Maria Mies
In an essay in the collection "The Myth of Catching up Development," Mies outlines some of her critique of "self determination" on the part of people (and especially women) in industrialized societies:
"The promises of freedom, equality, self-determination of the individual, the great values of the French Revolution, proclaimed as universal rights and hence also meant for women, are betrayed for many women because all these rights depend on the possession of property, and of money. Freedom is the freedom of those who possess money. Equality is the equality of money. Self-determination is the freedom of choice in the supermarket. This freedom, equality, self-determination is always dependent on those who control the money/property. And in the industrialized societies and nations they are mostly the husbands or the capitalists’ state. This at least is the relationship between men and women that is protected by law; the man as breadwinner, the woman as housewife. Self-determination and freedom are de facto limited for women, not only because they themselves are treated as commodities but also because, even if they possess money, they have no say in what is to be offered as commodities on the market.
This freedom, equality and self-determination, which depend on the possession of money, on purchasing power, cannot be extended to all women in the world. In Europe or the USA the system may be able to fulfill some of women’s demand for equity with men, as far as income and jobs are concerned (or wages for housework, or a guaranteed minimum income), but only as long as it can continue the unrestricted exploitation of women as producers and consumers in the colonies. It cannot guarantee to all women worldwide the same standard of living as that of middle-class women in the USA or Europe. Only while women in Asia, Africa or Latin America can be forced to work for much lower wages than those in the affluent societies — and this is made possible through the debt trap — can enough capital be accumulated in the rich countries so that even unemployed woman are guaranteed a minimum income; but all unemployed women in the world cannot expect this. Within a world system based on exploitation ‘some are more equal than others’.
Because the core of individual freedom, equality, self-determination, linked to money and property, is the self-interest of the individual and not altruism or solidarity; these interests will always compete with the self-interests of others. Within an exploitative structure interests will necessarily be antagonistic. It may be in the interest of Third World women, working in the garment industry for export, to get higher wages, or even wages equivalent to those paid in the industrialized countries; but if they actually received these wages then the working-class woman in the North could hardly afford to buy those garments, or buy as many of them as she does now. In her interest the price of these garments must remain low. Hence the interests of these two sets of women who are linked through the world market are antagonistic. If we do not want to abandon the aim of international solidarity and equality we must abandon the materialistic and self-centred approach to fighting only for our own interests. The interests’ approach must be replaced by an ethical one.
I tried to explain that if ragi, the subsistence food of the poor, entered the world market and became an export commodity it would no longer be available for the poor; its price would soar and that, provided the project worked, pesticides and other chemicals would soon be used to produce more ragi for the market in the North. But ragi production, she answered, would have to be controlled by people who would guarantee it was not polluted. This amounts to a new version of eco-colonialism. When I asked her, why as an alternative, she would not rather campaign in Germany for a change in the industrialized agriculture, for a ban on the use of pesticides, she said that this would take too much time, that the poisoning of mothers’ milk was an emergency situation. In her anxiety and concerned only with the interests of mothers in Germany she was willing to sacrifice the interests of poor women in South India.
She did not realize that this money would never suffice to buy the same healthy food for South Indian women’s infants that they now had free of cost. This example clearly shows that the myth of catching-up development, based on the belief of the miraculous workings of the market, particularly the world market, in fact leads to antagonistic interests even of mothers, who want only to give their infants unpolluted food.
In another essay in the same collection, "Self Determination: The End of Utopia," Mies expounds on her ideas about self determination:
"When feminists in the West demand reproductive self-determination for all women, without at the same time attacking the exploitative economic world order from which they themselves profit, then this demand is on the same level as was Ronald Reagan’s demand for human rights at a time when the US was supporting military dictatorships in the ‘Third World’.
‘Third World’ women criticize the demand for self-determination for still another reason. The utopia of the independent, isolated and autonomous female individual is not attractive to them. They oppose patriarchal exploitation and oppression, which, in their world as in ours, is often perpetuated by the institution of the family. But their concept of women’s liberation does not imply severing all communal relations, they cannot conceptualize the isolation of the individual woman as something positive.
All demands for self-determination are addressed to the state: it should either provide more liberal laws or abolish limiting ones. What most women do not want to know, however, is that the state will do this only if we give it more control over all reproductive processes — pre-natal care, hospital births — and that it is technology that makes this increasing control possible.
Self-determination has in fact been reduced to ‘freedom of choice in the supermarket’. Self-determination still means then simultaneous determination-by-others of a part of ourselves.
I am aware that the concept of symbiosis has negative connotations within the women’s movement. In psychoanalysis, the separation of the individual from the symbiosis with the mother is considered the premise for adulthood, for autonomy. It is always implied that symbiosis, ‘the living together’ — for that is what symbiosis means — cannot but mean a parasitical, dominative relationship, supposedly glued to our female anatomy.
The relationship of domination between mother and child is not simply ‘nature’, but rather the result of societal shaping of women within patriarchal societies, a result of violence. The problem does not lie with our anatomy which enables us to bring forth children, but rather with the destruction of living relations and patriarchal dominance. Technological strategies of contraception have not eliminated this dominance nor led to the preservation and rebuilding of these living connections, but rather to further degrade and atomize women.20 The re-creation of living relations does not only mean that we must refuse the technodocs further access to our bodies, but also that other human beings, women, men and children stand in a living social relation to the pregnant or to the infertile woman. The re-creation of living relations also means that the relation between the generations, above all between mothers and daughters, will be freed from patriarchal chains. Women’s liberation cannot mean that each daughter-generation must first of all see itself in enmity to the mother-generation and that freedom must be exercised first as ‘separation from the mothers’.
Re-creating living relations also means that men, too, accept responsibility for life, including responsibility for the consequences of sexual intercourse, unlike the old saying: ‘Lust for us, burden for women’. I see no prospect for the liberation of women in the removal, by technology, of the burden that our female corporality attaches to our lust, so that we, like men, could then enjoy ‘pure lust’. In my opinion, women’s liberation cannot mean Separation from this corporality, a ‘rise’ into men’s realm of transcendence; on the contrary, it must mean the attachment of men to these living connections, this dailiness, this burden, this immanence.
As Vandana Shiva points out in this book, a new vision — a new life for present and future generations, and for our fellow creatures on earth — in which praxis and theory are respected and preserved can be found only in the survival struggles of grassroots movements.
This quest for a new vision, however, is to be found not only among people in the South, who cannot ever expect to reap the fruits of ‘development’; the search for an ecologically sound, non-exploitative, just, non-patriarchal, self-sustaining society can also be found among some groups in the North. Here, too, this search for a new perspective involves not only middle-class people, disenchanted and despairing about the end-result of the modernization process, but even by some at the bottom of the social pyramid. We have called this new vision the subsistence perspective, or the survival perspective. This concept was first developed to analyse the hidden, unpaid or poorly paid work of housewives, subsistence peasants and small producers in the so-called informal sector, particularly in the South, as the underpinning and foundation of capitalist patriarchy’s model of unlimited growth of goods and money. Subsistence work as life-producing and life-preserving work in all these production relations was and is a necessary precondition for survival; and the bulk of this work is done by women.1 With increasing ecological destruction in recent decades, however, it becomes obvious that this subsistence — or life production — was and is not only a kind of hidden underground of the capitalist market economy, it can also show the way out of the many impasses of this destructive system called industrial society, market economy or capitalist patriarchy.
The logic of commodity-producing systems consists in the principle of surplus value production and the impetus for permanent growth. This logic is / was the same in both capitalist and AES-states, differing only in so far as in capitalist societies the surplus is accumulated privately and in the AES-countries it was accumulated by the state. In both systems people are in principle subjects, both as producers and as consumers. As producers they exchange their labour power for a wage (money); as consumers they exchange this money for commodities to satisfy their needs. In both systems there is a fundamental contradiction between production and consumption, because the sphere of production of commodities is principally separated from that of consumption by the sphere of circulation or the market. But also the individuals, the economic subjects, are dichotomized into producers and consumers with contradictory interests. ‘As producer the commodity-subject or exchange subject is not interested in the use-value of his products, irrespective of whether he is “worker” or “capitalist”, capitalist manager or production-director in a “real” socialist unit.
They do not produce for their own consumption but for an anonymous market. The objective of the whole enterprise is not the sensuous, direct satisfaction of needs but the transformation of work into money (wages, profit).’ For the producer his own products are de-sensualized, have become abstract ‘work-amalgams [gallerts]... because they are nothing but potential money.5 It makes no difference to them whether they produce Sachertortes or neutron bombs, writes Kurz. But as consumer, the same person has a quite opposite interest in the sensuous, concrete use-value of the things bought ‘... as individuals who eat, drink, need a house, wear clothes, people have to be sensuous...’ It is this contradiction between production and consumption, between exchange and use-values, which is ultimately responsible for the destruction of nature in industrial, commodity-producing society. The exclusive concern of people as producers is maximizing the money output of their production and they will therefore continue to produce poisonous substances, nuclear power, weapons, more and more cars. But as consumers they want clean air, unpolluted food, and a safe place for their waste, far away from their home. As long as production and consumption are structured in this contradictory way, inherent in generalized commodity production, no solution of the various economic, ecological and political/ethical/spiritual crises can be expected. Some people think that the solution lies in substituting environmentally noxious substances, technologies and commodities with nature-friendly, life-preserving ones. They propose harnessing commodity production and market forces to the service of sustainable development, replacing the production and marketing of destructive goods by ‘ecomarketing’. They want to mobilize funds from the corporate sector, even from those firms known for ruthless environmental pollution, to sponsor the activities of environmental organizations. But industry uses this eco-sponsoring more to improve its image than as a move to change their overall policy.
The latest development in this Greening of Capitalism strategy is the initiative taken by Stephan Schmidtheiny, Swiss industrialist and billionaire, who founded and leads the Business Council for Sustainable Development — a group of 48 leading international industrialists — and who was advisor to Maurice Strong, the secretary of the 1992 UNCED in Rio. Schmidtheiny and this Business Council developed a strategy showing how industry should, in future, combine growth with ecologically sound production. But the fundamentally contradictory relationships inherent in commodity production and consumption are not criticized. Nor is there a critique of the basic principles of capitalist production: individual self-interest, generalized competition and the system’s need for permanent growth. On the contrary, eco-marketing and eco-sponsoring are seen as a new area of investment, a new opportunity to extend commodity production and marketing. Green capitalism will serve only to transform ever more parts of nature into private property and commodities. A way out of this destructive and irrational system of commodity production cannot be found in catching-up development and technological fixes, even if technological alternatives could be quickly found to end and to repair some of the environmental damage caused by industrialism."