patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale summary

So it is with Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, a text that is challenging, compelling, inspiring, puzzling and perverse in equal measure. Overturning all, like good cultivators, they prepare the earth for renewal.A book can be a classic, and essential reading today, even if its principal argument is fundamentally wrong. Converging from widely divergent perspectives, Mies and Shiva achieved a profound conceptual synthesis: the rising of women, everywhere, to protect life from the capitalist patriarchal World System. 'The re-release of Ecofeminism after twenty years is auspicious and long overdue. Together they present a fundamental feminist critique of modern industrial development, its effects on women and children, on nature and all aspects of the environment, with many examples from real life around the world.' - Zed Press This is the basic text for women's study of ecofeminism, by two leading activist-scholars, one from the 'north', German professor emeritus Maria Mies, the other from the 'south', Indian physicist Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism's analysis of global politics, ecology and the status of women has an unmistakable ring of truth.' - Women's Review of Books moreĮcofeminism: the book she authored with Vandana Shiva defined and explained ecological feminism.įirst published in 1993, it was reissued by Zed Press (UK) in 2014, with a new foreward by Ariel Salleh. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today.

Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. 'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which 'capitalist productive labour' can be built up and exploited.'įirst published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today.

Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale summary