to a six-point summary on which the whole book hinges, at least until the conclusion, where a remarkable shift occurs:
'a. The hunters' main tools are not instruments to procure life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings'.
b. This gives hunters a power over living beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.
c. The object-relation mediated through arms, therefore, is basically a predatory or exploitative one: hunters appropriate life, but they cannot produce life. It is an antagonistic and non-reciprocal relationship. All later exploitative relations between production and appropriation are, in the last analysis, upheld by arms as means of coercion.
d. The object-relation to nature mediated through arms constitutes a relationship of dominance and not of cooperation. This relationship of dominance has become an integral element in all further production relations which men have established. It has become, in fact, the main paradigm of their productivity. Without dominance and control over nature, men cannot conceive of themselves as being productive.
e. "Appropriation of natural substances" (Marx) now becomes a process of one-sided appropriation, in the sense of establishing property relations, not in the sense of humanization, but in the sense of exploitation of nature.
f. By means of arms, hunters could not only hunt animals, but they could also raid communities of other subsistence producers, kidnap their unarmed young and female workers, and appropriate them. It can be assumed that the first forms of private property were not cattle or other foods, but female slaves who had been kidnapped' (62).
For Mies, then, the logics of patriarchy and capital are complementary, as capital's need for a non-wage sector, and specifically for domination over households, peripheries, and nature, is secured by male dominance over women and the imposition of a predatory and exploitative mode of accumulation based on violence at every level: 'In the last analysis, we can attribute the asymmetric division of labour between women and men to this predatory mode of production, or rather appropriation, which is based on the male monopoly over means of coercion, that is, arms, and on direct violence by means of which permanent relations of exploitation and dominance between the sexes were created and maintained' (65). In turn, the man-the-hunter/warrior model is far from lost in the mists of time. On the contrary, the 'full potential of the predatory mode, based on a patriarchal division of labour could be realized only under feudalism and capitalism' (66). It saw a renaissance during the period of European feudalism, during which 'not only the women ..., but also the male peasants themselves, were "defined into nature", that is, for the feudal lord they had a status similar to that of women: their bodies no longer belonged to themselves, but to the lord, like the earth'; and under feudalism and capitalism alike, so-called 'peaceful' methods of labour control 'were established and maintained through the monopoly over the means of coercion which the dominant class enjoyed. The social paradigm of man-the-hunter/warrior remained the base and the last resort of this mode of production (67, emphasis of the last sentence mine).
In the remaining pages of this crucial section ('Man-the-Hunter' under Feudalism and Capitalism', 66-71), Mies offers a reading of the development of capitalism that spells out this claim. In a two-fold development, the 'pacification' of European workers was made possible by the 'naturalization' and exploitation of the peripheries, and the granting of political concessions that had deep social and historical roots: 'These political concessions are not, as most people think, the male worker's participation in the democratic process, his rise to the status of a "citizen", but his sharing the social paradigm of the ruling class, that is, the hunter/warrior model. His "colony" or "nature", however, is not Africa or Asia, but the women of his own class'; and at the same time: 'The domestication of the bourgeois women, their transformation into housewives, dependent on the income of the husband, became the model of the sexual division of labour under capitalism'. In this context, European witch hunts were the paradigmatic cases of brutal attacks against sexual and productive autonomy that made European women 'the dependent, domesticated housewives that we are in principle today' (69). In short: 'At the end of this "civilising process", we have women disciplined enough to work as housewives for a man or as wage labourers for a capitalist, or both. They have learned to turn the actual violence used against them for centuries against themselves, and to internalize it; they defined it as voluntariness, as "love", the necessary ideological mystification of their own self-repression' (70); and 'the various forms of asymmetric, hierarchical divisions of labour, which have developed throughout history up to the stage where the whole world is now structured into one system of unequal division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation, are based on the social paradigm of the predatory hunter/warrior who, without himself producing, is able by means of arms to appropriate and subordinate other producers, their productive forces and their products. ... Man-the-hunter is basically a parasite, not a producer' (71).
This striking passage reveals the rhetorical structure of the book, which relies on a series of dichotomies: woman = social = cooperative = productive = life; man = individual = instrumental = destructive = death. It is this which gives it its power as a text, thought at the same time it gives rise to flagrant contradictions, small and large. So for instance, Mies argues, following other sources, that 'old Iroquois women had a voice in the decision-making on war and hunting expeditions. If they refused to give the men the necessary supply of food for their adventures, the men had to stay at home' (59), suggesting a community consensus rather than a male imposition; and although she draws her principal examples of predatory hunter-warrior raids from pre-colonial African societies (64-5), she then excludes African societies from her list of 'distinctive patriarchal societies' (66), presumably because she now needs to place them among the 'other peoples' oppressed by Western patriarchy and imperialism. Most significantly, in her discussion of gender roles in production, she has to apply an explicit double standard to get her argument to work. She argues that childbirth is work, and sees the woman's work of sowing the fields to grow food as a positive extension of this productive role - women 'let grow and make grow'. But in speaking of 'women's production of new life' (55), and insisting that 'female productivity is the precondition of male productivity' (58), she writes men and the social act of fertilisation/conception out of the process of production of children. It would be equally arbitrary, and no more absurd, to insist one-sidedly on the opposite argument: that male productivity is the precondition of female productivity, as fertization must precede gestation and childbirth. As it is, contradiction proliferates. Her argument that male bodily productivity differs from that of women because it cannot appear as such without the mediation of external means, of tools, whereas women's productivity can, so that men's contribution to the production of new life, 'though necessary at all times, could become visible, only after a long historical process of men's action on external nature by means of tools, and their reflection on this process', is followed by this:
'It is interesting that the first male organ which gained prominence as the symbol of male productivity was the phallus, not the hand, though the hand was the main instrument for tool-making. This must have happened at the stage when the plough replaced the digging stick or the hoe of early female cultivators. In some Indian languages there is an analogy between plough and penis. In Bengali slang the penis is called 'the tool' (yantra). This symbolism, of course, not only expresses an instrumental relationship to external nature, but also to women. The penis is the tool, the plough, the 'thing' with which man works upon woman. In the north-Indian languages the words for 'work' and 'coitus' are the same, namely 'kam'. This symbolism also implies that women have become "external nature" for men. They are the earth, the field, the furrow (sita) upon which men sow their seeds. ... But these analogies of penis and plough, seed and semen, field and woman are not only linguistic expressions of an instrumental object-relation of men to nature and women, they also indicate that this object-relation is already characterized by dominance' (57).
The first sentence here refutes the passage that precedes it. The second is speculative, but is necessary if Mies is to identify the male planting of the seed in the female as the opposite of the female planting the seed in the earth, not as a parallel with it. Otherwise, the digging stick would become the 'thing' with which woman works upon 'external nature', and the relationship between women and nature, just like that between men and nature, would be one of dominance and exploitation. The radical conclusion to which this leads is perfectly tenable, if you are so minded, and is in fact increasingly familiar in critical accounts of anthropocentrism. So the issue here is not that Mies' argument is outlandish, but that it rests upon a contradictory double standard. If conception is always the result of rape (which is the implication of her argument), so is cultivation. Alternatively, procreation where the initial sexual act is consensual is a productive social act in which men and women cooperate, as is the cultivation of the earth in a manner which is sustainable.
So the distinctive feature of this book is that it views capitalist accumulation as a predatory and exploitative process driven by the male quest for dominance, and resting on violence. It is crucial to the argument that in this Mies parts company with Luxemburg, specifically over her opinion that 'warfare and violence were necessary as methods to solve conflicts of interest as long as the productive forces had not reached their highest development, as long as human beings had not achieved total control and dominance over nature'; the problem with this, she says, is that the concept of the development of the productive forces 'implies violence and warfare against nature and human beings'. It is this, construed in terms of male violence against nature and women, that shapes the argument. So the chapter on colonization and housewifization that follows begins with this 'tentative thesis':
'The historical development of the division of labour in general, and the sexual division of labour in particular, was/is not an evolutionary and peaceful process, based on the ever-progressing development of productive forces (mainly technological) and specialization, but a violent one by which first certain categories of men, later certain peoples, were able mainly by virtue of arms and warfare to establish an exploitative relationship between themselves and women, and other people and classes' (74).
What follows is a particular take on science and technology, reflected in an extended narrative in which the source of capitalist accumulation is identified as the 'modern technology of warfare and conquest' (ibid): 'Only now the dualism, or rather the polarization, between the patriarchs and nature, and between men and women could develop its full and permanent destructive potential. From now on science and technology became the main "productive forces" through which men could "emancipate" themselves from nature, as well as from women' (75). The distinctive feature of the narrative, in other words, is that it takes antecedents and episodes from the earliest stages of capitalist development as disclosing and reinforcing its permanent character, and constitutive of its dynamics. The witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are seen as 'manifestations of the rising modern society' (83), in which the 'blood money' confiscated from those condemned 'was used for the private enrichment of bankrupt princes, of lawyers, doctors, judges and professors, but also for such public affairs as financing wars, building up a bureaucracy, infrastructural measures, and finally the new absolutist state' (87). At the same time, for the rising capitalist class of the mercantilist state 'it was necessary that the old autonomy of women over their sexuality and reproductive capacities be destroyed, and that women be forcibly made to breed more workers'. Colonization is seen as the counterpart of the witch hunts in the same period, in terms of 'primitive accumulation' (88-90): Mies has some excellent material that shows the frankly racist and instrumental manner in which issues of slave breeding, gender relations in marriage, and sexual relations with local women were addressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Cuba (where slavery was not abolished until 1886), Burma and East and West Africa (90-100). All this, however, begs a question that is never addressed: why should practices that were associated with mercantilism and absolutist states in the early stages of the development of capitalism, preceding the industrial revolution, still be fundamental requirements for capitalism in its maturity?
It is at this point that the concept of 'housewifization' is introduced, initially the context of the discussion of colonialism; and again, the way in which it is introduced is puzzling. Mies begins, oddly, with the argument made by Werner Sombart (1967; Mies quotes the original 1922 German edition) that 'the market for most ... rare colonial luxury goods had been created by a class of women who had risen as mistresses of the absolutist princes and kings of France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries', and hence that this 'gave the decisive impetus to capitalism because, with their access to the money accumulated by the absolutist state, they created the market for early capitalism (101). Mies is herself rather critical of this thesis, and in any case identifies it correctly with 'early merchant capitalism' (102, emphasis mine). Taking Sombart's discussion of a related tendency to domestication as a starting point, she then briefly traces the emergence of the 'patriarchal nuclear family, that is the monogamous nuclear family as we know it today', a form that was 'made the norm for all by a number of legal reforms pushed through by the state from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards (103-4). She highlights the 'pro-natalist policy for the propertyless working class' adopted by the nascent German state (in the North German League, she notes, propertyless people were prohibited from marrying until 1868): there and more generally, she argues, 'women 'had to be made to breed more workers' (105) - the housewifization of women had not only 'the objective of ensuring that there were enough workers and soldiers for capital and the state', but also the creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption' (106): 'By this time not only had the household been discovered as an important market for a whole range of new gadgets and items, but also scientific home-management had become a new ideology for the further domestication of women. Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labour power costs, she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs' (106). As we shall see, this focus on the housewife as consumer turns out to be central.
Having reached this point, though, and reviewed evidence of support a century and more ago among social democratic and socialist currents for the extension to the proletariat of the 'bourgeois nuclear family', Mies cuts the discussion short, in a point-blank refusal even to make the argument for the continuing status of non-wage labour: 'The function of housework for the process of capital accumulation has been extensively discussed by feminists in recent years. I shall omit this aspect here' (110). That is to say, her analysis of the family and of housewifization stops dead in its tracks with the emergence of the breadwinner-housewife dichotomy in the late nineteenth century. The idea of 'family', up to that point a fluid and and only recently emerging concept, as she rightly insists (104), is suddenly and mysteriously fixed for all time, and conditions relating to the emergence of capitalism itself on a world scale, in a world in which non-wage labour necessarily predominated, are taken to be essential to its continuation and maturity for all time. So when Mies turns to 'housewifization international' in what is the central chapter of the book, she interprets the New International Division of Labour as fixed around 'Western' multinational production in the labour intensive textile, garment, electronic assembly and toy industries: 'The relocation of industries from developed to underdeveloped countries does not mean a genuine industrialization of the latter' (113). Equally, she presents it in stark gender terms:
'The changes in the sexual division of labour which are taking place under the impact of the new strategy of integrating all Third World countries and areas into a global market system are such that men may gain access to money, new skills, technology, wage-labour, and productive property. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly defined as 'dependents', that is, housewives, irrespective of the fact that in many cases - as, for instance, in Africa - they still play the most crucial role in subsistence production' (115).
The reversion back to the image of the 'housewife' proper as the unpaid wife in African subsistence production, in no way representative of the New International Division of Labour - is telling here. On the one hand, the notion of 'housewifization' is rooted in this and in the image of the home-based lacemakers on Narsapur subjected to a strict regime of purdah, while on the other it is stretched out of recognition to include full-time factory work that generally employed young single women, mostly living away from home, and not 'housewives' at all (as Mies is well aware; see for example p. 117). Of course, the broader concept of patriarchy can be and has been extended to this phenomenon, but even at the time the immediate and longer-term implications for gender dynamics in the family were being registered. Aihwa Ong's Spirits of Resistance, published a year later, had the following to say about the 'critical leverage to realign domestic power relations' that working daughters enjoyed from the very start of access to factory work:
'The changing content of daughter-parent, sister-brother relationships is displayed in refusal of money to parents who remarry, criticism of brothers, more daring enjoyment of premarital sex, power over younger siblings who ask for money, and decisions to hand earnings over to the mother. While the edifice of male authority is maintained, male honour is in a fundamental sense undermined as the father's farm income steadily declines, unemployed brothers accept doles from working sisters, and the household budget derives increasingly from female wages. In many cases, it is the mother who prods daughters to begin factory work, who extracts their regular contributions, punishes but tolerates their sexual adventures, and persuades them to delay marriage' (Ong, 1987, 107-8).
All the same, Mies continues to insist (without any evidence) that 'women, not men, are the optimal labour force for the capitalist (and the socialist) accumulation process on a world scale ... because they are now being universally defined as "housewives", not as workers' (116; emphasis mine); and sidesteps her awareness both that the majority of Third World factory workers are young single women, and that in as many as a third of developing world households the 'breadwinner' may be female, to insist that the ideology of the housewife earning income supplementary to that of 'the so-called main "breadwinner", the husband' (118) somehow remains in force and invulnerable to these changed material and social circumstances. It is not surprising, then, that of the five examples that follow of the 'general pattern of the interplay of the sexual division of labour with the new international division of labour' (127), only one (women in the electronics industry) relates specifically to the latter - and that virtually none of the women so employed are housewives ('When they marry, they usually lose their job', 136). In what follows, Mies can and does go on to identify manifold forms of male violence against women, with evidence taken exclusively from India (dowry murder, amniocentesis and femicide, and rape); the cases detailed (146-56) are shocking, and continue to occur in India and elsewhere today. But again, the context is far removed from the new international division of labour, and no effort is made to link the two.
All of this is as puzzling as can be. Although Mies insists at the outset that 'labour can only be productive in the sense of producing surplus value as long as it can tap, extract, exploit, and appropriate labour which is spent in the production of life, or subsistence production ... which is largely non-wage labour mainly done by women' (47), she nowhere attempts to defend this argument, but rather treats the housewife-breadwinner nuclear family as continuing to be predominant as fact, though far from universal, and, mysteriously, entirely dominant as ideology. And as we have seen, when it comes to the new international division of labour, she does not show either that it involved 'housewifization', or that it was underpinned by male violence against women.
The alternative perspective would be that as capitalism matures, patriarchy in its various forms increasingly becomes a fetter upon its further development. In other words, it would bear out Marx's unambiguous insistence that all forms of production can potentially be appropriated and transformed by capital: in the drafts towards Capital known as the Grundrisse, he suggested that in bourgeois society, where capital is dominant, it assigns rank and influence to other modes of production, which at the same time appear to it as barriers to overcome: it seeks ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Marx, 1973: 106-107, 408). I take this to apply in principle (subject to the advance of scientific knowledge and appropriate technology) not only to 'domestic' or 'subsistence' production, but also to the production of human life itself, or procreation. Marx notes some degree of commodification of both child-rearing and subsistence production in his own day, but he wrote long before the application of technology to the home, which came for the most part with the widespread application of electric power to domestic tasks and services (lighting, then power, and hence refrigeration, cooking, and cleaning), incipiently from the 1880s, but more generally in the early twentieth century. Advances since Marx's day, and in relation to procreation itself from the late 1970s but again more generally since Patriarchy and Accumulation first appeared in 1986, suggest that the work involved in all aspects of reproduction is in principle and in practice open to subjugation and takeover by capital.
This suggests that the 'hierarchical division of labour between men and women and its dynamics' to which Mies refers are neither fixed, nor necessarily patriarchal in character, and that however much 'colonization' and 'housewifization' have contributed and may still contribute to the accumulation of capital, they should still be expected to be transcended over time. In other words, a classical Marxist perspective would see 'colonization' and 'housewifization' as barriers to be overcome, rather than as perennial enabling features of capitalist accumulation on a global scale. This doesn't mean they are not significant aspects of the historical development of capitalism, or that they are insignificant today, or that they are easily overcome. But it does mean that the (female) housewife - (male) breadwinner relation, whether as social practice or legitimating ideology, should be seen as an obstacle to capitalist development, as should patriarchy in any form.
The relevance of this perspective is demonstrated by a striking observation. While it is true that some states have adopted explicitly natalist policies, and still do (Russia being a conspicuous case in point today), and maintained traditional patriarchal perspectives with regard to male and female gender roles, you will search in vain in the publications of the leading voices of global capital - the World Bank and the OECD - for any suggestion that the interests of capital are best served if women remain in the home and occupy themselves with domestic labour, or for any expression of concern that social reproduction is threatened by the entry of women into the labour force, or, despite rapidly falling birth rates, that women should breed more workers. On the contrary, the consistent objective of both organisations is to bring as many women into the capitalist labour market as possible, and on a global scale. And the same is true of the proposition that 'Western' capital must have a subservient world of 'colonies' at its disposal for capitalist accumulation to continue. They are unapologetic advocates of the breaking down of the non-capitalist barriers to the direct exploitation of all humanity by capital, and they extend this to the still very extensive 'informal sector', which they wish to abolish. At the same time, they have become consistent advocates of 'sustainability' with regard to nature, on the perfectly logical grounds that capitalist accumulation cannot continue if the planet is destroyed. They are powerless in the end to resolve the contradictions inherent in capitalist production itself, of course, but they appear not to believe in the slightest that capital requires the 'colonies' of women, other peoples, and nature in order to survive.
Nor, to speak loosely, does capital itself. Capital, existing in the form of innumerable competing 'capitals', takes no thought for social reproduction, human life, or anything else except for the constantly search for new sources of profit and accumulation. For a long time, this has meant the commodification not only of housework, but also of the day-to-day reproduction of labour - through the now all too familiar array of provision ranging from ready meals and takeaways to the millions of sandwiches produced every day by corporate giants, making this by far the most common 'meal' for wage-earners. The expansion of this provision is made possible by the equally ubiquitous ordering and delivery services that have grown from nothing over barely more than a decade. And all of this has been accompanied by the virtual disappearance of the traditional nuclear family, along with a shift in the character of child-bearing as the choice not to have children becomes increasingly common, and the average age of the mother at the birth of the first child (UK and Wales) has shifted in a generation from the early twenties to the early thirties. In commercial agriculture, meanwhile, the capacity now exists to plant, tend and harvest practically every crop remotely through robotic technology. And not even on the horizon, but present in everyday life is the prominent fact that the old-fashioned methods of conception, gestation and childbirth are increasingly by-passed by now not so new technologies that offer new sources of profit to capital.
Does all this mean that Mies is completely wrong? At one level it does. As noted at the outset, she was misled into imagining that a particular institution - the nuclear family based upon a male breadwinner and a female housewife - disclosed something about the necessarily permanent nature of capitalism. And she mistook a moment at which relations between the advanced capitalist 'West' and the periphery seemed particularly exploitative, and set in stone, for an end point of capitalist development. Worst, while she denounced the destructive consequences of headlong capitalist development based upon the mobilisation of science and technology in the service of ever greater growth and accumulation, she did not sufficiently grasp the full extent of its transformative/destructive capacity, which turns out to take no regard either for human life itself, or for any social relationships, patriarchal or not, except the relation between itself on the one hand, and directly exploitable 'free labour' on the other. So it is no longer possible to assert with the confidence that she does that 'women at all times will be the producers of new women and men' (58), or more generally that 'housework and non-wage labour have never been included in the labour that is supposed to be reduced by machines' (217).
So, finally, to the conclusion, from which the last quotation above is taken. It contains a significant revelation, and a staggering reverse. First, Mies advances the labour of 'peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market' (216) as exhibiting the same sense of work as a burden and a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment and happiness, just like that of the mother.These are work processes that are equally 'connected with the direct production of life or of use values'; and the 'production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work' (217). Embedded in this passage is the following revelation:
'The peasants who have to work from dawn to dusk during the harvesting season, for instance, feel the burden of work more than anybody else in their bodies and in their muscles. But in spite of the hardship of this work, it is never only 'a curse'. I remember the times of haymaking or harvesting on our small subsistence farm in my childhood as times of extreme labour intensity for everybody - mother, children, father - and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction' (216).
This then is the touchstone for Mies' model of an ideal society, and it leads to a denunciation of 'consumer society' that still has a powerful appeal. Pretty much everything that is not directly useful and necessary for the sustenance of life is 'luxuries or superfluous trash' (218). So Mies advocates a return to 'autarky', self-sufficiency in food, and the abandonment of trade on a massive global scale for profit in favour of minimal exchange, based upon 'non-exploitative relations to nature, women an other peoples' (219). In this vision, agriculture would replace industry, and 'big agri-business farm factories' would give way to 'decentralized small farms': 'Within such an economy there would be no room and no use for the production of unnecessary things and sheer waste, as is the case within the growth model' (220-21). All well and good. But up to this point the whole thrust of the book is to deny the possibility of such a way of life, given the dominance of patriarchy. It would appear that Mies has painted herself into a corner, but she has a final surprise up her sleeve. Patriarchy, astoundingly, can simply be wished away:
'Any search for ecological, economic and political autarky must start with the respect for the autonomy of women's bodies, their productive capacity to create new life, their productive capacity to maintain life through work, their sexuality. A change in the existing sexual division of labour would imply first and foremost that the violence that characterizes capitalist-patriarchal man-woman relations worldwide will be abolished not by women, but by men. Men have to refuse to define themselves any longer as Man-the-Hunter. Men have to start movements against violence against women if they want to preserve the essence of their own humanity' (222).
Secondly, men would have to share equal responsibility for the immediate production of life - childcare, housework, the care of the sick and the old, the relationship work, all work subsumed under the term "housework" (222). That this is a reasonable demand, entirely consistent with a feminist perspective, is not in dispute. The problem with it is simply that it repudiates at a stroke the whole argument of the book so far - a true deus ex machina. And the proposition that follows is at the same time a logical consequence of the assertion that capitalism is a form of patriarchy (so that the voluntary abandonment of patriarchy entails the collapse of capitalism), and a fatal consequence of failing to identify the actual forces that drive capitalist accumulation forward:
'Nobody, particularly no man, should be able to buy himself free from this work in the production of immediate life. This would then have the immediate effect that men would have to spend more time with children, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the sick, etc., and would have less time for their destructive production in industry, less time for their destructive research, less time for their destructive leisure activities, less time for their wars' (ibid).
Mies herself describes this as a 'beautiful utopia' (224), and one that cannot come about in a short time. In the meantime, middle class women worldwide (villains themselves in this narrative because of their addiction to consumption) must renounce their complicity with patriarchy, launch a consumer liberation movement, boycotting luxury goods especially, and 'all items which reinforce a sexist image of woman, or anti-woman tendencies in our society' (225-6 - incidentally, a perspective that blames women for attracting male desire), investigate and trace the paths by which commodities reach our tables and our bodies, and use public boycotts of large corporations to force them to change. And she warns
'Feminists cannot be satisfied if international capital uses our consumer boycott of certain items only to develop a new marketing strategy to make us consume so-called health food, produced perhaps in alternative self-help enterprises which may work on a contract basis for the multinational food corporations, as we have already seen happening in the underdeveloped countries' (228).
This is a tacit admission that capital is not only focused on the production of weapons of mass destruction, but rather seeks profit wherever profit can be made, and is versatile and flexible in its tactics. Subsequent developments reflect the acuity of this observation. But they also suggest that the effort to explain capitalism in terms of patriarchy is fundamentally flawed. However, recognition that the argument could perhaps have been better made does not in itself invalidate the generous and inspiring vision of an equal, sustainable and harmonious society that Mies advances. Its relevance to pressing contemporary issues is unmistakable. Flawed it may be, but it is a classic all the same.
Reference
Sombart, Werner. 1967. Luxury and Capitalism, University of Michigan Press.
Patriarchy and Accumulation develops and extends arguments first made in an earlier classic case study by Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982). The lace workers in question were home-based women, either creating individual pieces or assembling them into larger items such as garments, tablecloths and bedspreads (assembly, or athukupani, being the more skilled task). Although they mostly worked 6 to 8 hours per day they were identified as 'housewives', and did not appear in employment statistics. They produced for the world market, with the great bulk of the marketing and all the export trade controlled by men. Women from various communities were involved, but one particular group that moved into lace-making as a consequence of impoverishment caused by the concentration of land during the 'green revolution' and became the majority, the Kapu, were subject to a patriarchal regime of purdah and seclusion, which precluded manual work outside the home. Mies argues that:
'If pauperisation provides the material elements for the integration of the lace workers into a world market-oriented production system, the ideology of the housewife, the woman sitting in the house, provides the necessary subjective and socio-cultural element for the building up and maintenance of such a system. In fact, the ideology of the housewife has in the case of the lace workers assumed the character of a material force: it has found its institutionalisation in the sexual division of labour in society, in the exclusion of women from other productive activities and from trade, in the marriage system and caste system' (175-6).
Hence the important concept of 'housewifisation' as the 'necessary precondition for the extraction of super profits from the lace workers' (176):
'I define housewifisation as a process by which women are socially defined as housewives, dependent for their sustenance on the income of a husband, irrespective of whether they are de facto housewives or not. The social definition of women as housewives is the counterpart of the social definition of men as breadwinners, irrespective of their actual contribution to their family's subsistence' (ft. 2, p. 180).
These themes recur in Patriarchy and Accumulation, in which housewifization is identified as a central to the new international division of labour. After an introductory chapter, 'What is Feminism?', successive chapter headings convey the argument clearly: 'Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour', 'Colonization and Housewifization', 'Housewifization International: Women and the New International Division of Labour', and 'Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Primitive Accumulation of Capital'. In brief, the sexual division of labour is social, not 'natural'; colonization and housewifization are active processes by which (male) strategies of capital accumulation are imposed and furthered; the new international division of labour is itself underpinned by 'housewifization'; and violence against women maintains male predominance. The book then concludes with chapters on 'National Liberation and Women's Liberation' (a useful but less original chapter on the cases of Russia, China and Vietnam, pointing out that the first does not guarantee the second), and a look 'Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society'. It is only in the conclusion - which springs a couple of big surprises - that the reader can finally make sense of the book as a whole.
The first thing to notice is that there are two distinct and potentially separate aspects to the argument. One rests on the proposition formulated by Mies in discussion with Claudia von Werhof and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen in the wake of the housework debate, and following Rosa Luxemburg, that 'the capitalist mode of production was not identical with the famous capital-wage-labour relation, but that it needed different categories of colonies, particularly women, other peoples and nature, to uphold the model of ever-expanding growth' (35). Mies and her fellow theorists brought to Luxemburg's thesis on imperialism the particular insistence that 'capitalism cannot function without patriarchy, that the goal of this system, namely the never-ending process of capital accumulation, cannot be achieved unless patriarchal man-woman relations are maintained or newly created' (38). In short, 'women's oppression today is part and parcel of capitalist (or socialist) patriarchal production relations, of the paradigm of ever-increasing growth, of ever-increasing forces of production, of unlimited exploitation of nature, of unlimited production of commodities, ever-expanding markets and never-ending accumulation of dead capital' (23). And in fact Mies goes further. Not only is capitalism necessarily patriarchal, but as the reference to socialism suggests, it is only one form of a broader system of patriarchal dominance over women, being 'the latest development of this system' (38). This in turn leads Mies to two important principles that are signal strengths of her analysis. First 'production' and 'reproduction' should be treated as aspects of 'one intrinsically interconnected system', that she terms 'capitalist-patriarchy', rather than in terms of a 'two-system' theory in which 'women's oppression in the private sphere or in "reproduction" is assigned to "patriarchy", patriarchy being seen as part of the superstructure, and their exploitation as workers in the office and factory is assigned to capitalism (38). Second: 'If we say feminism has to struggle against all capitalist-patriarchal relations, we have to extend our analysis to the system of accumulation on a world scale, the world market or the international division of labour' (39). Here Mies adopted the thesis most prominently advanced by André Gunder Frank, that the developed West actively 'underdevelops' the rest of the world, making overdevelopment and underdevelopment 'the two extreme poles of an inherently exploitative world order, divided up and yet linked by the global accumulation process or the world market' (39). Overall, then, there is a clear rationale to patriarchy as a system. In line with the housework debate, the housewife produces the husband as a free wage labourer, so that 'the housewife and her labour are ... the basis of the process of capital accumulation' (31). And male violence against women is not just 'deviant behaviour on the part of some men', but a method of 'keeping women in their place' (27) - a method on which all men rely and from which they benefit even if they do not personally practice it, and on which continued capitalist accumulation crucially depends. At this level, the argument develops from the work of Rosa Luxemburg, and its key point is the insistence on the fundamental and perennial reliance of [male] capitalism on [female] non-wage labour. In summary:
'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which 'capitalist productive labour' can be built up and exploited. Without the ongoing subsistence production of non-wage labourers (mainly women), wage labour would not be "productive". In contrast to Marx, I consider the capitalist production process as one which comprises both: the superexploitation of non-wage labourers (women, colonies, peasants) upon which wage labour exploitation then is possible. I define their exploitation as superexploitation because it is not based on the appropriation (by the capitalist) of the time and labour over and above the "necessary" labour time, the surplus labour, but of the time and labour necessary for people's own survival or subsistence production. It is not compensated for by a wage, the size of which is calculated on the "necessary" reproduction costs of the labourer, but is mainly determined by force or coercive institutions. This is the main reason for the growing poverty and starvation of Third World producers' ... '[P]oor peasant and tribal societies are now being "integrated" into a so-called new national and international division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation. Both in the capitalist metropoles and in the peripheries, a distinct sexist policy was and is used to subsume whole societies and classes under capitalist production relations. This strategy usually appears in the guise of "progressive" or liberal family laws (for example, the prohibition of polygamy), of family planning and development policies. The demand to "integrate women into development" ... is largely used in Third World countries to recruit women as the cheapest, most docile and manipulable labour force for capitalist production processes, both in agro-business and industry, as well as in the unorganized sector'. This also means that we should no longer look at the sexual division of labour as a problem related to the family only, but rather as a structural problem of the whole society. The hierarchical division of labour between men and women and its dynamics form an integral part of the dominant production relations, that is, the class relations of a particular epoch and society, and of the broader national and international division of labour' (48-9).
Underpinning this, though, is a second argument, developed through pp. 49-71, that hinges on the fundamental claim that women and men appropriate nature in completely contrasting ways. Here the argument is structured not by a particular view of capitalism, but by a stark dichotomy in which woman literally equals production and life, and man literally equals destruction and death. So an initial focus on the political economy of global capitalism is followed by an explication of the underlying logic behind it built around the idea of man-the-hunter/warrior, and this latter perspective turns out to dominate the whole account of the new international division of labour and of contemporary capitalism. After a critique of Marx on the 'production of life', Mies starts from the point that 'men and women act upon nature with a qualitatively different body' (52). Insisting that maleness and femaleness 'are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process' (53), she goes on to argue that women 'can experience their whole body as productive' (ibid), and over history have acquired knowledge through observation and experiment, appropriated their own generative and productive forces, and 'analysed and reflected upon their own and former experiences and passed them on to their daughters' (54). As for their social role: 'Women's production of new life, of new women and men, is inseparably linked to the production of the means of subsistence for this new life. Mothers who give birth to children and suckle them necessarily have to provide food for themselves and for the children' (55). So the 'first division of labour by sex, namely that between the gathering activities of the women and the sporadic hunting of the men, has its origin most probably in the fact that women necessarily were responsible for the production of the daily subsistence'; and this led women to invent tools and artefacts for the production, collection and storage of surplus - containers, baskets, digging tools and hoes (ibid). So it was women who developed 'the first truly productive relationship to nature': 'Women did not only collect and consume what grew in nature, but they made things grow' (ibid). And, expanding on this:
'Women's object-relation to nature was not only a productive one, it was also, right from the beginning, social production. In contrast to men, who could gather and hunt only for themselves, women had to share their products at least with their small children. This means, their specific object-relation to nature (to their own bodily nature as well as to the external nature), namely, to be able to let grow and make grow, made them also the inventors of the first social relations, the relations between mothers and children' (55-6).
Of course, despite the claim to the contrary, this is as biologically determinist as you can get - it simply puts a new spin on the way in which biology shapes social being, by insisting that women, in addition to giving birth, have to suckle their children and provide food for them thereafter. You can guess already that men are not going to come out of this well - the reference to the man's ability to hunt and gather for himself hints at what is to come. First,
'They [men] cannot experience their own bodies as being productive in the same way as women can. Male bodily productivity cannot appear as such without the mediation of external means, of tools, whereas women's productivity can. Men's contribution to the production of new life, though necessary at all times, could become visible, only after a long historical process of men's action on external nature by means of tools, and their reflection on this process' (56).
So 'before men could conceive not only of their own bodies as more productive than women's, but also establish a relationship of dominance over women and external nature, they had first to develop a type of productivity which at least appeared independent of and superior to women's productivity' (57). But standing in the way of this was the fact that 'female productivity is the precondition of male productivity and of all further world-historic development', as 'women at all times will be the producers of new women and men, and ... without this production all other forms and modes of production lose their sense' (58). This is the cue for the notion, crucial to the overall argument, of man the hunter/warrior. First, food obtained from hunting only ever supplemented the principal source of subsistence, gathering and cultivation by women, making man-the-hunter as provider a myth, despite its influential contribution to the later idea of man the breadwinner. Second, the 'man-the-hunter model is ... the latest version of the man-the-toolmaker model. In the light of this model, tools are above all weapons, tools to kill' (61; cf. p. 211). This leads to a six-point summary on which the whole book hinges, at least until the conclusion, where a remarkable shift occurs:
'a. The hunters' main tools are not instruments to procure life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings'.
b. This gives hunters a power over living beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.
c. The object-relation mediated through arms, therefore, is basically a predatory or exploitative one: hunters appropriate life, but they cannot produce life. It is an antagonistic and non-reciprocal relationship. All later exploitative relations between production and appropriation are, in the last analysis, upheld by arms as means of coercion.
d. The object-relation to nature mediated through arms constitutes a relationship of dominance and not of cooperation. This relationship of dominance has become an integral element in all further production relations which men have established. It has become, in fact, the main paradigm of their productivity. Without dominance and control over nature, men cannot conceive of themselves as being productive.
e. "Appropriation of natural substances" (Marx) now becomes a process of one-sided appropriation, in the sense of establishing property relations, not in the sense of humanization, but in the sense of exploitation of nature.
f. By means of arms, hunters could not only hunt animals, but they could also raid communities of other subsistence producers, kidnap their unarmed young and female workers, and appropriate them. It can be assumed that the first forms of private property were not cattle or other foods, but female slaves who had been kidnapped' (62).
For Mies, then, the logics of patriarchy and capital are complementary, as capital's need for a non-wage sector, and specifically for domination over households, peripheries, and nature, is secured by male dominance over women and the imposition of a predatory and exploitative mode of accumulation based on violence at every level: 'In the last analysis, we can attribute the asymmetric division of labour between women and men to this predatory mode of production, or rather appropriation, which is based on the male monopoly over means of coercion, that is, arms, and on direct violence by means of which permanent relations of exploitation and dominance between the sexes were created and maintained' (65). In turn, the man-the-hunter/warrior model is far from lost in the mists of time. On the contrary, the 'full potential of the predatory mode, based on a patriarchal division of labour could be realized only under feudalism and capitalism' (66). It saw a renaissance during the period of European feudalism, during which 'not only the women ..., but also the male peasants themselves, were "defined into nature", that is, for the feudal lord they had a status similar to that of women: their bodies no longer belonged to themselves, but to the lord, like the earth'; and under feudalism and capitalism alike, so-called 'peaceful' methods of labour control 'were established and maintained through the monopoly over the means of coercion which the dominant class enjoyed. The social paradigm of man-the-hunter/warrior remained the base and the last resort of this mode of production (67, emphasis of the last sentence mine).
In the remaining pages of this crucial section ('Man-the-Hunter' under Feudalism and Capitalism', 66-71), Mies offers a reading of the development of capitalism that spells out this claim. In a two-fold development, the 'pacification' of European workers was made possible by the 'naturalization' and exploitation of the peripheries, and the granting of political concessions that had deep social and historical roots: 'These political concessions are not, as most people think, the male worker's participation in the democratic process, his rise to the status of a "citizen", but his sharing the social paradigm of the ruling class, that is, the hunter/warrior model. His "colony" or "nature", however, is not Africa or Asia, but the women of his own class'; and at the same time: 'The domestication of the bourgeois women, their transformation into housewives, dependent on the income of the husband, became the model of the sexual division of labour under capitalism'. In this context, European witch hunts were the paradigmatic cases of brutal attacks against sexual and productive autonomy that made European women 'the dependent, domesticated housewives that we are in principle today' (69). In short: 'At the end of this "civilising process", we have women disciplined enough to work as housewives for a man or as wage labourers for a capitalist, or both. They have learned to turn the actual violence used against them for centuries against themselves, and to internalize it; they defined it as voluntariness, as "love", the necessary ideological mystification of their own self-repression' (70); and 'the various forms of asymmetric, hierarchical divisions of labour, which have developed throughout history up to the stage where the whole world is now structured into one system of unequal division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation, are based on the social paradigm of the predatory hunter/warrior who, without himself producing, is able by means of arms to appropriate and subordinate other producers, their productive forces and their products. ... Man-the-hunter is basically a parasite, not a producer' (71).
This striking passage reveals the rhetorical structure of the book, which relies on a series of dichotomies: woman = social = cooperative = productive = life; man = individual = instrumental = destructive = death. It is this which gives it its power as a text, thought at the same time it gives rise to flagrant contradictions, small and large. So for instance, Mies argues, following other sources, that 'old Iroquois women had a voice in the decision-making on war and hunting expeditions. If they refused to give the men the necessary supply of food for their adventures, the men had to stay at home' (59), suggesting a community consensus rather than a male imposition; and although she draws her principal examples of predatory hunter-warrior raids from pre-colonial African societies (64-5), she then excludes African societies from her list of 'distinctive patriarchal societies' (66), presumably because she now needs to place them among the 'other peoples' oppressed by Western patriarchy and imperialism. Most significantly, in her discussion of gender roles in production, she has to apply an explicit double standard to get her argument to work. She argues that childbirth is work, and sees the woman's work of sowing the fields to grow food as a positive extension of this productive role - women 'let grow and make grow'. But in speaking of 'women's production of new life' (55), and insisting that 'female productivity is the precondition of male productivity' (58), she writes men and the social act of fertilisation/conception out of the process of production of children. It would be equally arbitrary, and no more absurd, to insist one-sidedly on the opposite argument: that male productivity is the precondition of female productivity, as fertization must precede gestation and childbirth. As it is, contradiction proliferates. Her argument that male bodily productivity differs from that of women because it cannot appear as such without the mediation of external means, of tools, whereas women's productivity can, so that men's contribution to the production of new life, 'though necessary at all times, could become visible, only after a long historical process of men's action on external nature by means of tools, and their reflection on this process', is followed by this:
'It is interesting that the first male organ which gained prominence as the symbol of male productivity was the phallus, not the hand, though the hand was the main instrument for tool-making. This must have happened at the stage when the plough replaced the digging stick or the hoe of early female cultivators. In some Indian languages there is an analogy between plough and penis. In Bengali slang the penis is called 'the tool' (yantra). This symbolism, of course, not only expresses an instrumental relationship to external nature, but also to women. The penis is the tool, the plough, the 'thing' with which man works upon woman. In the north-Indian languages the words for 'work' and 'coitus' are the same, namely 'kam'. This symbolism also implies that women have become "external nature" for men. They are the earth, the field, the furrow (sita) upon which men sow their seeds. ... But these analogies of penis and plough, seed and semen, field and woman are not only linguistic expressions of an instrumental object-relation of men to nature and women, they also indicate that this object-relation is already characterized by dominance' (57).
The first sentence here refutes the passage that precedes it. The second is speculative, but is necessary if Mies is to identify the male planting of the seed in the female as the opposite of the female planting the seed in the earth, not as a parallel with it. Otherwise, the digging stick would become the 'thing' with which woman works upon 'external nature', and the relationship between women and nature, just like that between men and nature, would be one of dominance and exploitation. The radical conclusion to which this leads is perfectly tenable, if you are so minded, and is in fact increasingly familiar in critical accounts of anthropocentrism. So the issue here is not that Mies' argument is outlandish, but that it rests upon a contradictory double standard. If conception is always the result of rape (which is the implication of her argument), so is cultivation. Alternatively, procreation where the initial sexual act is consensual is a productive social act in which men and women cooperate, as is the cultivation of the earth in a manner which is sustainable.
So the distinctive feature of this book is that it views capitalist accumulation as a predatory and exploitative process driven by the male quest for dominance, and resting on violence. It is crucial to the argument that in this Mies parts company with Luxemburg, specifically over her opinion that 'warfare and violence were necessary as methods to solve conflicts of interest as long as the productive forces had not reached their highest development, as long as human beings had not achieved total control and dominance over nature'; the problem with this, she says, is that the concept of the development of the productive forces 'implies violence and warfare against nature and human beings'. It is this, construed in terms of male violence against nature and women, that shapes the argument. So the chapter on colonization and housewifization that follows begins with this 'tentative thesis':
'The historical development of the division of labour in general, and the sexual division of labour in particular, was/is not an evolutionary and peaceful process, based on the ever-progressing development of productive forces (mainly technological) and specialization, but a violent one by which first certain categories of men, later certain peoples, were able mainly by virtue of arms and warfare to establish an exploitative relationship between themselves and women, and other people and classes' (74).
What follows is a particular take on science and technology, reflected in an extended narrative in which the source of capitalist accumulation is identified as the 'modern technology of warfare and conquest' (ibid): 'Only now the dualism, or rather the polarization, between the patriarchs and nature, and between men and women could develop its full and permanent destructive potential. From now on science and technology became the main "productive forces" through which men could "emancipate" themselves from nature, as well as from women' (75). The distinctive feature of the narrative, in other words, is that it takes antecedents and episodes from the earliest stages of capitalist development as disclosing and reinforcing its permanent character, and constitutive of its dynamics. The witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are seen as 'manifestations of the rising modern society' (83), in which the 'blood money' confiscated from those condemned 'was used for the private enrichment of bankrupt princes, of lawyers, doctors, judges and professors, but also for such public affairs as financing wars, building up a bureaucracy, infrastructural measures, and finally the new absolutist state' (87). At the same time, for the rising capitalist class of the mercantilist state 'it was necessary that the old autonomy of women over their sexuality and reproductive capacities be destroyed, and that women be forcibly made to breed more workers'. Colonization is seen as the counterpart of the witch hunts in the same period, in terms of 'primitive accumulation' (88-90): Mies has some excellent material that shows the frankly racist and instrumental manner in which issues of slave breeding, gender relations in marriage, and sexual relations with local women were addressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Cuba (where slavery was not abolished until 1886), Burma and East and West Africa (90-100). All this, however, begs a question that is never addressed: why should practices that were associated with mercantilism and absolutist states in the early stages of the development of capitalism, preceding the industrial revolution, still be fundamental requirements for capitalism in its maturity?
It is at this point that the concept of 'housewifization' is introduced, initially the context of the discussion of colonialism; and again, the way in which it is introduced is puzzling. Mies begins, oddly, with the argument made by Werner Sombart (1967; Mies quotes the original 1922 German edition) that 'the market for most ... rare colonial luxury goods had been created by a class of women who had risen as mistresses of the absolutist princes and kings of France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries', and hence that this 'gave the decisive impetus to capitalism because, with their access to the money accumulated by the absolutist state, they created the market for early capitalism (101). Mies is herself rather critical of this thesis, and in any case identifies it correctly with 'early merchant capitalism' (102, emphasis mine). Taking Sombart's discussion of a related tendency to domestication as a starting point, she then briefly traces the emergence of the 'patriarchal nuclear family, that is the monogamous nuclear family as we know it today', a form that was 'made the norm for all by a number of legal reforms pushed through by the state from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards (103-4). She highlights the 'pro-natalist policy for the propertyless working class' adopted by the nascent German state (in the North German League, she notes, propertyless people were prohibited from marrying until 1868): there and more generally, she argues, 'women 'had to be made to breed more workers' (105) - the housewifization of women had not only 'the objective of ensuring that there were enough workers and soldiers for capital and the state', but also the creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption' (106): 'By this time not only had the household been discovered as an important market for a whole range of new gadgets and items, but also scientific home-management had become a new ideology for the further domestication of women. Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labour power costs, she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs' (106). As we shall see, this focus on the housewife as consumer turns out to be central.
Having reached this point, though, and reviewed evidence of support a century and more ago among social democratic and socialist currents for the extension to the proletariat of the 'bourgeois nuclear family', Mies cuts the discussion short, in a point-blank refusal even to make the argument for the continuing status of non-wage labour: 'The function of housework for the process of capital accumulation has been extensively discussed by feminists in recent years. I shall omit this aspect here' (110). That is to say, her analysis of the family and of housewifization stops dead in its tracks with the emergence of the breadwinner-housewife dichotomy in the late nineteenth century. The idea of 'family', up to that point a fluid and and only recently emerging concept, as she rightly insists (104), is suddenly and mysteriously fixed for all time, and conditions relating to the emergence of capitalism itself on a world scale, in a world in which non-wage labour necessarily predominated, are taken to be essential to its continuation and maturity for all time. So when Mies turns to 'housewifization international' in what is the central chapter of the book, she interprets the New International Division of Labour as fixed around 'Western' multinational production in the labour intensive textile, garment, electronic assembly and toy industries: 'The relocation of industries from developed to underdeveloped countries does not mean a genuine industrialization of the latter' (113). Equally, she presents it in stark gender terms:
'The changes in the sexual division of labour which are taking place under the impact of the new strategy of integrating all Third World countries and areas into a global market system are such that men may gain access to money, new skills, technology, wage-labour, and productive property. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly defined as 'dependents', that is, housewives, irrespective of the fact that in many cases - as, for instance, in Africa - they still play the most crucial role in subsistence production' (115).
The reversion back to the image of the 'housewife' proper as the unpaid wife in African subsistence production, in no way representative of the New International Division of Labour - is telling here. On the one hand, the notion of 'housewifization' is rooted in this and in the image of the home-based lacemakers on Narsapur subjected to a strict regime of purdah, while on the other it is stretched out of recognition to include full-time factory work that generally employed young single women, mostly living away from home, and not 'housewives' at all (as Mies is well aware; see for example p. 117). Of course, the broader concept of patriarchy can be and has been extended to this phenomenon, but even at the time the immediate and longer-term implications for gender dynamics in the family were being registered. Aihwa Ong's Spirits of Resistance, published a year later, had the following to say about the 'critical leverage to realign domestic power relations' that working daughters enjoyed from the very start of access to factory work:
'The changing content of daughter-parent, sister-brother relationships is displayed in refusal of money to parents who remarry, criticism of brothers, more daring enjoyment of premarital sex, power over younger siblings who ask for money, and decisions to hand earnings over to the mother. While the edifice of male authority is maintained, male honour is in a fundamental sense undermined as the father's farm income steadily declines, unemployed brothers accept doles from working sisters, and the household budget derives increasingly from female wages. In many cases, it is the mother who prods daughters to begin factory work, who extracts their regular contributions, punishes but tolerates their sexual adventures, and persuades them to delay marriage' (Ong, 1987, 107-8).
All the same, Mies continues to insist (without any evidence) that 'women, not men, are the optimal labour force for the capitalist (and the socialist) accumulation process on a world scale ... because they are now being universally defined as "housewives", not as workers' (116; emphasis mine); and sidesteps her awareness both that the majority of Third World factory workers are young single women, and that in as many as a third of developing world households the 'breadwinner' may be female, to insist that the ideology of the housewife earning income supplementary to that of 'the so-called main "breadwinner", the husband' (118) somehow remains in force and invulnerable to these changed material and social circumstances. It is not surprising, then, that of the five examples that follow of the 'general pattern of the interplay of the sexual division of labour with the new international division of labour' (127), only one (women in the electronics industry) relates specifically to the latter - and that virtually none of the women so employed are housewives ('When they marry, they usually lose their job', 136). In what follows, Mies can and does go on to identify manifold forms of male violence against women, with evidence taken exclusively from India (dowry murder, amniocentesis and femicide, and rape); the cases detailed (146-56) are shocking, and continue to occur in India and elsewhere today. But again, the context is far removed from the new international division of labour, and no effort is made to link the two.
All of this is as puzzling as can be. Although Mies insists at the outset that 'labour can only be productive in the sense of producing surplus value as long as it can tap, extract, exploit, and appropriate labour which is spent in the production of life, or subsistence production ... which is largely non-wage labour mainly done by women' (47), she nowhere attempts to defend this argument, but rather treats the housewife-breadwinner nuclear family as continuing to be predominant as fact, though far from universal, and, mysteriously, entirely dominant as ideology. And as we have seen, when it comes to the new international division of labour, she does not show either that it involved 'housewifization', or that it was underpinned by male violence against women.
The alternative perspective would be that as capitalism matures, patriarchy in its various forms increasingly becomes a fetter upon its further development. In other words, it would bear out Marx's unambiguous insistence that all forms of production can potentially be appropriated and transformed by capital: in the drafts towards Capital known as the Grundrisse, he suggested that in bourgeois society, where capital is dominant, it assigns rank and influence to other modes of production, which at the same time appear to it as barriers to overcome: it seeks ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Marx, 1973: 106-107, 408). I take this to apply in principle (subject to the advance of scientific knowledge and appropriate technology) not only to 'domestic' or 'subsistence' production, but also to the production of human life itself, or procreation. Marx notes some degree of commodification of both child-rearing and subsistence production in his own day, but he wrote long before the application of technology to the home, which came for the most part with the widespread application of electric power to domestic tasks and services (lighting, then power, and hence refrigeration, cooking, and cleaning), incipiently from the 1880s, but more generally in the early twentieth century. Advances since Marx's day, and in relation to procreation itself from the late 1970s but again more generally since Patriarchy and Accumulation first appeared in 1986, suggest that the work involved in all aspects of reproduction is in principle and in practice open to subjugation and takeover by capital.
This suggests that the 'hierarchical division of labour between men and women and its dynamics' to which Mies refers are neither fixed, nor necessarily patriarchal in character, and that however much 'colonization' and 'housewifization' have contributed and may still contribute to the accumulation of capital, they should still be expected to be transcended over time. In other words, a classical Marxist perspective would see 'colonization' and 'housewifization' as barriers to be overcome, rather than as perennial enabling features of capitalist accumulation on a global scale. This doesn't mean they are not significant aspects of the historical development of capitalism, or that they are insignificant today, or that they are easily overcome. But it does mean that the (female) housewife - (male) breadwinner relation, whether as social practice or legitimating ideology, should be seen as an obstacle to capitalist development, as should patriarchy in any form.
The relevance of this perspective is demonstrated by a striking observation. While it is true that some states have adopted explicitly natalist policies, and still do (Russia being a conspicuous case in point today), and maintained traditional patriarchal perspectives with regard to male and female gender roles, you will search in vain in the publications of the leading voices of global capital - the World Bank and the OECD - for any suggestion that the interests of capital are best served if women remain in the home and occupy themselves with domestic labour, or for any expression of concern that social reproduction is threatened by the entry of women into the labour force, or, despite rapidly falling birth rates, that women should breed more workers. On the contrary, the consistent objective of both organisations is to bring as many women into the capitalist labour market as possible, and on a global scale. And the same is true of the proposition that 'Western' capital must have a subservient world of 'colonies' at its disposal for capitalist accumulation to continue. They are unapologetic advocates of the breaking down of the non-capitalist barriers to the direct exploitation of all humanity by capital, and they extend this to the still very extensive 'informal sector', which they wish to abolish. At the same time, they have become consistent advocates of 'sustainability' with regard to nature, on the perfectly logical grounds that capitalist accumulation cannot continue if the planet is destroyed. They are powerless in the end to resolve the contradictions inherent in capitalist production itself, of course, but they appear not to believe in the slightest that capital requires the 'colonies' of women, other peoples, and nature in order to survive.
Nor, to speak loosely, does capital itself. Capital, existing in the form of innumerable competing 'capitals', takes no thought for social reproduction, human life, or anything else except for the constantly search for new sources of profit and accumulation. For a long time, this has meant the commodification not only of housework, but also of the day-to-day reproduction of labour - through the now all too familiar array of provision ranging from ready meals and takeaways to the millions of sandwiches produced every day by corporate giants, making this by far the most common 'meal' for wage-earners. The expansion of this provision is made possible by the equally ubiquitous ordering and delivery services that have grown from nothing over barely more than a decade. And all of this has been accompanied by the virtual disappearance of the traditional nuclear family, along with a shift in the character of child-bearing as the choice not to have children becomes increasingly common, and the average age of the mother at the birth of the first child (UK and Wales) has shifted in a generation from the early twenties to the early thirties. In commercial agriculture, meanwhile, the capacity now exists to plant, tend and harvest practically every crop remotely through robotic technology. And not even on the horizon, but present in everyday life is the prominent fact that the old-fashioned methods of conception, gestation and childbirth are increasingly by-passed by now not so new technologies that offer new sources of profit to capital.
Does all this mean that Mies is completely wrong? At one level it does. As noted at the outset, she was misled into imagining that a particular institution - the nuclear family based upon a male breadwinner and a female housewife - disclosed something about the necessarily permanent nature of capitalism. And she mistook a moment at which relations between the advanced capitalist 'West' and the periphery seemed particularly exploitative, and set in stone, for an end point of capitalist development. Worst, while she denounced the destructive consequences of headlong capitalist development based upon the mobilisation of science and technology in the service of ever greater growth and accumulation, she did not sufficiently grasp the full extent of its transformative/destructive capacity, which turns out to take no regard either for human life itself, or for any social relationships, patriarchal or not, except the relation between itself on the one hand, and directly exploitable 'free labour' on the other. So it is no longer possible to assert with the confidence that she does that 'women at all times will be the producers of new women and men' (58), or more generally that 'housework and non-wage labour have never been included in the labour that is supposed to be reduced by machines' (217).
So, finally, to the conclusion, from which the last quotation above is taken. It contains a significant revelation, and a staggering reverse. First, Mies advances the labour of 'peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market' (216) as exhibiting the same sense of work as a burden and a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment and happiness, just like that of the mother.These are work processes that are equally 'connected with the direct production of life or of use values'; and the 'production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work' (217). Embedded in this passage is the following revelation:
'The peasants who have to work from dawn to dusk during the harvesting season, for instance, feel the burden of work more than anybody else in their bodies and in their muscles. But in spite of the hardship of this work, it is never only 'a curse'. I remember the times of haymaking or harvesting on our small subsistence farm in my childhood as times of extreme labour intensity for everybody - mother, children, father - and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction' (216).
This then is the touchstone for Mies' model of an ideal society, and it leads to a denunciation of 'consumer society' that still has a powerful appeal. Pretty much everything that is not directly useful and necessary for the sustenance of life is 'luxuries or superfluous trash' (218). So Mies advocates a return to 'autarky', self-sufficiency in food, and the abandonment of trade on a massive global scale for profit in favour of minimal exchange, based upon 'non-exploitative relations to nature, women an other peoples' (219). In this vision, agriculture would replace industry, and 'big agri-business farm factories' would give way to 'decentralized small farms': 'Within such an economy there would be no room and no use for the production of unnecessary things and sheer waste, as is the case within the growth model' (220-21). All well and good. But up to this point the whole thrust of the book is to deny the possibility of such a way of life, given the dominance of patriarchy. It would appear that Mies has painted herself into a corner, but she has a final surprise up her sleeve. Patriarchy, astoundingly, can simply be wished away:
'Any search for ecological, economic and political autarky must start with the respect for the autonomy of women's bodies, their productive capacity to create new life, their productive capacity to maintain life through work, their sexuality. A change in the existing sexual division of labour would imply first and foremost that the violence that characterizes capitalist-patriarchal man-woman relations worldwide will be abolished not by women, but by men. Men have to refuse to define themselves any longer as Man-the-Hunter. Men have to start movements against violence against women if they want to preserve the essence of their own humanity' (222).
Secondly, men would have to share equal responsibility for the immediate production of life - childcare, housework, the care of the sick and the old, the relationship work, all work subsumed under the term "housework" (222). That this is a reasonable demand, entirely consistent with a feminist perspective, is not in dispute. The problem with it is simply that it repudiates at a stroke the whole argument of the book so far - a true deus ex machina. And the proposition that follows is at the same time a logical consequence of the assertion that capitalism is a form of patriarchy (so that the voluntary abandonment of patriarchy entails the collapse of capitalism), and a fatal consequence of failing to identify the actual forces that drive capitalist accumulation forward:
'Nobody, particularly no man, should be able to buy himself free from this work in the production of immediate life. This would then have the immediate effect that men would have to spend more time with children, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the sick, etc., and would have less time for their destructive production in industry, less time for their destructive research, less time for their destructive leisure activities, less time for their wars' (ibid).
Mies herself describes this as a 'beautiful utopia' (224), and one that cannot come about in a short time. In the meantime, middle class women worldwide (villains themselves in this narrative because of their addiction to consumption) must renounce their complicity with patriarchy, launch a consumer liberation movement, boycotting luxury goods especially, and 'all items which reinforce a sexist image of woman, or anti-woman tendencies in our society' (225-6 - incidentally, a perspective that blames women for attracting male desire), investigate and trace the paths by which commodities reach our tables and our bodies, and use public boycotts of large corporations to force them to change. And she warns
'Feminists cannot be satisfied if international capital uses our consumer boycott of certain items only to develop a new marketing strategy to make us consume so-called health food, produced perhaps in alternative self-help enterprises which may work on a contract basis for the multinational food corporations, as we have already seen happening in the underdeveloped countries' (228).
This is a tacit admission that capital is not only focused on the production of weapons of mass destruction, but rather seeks profit wherever profit can be made, and is versatile and flexible in its tactics. Subsequent developments reflect the acuity of this observation. But they also suggest that the effort to explain capitalism in terms of patriarchy is fundamentally flawed. However, recognition that the argument could perhaps have been better made does not in itself invalidate the generous and inspiring vision of an equal, sustainable and harmonious society that Mies advances. Its relevance to pressing contemporary issues is unmistakable. Flawed it may be, but it is a classic all the same.
Reference
Sombart, Werner. 1967. Luxury and Capitalism, University of Michigan Press.