anarcha adventures

From Infoshop.org, on a page entitled: “Debunking Nonsense in the Anarchist Movement: Correcting misconceptions and misinformation promoted by anarchists”

“The Tyranny of Structurelessness”
One of the more ignorant things promoted by anarchists as anarchists is an essay titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” which was written by feminist activist Jo Freeman in the early 1970s. The anarchists that promote this essay often do so out of frustration with small groups, which are often controlled by disorganization and the unfamiliarity of anarchists with anarchist group process. The probem with this essay is that Freeman was an authoritarian leftist who wrote the essay to attack the anarchistic consciousness-raising groups being organized by feminist women at that time. Freeman was in favor of building mass parties in the Leninist mode and was alarmed at the anarchist ideas taking hold among radical women. An anarchist named Cathy Levine wrote a response, “The Tyranny of Tyranny”, which defended small anarchist groups. The irony, of course, is that contemporary anarchists are using an anti-anarchist essay to criticize problems in their groups and organizations! It is far better to actually talk about group process problems than to wave a decontextulaized essay over people’s heads.

Joreen aka Jo Freeman might well have been an authoritarian feminist. But, she also had some really good points about the womens movement of the time that are equally applicable to the anarchist movement today. The Tyranny of Structurelessness and The Tyranny of Tyranny are both works that I’ve republished several times and distributed far and wide. Both have much to say about the many problems associated with organising in either structured or non-structured groups.

I first came across The Tyranny of Structurelessness through a Sydney-based anarchist group called Love and Rage. They’d republished the pamphlet before I got involved, though I wasn’t really curious to read it until I was searching for answers as to why our little group didn’t function all that well. Y’see, it wasn’t just the anarchy and lack of leadership that was getting us down. It was the surplus of leadership (especially from the males) that was holding us back. Not that we actually invested them with a power to act, to speak, or make sole decisions - oh no! That would’ve been creating a hierarchy. At the time I responded to this unseen menace by arguing to elect office bearers - because that would at least create in our minds the structure that we had allowed to exist in fact. Having officials would at least have allowed us to recall them when they fucked us over, which they did. Many times.

I found the analysis of the “Star System” in The Tyranny of Structurelessness to fit the situation I was in perfectly. We had allowed ourtselves to create a hierarchy that we couldn’t control because we would not allow ourselves to name it.

Women are trained to have trouble with naming. Naming our bodies is an old taboo. If I can’t say “cunt”, how can I love my cunt? How can I fight sexual abuse when there are no words to describe it with? If I can’t name gender privilege, then I can’t call it out and I can’t convince others they have a right and responsibility to do so too. So for me, it is vital to recognise the substance of a relationship and name it accordingly. Just because we call ourselves ‘anarchist’ doesn’t mean we actually are practising anarchism. If we discard the analytic tools that allow us to criticise our own actions, our own structures (or lack of structures), then we can’t progress away from the capitalist, domineering relationships we are brought up with toward the open and trusting relationships we would like to create.

Much of Joreen’s analysis is anarchist-friendly, if not actually anarchist. Let’s face it, there isn’t a crush of contenders when it comes to active, contemporary anarchist-feminist theorists. We take what we can get and use it for our needs:

Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person’s “property” and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.
Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one’s power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion — without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.

Much of The Tyranny of Structurelessness rings all too true for me and my compas. The star system, the friendship system, the ear-to-the-ground system - they all work fine when you’re on the inside. But what if you’re not? What if you’re excluded because you’re just not cool enough? Or just not friends with one person? Or you need to work, and can’t be available all the time to become friends with everyone? Or what if you’re a woman and the males of the group use the informal nature of the collective to make decisions without you?

Whether Joreen made this analysis out of fear of anarchist methods, or concern for ungovernable privilege doesn’t matter to me. Infoshop.org’s “corrections” of the this pamphlet don’t amount to anything more than trot-bashing. Its easy to say “don’t read this - its written by an authoritarian”. Its harder to actually come to terms with the rational critiques made of anarchist organising methods. Its harder to answer those critiques, and its hardest of all to accept that there might be some truth in them.

Infoshop.org isn’t debunking myths about anarchism, they’re re-bunking myths about the womens movement. Slabs of the 1960s / 70s womens movement might have been truly anarchist, but there were also strong currents of all flavours. There was misandry, there was polyamoury, there was lesbian power and macrobiotics. There was the anti-war movement that engulfed everything. To invalidate one pamphlet because it was written by a young authoritarian is a ludicrous! Half the left at that time were authoritarian (and half still are). But its also a bit authoritarian to discount their genuine attempts at analysis for the fact of their authoritarianism alone.

Infoshop’org’s criticism is also simply rude. It calls reading and distribution of The Tyranny of Structurelessness “one of the more ignorant things promoted by anarchists”. How can this kind of statement be justified alongside an intro proclaiming that “Infoshop is a site for all anarchists”. All anarchists, except women who find value in the writings of Joreen? Oh please! How can we be anti-authoritarian and call people “ignorant” for finding a pamphlet useful?

Anarchists need to take on critiques of anarchism. I’m concerned that Infoshop.org talks about how “contemporary anarchists are using an anti-anarchist essay to criticize problems in their groups and organizations” as being somehow bizzarre. I can’t see the problem with that. These problems are there (yes, they are). Responding to criticisms in this way is a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “la la la la la”. It won’t make those problems go away - it will just alienate the people who see and are affected by those problems.

Is it just me, or is it really likely that the people who are accused of “wav[ing] a decontextulaized essay over people’s heads” are probably women talking about how informality can disempower them within their anarchist collectives? If they’re going first to a feminist text, they probably are women. In response, I can say that its much better to sit and have a think about why people are going to an “authoritarian” feminist essay for answers to the collective’s problems instead of just talking about it, than it is to have a rant about how feminist texts aren’t to be trusted because they’re all written by authoritarians anyway.

There are at least 2 kinds of authority. Power to and power not to. Power not to address patriarchy. Power not to take others seriously because they’re reading the ‘wrong’ texts. Power not to include and engage those who feel they have a genuine problem with group process.

Perhaps someone using The Tyranny of Structurelessness has hit a nerve?

Further reading: You might also want to look at The BITCH Manifesto, by Joreen, which has some good points (and some less-than-good points). Then search out “No Bath But Plenty Of Bubbles” (an oral history of the UK Gay Liberation Front) by Lisa Power for some context, great protest techniques and class conflict within the gender / sexuality movement.

Disclaimer:
1. I’m not in the Joreen fanclub.
2. I have talked about “Infoshop.org” here as the author of the page I’m responding to because it isn’t signed by anyone in particular.
3. I never said I was perfect, or spelled correctly, or typed well.

Meaningless word-junky point-scoring
10 points for mis-use of the word ‘ironic’! BINGO!

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is I should say here tonight. There is so much to be said about the practice of anarchism and the practice of feminism that it can be really overwhelming. I finally decided that the essence of what I wanted to talk about was expressed in one concept: unpaid labour.

But first, let’s dispense with dualism. Dualism causes lots of problems when we try to analyse something as complex as gender oppression and gender privilege within capitalist society. If you try to apply the oppressor / victim analysis to every novel situation, you get nonsense such as “all men are rapists” (and hence all women are rape victims), or at best a bifurcation: “men are from mars women are from venus”. I’m not a victim, and I’m not from venus - something is lacking from the simple dualist analysis.

We live in a complex society where class oppression interlocks with racial oppression, and gender oppression, and sexuality oppression, and body image oppression, and so on. We might be able to point to one or other oppression and say “look, there’s the most important locus of oppression” and decide that all of our organising should be concentrated at that one point. Lots of leftists organise at work - the point of production of socially valued commodities. The idea is to seize the means and tools of prodcution and threaten capital with our fructive power. But we can’t simply ignore these other forms of oppression because they are (supposedly) less likely to lead to revolution.

As anarchists, we’re meant to be against all forms of hierarchy and domination. But to say that one struggle against an overwhelming everyday oppression is more important than another one is actually creating a hierarchy of domination - the domination of one struggle by another. In reality, struggles against every day oppression mix and reinforce one another, and we are both oppressed and oppressor each day of our lives. Living out the anarchist revolution has as much to do with refusing gender privilege as it does with freeing factories from capitalist appropriation.

Today’s society is complex - a few women are CEOs and a few men are housewives. This complexity shouldn’t phase us from seeing what is really going on. Women CEO’s still suffer some gender disadvantage. Being locked out of the old boys club, being talked over in meetings, being presumed incompetent by underlings , and possibly being sexually threatened because their ’success’ is a threat to masculine virility. But do I, a working class anarchist woman care about this fictious female CEO? Should I get out of bed to picket for her right to earn big bucks by enforcing labour discipline against me simply because she’s a woman? No. no and no again!

There is no way this woman should be subject to gender discrimination. But there is nothing that gives her the right to class privilege over me either. I would gladly help this woman to combat the gender discrimination, but only on the condition she gives up her class privilege over me. When womens politics comes into contact with class politics, the only anarchist solution can be a divesting of privilege, and a struggle for true equality.

Same goes for my comrades here - my support of them in their struggles, and in our mutual struggles together comes at the price of an end to their privilege - a renunciation of their privilege over all others, including me as a woman.

Another byproduct of complexity is that it is a little harder to see privilege and disprivilege. I can discern gender privilege when I resist against it. The barrier is there, just out of sight, and it is very real. There are a myriad of behaviours and discussions that are taboo for women in this society. Talking about gender oppression is top of the list. Where do we get the idea of the ‘crazy feminist’ from? Most feminists are very logical, rational women who wanted gender equality within their own class. They didn’t even demand anything really radical like “an end to wage labour”, or the distruction of class society as we know it. They simply look rationally at gender relations and conclude “that’s not right, there must be equality of the sexes”. Not too strange a demand, yet we have a social unconscious image of feminists as crazy people, who don’t have a grip on reality. The collective unconscious forms this idea to excuse the individual’s continuted mistreatment of women and to enforce the taboo on women organising against being oppressed as a gender.

Other discources that are taboo for women include some that we probably know a lot about now, even though we may not have broken them down entirely: talking about menstruation, talking about rape and sexual abuse (from actual rape to the continued sexualisation of women through the popular and underground media). Talking about cunts in a positive sense. Refusing to shave body hair, refusing to diet. If you think these don’t exist, try testing them and gage the reaction you get.

But the one I want to bring out tonight is unpaid labour. Not only because it fits directly with a marxist / anarchist analysis of class oppression, but because I am sick of doing it.

Women do unpaid labour. This labour is socially vital, yet it is dismissed by those who prejudice workplace politics due to a belief that there is only one ‘point of production’ where the means and tools can be seized. Some of the unpaid labour that women routinely do includes:
* Being emotional. Counselling friends, co-workers, bosses and lover when they ask. Being approached to counsel because of the fact of being a woman.
* Conforming to gender expectations - grooming. The hours spent grooming!!
* Consuming in order to groom! Those hours upon hours at K-mart, or at the op-shop searching for the perfect skirt to express our personalities. Normalising the dissapointment of not finding it: “if I were skinnier, I’d have better luck op-shopping”.
* Doing housework. Chasing others to do housework. Deciding not to do housework, and obsessing about that choice. Being incredulous about how long others will wallow in filth while they wait for you do do housework.
* Sexual services - from grooming to dating to sex when you don’t quite feel like it. To sex at all. To being sexy to fulfil a role, to denying sexuality to fulfil a role. To never knowing when that sexiness if real and when its faked. Being told by a woman at “Reclaim the Night” that women should excercise “pussy power” to make men become pro-feminist.
* Child raising. Why is that a woman’s task? Why is child care a “womens issue”? Why is abortion a “womens issue”?
* Being nice. Being clean. Smiling. Forgiving minor sexual assaults.
* Confirming the myth of male power. Taking a back seat. Doing support work in the (unconfirmed belief that the guys would do it for you). Ignoring the sexist, racist, ageist shit because you fear exclusion.
* Most insidious for anarchist / broadly left women: taking on the feminist cause within left groups. Explaining feminism to ‘left’ men. Taking up feminist causes within mixed-gender collectives, only to find that feminist work is ‘extra’ work to the collective’s main function. Patiently or impatiently waiting for men to realise that you’re saying something logical about gender relationships, and then realising that they view combating patriarchy as entirely optional. Normalising that dissapointment. Normalising the need to shout to be heard. Normalising being called “crazy”, “irrational”, “hysterical”. Learning to hear “don’t wind her up again” after you finish speaking.
* And more …

The thing about unpaid labour is that it is socially necessary labour. Imagine if no-one did the dishes for a month. Or took children to school, or cared for their boss at work. Money might not change hands, the form of exchange might be removed from the sexy machines associated with blue collar labour - but such labour is still very real. Such a strike would bring real pressure to bear on the oppressors - at work, at home, in society at large.

As long as unpaid labour exists, society gets a free ride off the back of someone or other. At the moment, those people are mostly women. The carer, the nurturer, the housewife. What’s more, it doesn’t matter whether or not we as women do unpaid labour. While that role exists at all are tarred by it. We are either its drudges or we are outcasts for denying it. By refusing to engage in unpaid labour we become the crazy women. Some of us are outcasts who are suckered into becoming drudges out of love, or care, or because ’someone’s got to do it’. Love and care - beautiful genuine emotions, and treacherous as excuses to be lashes to domestic slavery.

So why do we even do unpaid labour? Why is it there? I can’t say how it started that women did ‘unpaid labour’ and men did ‘tradeable labour’ . The reasons ususally have something to do with childbirth and childcare, but that doesn’t take into account the very fact that childcare is itself unpaid labour. It could be that in feudal society, the nuclear family was en economic unit which faced the world - so tasks were divided yet equally compenated. In Australia there actually was an industrial relations court decision (Harvester) that told women their wage was worth less than a man’s partly because the compensation for her domestic work was paid to him! Go figure.

Nowadays we’re still fighting against the habbits of those times - women only recently got equal pay in law, and are still fighting for it in practice. So partly, unpaid labour is institutionalised, partly a habbit, but mostly I think we do it because its easier. If I don’t do the dishes, my house is unpleasant. If I don’t care for my boss emotionally, my working time is really tense. If I don’t care for my children (if I had any), they would fall rapidly to delinquency and I’d become a shamed mother.

I think part of the way forward for anarchist women is a letting go of doing unpaid labour, letting it stay undone to some extent. Refusing it. But this really can’t go on unless men take up some of that unpaid labour on themselves. If men did half as much unpaid labour as women are expected to do, we could struggle together against a common enemy: appropriation of our free time by non-exchangeable social reproductive labour.

But men don’t do as much unpaid labour as women are expected to do. They aren’t expected to do it. They don’t expect to do it. This is the manifestation of patriarchy. This is a system of difference, of splitting where there should be solidarity. Working class men and women should be able to unite to refuse unpaid labour, but it can’t happen while men are telling women that the only real struggle is in the paid workplace, and asking why isn’t dinner on the table?

On friday night, I was with a group at a pub. We were all talking anarchism, when a middle-aged guy who wasn’t an anarchist came up to talk about music and culture. Ok, cool. Then he stated that women were ‘more sexually free than men’ because women ‘can wear skirts, and heels’ and ‘dress sexily’ when they want to. Supposedly a man can’t. Well, ok, a heterosexual man might get bashed if he wears high heels under his cargo pants, and that would suck. But men do dress sexily - they do it all the time in the queer scene, and in the transgender scene, and in the mixed-sexuality diy stripping scene. Straight men dress sexily when they want to attract and impress women. I feel sorry for men who feel that they need to dress from the Lowes and Elliots all-nylon range, but dagginess in male dress doesn’t equal sexual freedom for women.

“Slut, ho, whore, unclean bitch” were all nice words I remember from my pre-sexual days. Why does a 10 year old girl get called a “slurry” when she doesn’t even have sex? This was the first clue in my life that men use sexuality to dominate women. I had never had sex, yet I was called a “slut” for expressing my thoughts opinions. My sexuality would always be available for others to judge me on. If I had sex with men (or even a man), I would be a whore. If I didn’t I would be a “prude”. If I had sex with women, I would be a “shame”, or a “waste”. If I display sexually by wearing lipsitck and going on a diet, then I might be “hot”, or “alright”. And I’ve got large breasts, so my face doesn’t matter so much to some. But if I let myself get fat, or am in fact unattractive - I’d be a “dog”. Given that I am surrounded by images of beautiful, sexual women who don’t look like me, I believe that I’m a “dog”. So yeah, given the options, a woman might chose to display, and dress sexily, to invite all others to look and maybe to touch. She might feel her sexual power of attraction and selection and mistake this for a real power. But sexual power ends at satiation. If she doesn’t fuck, a woman becomes a “prick tease”. The ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ dilemma that women face is actually a continuing plane of oppression that women are daily lashed to by media, by men’s attitudes to women, and by womens attitudes to other women and their attitude to themselves.

Women are pitted against each other in the sexual arena (a very sexy-sounding thing, but an ugly reality). The hierarchy of attractiveness is a complex sum based on age, quality of visage, fatness, and willingness to sexually display. This hierarchy is increasingly commodified and women are also judged on their style and brand of clothes, makeup, shoes, purses and haircut. Who hasn’t got one of those ugly fake Gucci bags? Everyone knows they’re fake and ugly, but carry them for the status they might attach. Supposedly alternative images of womens’ sexuality as found on Suicide Girls is nothing more than a tattooed re-invention of pandering to male fantasy about women. Just look at the comments attached to the SG podcast (”Good stuff. I just can’t wait till they start video casting”) (my emphasis). The sleek and pretty things who parade on SG do nothing but add another layer of curiosity to the sexual performance that is a woman’s daily life.

Women use sexuality against each other. Women enforce the sexual mores of the time - by disciplining other women who don’t meet the standard. And by comparing themselves to each other in order of attractiveness or achievement. The bible story of “Rachael and Leah” is still a current example - two women compete to outbreed each other; breeding becomes the marker of their success as women. Today women size each other up according to waist line, breast size, prettiness and willingness to conform. If you don’t understand, try not shaving your armpits, or talking about menstrual blood to your galpals - are they into it, or are they disgusted? Cleo and Cosmo say they’re meant to be disgusted. Though once upon a time, only “whores” would shave their pits, today its mandatory.

It doesn’t matter who is enforcing the sexual oppression of women. The gender of the oppressor might lead to a feeling of being betrayed by ‘the sisterhood’, but is not material to the fact of oppression. The fact is that women are tied to their sexuality for better or for worse.

This is the key to the ‘women have more sexual freedom’ mythology. A woman does not have sexual freedom until she has freedom from being sexualised, either positively or negatively.