(Page 8 of 42) - Feminist Contestations and Commonalities Across First World/Third World, African, and Latin American Divides: Toward Comparative Intersectional Feminisms authored by Disney, Jennifer.

exploited.

Without the “superexploitation” of non-wage laborers (women, colonies, peasants),

wage labor would not be productive. What distinguishes Mies’ analysis from others in the

domestic labor debate is her interest in going beyond ‘fitting’ household labor into Marxist

theory by examining unpaid labor in the context of the developing countries of the Third World:

In contrast to the West's debate on housework, we were not mainly
concerned with the integration of housework into Marxist theory
in which, so far, it had been ‘forgotten.’ Our main concern was
to show that capitalism was more than the relation between wage
labor and capital. The analysis of housework and of other non-wage
work of subsistence producers in the colonies leads to a fundamental
critique of the common perception of capitalism.

Mies theorizes the connections between the exploitation of women, peasants, and colonies

themselves, thereby revealing her commitment to a global common ground upon which to build

a feminist struggle uniting women and peoples of color against imperialism.

Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen’s work also reveals an excellent analytical blend of

socialist feminist domestic labor debates, discourse on dependent capitalism, and the merger

between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. Bennholdt-Thomsen analyzes the

parallels among all non-wage labor performed throughout the world - subsistence agricultural

production engaged in by peasants in the ‘Third World’ and domestic labor performed by

‘housewives.’ This unpaid labor “reduces the cost of labor for capital and so ensures the super-

exploitation of both peasants and women.”

Bennholdt-Thomsen argues that there is a

fundamental contradiction within the capitalist mode of development between subsistence

production and social production which is necessary for the accumulation process:

Within the present capitalist world economy, housewives
and peasants (men and women) are the main subsistence
producers; in different concrete forms both reproduce labor
power for capital without compensation....these two groups
are integrated into the capitalist mode of production through
their marginalization, i.e., they form the consolidated mass of the
industrial reserve army of labor, and as such they are continuously
reproduced as part of the process of extended reproduction of capital.