Maria Mies, 1931-2023
Fighting housewifisation and reclaiming our planet
▻https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/maria-mies-1931-2023
The first gift that Maria Mies leaves us is her understanding of capitalism as a global system reorganising life and production at once, experienced differently across the world economy, and centred on the home as the key patriarchal site of labour-surplus extraction and struggle. Mies is globally renowned for her book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a Global Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, originally published by Zed in 1986, and for proposing, in the words of Silvia Federici, who wrote the forward to the latest 2014 edition, ‘a vision of world history centred on the “production of life” and the struggles against its exploitation’. Central to Mies’ thinking is the concept of housewifisation, that concerns the ways in which capitalism structures patriarchy by constructing women as housewives, homemakers and/or subordinate reproductive labourers, eventually projecting this disadvantage onto the labour market.