Preface to the new edition

Books Have Their Fate

When I started writing Patriarchy and Accumulation in the early 1980s my intention was
not to produce a grand theory on the functioning of capitalist patriarchy. My limited aim
was to find answers to a few burning questions which kept cropping up both in the
struggles of the new women’s movement and also in my classes in the department of Social
Pedagogy in Cologne, Germany, and later in the ‘Women and Development’ programme at
the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, where I had been teaching since 1979. The
participants in this programme were women from the South. For many of them ‘feminism’
was a strage phenomenon, something relevant to Western middle-class women. But they
did not yet understand that the ‘Woman Question’ was their question too.

Women’s work under Capitalism: New Questions about an Old Problem

Against the backdrop of this context and of my own experience in India, where I had lived
for five years, it was obvious that I could not restrict my theoretical quest to a Eurocentric
perspective. When feminists in Europe and North America began to ask why housework
was not paid under capitalism – a question which challenged both liberal and Marxist
economics – I could not limit this question to housewives in the industrialized North. What
about women in the South? What about rural women there? What about small peasants in
general and their relationshipto capitalism? Obviously there was a lot of work being done
in this world that was not covered by the category economists use to define the
relationship of workers to capital. This category was restricted to waged employment only,
and to so-called ‘free’ waged employment at that, because it was protected by unions and
labour laws.

I was not the only one to ask similar questions around that time. Since the early 1970s, I
had been working with two German friends, Claudia von Werlhof and Veronika Bennholdt-
Thomsen, who like me had lived and worked in the Third World and tried to link this
experience to the new feminist questions regarding women’s work under capitalism. The
result was that this questioning, which we shared with many feminists at that time,
automatically led to a much broarder horizon than is usually found in social research. But
then, when one wanted to understand why women’s reproductive work – as it was then
still called, following Marxist terminology – had no value under capitalism, one was
immediately faced with another theoretical problem. Either one had to explain this
devaluation by the anatomical difference between men and women, as was done by
biological determinists, or one had to find a social and a historical explanation for the
phenomenon. The problem was not simply difference between the genders; there was
obviously a dominance relationship, based on a long history of exploitation and oppression,
which had to be taken into account. It was in this context that the concept of patriachy
became relevant for me. I had discovered patriarchy as a system during my Ph.D research
on Indian women’s role conflicts. When I came back I discovered German patriarchy, which
was structurally not as different as I had thought. I began to understand that the
exploitation and oppression of women are not just accidental phenomena but are intrinsic
parts of a system, a system which, moreover, has existed for at least five thousand years
and which has penetrated and structured all ‘great civilations’ and cultures of the globe.
The historical depth and geographical breadth of this system also became manifest in the
course ‘Women and Development’ at the ISS, where women from different cultural and
religious backgrounds had come together. Although this system had developed many
different cultural manifestations, some more brutal than others, it was structurally still the
same. As soon as the students on the course understood this they coined the slogan
‘Culture divides us. Struggle unites us!’ Hence, the issue of patriarchy not only immediately
transcended the usual horizons of time and space, begging the question of its origin and
expansion, but also gave rise to the question ‘What can we do to change this anti-woman
system?’ Most women were not satisfied by a mere academic analysis and the statement
that such a system prevails even in our modern era. They wanted to know how it all
started, when and where, and how we could fight it.

My own questioning went further and deeper. Apart from the question of its origin, I
wanted to know why such a brutal system did not disappear with modernity, or with
capitalism, as both Marxists and liberals had predicted. What was, what is, the relationship
between patriarchy and capitalism? Are they two systems? Are they one system? Is
patriarchal exploitation and subordination necessary for an economic system based on
extended accumulation? Or could this accumulation also happen without hierarchical,
exploitative gender relations? It was obvious that we could no longer be satisfied with the
classical Marxist explanation, that this relation was only a secondary contradiction whose
solution would come after the primary contradiction – the class antagonism between
labour and capital – had been resolved. There was consencus at the time among feminists
about this understanding, even among faminist of the left, the Marxist and socialist
feminist. No feminist accepted any longer that we women were only a ‘secondary
contradiction’.

But we were still left with the question of the intrinsic relationship between patriarchy and
capitalism. We all knew, of course, that patriarchy preceded capitalism. Was it then correct
to say that it simply continued as a kind of substructure? Why was the great promise of
modernity to abolish all feudal, patriarchal, backward relationships not fulfilled when it
came to women? After all, feudalism had been abolished, at least in the industrialized
world. Why had this not also happened with regard to the patriarchal relationship between
the genders?

The more the feminist movement developed, the more we discovered new manifestations
of patriarchal structures and ideologies. In particular, the movement against violence
againts women, againts woman-battering, rape, pornography, sexsual abuse in the
workplace, violence againts women in the media and advertising, challenged the prevailing
myth that modernity had ‘civilized’ the man-woman relationship, had ‘tamed’ the erstwhile
aggresive, anti-women tendencies in men. No, these were not just ‘left-overs’ of a feudal
past; this was the hearth of capitalism: it was capitalist patriarchy.

It was the analysis of the role of housework under capitalism that provided the first
theoretical understanding of the political economy of capital patriarchy. This movement
had started around 1980. It became clear that women’s unpaid caring and nurturing work
in the household was subsidizing not only the male wage but also capital accumulation.
Moreover, by defining women as housewives, a process which I then called ‘house-
wifization’, not only did women’s unpaid work in the household become invisible,
unrecorded in GDP (Waring 1988), and ‘naturalized’ – that is, treated as a ‘free good’ – but
also her waged work was considered to be only supplementary to that of her husband, the
so-called breadwinner, and thus devalued. The construction of woman as mother, wife and
housewife was the trick by which 50 per cent of human labour was defined as a free
resource. It was female labour.

At the congress ‘The future of women’s work’ in Bielefed (1983), Claudia von Werlhof, in
her paper, ‘The Proletarian is Dead. Long Live The Housewife!’, demonstrated not just that
housework and housewifization were models for women’s labour, but that transational
capital, in its effort to break the dominance of trade unions and to flexibilize’ labour, would
eventually also housewifize male labour: that is to say, men would be forced to accept
labour relations which so far had been typical for women only. This means labour relations
outside the protection of labour laws, not convered by trade unions and collective
bargaining, not based on a proper contract – more or less invisible, part of the ‘shadow
economy’.

To enforce such labour relations, economic violence – that is, sheer necessity – was and is
often insufficient. Violence was the secret of this system not only when it came to the
exploitation of women’s labour and bodies, as had become clear in the discourse on
housework and woman-battering: violence was also the means by which foreign lands had
been conquered, subordinated and colonized by early European capitalists. Without this
colonization, without the pillage and plunder of lands and people in Asia, Africa and South
and Central America, without the slavery of modern times, capitalism would not have got
off he ground. Violence was the heart of what Marx had called the primitive accumulation
of capital. But contrary to what Marx had believed, namely that this violence and this
primitive accumulation had preceded capitalism proper, we saw that it continued up to our
own day, with regard to women and to the colonies – now called developing nations – and
with regard to nature, the foundation of all life and production. Nature was treated in the
same one-sided, exploitative way – as a ‘free good’ – as women’s labour or the colonies
were treated. To put it the other way round: women and the colonies were treated as
‘nature’, they were ‘naturalized’. Therefore Claudia von Werlhof, Veronika Bennholdt-
Thomsen and I, following Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis, began to talk of ongoing primitive
accumulation as the secret of modern capitalism.

Capitalism is Different

If one included women’s unpaid housework, the work of subsistence peasants, the work
done under colonized conditions, and nature’s production in one’s analysis of the political
economy of capitalism, one got a totally different picture of this system than that projected
by economists. Capitalism was ‘deeper’ and ‘broader’ than students of economics learned
from their textbooks. It was more than ‘wage labour’ and ‘capital’. Moreover, it was, as
Wallerstein (1974) had found out, a world system right from its beginning up to now. It
could not be understood if one restricted one’s analysis to the core countries of Europe or
the industrialized countries.

This analysis proved useful when I began to study women’s work under the impact of what
was called the New International Division of Labour. After the oil-shock of the early 1970s,
European, Japanese and US corporation began relocating labour-intensive industries such
as textiles, electronics and toys to so-called cheap-labour countries in Southeast Asia or at
the Mexican border. In these factories, assembled in Free Production Zones (FPZs), or in
maquiladoras in Mexico, 80-90 per cent of the workforce were young, unmarried women
who had to work under almost forced-labour conditions, without unions, without the
protection of labour laws and often threatened by direct violence. These women were
usually fired when they benefits. I discovered that, in their case, as in that of many other
women workers in the ‘colonies’, housewifization international was the theoretical device
to devalue women’s work and to ‘construct’ them internationally as cheap labour. I tired to
show the connections between the prevailing sexual division of labour and the
international division of labour in the global economy. Transnational corporations would
not have moved their production to Southeast Asia or to the Mexican border had they
been forced to employ well-paid, unionized male workers as in the USA or Europe.

In the course of these reflections it became clear that capitalism was different from what
people thought it was. Capital accumulation or permanent growth was possible as long as
huge areas of human and nonhuman production could be colonized. Women, nature and
the people and lands of Africa, Asia and Latin America seemed to have been the main
colonies hitherto. What was more, these colonies were not only interconnected, but they
formed the invisble underground foundation for this accumulation process. We used the
metaphor of an iceberg, where capital and waged labour form the invisible economy,
‘above the water’, counted in the GDP, where waged labour is protected by a labour
contract, and where housework, work in the informal sector, work in the colonies and
nature’s production form the underwater part of this economy.

I think this was the most important insight for me while I wrote this book, I had started
with a rather limited set of questions, inspired by the lacunae in the women’s movement’s
theoretical analyses. But I could not find plausible answers to these questions unless I
looked at capitalism as a whole, and also at the still existing socialist countries. It was this
methodological perspective from below, from the point of view of women, of nature and
colonized people which ended up in what some people felt to be too vast a vision, too
breathtaking a project, too encompassing an analysis, too demanding and bold a political
strategy.

Books Have their History: How this Book was Received

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale has been a controversial book, right from
1986 whwn it first appeared. It provoked reactions of enthusiastic applause as well as of
schating criticism. In spite – or perhaps because – of this, it led to a continous stream of
debates in women’s studies courses as well as among people concerned about such issues
as the future of work, ecology, and the search for perspectives on a new economy and
society.

Since the book had been written by a feminist it took some time for men to discover it. But
once they had read it there was a similar polarization: either rejection or praise. Obviously
this was a book that hit people deep in their innermost feelings and convictions, and
provoked them to react. It created ‘Betroffenheit’ – a term I had used early on in the
movement to spell out the difference between feminist research and the usual indifferent ,
uninvolved attitude of positivist maintream research (Mies 1978). The German word
‘Betroffenheit’ expresses not only concern, a state of being affected, but also reflection and
the appeal to do something, to act. In this respect, I think, the book has been a success.

But the fact that it has remained in print, and that it now sees this new edition is due not
only to this characteristic. The book raises some questions that cropped up in the context
of the new women’s movement, but in the course of time revealed themselves as being, in
fact, general questions, relevant to everybody. In this sense one can say that woman
question is not a niche question but the most general one. Today, when the managers of
the global economy have no better recipe to bring down labour costs than by
‘housewifizing’ or flexibilizing labour, people begin to see the relevance of our analysis,
began about twenty years ago.

Before I come to some of the more important points of criticism, I want to draw attention
to the social and historical context within which this book was written, within which the
critique took place and by which it was influenced. The book appeared in English in 1986.
The German translation came out in 1988. I wrote the book in English first because I
wanted it to circulate quickly and be accessible to women in The South. The 1980s were the
years when the Keynesian welfare state, which had dominated Western economies since
the Second World War, came under direct attack by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the
US. The new neoliberal theory, developed by Milton Friedman and the ‘Chicago School’,