Dark Star Collective
WITH THE PUBLICATION OF BENEATH THE PAVING STONES DARK Star brought together various Situationist pamphlets it had reprinted with Rebel Press into a book format. We are now pleased to be able to produce our second anthology which brings together the feminist and anarcha-feminist pamphlets which we reprinted with Rebel press. We would like to take this opportunity to assert that we still think that pamphlets have an important role to play in the dissemination of Anarchist ideas and hopefully we will go on producing them, and we encourage and support other groups to continue this practice. However as a group of people who have wide experience of working both in the radical and commercial publishing/bookselling arena our decision to produce these anthologies is also eminently practical. We have spent years tracking down pamphlets, articles etc. and we wish to make these as accessible as possible. While libraries are happy to keep books in specialist libraries, which are difficult for ‘ordinary’ people to access, they are unlikely to keep pamphlets. All of the pamphlets reprinted in this anthology were once readily available in your ‘local friendly radical bookshop’ or widely available through mail order via radical publications, and had a wide circulation. Regrettably, with the decline of radical bookshops/spaces, one-off publications etc, and the increasing consolidation and money-driven commercial bookshops, these outlets are becoming fewer and fewer, and the chances of placing a book in the commercial domain are far higher than the chances of placing a pamphlet.
Although we know that the criticism “why reprint old pamphlets?” will be levelled against us, we have no doubt that these pamphlets have both a historical and continuing significance. Also we feel no need to apologise for seeking to preserve and pass on significant works to younger/newer comrades. Despite the fact that anarchism comes in and goes out of fashion, to leave this task to commercial publishers seems to us a gross irresponsibility. As one-time participants in, and regular visitors to the Anarchist Bookfair, the number of times we have heard the question “Have you anything on anarcha-feminism?” would in itself justify our reprinting these pamphlets. Obviously we hope that the re-publication of these pamphlets will also stimulate debate about anarcha-feminism, and encourage a more widespread distribution of the issues that it raised. The first pamphlet that Dark Star reprinted was The Tyranny Of Structurelessness shortly followed by The Tyranny of Tyranny. Originally reprinted by Dark Star as two separate pamphlets they were reissued together as Untying The Knot: Feminism, Anarchism & Organisation (co-published with Rebel Press). At that time most of Dark Star were members of a Bookshop Collective undergoing numerous problems that other collectives and small groups were encountering. The Tyranny of Structurelessness, although originating from the Womens Liberation Movement and its associated period of consciousness-raising (and we should emphasise that we have no desire to seek to appropriate it as a work of anarchism), was immediately recognised as relevant to us as a group seeking to formulate non-hierarchical working methods, and by extension, relevant to many libertarian groups around the country. We reprinted it as much as a discussion document for those groups as a pamphlet in its own right. To cite the continued relevance of this pamphlet consider:
“The many and various people who did Angry Brigade things were not very comfortable with clandestinity, which is inevitably elitist when it doesn’t come out of a mass movement. Looked at now this conclusion seems inescapable. One of the most important texts of the time was The Tyranny of Structurelessness which showed how informal leaderships were especially undemocratic AND IT REMAINS ESPECIALLY RELEVANT NOW WHEN IDEOLOGUES OF THE INTERNET DISTORT ITS DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL WITH THEIR HOLISTIC FLIM-FLAM” (our caps). John Barker, review of Tom Vague’s Anarchy in the U.K. (Transgression No4)
“I’d like to take up some of your points about structures. In certain specific arenas, such as when organising actions, such a (de-centralised, non-hierarchical) structure is useful in terms of not having leaders of demos etc, but in terms of organisation it’s not. l would definitely recommend you read (if you haven’t)The Tyranny of Structurelessness in Untying the Knot.
In practice, the sort of movement you’re advocating is dominated by informal leaders who thrive on the lack of a structure (which could shut them up and bring more hesitant people, unconfident about their ideas, more to the fore). Such groups preclude the involvement of most working class people as they represent friendship cliques which are created usually in middle class circles and, crucially, OUTSIDE of the meeting/action basis of the group movement…” AF member replying to a letter in Organise 51
It seemed to us at the time, and it still seems to be the case, that the issues raised in Untying the Knot are essential reading for anarchists in the understanding of organisational practice. (We also advocate that people study Worker’s Councils, The Miner’s Next Step, the experiments in Spain etc). The pamphlets contained in Untying the Knot had a direct practical impact upon us. They were addressing problems that we were attempting to deal with daily. Our nightly fantasies of International Anarcho-Syndicalist Unions seizing the means of production, Workers Councils arising, tenants taking over etc. were crushed against the daily reality of trying to run a bookshop!
The issues these pamphlets raised and the recognition they evoked in certain sections of the radical movements of that period would seem to suggest that there was a certain area of possible dialogue between the discourse of certain strands of the Womens Liberation Movement and the Anarchist movement. A position made explicit by Cathy Levine:
“Like masturbation, anarchism is something we have been brought up to fear, irrationally and unquestioningly, because not to fear it might lead us to probe it, learn it and like it. For anyone who has ever considered the possibility that masturbation might provide more benefits than madness, a study of anarchism is highly recommended—all the way back to the time of Marx, when Bakunin was his most radical socialist adversary…”
A strand, a tendency, whatever you wish to call it began to emerge, eventually defining itself as anarcha-feminism. It would be dishonest to assert that anarcha-feminism was welcomed with open arms by the anarchist movement: consider the following report from Zero No 5 Feb/March 78:
“The South East and London Anarchist Libertarian conference, the first to be held since Warwick three years ago, took place over January 27/28/29 at Essex University. Organised on sexual politics and communication, around 150 people took part. We hope it will prove to be a watershed in the Anarchist movement’s history.
On the Friday night a planning meeting took place to finalise workshops and other conference details. From the hostility with which the already scheduled all-women’s and all-men’s workshops were challenged it became clear that confrontation over the issue of sexual politics was likely to dominate the entire weekend. This was borne out as the workshops got underway; workshops not on sexual politics rarely got beyond hostile conflict over sexism, while workshops on sexual politics were of necessity taken up with discussing what was happening in the conference itself.
The women’s workshop began with a coherent supportive discussion in which we tried to clarify the links between our anarchism and our feminism. On the whole we were in agreement on the need both for an autonomous women’s movement and to develop feminism within the Anarchist movement. These feelings were not shared by some of the men in the conference who saw no evidence of sexism in the anarchist movement and attached little importance to patriarchal oppression. At times throughout the conference women were belittled and even insulted, and their ideas trivialised—often by men who claimed to be ‘insulted’ by our allegations of sexism…
Some of us came away depressed although others of us saw what happened as more constructive. This was, after all, the conference at which feminist and homosexual politics raised their angry beautiful heads and refused to go away. Essex could have been the first conference of a new, sexpol-conscious, anarchist politics, but left us instead determined that it should be the last of the old. The anarchist movement will fail to accomplish anything until it has come to terms with the oppression of men over women…”
We have no wish to dwell upon the reception that anarcha-feminism received from certain sections of the anarchist movement, but merely to remind ourselves as anarchists that we have not been as receptive to new challenges as we might hope to be. Retrospectively certain of the ideas of anarcha-feminism seem to fall coherently into ideas that were current at the time. The slogan ‘The personal is political’ can be seen in Breton’s “Transform the world, said Marx, change life said Rimbaud…,” seen in the Situationist demand for the revolution of everyday life, and seen in the rather more prosaic tradition of “How come we always make the tea and do the typing?”
Fortunately the Black Bear anarcha-feminist imprint produced six pamphlets which constituted the original Quiet Rumours and we would like to take this opportunity to commend their commitment to their publishing project without which anarcha-feminist ideas would never have had the impact which they did. Between them these pamphlets offer not only an overview of anarcha-feminism but an excellent and lucid exposition of both the Womens Liberation Movement and anarchism.
As Peggy Kornegger observes in Anarchism: the Feminist Connection:
“The current women’s movement and a radical feminist analysis of society have contributed much to libertarian thought. In fact, it is my contention that feminists have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years. We now need to become consciously aware of the connections between anarchism and feminism and use that framework for our thoughts and actions.”
A review of Quiet Rumours in The Anarchist Feminist Magazine Winter 1985 reads “I hope this outline inspires you to read this collection and move on. What happened to anarcha-feminist writings since the seventies?”
We are pleased to offer this retrospective anthology in the hope that it works not only as an essential collection of texts past but offers inspiration for future discussion and debate.
Dark Star Collective