published in issue 7, by Chepina Hukku
http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=319
You might have heard the story. It was about 4pm on Sunday 7 June and
the Anarchist Movement conference in London was drawing to a close. The
15 discussion groups had finally all had their turn at the mic in what
had been a painstaking 2-hour final plenary. Perhaps more interesting
than the much distilled feedback from each of the groups on 2 days of
discussion among 15 near strangers was the fact that for the 200 odd
people in the large hall, this was the first opportunity to get a sense
of their fellow participants at the conference. Inspired by what seemed
to have emerged somewhat more organically at the famed Bradford
gathering of 1998, the conference organisers’ were determined that
class-war anarchists should spend the weekend sat alongside climate
campers in small discussion groups. Along with tube delays that
prevented many from arriving for the opening plenary on Saturday morning
this meant that until this point, the numbers and make-up of
participants had been impossible to gauge.
The arrival of anarcha-feminist group No Pretence couldn’t have been
better timed. Although I can only speak for myself, surveying the room,
my doubts of the past 2 days seemed to be shared by others: just how
much of an affinity did each of us feel with the people around us? And
just how much did this room reflect the movement we had each felt we
were part of?
Enter No Pretence, projector, screen and very own mic a-blazing.
As I say, the intervention was well timed. With the discomfort
described above hanging over the room and the conference organisers
about to facilitate the ominously-titled “What next?” part of the
programme, the sight of eight masked, black-clad figures bursting onto
the floor, hastily setting up their kit and launching an impassioned
critique of the movement, as exemplified (for them) by the Anarchist
Movement conference, certainly offered the possibility of seeing some of
these doubts articulated. Five minutes later and No Pretence’s raw yet
well-rehearsed attack on gender discrimination in our movement (and the
absence of this issue from the conference programme) was over, and the
group were bounding triumphantly out of the room. The statement they had
read out claimed: “No matter how much we aspire to be ‘self-critical’
there is a clear lack of theorising and concrete action around sexism,
homophobia and racism in the anarchist movement.” But what had the
intervention achieved?
Lamentably, the intervention cannot claim to have shaken the
conference out of its inertia and forced it to acknowledge not only the
patent fragmentation of the movement it supposedly represented, but also
that movement’s present weakness despite sharp new increases in class
conflict and social unrest with established institutions. But that was
never its intention, I suppose. It didn’t bode well either that the most
the onlookers could muster in response to the intervention was polite
applause; that the male conference organiser who resumed proceedings
immediately after No Pretence’s exit didn’t even make the gesture of
offering the mic to a female; or that the same guy’s misjudged comment
about it “all being planned” was the only acknowledgement that the
“interruption” had even happened.
Beyond the confines of that room, however, the intervention has
certainly been able to provoke a reaction. If at first the intervention
received applause from most, if not all, of the anarchist audience,
since then the response seems to have fallen into two camps. Firstly,
there are those individuals or representatives of various feminist and
anarchist groups who have applauded the action as long overdue. They
echoed the sentiment that women in the anarchist movement have not been
spared sexist behaviour from men (and other women). The second camp,
which we will examine in more detail later, is made up of those,
including some of the conference organisers, who have predictably
rejected the comparisons drawn between mainstream society and the
anarchist movement.
Unfortunately, both sets of responses fail to distinguish between the
No Pretence statement and the accompanying video. The latter, which has
sadly proved the most enduring talking point since the conference,
features a stark comparative look at male domination of political
activity and the persistence of traditional gender roles in the photo
albums of liberal democracy and the anarchist movement respectively.
The sort of facile finger pointing at overt gender hierarchies in which
the No Pretence video indulges is not without its place (after all, if
it creates a space in which we can vent our frustrations with the
gendered society we all experience daily, either within the movement or
beyond, it can be considered a useful exercise in and of itself). This
is especially true at a conference which did tend to give primacy to the
issue of class struggle and thus tend (whether unintentionally or
otherwise) to accept agency to lie with the male factory worker.
Unfortunately though, this finger-pointing is not without its
pitfalls either. The preoccupation with obvious sexisms draws attention
away from the crucial point: that is, the relationship between sexism
and social domination in a capitalist society. It is this relationship
that should be scrutinised if we are to understand the truly incipient
forms of sexism embedded in our social relations. A case in point: No
Pretence far too easily cried “Oppression” when they misheard a heckler
from the audience: “Are you going to dance, sexy?” It has since been
revealed (and I can confirm first hand), that the line was actually “Are
you a dance act? Diversity!”; a remark not on the gender of those
storming the stage, but a reference to the winning act of Britain’s Got
Talent, who chose a similarly black-hood/concealed-face outfit for their
popular audition. While occurrences of overt sexism are not unthinkable
also in anarchist circles, real oppression will come much more subtly
than that.
If anarcha-feminists are trying to tackle a feudal form of sexism,
where women are actively prevented from participating in political
society by a ruling class of men, they are attacking a straw man. The
particular form that capitalist patriarchy, or patriarchal capitalism,
takes is of a more structural, indirect kind. Capitalism, ironically, is
based on the (liberal) principles of freedom and equality. Only when we
are free and equal can we sell our labour power for survival – it is
the basis of a class society. Capitalist patriarchy is not shaped by
direct exploitation of women, obvious discrimination and domination. It
is more subtle, and therefore more persistent, than that. We should not
ask of society, and its representation in the anarchist movement, a
liberal awareness of feminist issues, gender inequality and positive
discrimination. I’d much rather hear the speeches of feminist men than
sexist women.
To be fair to No Pretence, they have recognised this themselves, when
they write that “hierarchical social relations cannot be reduced to
personal insults or behaviour. Sexism thrives upon subtle and intangible
processes which make gender domination and exploitation endemic.” But
the vocabulary of gender “exploitation” nonetheless tends towards
outdated understandings of sexism (under capitalism) as analogous to
similarly misled concepts of class as a crude slave vs. master
relationship.
Earlier waves of radical feminism adopted an anti-capitalist position
based on the asymmetrical way in which capitalist economics impose
value on traditionally gendered social roles and divisions of labour.
Today, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, one of the more contemporary radical
feminists to which the No Pretence statement proudly alludes, has paved
the way for just one of the many more sophisticated lines of analysis
that have been developed in more recent years in response to the onset
of the advanced global capitalism we know today. The body of radical
research that emerged from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, for example, based as
it is around the physical and psychological violence inflicted by the
new digital industries of the unregulated US-Mexican border zone upon
their increasingly feminised labour force, is a stark reminder that more
sophisticated critiques of the interstices between class, gender and
production – traditional understandings of which are now blurred – are
required if we are to unearth the indirect structures that underlie to
sexism in society.
Likewise, today we are faced with much more complicated forms of
social control, with liberal society adopting women quotas for
representation in public life, positive discrimination embedded in
employment legislation and formal equality of opportunity. Does this
make modern capitalist society anti-sexist? No! But at the heart of an
anarchist feminism must be the understanding that capitalist
exploitation is structured in a more complex manner. If future No
Pretence actions are to be taken seriously they should refrain from
seeking a liberal response by insinuating that more female participation
in anarchist platforms would in any way constitute a rejection of
capitalist patriarchal forms of domination.
But there is perhaps an even more compelling lesson to be learnt from
No Pretence’s use of sensationalist visual material which, as I have
demonstrated, might have detracted from, rather than reinforced, their
more astute accompanying statement. It seems to me that the use of such
a montage betrays a certain naivety as to the response of a movement
that, outside of radical feminist spheres, is largely indifferent to and
comparatively unsophisticated in its analysis of gender politics (when
compared to other Western European countries, for example). Indeed, it
has been all too easy for those who are reluctant to engage with No
Pretence’s proposition, for whatever motive, to dismiss the intervention
based on the (fair?) assertion that the examples used by No Pretence to
illustrate sexist behaviour in anarchist circles were selective and
misleading. The fact that the intervention has given way to this sort of
refutation is disappointing, but not particularly dangerous in itself.
Conversely, that criticisms on these grounds have proven to be so easily
and widely accepted/acceptable has in turn allowed far more sinister
comments to creep into the debate relatively unnoticed, under the guise
of springing from objections similar to those that dismissed the video
as unrepresentative.
Some anarchists have suggested, for example, that the group should
have brought feminism to the discussion table during the conference
group sessions, rather than set their own. Comments such as this prove
that while the video was perhaps a mistake for the group, covering up
was certainly the right thing to do. It does not matter whether No
Pretence are men or women, masking up was an adequate way to anticipate
the response from the conference organisers: that the anarcha-feminists
should have brought their opinions to the available structures of the
conference. This to me was the truly sexist response: the suggestion
that a feminist critique of patriarchal hierarchy could be adequately
addressed – and thereby recuperated – within the constraints of
facilitated discussion on anarchism, movement, and class.
Summing up, it seemed to me that the anarcha-feminist intervention
was held back by a pseudo-radical proposition: that anarchism is
opposition to hierarchy in its amalgamated multiplicity; i.e.
anti-capitalism + anti-racism + anti-sexism + anti-homophobia + etc =
anarchism. The intervention seemed to say that ‘you can’t be an
anarchist without being a feminist’. Maybe they had it the wrong way
round: ‘you can’t be a feminist without being an anarchist’ would be a
radical slogan based on the recognition of capitalist patriarchy. Sexual
liberation can only be achieved in freedom!
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