Lifted from The Tyrrany of Structurlessness by Jo Freeman

PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING

Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of “structurelessness,” it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself — only its excess use.

While engaging in this trial-and-error process, there are some principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective:

1. Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.
2. Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power,but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
3. Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.
4. 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.
5. Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of “apprenticeship” program rather than the “sink or swim” method. Having a responsibility one can’t handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one’s skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.
6. 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.
7. Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members’ skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.

When these principles are applied, they insure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large, The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.

One of the shining lights in the working womens movement today is the Global Womens Strike. AWOL totally support and encourage women to take strike action to unravel the yoke that binds us to capitalism and patriarchy.

This is a statment explaining the GWS from their website.

Demands of the Global Womens Strike

The Strike and its demands give a unique framework for grassroots women and girls to express our needs whatever our situation, race, nationality, age, income, occupation, dis/ability, sexual preference . . . in towns and cities but also in villages, where most of us live. We hope that whatever demands you highlight or add, you will list them ALL. The demands unite everyone taking part in the Strike, and to each local action they bring international power.

The anti-globalisation, anti-war movement, to which women are contributing so much hard work and energy, is just beginning to recognise that Invest in Caring not Killing is a perspective for winning.

That is why the central demand of the Strike is:

• Payment for all caring work — in wages, pensions, land and other resources. What is more valuable than raising children and caring for others? Invest in life and welfare, not military budgets and prisons.
• This establishes women’s entitlement – though we do the basic work in every society, our contribution is uncounted. The other demands are about specific needs, showing the ways that this first basic demand would change the world.
• There has never been so much wealth in the world and there have never been so many of us, starting with women and children, who have nothing. At this crucial moment, we women must make our voices heard and our collective power felt.

Demands:

• Payment for all caring work - in wages, pensions, land & other resources. What is more valuable than raising children & caring for others? Invest in life & welfare, not military budgets or prisons
• Pay equity for all, women & men, in the global market.
• Food security for breastfeeding mothers, paid maternity leave and maternity breaks. Stop penalizing us for being women.
• Don’t pay ‘Third World debt’. We owe nothing, they owe us.
• Accessible clean water, healthcare, housing, transport, literacy.
• Non-polluting energy & technology which shortens the hours we work. We all need cookers, fridges, washing machines, computers, & time off!
• Protection & asylum from all violence & persecution, including by family members & people in positions of authority.
• Freedom of movement. Capital travels freely, why not people?

Why go on strike?

Women do the work of giving birth to, feeding and caring for the whole world. Those in whom we have invested our lives are slaughtered as ‘collateral damage’ or turned into killing machines. And so we have been central to every anti-war movement. It is a disaster that only half the human race is trained to care and the other half told it has ‘more important things to do’.

As corporate power and its wars threaten every corner of all our lives, people everywhere have formed massive movements – to reclaim our land and our planet, and to stop the theft (via privatisation) of water, seeds, genes . . . The Global Women’s Strike, women’s independent voice in this great movement, reclaims military spending for caring, feeding, healing, learning.

Strike for:

• A world which values all women’s work and all women’s lives.

Strike against:

• “America’s new war” and all wars - women & children are most of those killed & wounded, and 80% of refugees.
• Globalisation - an end to no pay, low pay and too much work.

Can anyone deny that production should be at the service of caring, not killing and profit? Yet $800+ billion is spent on arms each year – and more money has been committed to bombing countries like Afghanistan where people are starving, and persecuting or imprisoning anyone anywhere who dares to oppose.

A strike is the strongest weapon that workers have, and women, who do 2/3 of the world’s work, are the hardest workers. When we stop, everything is disrupted.

Women and girls in over 60 countries made the first two Strikes a success by taking at least some time off from their work, waged as well as unwaged.

Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are corporations and 49 are countries.

People everywhere see that governments are promoting corporate greed against us while lining their own pockets. They impose structural adjustment programmes and cuts in services and welfare benefits, impoverishing us and imposing killing overwork.

The gap between women’s wages and men’s is 25%-50% and growing, lowering our pensions and our social power at every age.

Together the Strike and its demands give a unique framework for grassroots women and girls to express our needs whatever our situation, race, nationality, age, income, occupation, dis/ability, sexual preference . . . in towns and cities but also in villages, where most of us live.

The demands unite everyone taking part in the Strike, and to each local action they bring international power.

(Yes, this contains all my typoes, please correct them! - Except perhaps ‘emotional cement’)

Let’s go AWOL

Anti-capitalist
Autonomous
Anti-authoritarian
WOmens
Liberation

Priorities which shape an AWOL perspective:

Opposining Sexual Violence

• Our direct / indierct experience of it
• strategies for dealing with it as it arises in everday life in our “sub-cultures”
• sexual violence as all-pervasive “culture”, permeating all dominant sexual imagery and our own sexual conditioning
• Reproductive freedom
• Abortion and the current reactionary offensive
• reproductive autonomy in general: the right to knowledge and control over our own bodies; the deliberate lack of access to information about contraception, sexuality, motherhood and relationship choices, and menstruation, especially for young and not-so-young women

Unpaid Labour

• Broad understnaging that womens’ labour in the home (and beyond) is central to the functioning of the capitalist system participation and support for the Global Womens’ Strike, which takes place on IWD and highlights the need to divert funding ffrom military spending, over to paying for ‘caring work’, largely unpaid (or grossly underpaid) – came out of the Wages for Housework Campaign, has taken off in many places around the world, including Venezuela.

Outworkers and fashion fascism

• Women are explited at both ends of the production equation within the “fashion” industries: as producers of garments, and as consumers bullied into spending big on clothes made by sweated labour
• narrow, manipulative, and inherently violent notions of beauty imposed on us at every turn (ties in with the sexual violence angle)
• Shedding the layers of conditioning which represses our Autonomy
• The dead weight of our rigourous training to repress our Autonomy:and into our sexual roles as – sex object (or aspiring sex object), obedient worker, dutiful housewife and childbearer/childrearer, discinpliner of the “next wave of labour” (i.e. Children), and all-round dispenser of emotional support and effection to males the world over – forever projecting permanent sexual availability, and existing in a prision/factory of domesticity.
• The role of the church, family and spectacle (perpetrated by the media) in cementing this
• strategies for reversing this process
  
  • emotional cement for autonomy
  • excercising our capacity to live out other, more preferable roles

Queerness and Sexual Autonomy

• Naming our sexuality for ourselves
• living out a sexuality that is autonomous, that is, not necessarily revolving around or even wanting men in the picture
• living out a sexuality that is entirely at odds with the socially-restricted role cut out for us by capitalist patriarchy (as outlined above)

*Lastly, an AWOL persepctive is relevant to ALL other forms and areas of organising,and/or creation of social spaces. *

by A