No Woman, No Revolution, Part 5
Formless house (Alvar Aalto)
Tyranny of Structurelessness
As she tells us at the
beginning of the attached document, the first version of Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny
of Structurelessness” was given as a talk more than 40 years ago, in 1970.
Part of its instant appeal is
that it states “the obvious”, i.e. things that those of us with even a small
amount of experience know very well to be true. For example:
“...there is no such thing as a
structureless group.”
Not only is this obvious, but
it is also part of scientific knowledge of human society. Humans are social
creatures, and live their lives in relation with each other. These
relationships always have structure, although the structure of the
relationships is constantly changing.
If, as Spinoza and Engels
thought, freedom is “the recognition of necessity”, then freedom of
relationships, and within relationships, will be greater if their structure is
acknowledged, and not denied.
If, as Gramsci thought, all
social groups contain their “organic intellectuals”, then some of these may be
good and others bad. But the remedy for bad intellectuals is not to pretend
that there are no intellectuals. They are there, whether people are conscious
of them, or not.
What Jo Freeman shows is that
“structurelessness”, as applied in the Women’s Movement, became a screen behind
which women who had advantages of class privilege, derived from the generally
class-divided society outside, where able to manipulate the other, poorer and
working-class women, so as to preserve their hegemony or dictatorship within
these feminist circles.
“For everyone
to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in
its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit,” says Freeman.
Explicit structure means open
Rules of Debate, Procedure of Meetings (“Standing Orders”) including notice of
meetings, a Constitution, listed membership, minutes, book-keeping, and
election of leadership on a periodical basis.
In South Africa, a “Progressive
Women’s Movement” (PWM) exists which has no formal structure. Its “Base
Document” (not a constitution) says that it is “Organic – not a formal
structure”. In practice this means that its decisions are taken by its
sponsors, who fund its principal gatherings and who maintain it from outside
itself. This maintenance is done by the ANC Women’s League.
The first, three-paragraph
section of Jo Freeman’s essay, called “Formal and Informal Structures”, is the
best of the four sections. It “says it all”. The next three sections are more
experiential and discursive. The final section gives some advice on
organisation, and one may have different views about the details.
The main thing that
organisation is essential for the working-class women, and for the working
class in general. “Organise or starve!” is a good slogan.
In South Africa, the great
age of organisation was from the beginning of the 20th century and
especially from the founding of the ANC in 1912, up until 1990.
The organisations that still
flourish were founded then. Of them, the ANC and the SACP continue to grow, but
COSATU is not growing at the same rate, if at all.
In 2003 COSATU adopted its
“2015 Plan”, which called for four million members by the time of the 10th
COSATU Congress, held in 2009. In fact, the membership at that time had barely reached
2 million, and it was very little changed by the time of the 11th
COSATU Congress, which took place three years later in September, 2012.
On the other hand, since
1990, a large number of NGOs have been established, which, calling themselves
“civil society”, or “social movements”, hold themselves out as the new
representatives of the masses. Whereas they only represent their bourgeois
funders and sponsors.
Internationally, the “Occupy”
movement is not the first to shoot up on the stony ground of
“structurelessness”, only to die away even faster.
What Jo Freeman said,
addressing the Women’s Movement forty years or more ago, today remains
applicable to all of our activities, and not just to the Women’s Movement.
Conversely, it is clear that
much (but not all) of the ideology of the Women’s Movement is only masquerading
as feminism, whereas it is actually imported from, and is no different from,
the prevailing bourgeois ideology of capitalist society. This is certainly the
case with “structurelessness”.
“Structurelessness” has
nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with degenerate
“post-modern”, anti-humanist bourgeois philosophy in the service of
Imperialism.
·
The above is to introduce
the original reading-text: Tyranny of
Structurelessness, Jo Freeman, 1973.
