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 120-121

This strategy of mobilizing poor, cheap, docile, dexterous, submissive Third World women [the adjectives refer to previously described Third World government-sponsored advertisements aimed at capitalists -Ethan] for export-oriented production is only one side of the global division of labour. As we said before, it is not enough that these commodities are produced as cheaply as possible, they also have to be sold. In the marketing strategies of the Western and Japanese corporations which are thriving on the export-oriented production in Third World countries, Western women play a crucial role, too, but this time not as producers, but as consumers, as housewives, mothers, and sex objects.

As producers, women in Europe and the US were the first to be fired as a consequence of the new IDL [international division of labour -Ethan]. They lost their jobs in textile industries and electric industries. When Phillips in Eindhoven in Holland closed its factory there in order to re-open others in Third World countries, thousands of women lost their jobs. They were sent home to their kitches with the argument that they should show solidarity with Third World women who needed jobs, whereas in Holland the husband's income was so high that a woman could stay at home and use her time to look after her children better. At the same time, the same multinational corporations mobilize women constantly as buyers of their goods. The tremendous expansion of TV and the introduction of cable TV have as their main purpose the expansion of advertising. Most of the advertising is directed towards women as consumers, or the advertisements themselves contain images of women as sex symbols as their most important ingredient. Here we see the new IDL divides the world up into producers and consumers, but it also divides women internationally and class-wise into producers and consumers. This relationship is structured in such a way that Third World women are objectively--not subjectively--linked to First World women through the commodities which the latter buy. This is not only a contradictory relationship, but also one in which the two actors on each side of the globe do not know anything of each other. The women in South and South-East Asia hardly know what they produce or for whom they make the things they make. On the other hand, the Western housewife is totally oblivious of the female labour, the working conditions, the wages, etc., under which the things which she buys are produced. She is only interested in getting these things as cheaply as possible. She, as most others in Western countries, attributes the overabundance in our supermarkets to the 'productivity' of Western workers. We shall have to discuss the question of whether this contradictory strategy which divides women worldwide into workers and housewives contributes to women's liberation. It is often argued that this strategy gives jobs to Third World women and cheap consumer goods to Western women/housewives. So both should be happy. But if we look more closely at the consequences of this strategy, we may come to another conclusion, namely, that the enslavement and exploitation of one set of women is the foundation of a qualitatively different type of enslavement of another set of women. One is a condition as well as the consequence of the other.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 118-119

Almost at the same time as this new international division of labour was being worked out and put into practice, the world was made aware of the necessity of 'integrating women into development.' Already in 1970, Esther Boserup had found out that women had not benefited from whatever development had taken place in Third World countries. Here findings were corroborated by the many reports on the status of women prepared by governments for the UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico in 1975. It was found out that women's status had deteriorated in most Third, and even First World countries in all spheres: in politics, employment, education, health, law. As a consequence, the World Plan of Action presented by this conference demanded that the governments make substantial efforts to remedy the situation and to integrate women into development. After this, the UN organizations, the World Bank, the NGOs, all began to talk of women, and to include a chapter on women and development in their programmes. Can we consider this as a genuine change of heart on the part of the male development planners? Were they now really interested in women's liberation after they had forgotten about them throughout all the previous years? And what did they, what do they, mean by 'integrating women into development'?

To begin with, let us not forget one thing: women were also integrated into the old strategy of development. Their unpaid or low paid labour as farm workers, as factory workers, as housewives had also been the base of what has been called modernization in developing countries. But this labour had remained invisible; it provided a lot of the subsistence basis on which male wage-labour could emerge. It subsidized the male wage. But now something else was meant. 'Integrating women into development' means, in most cases, getting women to work in some so-called income-generating activities, that is, to enter market-oriented production. It does not mean that women should expand their subsistence production, that they should try to get more control over land and produce more for their own consumption, more food, more clothes, etc., for themselves. Income in this strategy means money income. And money income can be generated only if women produce something which can be sold in the market. As purchasing power among poor Third World women is low, they have to produce something for people who have this purchasing power. And such people live in the cities in their own countries, or they live in the Western countries. This means that the strategy of integrating women's work into development also amounts to export- or market-oriented production. Poor Third World women produce not what they need, but what others can buy.

Another characteristic of this strategy is that it defines Third World women not as workers, but as housewives. What they do is not defined as work, but as an 'activity'. By universalizing the housewife ideology and the model of the nuclear family as signs of progress, it is also possible to define all the work women do--whether in the formal or informal sectors--as supplementary work, her income as supplementary income to that of the so-called main 'breadwinner', the husband. The economic logic of this housewifization is a tremendous reduction of labour costs. This is one of the reasons why international capital and its spokesmen are now interested in women.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 69

The 'pacification' of the European workers, the establishment of a new form of labour control through the wage-nexus, the transformation of direct violence into structural violence, or of extra-economic coercion into economic coercion, needed, however, not only special economic concessions, but also political concessions.

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 within that part of 'nature', the boundaries of which are defined by marriage and family laws, he has the monopoly on the means of coercion, of direct violence, which, at the level of the state, the ruling classes invested in their representatives, that is, the king and later the elected representatives.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance pages 775-777

I think we can take Besayev and the killers at their word, that this killing was done in retribution for the killing of their own children: you kill ours, we kill yours, fair enough? But I believe it's also true that the Chechens were trying to send a message which I believe would run something like this: stop killing our children. The next question is: to whom are they trying to send the message? If they're trying to send it to the people of Beslan, I think they're trying to send it to the wrong people. I think it's safe to say that Russia is no more of a democracy than the United States, which means even if the people of Beslan receive the message loud and clear--even if they're terrorized into not supporting Russia's occupation of Chechnya--if probably won't cause the Russian government to withdraw from Chechnya. The people from Beslan almost undoubtedly have no more influence on Russian policy than the people of Crescent City, California have on United States policy.

I'd imagine Besayev and the others are fully aware of this. This makes me suspect that their message was intended not just for the people of Beslan but for Putin and the others who run the Russian government, those who could actually make the decision to withdraw from Chechnya. But there's a big problem with this logic: it presumes that Putin and others of the Russian elite give a shit about the people of Beslan, an extremely doubtful proposition. Consider the United States: do you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney care about your life, or the lives of your family? Their rhetoric aside, do you think they honestly care about the lives of American citizens? Do you think they care more for human beings than for corporations, production, personal financial gain, or increasing their personal and political power? If so, how could they possibly promote the use of pesticides? How could they promote the toxification of the total environment, with the consequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year? If Bush, Cheney, and company cared about human lives, they would help us to prepare for the end of civilization. But they don't. They don't care about humans in general. They don't care about American citizens. They don't care about this or that small town. If Chechens obliterated the entire town of Crescent City, California, certainly the United States would use that as an excuse to bump up repression at home and to conquer yet another oil-extracting country, but I can guarantee you George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would feel no pain.

The same holds true for retribution. The point of retribution seems to be: you cause me pain, and I cause you pain so you know how it feels. But I'm guessing Putin feels no pain over the deaths of these children. He undoubtedly feels a bit of panic as he tries to deal with the public relations nightmare this situation has created. But pain? No.

Putin will almost undoubtedly follow Jefferson's lead in saying, "In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." But I realize now that Jefferson was lying all along, and what he really meant was: "In war they shall kill some of those whose lives we don't much care about anyway, and the troops we command shall destroy all of them."

I'm not saying that killing hundreds of children in some small town in southern Russia is a morally acceptable way to send a message to those in power. Nor am I saying it is not understandable that if some group is systematically killing your sons and daughters and husbands and wives and sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and lovers and friends that you may want to lash out at members of that larger group. I am saying that there are much longer levers they could have used. If they were trying to send a message to Putin or others of the Russian elite, it probably would not have been a bad idea to strike closer to their home.

How would this play out differently if instead of killing children in Beslan, the Chechens killed Putin's children and the children of others who command Russian soldiers to loot, rape, and kill in Chechnya? What if they skipped the children and went straight after the perpetrators? Would Putin then feel pain? Would that be a more understandable retribution? Would that send a message Putin could understand? Would Putin be so quick to commit more troops to this murderous occupation if he knew that by doing so he was placing his own life and the lives of those nearest to him at risk? Let me put this another way: Do you believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would have been so eager to invade Iraq--oops, to order other people's sons and daughters to invade Iraq--if they themselves would have been in serious danger of being maimed or killed, and if they knew their children would be the first to die?

Not on your life. Not on theirs either.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 22

It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence.

The consequence of all this is fatal indeed. And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.