Ch 5 of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies.
Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7
[text in square parenthesis are my comments and additions]
[related content on this blog tagged #feministdragon reinventing our economy]
Chapter 5 Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Primitive Accumulation of Capital
Regardless of how women are integrated into capitalism, or subordinated under the global process of capital accumulation, they do not become "free-wage laborers or proletarians". [Even though women are technically categorized as free-wage laborers in the Global North, they are also not paid the same as male workers in those fields, so women's labor still is an invisible, lower-class category that is not named but nevertheless exists.]
Indian women see traditional village norms breaking under capitalist farming practices, and experience direct violence if they ask for the legally guaranteed minimum wage. Marginal peasant women are being raped, their huts burnt, their husbands beaten if they try to cultivate the lad allotted to them legally by land reform provisions. Men are also increasingly turned into bonded laborers instead of free laborers. [Bonded laborers are typically working a set amount of time to pay off a debt or an up-front payment, and free laborers receive a weekly or monthly salary. (You can see the possibilities for abuse in the bonded laborer situation.)]
In the last chapter we saw how in the dairying industry poor rural women see almost no return for all their labor, the money generally going to the agencies and investors instead. In this way women's labor is tapped almost free of cost for the accumulators.
These conditions reveal how poor peasant women in the Global South do not voluntarily embrace the housewife model, but have to be put under considerable economic and ideological pressure to give up subsistence production and accept commodity production.
Development planners also fear that small-scale producers could use the credits for their own benefit and not for export production with the schemes. Therefore the production processes are organized so that the producers can ONLY work for the commodity production and cannot get control over the product. In Cumaripa everybody had to sign a bond that she would only work for the cooperative and could not leave. This is more like a forced labor camp than a development opportunity.
In these production relations, based on violence and coercion, we can observe and interplay between men (fathers, brothers, husbands, pimps, sons), the patriarchal family, the state, and capitalist enterprises.
Can this violence be explained by other more accidental reasons? Before answering this question MM will present a number of examples of violence against women in India.
Dowry-Murders
Between 1978 and 1980 small women's groups in the cities of Bombay, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore began a campaign against rape and against the murder who had not brought enough dowry to their husbands' families. This did not only happen in poor families but often in 'progressive middle class families as well.
Marriages are arranged by the families of bridegroom and bride, who often have only seen a photograph. During the marriage negotiations the groom's family demands an amount of 'dowry'. The bride's family has no right to demand anything, but must try to negotiate down the price. In middle class families these include demands of up to Rs500,000 [~63,000USD in 1980], and prestige items like gold, refrigerators, scooters, TV sets, watches, cars and travel. An unmarried woman has neither place nor status in patriarchal India, so it is not a question of being able to refuse. If they don't have the money the bride's family will take out loans. In some cases they promise to pay more after the marriage. The bride moves to the husband's family's house and the harassment can start immediately. They try to extract more money from her family, subject her to humiliations and brutalities. If she cannot get more money, she is found dead. The in-laws say she burned herself in an accident while cooking, or committed suicide. MM then gives the stories of six women who went through this.
After the anti-dowry murder campaign by the Indian feminists, many more cases appeared in the press. In spite of the movement against it, the numbers of women murdered rose rapidly after 1980.
Amniocentesis and 'Femicide'
The sex-ratio in India has been declining since 1910. It has become socially accepted that the birth of a daughter is a disaster. This plus all the practices of exploiting brides and women are evidence of the fact that women are not wanted in India.
Femicide was made easier by the new [in 1980] technology of sex-preselection through amniocentesis and ultrasound scanning. A newspaper article at the time about the new tests quoted a woman saying, "Doctor, kill it if it is a girl," with little reaction. MM wonders what would have happened if the pregnant woman had told the doctor, "Doctor, kill it if it is a boy." [In 2019 the Times of India reported that no girl had been born in 132 villages in the small Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in the last three months.] The cost of amniocentesis is rather low, making it affordable for even rural families in poor areas.
One economist in 1983 saw the reduction in the numbers of women as a positive, saying that they will become more valuable and female children will be better cared for, predicting the prices of dowries would fall. [We can see in 2026 that this has not happened]
Rape
Rape was seen as a 'normal' thing to happen in 'backwards' rural regions. But women's groups exposed that it was on the increase in cities and was perpetrated by all classes of men, including the police. MM gives several stories of women who were raped and beaten and even murdered by police to cover up the rapes. She then shows the indifferent reactions of the politicians in the Indian government.
Violence against women in India is increasing, and the newspapers in India declare it to be a part of India's 'feudal past', a holdover of the bad old days, which progressive capitalism would banish to the history books. However MM connects this increase in violence to the capitalist development of India.
She then discusses an economist named Bardhan who theorised that if women were productively employed (in the capitalist system) they would be more valued and less open to abuse. MM counters that his concept of 'economy' is too narrow, as it excludes by definition housework, childbearing, and childrearing from the category of 'productive labor', and reduces women to a unit of consumption.
Thus, at the centre of this argumentation is the concept of woman as a 'non-productive' dependent housewives. This theory reduces all violence against women, dowry murders, female foeticide, rape neglect of baby girls, etc to this theoretical assumption that women are a liability, and a burden because they are economically 'non-productive' entities, and this can only be remedied if women are 're-introduced into social production', that is if they are 'gainfully employed'.
This logic does not explain the existing reality, not only in India, but in the rest of the world, where violence against women is increasing despite that more than 40% of women [again, in 1980] are engaged in 'socially productive' work outside the household. Wife beating and violence against women occur in all classes and affect women regardless of employment or social status.
The stark reality of existing and growing violence against women all over the world is not only a historical criticism of Engels' famous Utopia but also of the concept of capitalism that still prevails unbroken, both with Marxists and non-Marxists. The case of dowry makes it clear that the capitalist law of the exchange of equivalents does not function when women's contribution to the economy is concerned, irrespective of this contribution is housework, child-bearing, or wage-work or other gainful employment.
In fact women's work is separated out of the capitalist economy and obscured. Women do not stop working in the houses, in the fields, in the factories, they do not stop giving birth to children and raising them, but this work is no longer considered socially productive work, it is made invisible.
Dowry cannot be the compensation for women's lifelong subsistence, because she herself is the main subsistence worker for the family, even in middle-class families. More men depend on women's work than women depend on a male 'breadwinner'.
Dowry vs Bride-price
Bride-price is a payment from the man's family to the woman's to compensate for their loss of the woman's contribution to the subsistence of her family. Dowry is instead a 'tribute' from the woman's family to the man's family. This is consistent with the Bramahnic tradition of giving to support the priestly Brahmans in return for spiritual gains. "He who gives has always to give," meaning that the giving is one-way and that's normal.
In a dowry, only the qualifications of the man count towards what the price is. The qualifications and achievements of the woman do nothing to reduce the price commanded by the man's family. Thus there are different dowry rates for doctors, civil servants and foreign-returned PhDs, and command higher prices. Also, increasingly the dowry is appropriated by the man himself, and not his family, and more often in the case of high dowry-fetchers. These men demanded high dowries in compensation for the money spent on their education, and in many cases use it for an initial investment to start a business, clinic, practice or office. The dowry may include commodities like a suit, wrist watch or western shirts.
The institution of dowry can thus be seen as a source of wealth which is accumulated not by means of the man' s own work or by investing his own capital, but by extraction, blackmail and direct violence. The command over dowry gives all men the chance to get hold of money which they have not earned and to have access to modern consumer items which they might otherwise not be able to buy. The dowry also creates a market for such goods. It paves the way for the spread of market-values and market -commodities, even among the poor.
Are men rapists by nature?
There are a number of myths about women and sex in male-dominated societies, and it is the institutions and social relations they are meant to prop up that determine people's behaviour, and not the written laws.
1. Rape does not exist, because no woman can be raped against her will. Women like to be raped
2. Women are masochists by nature, they don't enjoy sex unless they are forced. They want to be beaten.
3. A woman who is raped has provoked the man, she was behaving like a prostitute
4. It is a woman's fault if she is raped. Why was she wearing certain clothes? Why was she alone?
5. Rape takes place only outside marriage. Within marriage it is by definition by mutual consent.
6. Rape mainly occurs among the poor and uneducated, it is a manifestation of poverty and backwardness
7. Rape is a feature of feudal production relations, it is a class issue. If class relations change, sexual violence will disappear. This myth is usually put forward by the left. It does not explain the increase in sexual violence in urban centers, or in areas with more capitalist development.
Most of these myths blame the woman. They also imply that men cannot control themselves and have to follow through if they are 'provoked'. Women are seen as masochistic and mute, men as aggressive or sadistic by nature. Women are expected to behave in such a way as to avoid male loss of control.
The 'survival of the fittest' means the conquerors and victors are always right, and this is the ideology behind the rape laws and myths. MM asks, "Are we unable to see that those who subscribe to this sort of science also subscribe to fascism and imperialism?
No aggressor can maintain permanent control over those he has conquered and subordinated unless the subordinated are made to accept this state of affairs, as nature-imposed or God-given. The inventors of the patriarchal ideology have invented an ideology for women: the eternal victim, the self-sacrificer, the masochist, born to serve others, her husband and sons. She has no autonomy over her life, her body, her sexuality. She is a means, an object, not a subject. Rape victims are expected not to hit back or defend themselves, but to commit suicide because their 'honour' as a 'good' woman was destroyed. Women are expected to feel that they are weak, that they need male protection, that they cannot fight back. Self-immolation is the act through which they try to regain their humanity.
However, if men were rapists by nature, we would not then be witnessing an increase of rape cases in India and the rest of the world. What are the factors that contribute to it? They must be social, economic and historical--as they have always been. Today there is a general brutalization of life, a merciless struggle of the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor, men against women. This is a result of the predatory and dominance relationship betwen man and nature, a concpet that emerged with capitalism.
What seems to be happening is that the traditional controls and checks of repressive patriachal morality are breaking down in India and elsewhere, not through liberalization of sexual morality but by the peculiar way in which capitalism has worked through these societies.
While this chapter has focussed mainly on India, it is not difficult to find other examples of direct and structural violence as an integral part of sex and class relations, as well as of the international division of labour. The clitoridectomy and its modernization in Africa, the brutalizaion of women in the Soviet Union, the female foeticide in China are evidence of the fact that 'modernization' policies go hand in hand with patriarchal tendencies, even in socialist countries.
Violence against women is the main common denominator that epitomizes women's exploitation and oppression, irrespective of class, nation, caste, race, capitalist, or socialist systems, Third World or First World.
Violence against women is closely related to men-women, class, and international relations. All these relations are today more or less integrated into systems of accumulation. Men have been defined as 'free' citizens who can own property and therefore can enter into contractural relationships with each other on the basis of the principle of value equivalent exchange.
Women have never been defined as free historical subjects. Women are not even owners of their own person. Their person, labor, emotionality, children, body, sexuality are all belonging to their husband. Women are property, so they cannot be owners of property. This is why voting rights were given so late to women and why rape in marriage is not considered a crime.
MM then says that because women are property they therefore cannot enter into contracts, which means that they can only be subordinated by force and direct violence. [I...am not sure of the logic of this. I would rather say that in order to get women to accept the situation of being property and to continue doing work and service for men they have to be continually violated and forced.]
The worldwide increase in violence against women is basically a fight over the territory of their own selves, over which men have not yet been able to establish a firm and lasting dominance. [despite literal millennia of trying.]
Without violence and coercion, neither modern men nor modern states are able to follow their model of progress and development which is based on dominance.
