Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 221-222

A feminist conception of an alternative economy will include all that has previously been said about autarky and decentralization. But it will place the transformation of the existing sexual division of labour (based on the breadwinner-housewife model) at the centre of the whole restructuring process. This is not mere narcissistic self-indulgence of women, but the result of our historical research as well as our analysis of the functioning of capitalist patriarchy. Feminists do not start with the external ecology, economy and politics, but with the social ecology, the centre of which is the relation between men and women. Autonomy over our bodies and lives is, therefore, the first and most fundamental demand of the international feminist movement. 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.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 216-219

Towards a feminist concept of labour

It is obvious...that the development of a feminist concept of labour has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labour and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy--the realm of freedom--can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labour, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter.

1. If we take as our model of a 'worker' not the white male industrial wage-worker..., but a mother, we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her, work is always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment, and happiness. Children may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead. Even when children turn out to be a disappointment for the mother, when they eventually leave her or feel contempt for her--as in fact many do in our society--the pain she suffers at all this is still more human than the cold indifference of the industrial worker or engineer vis-à-vis his products, the commodities he produces and consumes.

The same unity of work as a burden and work as enjoyment can be found among peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market. 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 everyone--mother, children, father--and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction... Anyone who has had an opportunity to observe the work-process of people involved in non-market oriented subsistence production will have found this interplay of work as necessity and burden, and work as a basic source of enjoyment and self-expression.

The same is true for the work of the artisan or in handicrafts production, as long as this work is not yet fully subsumed under the compulsions of the market.

The main characteristics of the work-processes described above is that they are all connected with the direct production of life or of use values. A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and of wealth..., of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work.

2. ...[A] feminist concept of labour cannot be based on the Marxist (and capitalist) economics of time. The shortening of the daily labour time or of the labour time within a life span cannot be a method for the realization of a feminist utopia. Women have by now realized that the reduction of time spent in commodity production does not lead to more freedom for women, but rather to more housework, more non-wage work in household production, more relationship or emotional work, more consumption work. The vision of a society in which almost all time is leisure time and labour time is reduced to a minimum is for women in many respects a vision of horror, not only because housework and non-wage work have never been included in the labour that is supposed to be reduced by machines, but also because it will be women who have to restore to the then idle men a sense of reality, meaning and life.

A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest and enjoyment are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organization of time prevail, the length of the working-day is no longer very relevant. Thus, a long working-day and even a lifetime full of work, will not then be felt as a curse but as a source of human fulfilment and happiness.

Such a new concept of time cannot, of course, be brought about unless the existing sexual division of labour is abolished. Such a change, however, will not come, as some women expect, by a reduction of the working-day or week through rationalization and automation. The men whose weekly or daily or life labour time has already been shortened through modern technology do not share more of the housework, but rather engage in more drinking, more TV-watching, or in other male leisure time activities... The whole reduction of the work-day since the times of Marx and Engels has nowhere resulted in a change in the sexual division of labour, has not resulted in men feeling more responsible for housework, children, or the production of life.
3. The third element which has to be stressed in a feminist concept of labour is the maintenance of work as a direct and sensual interaction with nature, with organic matter and living organisms. In the Marxist concept of labour, this sensual, bodily interaction with nature--human nature as well as external nature--is largely eliminated because more and more machines are inserted between the human body and nature. These machines are, of course, supposed to give man dominance and power over 'wild' 'blind' nature, but at the same time they reduce his own sensuality. With the elimination of labour as necessity and burden, the potential of the human body for enjoyment, for sensuality and for erotic and sexual satisfaction, is also eliminated. As our body will ever be the base for our enjoyment and happiness, the destruction of sensuality, resulting from the interaction with machines rather than with living organisms, will only result in a pathological search for an idealized 'nature'. In a desperate effort to restore this lost sensuality to the (male) body, the female body is mystified as both 'pure or base nature' and as the goal of fulfilment of all desires...

4. Direct and sensual interaction with nature in the work process is not yet sufficient, however. This could also be realized through some sport or hobby. And, indeed, the architects of modern society are visualizing an increase of such physical activities as a kind of therapy for people who have been made redundant as workers through automation. But how long will hobbies and sports provide a sense of purpose and meaning to people, even if their daily requirements are provided for by the welfare state?

A feminist concept of labour has to maintain that work retains its sense of purpose, its character of being useful and necessary for the people who do it and those around them. This also means that the products of this labour are useful and necessary, and not just some luxuries or superfluous trash as are most of the handicrafts made today by women in 'income-generating activities' in Third World countries.

5. This sense of usefulness, necessity and purpose with regard to work and its products, however, can only be restored as the division and the distance between production and consumption are gradually abolished. Today, the division and alienation are, as we have seen, global. Third World women produce what they do not know, and First World women consume what they do not know.

Within a feminist perspective, production of life is the main goal of human activity. This necessitates that the processes of production of necessary things and processes of consumption are again brought together. Because only by consuming the things which we produce can we judge whether they are useful, meaningful and wholesome, whether they are necessary or superfluous. And only by producing what we consume can we know how much time is really necessary for the things we want to consume, what skills are necessary, what knowledge is necessary and what technology is necessary.

The abolition of the wide division between production and consumption, does not mean, of course, that every individual, or even every small community, must produce all they need and have to find everything in their ecological surroundings. But it does imply that the production of life is based on a certain autarkic relation of a certain community of people to a specific region, the size of which has to be determined on the basis of the principles spelt out at the beginning of this section. Goods and services imported into such a region should be the result of non-exploitative relations to nature, women and other peoples. The tendential bringing together of production and consumption will drastically reduce the possibilities for this exploitation, and largely increase the potential for resistance to economic and political blackmail and coercion.

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.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing, page 119

There are other questions: why is "greatness" in art so often aggressive? Why does "great" literature have to be long? Is "regionalism" only another instance of down-grading the vernacular? Why is "great" architecture supposed to knock your eye out at first view, unlike "indigenous" architecture, which must be appreciated slowly and with knowledge of the climate in which it exists? Why is the design of clothing---those grotesque and sometimes perilously fantastic anatomical--social-role--characterological ideas of the person---a "minor" art? Because it has a use? In admiring "pure" (i.e., useless) art, are we not merely admiring Veblenian conspicuous consumption, like the Mandarin fingernail?

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance page 887

People often ask me what sort of a culture I would like to see replace civilization, and I always say that I do not want any culture to replace this one. I want 100,000 cultures to replace it, each one emerging from its own landbase, each one doing what sustainable cultures of all times and all places have done for their landbases: helping the landbase to become stronger, more itself, through their presence.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance page 766

Civilization has from the beginning devoted itself almost completely to conquest, to war. It's sometimes hard to say--and I'm not sure I care anyway--whether the civilized hyperexploit resources to fuel the war machine, or need a war machine to seize resources (which are then hyperexploited to fuel the war machine). It's probably a bit like asking whether the dominant culture is so destructive becasue most of its members are insane, suffering from a form of complex PTSD; or whether the dominant culture is so destructive because its materialistic system of social rewards--overvaluing the acquisition of wealth and power and undervaluing relationship--leads inevitably to hatred and atrocity; or whether the physical resource requirements of cities necessitate widespread violence and destruction. The answer is yes.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance page 655

This disconnection from killing is related to a disbelief in our own deaths, and even moreso to a disbelief in the rightness of our own deaths and a belief on the other hand that death is the enemy. As such it ties back to premise four of this book. Death is violence and violence cannot happen to us. We cannot die. We will not die. We are immortal. This delusion is based on the linear/historical view of the world we discussed so very long ago in this book, where life is not a circle where I feed off you who feeds off someone else who feeds off someone else who feeds off someone else who feeds off me (or put another way, where I feed someone else who feeds someone else who feed someone else who feeds someone else who feeds me). Rather we are exempt from this cycle. We are at the top of a pyramid. We are consumers. I feed off you and I feed off someone else and I feed off someone else and I feed off someone else and I feed off someone else. No one feeds off me. I will never die.

Susan Sontag, On Photography page 13

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in East Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. In end-of-the-century London, Samuel Butler complained that "there is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been--what people needed protection from. Now nature--tamed, endangered, mortal--needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow page 411-412

Young ex-architect Kekulé went looking among the molecules of the time for the hidden shapes he knew were there...He saw the four bonds of carbon, lying in a tetrahedron--he showed how carbon atoms could link up, one to another, into long chains. . . . But he was stumped when he got to benzene. He knew there were six carbon atoms with a hydrogen attached to each one--but he could not see the shape. Not until the dream: until he was made to see it, so that others might be seduced by its physical beauty, and begin to think of it as a blueprint, a basis for new compounds, new arrangements, so that there would be a field of aromatic chemistry to ally itself with secular power, and find new methods of synthesis...

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the world can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

Stanislaw Lem, "Pericalypsis" in A Perfect Vacuum page 81

Our mighty civilization, he says, strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible. The impermanent product must soon be replaced by a new one, and this is good for the economy; the permanence of the packaging, on the other hand, makes disposal difficult, and this promotes the further development of technology and organization. Thus the consumer copes with each consecutive article of junk on an individual basis, whereas for the removal of the packagings special antipollution programs are required, sanitary engineering, the coordination of efforts, planning, purification, and decontamination plants, and so on. Formerly, one could depend on it that the accumulation of garbage would be kept at a reasonable level by the forces of nature, such as the rains, the winds, rivers, and earthquakes. But at the present time what once washed and flushed away the garbage has itself become the excrement of civilization: the rivers poison us, the atmosphere burns our lungs and eyes, the winds strew industrial ashes on our heads, and as for plastic containers, since they are elastic, even earthquakes cannot deal with them. Thus the normal scenery today is civilizational droppings, and the natural reserves are a momentary exception to the rule. Against this landscape of packagings that have been sloughed off by their products, crowds bustle about, absorbed in the business of opening and consuming...