Maria Mies > Quotes

“Peace in patriarchy is war against women.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“The feminist project is basically an anarchist movement which does not want to replace one (male) power elite by another (female) power elite, but which wants to build up a non-hierarchical, non-centralised society where no elite lives of exploitation and dominance over others.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“The division of the world which followed defined certain parts of the world as ‘nature’, that is, as savage, uncontrolled and, therefore, open for exploitation and civilizing efforts… the process of naturalization’ did not affect only the colonies as a whole and women of the working class the women of the bourgeoisie also were defined into nature as mere breeders and rearers of the heirs of the capitalist class. But in contrast to the African women who were seen as part of ‘savage’ nature, the bourgeois women were seen as ‘domesticated’
nature.”
― Maria Mies

“Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.”
― Maria Mies, Ecofeminism

“By focusing on the male violence against women, coming to the surface in rape, and by trying to make this a public issue, feminists have unwittingly touched one of the taboos of civilised society, namely that this is a ‘peaceful society’. … The very fact that rape has now become a public issue had helped to tear the veil from the facade of so-called civilised society and has laid bare its hidden, brutal, violent foundations.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Feminists are those who dare to break the conspiracy of silence about the oppressive, unequal man-woman relationship and who want to change it.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Capital is able to hide behind the figure of the husband, called ‘breadwinner’, with whom the woman, called ‘housewife’, has to deal directly and for whom she is supposed to work out of ‘love’, not for a wage. The wage commands more work than what collective bargaining in the factories shows us. Women’s work appears as personal service outside of capital’ (Dalla Costa, 1973: 34; transl. M.M.).”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“All those feminists who had hoped that women’s liberation could be brought about by putting pressure on the state and thus getting more social welfare for women, or by demanding equal opportunities for women in the job market, particularly in the higher ranks of this market, or by increasing women’s participation in political and other decision-making bodies, find their expectations shattered. They have to realize today that the fundamental democratic rights, the claim to equality and freedom, are also fair-weather rights, as far as women are concerned, and that these rights, in spite of the rhetoric of their universality, are suspended when the accumulation needs of capital require this.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Maleness and femaleness are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process. In each historic epoch maleness and femaleness are differently defined. The definition depends on the principle mode of production in these epochs.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“The survival of the fittest’ – the strong MEN – means that the conquerors, the victors, are always right. This is precisely the ideology behind the rape laws and rape myths. Are we unable to see that those who subscribe to this sort of science also subscribe to fascism and imperialism?”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“In a contradictory and exploitative relationship, the privileges of the exploiters can never become the privileges of all. If the wealth of the metropoles is based on the exploitation of colonies, then the colonies cannot achieve wealth unless they also have colonies. If the emancipation of men is based on the subordination of women, then women cannot achieve ‘equal rights’ with men, which would necessarily include the right to exploit others. Hence, a feminist strategy for liberation cannot but aim at the total abolition of all these relationships of retrogressive progress. This mean it must aim at an end of all exploitation of women by men, of nature by man, of colonies by colonisers, of one class by another. As long as exploitation of one of these remains the precondition for the advance (development, evolution, progress, humanisation, etc.) of one section of people, feminists cannot speak of liberation of ‘socialism’.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“I interpret autonomy as this innermost subjectivity and area of freedom – small as it may be – without which human beings are devoid of their essential human essence and dignity, without which they become puppets or organisms without an element of free will and consciousness, or mere assemblies of organic matter, as is the model of reproductive engineers today. In the concept autonomy, therefore, the feminist aspiration to maintain and strengthen or recreate this innermost subjective human essence in women is expressed and preserved. On the other hand, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that capitalism, by focussing on the atomized individual in its marketing strategies has, to a large extent, perverted the humanist aspiration inherent in the concept of autonomy.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“In this essay the classical Marxist position that housework is ‘non-productive’ is challenged for the first time. Dalla Costa points out that what the housewife produces in the family are not simply use-values but the commodity ‘labour power’ which the husband then can sell as a ‘free’ wage labourer in the labour market. She clearly states that the productivity of the housewife is the precondition for the productivity of the (male) wage labourer. The nuclear family, organized and protected by the state, is the social factory where this commodity ‘labour power’ is produced. Hence, the housewife and her labour are not outside the process of surplus value production, but constitute the very foundation upon which this process can get started. The housewife and her labour are, in other words, the basis of the process of capital accumulation.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“This covert or overt biological determinism, paraphrased in Freud's statement that anatomy is destiny, perhaps the most deep rooted obstacle to the analysis of the causes of women oppression and exploitation”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“... 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 a 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 divisions of labour.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“We can say that the various forms of asymmetric, hierarchical divisions of labour, which have developed throughout history up to this 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.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Too often the concept of nature has been used to explain social inequalities or exploitative relations as inborn, and hence, beyond the scope of social change”
― Maria Mies

“Whereas the concept patriarchy denotes the historical depth of women’s exploitation and oppression, the concept capitalism is expressive of the contemporary manifestation, or the latest development of this system. Women’s problems today cannot be explained by merely referring to the old forms of patriarchal dominance. Nor can they be explained if one accepts the position that patriarchy is a ‘pre-capitalist’ system of social relations which has been destroyed and superseded, together with ‘feudalism’, by capitalist relations, because women’s exploitation and oppression cannot be explained by the functioning of capitalism alone, at least not capitalism as it is commonly understood.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Others felt that feminists would split the unity of the working class or of other oppressed classes, that they forgot the broader issue of revolution by putting the issue of women’s liberation before the issue of class struggle or national liberation struggle.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour