My problems with structure in the anti capitalist movement
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but I haven’t gotten around to it, and I’m really tired at the moment, so what I’m going to write probably won’t be that good.
I guess, one problem I have is that i think that there are big problems with sexism, and this is not acknowleged at all in the uk. I was talking to my neighbour (who is not left wing at all) about gender stuff, and she said that in a lot of the theatre stuff she’s involved in, within the commitees, the women will do a lot of the unrewarding work - like taking minutes in meetings, or searching for venues, or contacting other groups, and the men will do the more satisfying stuff - like if posters need to be made, or if they need a website to be set up, and the people who really take charge, and get most of the credit for organising stuff are men.
I think this kind of thing happens all the time within the movement as well. i’ve met quite a few people - mainly women, who have said that they’ve not felt confident enough to volunteer to do the more difficult work, and that they’ve felt unskilled. Most men that i’ve spoken to about this don’t seem to know what I’m talking about. The structure we use relies on people deciding what they want to do and doing it - not being told what to do. Not everyone feels confident enough, or feels that they are skilled enough to do whatever they want. And I think often they are not encouraged to feel this way. The people (mainly men) who have the confidence and the skills tend to just take charge of things. Many of the informal leaders seem to really enjoy the feelings of power that doing loads of stuff brings. Note that I am not writing from my experiences in Cambridge here :-).
There was quite a good (although somewhat patronising) article in zmag about how to resolve problems of skill/confidence. I’m so sick of going to meetings where there are like, 3 guys talking to each other. I’ve spoken to a few people in Brighton (where I’m living now) about this, and all of them seem to see who does what tasks as just being a matter of individuals having to “take the initiative” (It really pisses me off when anarchists use phrases like “take the initiative”). There seems to be no discussion of the fact that if you want groups to be non hierarchical you need to do lots of stuff to make them non hierarchical. Much has been written about sexism within the movement: Let Patriarchy Burn |
Shut the fuck up. There should in fact be a list of links here.
I’m not saying that problems with structure are simply to do with men being the informal leaders and women being oppressed - some men can also feel less confident and less able to do stuff, and in “non hierarchical” womens groups there have often been problems with the oppression of participants. The tyranny of structurelessness was in fact written about the womens movement. It just seems to me that in mixed groups (and there are very few women only groups in the uk) men are much more likely to be at the top of the informal hierarchies than women.
Something else that annoys me is just that general unpleasantness and bullying seems to occur. There is some stuff about this (and other struture issues) on this website, especially this article.
A final (and brief) thing is that a lot of what activists do seems to have no relavance to the outside world at all. We’ll go and do an action or work on a project, but all the time it just feels as if we are just doing it for reasons of personal development or something. It doesn’t feel as if we are trying to change things at all. We are just stuck in these sort of activist cliques and have no idea of what is going on outside. I read Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism by Bookchin the earlier today, and i think he makes some good points, but i have not really had time to think about it yet. I also thought his critique of primitivism as not recognising the “liberatory aspects of euro-american civilisation” was slightly racist, although i think primitivists are fucking crazy. Hope this makes some sense, I am about to fall asleep on the keyboard.
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That Collective Book is really good, I’d heard of it but hadn’t read it before. You might be interested to know that one of the authors was recently involved in a discussion about consensus on the Aut-op-sy mailing list. It has to be said the discussion wasn’t much cop: some of the points made by David Graeber (who I think was Kristina’s undergraduate advisor?) are interesting, but there’s a lot of mutual misunderstanding and, amid the straw-man challenges, some interesting and difficult questions get asked which the pro-consensus folks avoid (particularly the example given of a group deciding which union to affiliate to).
More generally, I agree with a lot of what you say (largely, in fact, because you’ve persuaded me already; I don’t think I’ve thanked you for making me aware of lots of issues about group power dynamics I hadn’t really thought of before, but I should do so).
Comment by Tim @ 12/29/2004 1:09 am
this is all fucking right on. even the nuanced view of bookchin vs the primitivists.
Comment by geo @ 12/29/2004 4:30 pm