Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 211-212

[A] feminist perspective has to start with some basic principles, which can guide political action at all levels. The following seem to me the most basic:
  1. Rejection and abolition of the principle of colonizing dualistic divisions (between men and women, different peoples and classes, man and nature, spirit and matter) based on exploitation for the sake of ever-expanding commodity production and capital accumulation.

  2. This implies the creation of non-exploitative, non-hierarchical, reciprocal relationships between parts of our body; people and nature; women and men; different sections and classes of one society; different peoples.

  3. A necessary consequence of non-exploitative relations with ourselves, nature, other human beings and other peoples or nations will be the regaining of autonomy over our bodies and our lives. This autonomy means, first and foremost, that we cannot be blackmailed, or forced to do things which are against human dignity in exchange for the means of our subsistence or our life. Autonomy in this sense should not be understood individualistically and idealistically--as it often is by feminists--because no single woman in our atomized society is able to preserve her autonomy. Indeed, it is the antithesis of autonomy if it is understood in this narrow egotistic sense. Because the enslavement of the consumers under capitalist conditions of generalized commodity production is brought about precisely by the illusion that each individual can buy her or his independence from other human beings and social relations by the purchase of commodities.

    Autonomy understood as freedom from coercion and blackmail regarding our lives and bodies, can be brought about only by collective effort in a decentralized, non-hierarchical way.

  4. A rejection of the idea of infinite progress and acceptance of the idea that our human universe is finite, our body is finite, the earth is finite.

  5. The aim of all work and human endeavour is not a never-ending expansion of wealth and commodities, but human happiness (as the early socialists had seen it), or the production of life itself.

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