The Family isn’t just a natural social unit based on caring anymore. It is a rigid economic grouping of people into cramped lodgings and restrictive economic relationships. The Family ceases to be natural the moment that it becomes economically necessary.

The Family subverts the individual. Women are devalued in by an economic system that doesn’t pay them for any housework or child raising labour. Children are totally dependent on their parents for housing and food, and they are totally subject to their parents’ will. The most authoritarian relationship within society is that between parent and child. Some parents invert this relationship and become servants of their children, but they have the quick-release of adulthood – at any time they can regain their authoritative power. When you can no longer choose an alternative, then your individuality is no longer valued. You become “a wife” and “a mother”, and no longer have a name but “honey” or “mum!”.

Individuals who don’t fit within The Family structure find themselves: suffering under the dictatorial yoke of parents and patriarchs; cast into reactive youth cultures; or stoically struggling to maintain a single-parent family on the dole. The Family is the basis of society and to not fit in the family is to be different.

The Family benefits big capital because when individual workers group together, pooling their resources to survive. Wages only need to increase in line with the cost of providing a survival allowance to groups, not in line with the cost of supporting individuals in society. Only 80 years ago, the controllers of wages in Australia would calculate what a woman’s wage was worth by assuming that she lived with a husband and child who would each work – a woman’s wage was 70% of a man’s; a child’s wage about 60%. The Family in Australia has its roots in an economic unit where each party was bound to group together by the need to pool their wages to provide food and shelter for themselves as a group. The man, woman and child were all stuck - but women and children more so.

The Family takes on the cost of child raising and education. Choosing which school your kids goes to is an economic choice – what can you afford? If you sacrifice now, will your child become Prime Minister some day?

Today, little changes. The nature of family is still gendered.

Workshop Notes for Subplot (28 August 2005)

Unpaid Labour

• What kinds of unpaid labour do we engage in (or are meant to engage in)?
  
  • Cleaning
  • Having kids, taking care of them, educating them, etc.
  • Psychological services
  • Being pleasant
  • Pretending that menstruation doesn’t affect us (part of being pleasant)
  • Being beautiful (shopping, consuming beauty products and fashion, ,
  • Sexual services - includes the provision of sex, being available, being attractive, courtship and mating games
  • Provision of comfort and reassurance
• Why do we do unpaid labour? (its easier, its gratifying, no-one else will do it / it needs to be done)
• How does it affect our autonomy?
• Can we have autonomy when we can’t access free time and/or can’t access the right to refuse to work in our “free” time
• Are there ways that we could stop or avoid doing unpaid labour
  
  • Is simply refusing possible?
• What are the traditional/ perceived consequences of refusing to engage in unpaid labour?
  
  • Being a ‘bad’ woman / mother / wife
• How does the struggle for equality affect us in doing unpaid labour?
• (Do we even struggle for equality? How about a struggle for autonomy and self-definition?)
• How does unpaid labour interact with class? Is it a class phenomenon, or simply more damaging to the working class? How does capitalism benefit from all this unpaid labour that we do?
• How do roles direct us toward doing unpaid labour, and who benefits?
• Do you get stuck working in your role, but outside your ‘area of responsibility’ (e.g. Playing mother to your boss)?

Autonomy

• What is autonomy?
• How do we “get” autonomy?
• Is autonomy the same as anarchism? What’s the difference?
• What, if anything, does anarchism hold for women (as women)?
• Is (political and personal) autonomy (from capitalism, from patriarchy, from hierarchy) possible?
• What roles are we engaged in? How do roles constrain us and prevent our autonomy? Are there roles that women especially play?

Anarcha / anarchism

• Can we define anarcha-feminism? (is it a ‘movement’, a philosophy, an attitude, or a resort to banding together against hostile elements?)
• At what point do we cease to engage in “the broader movement” which never really included or represented us in the first place?

Remember kids, Jezus woz a zombie!

Look at what subplot tells us about the scene at large, and the scene’s hostile attitude to feminism
approach to activisim very vague
approach to theory and practice very vague and apolitical
approach to activism that emphasises “what’s happening out there”, not what’s actually affecting us
approach to activism that de-emphasises the struggle of everyday life (is this because its student-dominated and they don’t yet need to struggle with the imposition of everyday life??)
should be engage with the politics of DIY and try to embellish / respond to those politics?

• There was a general DIY feeling
• very low level of politics - especially feminist politics
• people wanted us to wrap and deliver the politics to them on a platter
• lots of informal networks created, it was good for forbes organising, maybe not for awol
• the structure(lessness) of subplot lead to it being very fluffy, and studenty - this wasn’t really shaped to “what we as awol wanted”
• we felt we provided the token womens group, and this was a product of the structurelessness of subplot - womens politics needs to be consciously taken up, and structurelessness doesn’t allow this
• there were criticisms of our workshop being a womens only space. there’s a general feeling that women should be equal with men, give men a chance, or educate men about feminism. one guy did want to come, and he seemed nice, so it was a bit hard to tell him to leave (thanks Rox for doing it)
• Cotton (from queeruption) made a comment to Amy that she enjoyed it being a fem-only space, and that the conference was a bit intimidating for women
• the attendees weren’t new to organising, but seemed passive. They were politically passive. we see this as a movement away from politics in general (and toward organising / campaigning). we see this as symptomatic of DIY ideology in general.
• We didn’t really get to the practical side of our organising / struggle for autonomy
• This raises the questions: are we about action, or theory, or both? were these actions (subplot and the last weekend) contrary to our own aims and analyses?
• we feel we just filled a void for fem-politics at subplot
• the openness of subplot simply rewards privilege by creating spaces where educated white males can dominate (which they did)
• On the monday, women were speaking about the lack of facilitation and how they weren’t feeling very comfortable in workshops
• The zine was good - lots of good comments about it
• Interesting question: what is the role of men in womens struggle?
  
  • Men should hold pro-feminist discussion groups where they come to terms with their privilege as men in a patriarchy
  • they should invite women to tell them how it is, and treat us like honoured guests
  • At the next conference, we should schedule a workshop called “Educated White Heterosexual Males Anarchists With Decent Incomes Deal With Their Privilege”, see who turns up and lock the door on them. ha ha ha.
• Did we touch a nerve with saying it was a womens only space? why do men not give a fuck when we organise openly, but want to come in as soon as we declare an autonomous space??
• Transexualism (can men in skirts enter a women-only space?)
  
  • Part of drag is enforcing patriarchy. A man’s right to ‘change gender’; a man’s take on ‘what a woman should be’; a man’s impression that ‘a woman is her purse and lipstick’. Maybe this is more about transvestism than about transexualism.
  • Is a woman in drag more confronting? probably. she challenges the patriarchal notion that a woman can’t control her self/image/gender and must be constructed from without
  • Some transgender people are genuine about being female / woman. Should be wary of making generalisations.
  • Men who identify as women have an obligation to be pro-feminist, or at least not to be anti-feminist

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“Feminism is a form of terrorism much closer to home than Islamic terrorism. It’s a war against God’s design for marriage and family … And [feminism] continues to be propagated in the public education system. Any child that is being brought up under this system will be infected. Girls are being empowered and boys are being weakened. ”

‘Honour thy Father’, article in Good Report magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2005
Good Report Magazine is published in Sydney by supporters of Fred Nile’s Christian Democrat Party

This is scary for a number of reasons. The author totally misunderstands feminism, the aim of which is to empower women, not disempower men (who really cares what men are up to anyway?) , or break down the family. The idea behind mainstream feminism is to create a new kind of famliy where the woman isn’t positioned as a the workhorse of every other family member. AWOL would probably posit that the family structure / relationship is a major problem in society and should be broken down where it sanctions the use and abuse of women and children for the benefit of men and adults generally. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean an end to community, to coupling, to child-raising.

Equally scary is the assumption that the public education system is somehow pro-feminist, pro-woman, or even pro-child. Let someone who’s been there tell you: it isn’t. The public education system is as patriarchal as any other, even more so. At least a private girls school will equip a woman with a sense of confidence and entitlement. Public education equips girls with low self esteem and a lingering sense that they can’t be heard above all the louder, more obnoxious voices of misbehaving boys.

The final reason this comment is scary is that it pretends there is something wrong with equal power between the sexes. The author of this comment sees power in a hierarchical sense - that power must be absolute, and inflicted upon others (women) for it to be real power. The author assumes that boys are emasculated because girls are being empowered, which is indicative of the abusive concept of power the author has - girls can’t be empowered unless it is at the expense of male power. Feminists seek to empower women to gain agency in their own lives - not to become an oppressor of others.

*AWOL thanks A (sydney) for the report*

I came across this article on Autonomy and Solidarity. Its interesting because it is written by a male who seems to be genuinely struggling with his sexism and privilege. He can’t be said to have “succeded” at unprivileging himself, but he does highlight different techniques that were used to confront him about his sexism. The most interesting point was that after refraining from speaking in meetings, waiting for women to speak, trying to listen to women, he has a moment of realisation: even the actions he took to redress his privilege were actions of power. For a man to just say “I recognise gender privilege and sexism” is an action that privileges him as an “enlightened man”.

This article might form a good basis for sistas who did want to confront their male friends about sexism.

I struggle everyday to really listen to voices I identify as women’s. I know my mind wanders quicker. I know that my instant reaction is take men’s opinions more seriously. I know that when I walk into rooms full of activists I instantly scan the room and divide people into hierarchies of status (how long they’ve been active, what groups they’ve been part of, what they’ve written and where it’s been published, who are their friends). I position myself against them and feel the most competitive with men. With those I identify as women, the same status hierarchies are tallied, but sexual desirabilty enters my hetero mindset. What is healthy sexual attraction and desire and how does it relate to and survive my training to systematically sexualize women around me? This gets amplified by the day-to-day reality that this society presents women as voiceless bodies to serve hetero-male desire, we know that. But what does it mean for how I communicate with my partners who are women and who I organize with? How does it translate into how I make love, want love, express love, conceptualize love? I’m not talking about whether or not I go down on my partner or say I love you, I’m talking about whether or not I truly value equality in our relationships over getting off on a regular basis.

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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.