Maria Mies

In this groundbreaking work, two world-renowned scholars argue that ecological destruction and industrial catastrophes constitute a direct threat to everyday life, the maintenance of which has been made the particular responsibility of women. In both industrialised societies and developing countries, the new wars the world is experiencing, violent ethnic chauvinisms, and the malfunctioning of the economy also pose urgent questions...

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. First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a...