A-Infos (en) Poland, Warsawa, <alter-ee> Praska Anachist Group on "The EU, Anti-EU movements and feminist perspectives"

[Zaczek <hydrozag@poczta.onet.pl>]

 ________________________________________________
      A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
    News about and of interest to anarchists
 http://ainfos.ca/ http://ainfos.ca/index24.html
 ________________________________________________

The Praska Group is a small collective from Warsaw. It is a member of the
  Anarchist Federation. Its members are active in a number of movements and
  have been organizing No Border activities plus are active in feminism and
  criticism against gender and sexual stereotypes. The group were among the
  founders of the anarcho-feminist group KURWA (now defunct); although it is
  not a specifically feminist group, anarcha-feminist and gender issues are
  essential to its politics. Members of the group also edit a zine for women
  workers called "Women to the Streets".
 >
www.alter.most.org.pl/pga
 >
  We began anti-EU campaigns several years ago. It became clear right away
  that we would both find it impossible to integrate into the other anti-EU
  movements and that we would have trouble finding a base with many that we
  would normally like to network with politically, in particular feminist.* In
  this article we will give you only a few of our arguments against the EU as
  we would like to focus on the feminist perspectives, why we feel feminists
  did not engage in the anti-EU movements and how we feel that the powers that
  be knowingly co-opt feminist movements for their own purposes.

(* We feel it is important to clarify what we mean by feminists as clearly feminists
range from liberal feminists to anarcha-feminists. Here we use the blanket term because
in relation to the EU, it seemed most feminists used similar argumentation.

Among more radical or social feminists, we did not find vocal criticism and sometimes
found open support for the EU from a reformist position. Although we suppose that some people will
postfactum turn out not to be so supportive, any feminist opposition was essentially silent
during the pre-referendum period.)

  We feel that any truly brief critique of the EU may not be entirely
  convincing hence we encourage people to look for more documents on our web
  site to get a more in-depth look at some of the arguments. Some of the
  reasons we are against the EU are as follows:
 >
  * The EU, like all superstatist institutions, exists to consolidate the
  power of capital. We are against all national and international efforts to
  control the production and distribution of wealth, goods and services. We do
  not believe the role of the state or superstate can ever be to check capital
  even when it claims to be working in the interests of the national good, not
  capital. We believe that superstates serve to consolidate power which
  ultimately leads to higher stages of imperialism and more free reign for
  capital.
 >
  * We are against the EU Employment Strategy, in particular the Third Pillar
  which calls for the increased casualization of labour. We have concerns
  about Polish workers' role in Europe as a force of potential strikebreakers
  and see expansion as an element which helps the bosses implement anti-worker
  policy. This in no way means that we support calls to keep people off the
  labour market but we are concerned about the social and economic
  implications that an expanded European labour market comprised of workers
  from such greatly varying income groups can bring.
 >
  * We are against EU border policy, in particular its implementation in  Poland.
 >
  *  We do not like the policies of the Common Agricultural Policy and are
  particularly concerned about the social and economic impact of large-scale
  corporate agribusiness in Poland.
 >
  * We are against Eurocracy as we are against all forms of representative
  government.
 >
  * We do not like many of the policies of social control, for example
  implementation of the SIS-II.
 >
  * In the case of Poland, we feel that many points in the Acquis Communitaire
  will have extremely negative consequences for working and poor people, in
  particular as the Acquis was carefully constructed to serve the purposes or
  European capital.
 >>
 >
  The Feminist Perspective(s)
 >
  After the referendum, we are beginning to hear a few isolated feminists
  criticise particular points of the EU yet prior to the referendum, hardly a
  critical word was to be found. We suppose that certain people quelled their
  criticisms in fear of negative results at the polls, having convinced
  themselves that, negative aspects or not, EU membership was bound to bring
  them more benefit than harm.  We must say that, for certain people, there
  will be certain benfits just as there will be losses. As to whether or not
  membership brings more benefits than not, we think it depends on how you
  qualify it. Strategic alliances with wealthier states sometimes do bring
  benefits if your country manages to exploit global capitalism and
  imperialism to increase wealth inside its borders. We have already seen
  clearly enough that Poland would like to become a political and economic
  power and is willing to go to war and police Iraq to gain prestige and some
  post-war rebuilding contracts. The press is quick to call Poland's imperial
  venture a success but we do not accept the criteria used.  EU membership and
  the development of the Polish economy along Western European standards may
  eventually produce some outward measures of wealth but we see the other side
  of the coin: worsening conditions for workers, moving production to
  countries using sweatshop labour, mass unemployment and underemployment,
  widening income gaps - to name just a few. Some people will argue that this
  will go on regardless of whether Poland joins the EU, and we agree only we
  mention this to question that widespread thought in Poland that EU
  membership would be a panacea remedy for the Polish economy.  When treating
  feminist's perspectives of the EU and their support, we have to assume that
  their first and foremost concerns were in sync with the overwhelming social
  anxiety about material life. Therefore, to momentarily put aside any ideas
  on the EU which might be particularly feminist, we have to assume that
  many feminists are plugged into the myths of capitalism about how
  wealth is created and comparing their own material standard of living with
  those in the EU, came to the  conclusion that joining the EU would bring
  economic benefits.
 >
  Again, judging the state of the economy is usually a matter of which factors
  and indicators you look at, but we are highly critical of this point of
  view. As we feel that we probably cannot adequately convince those reader
  who might not be critical of capitalism, to indicators of wealth used by
  capital and by world development models, we will move from this point just
  saying that we are not convinced by this view. (You may consult the web page
  for more arguments.)
 >
  On to arguments which we found particular to the feminsts, we can break them
  into two groups: arguments based wholly or partially on misinformation and
  arguments based on fact but which often represented, to our minds, wishful
  thinking.
 >
  Among the arguments we heard which represented misinformation are the
  following:
 >
  That abortion will become legalised in Poland;
  That homosexuals will be allowed to marry;
  That that consitution forbiding discrimination will end pay differentials;
  That there will be quotas  guaranteeing equal participation of women in
  government.
 >
  (Other common myths, for example on Schengen's immediate implementation in
  Poland, we will not comment on here.)
 >
  Hopefully I do not have to point out to readers that this is just
  misinformation. Unfortunately I did not even manage to convince some people
  locally that homosexuals did not have the right to marry throughout the EU.
 >
  This aside, the more powerful factors seemed to be other matters of
  interpretation.
 >
  In particular, we feel that many Polish feminists look in envy at the
  situation of their counterparts in other countries. Feminism, although
  already more mainstream than 10 years ago, is not as widespread as in places
  like Sweden or England or Germany and thus, consciously or not, many Polish
  feminists look to other countries as more developed models. Thus, logical,
  or not, many Polish feminist look at EU countries and see countries where
  the level of feminist consciousness is higher and where this is even
  embedded in consitutions, government policies and legal documents.
 >
  It did not help that so many of the anti-EU camp were arch conservatives who
  argued that the EU would bring feminism and legalize homsexuality in Poland.
  Many feminists combined reaction to those conservatives and social change
  with EU membership.
 >
  There are several problems with this however. First, we see a tremendous
  difference between what is declared on paper and what really happens.
  Second, have seen time and time again how countries looking in envy at some
  aspects of social, political or economic life abroad implement their
  politics, join in supranational alliances with them only to find that the
  reality of it all is far different than what they expected.
 >
  We suppose that feminists in the future will be in for a rude awakening
(but
  that doesn't mean we aren't happy to try to wake them up before the fact).
 >
  For example, they may find that the pay differentials don't disappear. If
  they did their homework, they might also find that pay differentials are
  actually higher in some EU countries than in Poland. Contrary to all
  capitalist logic, if they want more equal salaries to men, they should look
  to Belarus where the differentials are actually quite low. (Then again, with
  such crappy salaries, maybe this is easy to accomplish.) It also turns out
  that the percentage of women in management jobs is higher in Poland than in
  many EU countries.
 >
  Not that these are our main priorities, but just to look at a typical liberal
  feminist perspective.
 >
  We don't want to insinuate that things are good enough here. But we question
  what women actually feel is so much better in the EU. Feminists will point
  out all the discrimination in Poland as an almost unique case and say things
  like "you'd never see that in X". And, in some cases, they are right. And in
  some not. Because the fact is that you do not legislate change, you do not
  impose feminism from above and feminist practice is not created in a vacuum.
  If some anti-discrimination practices do exist in some other places, it's
  not because some laws and principles were put into place and forced the bad
  guys to comply: it's because of years of social struggle, and, unfortunately
  also because the needs of the economy are in perfect sync with it all and
  these override social reaction.

  So what do these people want? Do they want to be given the right to sue
  their employers if they are discriminated against? One look at how that
  works abroad should put that out of their minds. As a matter of fact, the
  Polish courts have a good record of protecting women workers.*
  The EU, with all its declarations on workers' rights, are always
encouraging changes to the Labour Code and
  practice in the Labour Court. (* It is true though that sexual bias cases
rarely ever are brought in Poland.)
 >
  We wonder how well off women workers will actually be when more reforms
  encouraging the casualization of labour are complete; won't women be the
  ones willing most of the crap jobs? The "career breaks" that the European
  Employment Strategy encourages - won't that often be used for unpaid
  maternity leave?  And the pension and health care reforms; in a country
  where women live on the average 10 years longer than men, making the
  overwhelming majority of pensioneers women, doesn't this amount to screwing
  old women?
 >
  Of course we are also sure that some middle-class and many upper-class women
  will benefit.
  We also see one of the problems being that many feminists actually are from
  an elite sphere of people - if not an economic elite, then a cultural elite.
 >
  For example, some women argued that it would be much easier for them to
  study abroad after being EU members. While this may be true, we wonder how
  many people in a sense can actually take advantage of such benefits. First,
  education in Poland is a class issue; it is moving towards paid education
  and what is left of public higher education is dominated by children from
  wealthier backgrounds who had better school, tutors, etc.. So we wonder if
  the benefits of 10,000 people studying abroad can counterbalance the
  negative effects EU policies  will directly or indirectly have on the
  children of the 1 million displaced farmers.
 >
  We see a failure amongst the feminists to make a deeper social analysis due
  to class and social privelege. While they tend to look at themselves as a
  "progressive element", they tend to look at rural women as victims of
  domestic abuse, conservative, religious and backwards - in need of uprooting
  for their own good.
 >
  Many feminists also argued that their organizations will be able to get
  money from the EU. This, to a certain extent, is true - but probably not to
  the extent they presented before the referendum. Before the referendum you
  could see lots of information about how feminists will be able to use
  structural funds; now that the referendum is history, you see disclaimers in
  places like Oshka bulletin ( main feminist calendar/ information source)
  saying that, although there may be some money available, you mustn't forget
  that most of the money goes to things like infrastructure, building roads,
  etc.. (Wow, thanks for informing them now; maybe if such info was out a few
  months ago, I wouldn't have had such arguments with feminists who were
  prematurely counting on the cash rolling in from the structural funds!) The
  fact is, regardless of whether women get money or not from the EU to do
  feminist work, it does not change our opinion. As a matter of fact, we are
  critical of these funds for various reasons. First, we see that these funds
  can often make organizations dependent and unwilling to criticize.

  Government think-tanks clearly write about the role NGOs should have in
  being a  civil partner and channelling dissent.  Second, we feel that heavy
  outside funding for organizations that exist in a social vacuum could have
  the opposite effect. For example, the nutty claims by the right that
  homosexuality will be sponsored by the EU may well seem true to people and
  people who see something as foreign and being imposed on them often connect
  things like this with cultural imperialism, etc.. We are not saying that we
  think these sorts of views should be pandered to, it's just perceived
  differently when a movement grows of it's one accord and has its own social
  base and when it is imported as a set of cultural values from abroad and
  ultimately this will have its consequences. Third, we believe that certain
  segments of NGOs form elites that are eventually bought and are willing to
  sell out larger social interests for narrower ones. In such a case, the
  interests of groups like feminists will more and more be contrasted with
  groups like workers, ecologists, farmers. Feminists are in danger of
  supporting the system over the larger social base. Thus financial dependancy
  is often a very effective way of splitting the interests of different social
  groups and making certain connections impossible at the grassroots level.
  Finally, from our anarchist point of view, we do not agree with paying taxes
  and having some bureaucrats dole out where money is to be allocated. We have
  no objection to feminist groups getting money to do their political work,
  only the money should come from donation and a real support base, not from
  the state or superstate. Some people might argue that taxes are a fact and
  they'd prefer feminists to get them rather than the military - and we'd
  agree but in the situation where many people base their support of a
  superstate on the fact that they'll get some cash from it, we can't help but
  point out that it's still money stolen from working people and, although on
  one hand you may think you're better capable of organizing our own
  liberation, on the other you're also perpetuating your own exploitation.
 >
  Here, in this criticism of the position that feminists played in mustering
  support of the EU, we do not want to particularly demonize the feminists;
  like many other people, they were working from a position of incomplete
  information, wishful thinking and viewing their interests in rather narrow
  terms. We understand that post-factum, many feminists will begin to vocalize
  the aspects of EU politics that they do not like or agree with; in fact,
  many people voted for accession merely because they saw no "pragmatic"
  alternative to it. It is our hope to add to the feminist perspective in
  Poland by offering a radical analysis which takes alienation into account
  and which also will take a deeper look into both the class biases of certain
  aspects of feminist politics and will be critical of the results which can
  be expected by engaging in reformist politics.
 >
  Anti-EU Movements, the Conservatives and Us
 >
  One factor that no doubt highly influenced some feminist and gay
  perspectives was the public face of the anti-EU movement. (And here I say
  the public face because there is reason to people that in fact it was much
  more diverse than many people thought.) Nationalist, conservatives and
  Catholics tended to oppose EU assession. For many, pro-EU politics were seen
  as a rejection of xenophobia, tradition, family values, the church,
  homophobia and provincialism.
 >
  There are many problematic issues raised by this, not the least of which is
  that accession in and of itself will not be able to change these things. As
  a matter of fact, if the first years in post-accession Poland go badly, it
  is quite possible that the opposite will happen: it will be exactly the
  conservatives who will gain political credibility. As we look at current
  political movements in places like France, Belgium or Austria, we can see
  how reactionary politics feeds off of popular discontent and it makes you
  wonder what the possibilities for a right-wing insurgence are in Poland.
 >
  In Poland, there is almost a non-existent left wing and only small
  grassroots movements. We found however that all the small communist and
  left groups most of the anarchists and most localists also took anti-EU
  positions. So the political spectrum on the EU looked as if the small left
  and anarchist scene was "on the same side" as the conservatives but on the
  opposite side of feminists and gays.  For us, this was a troubling
  perspective that still has many consequences. Not the least problematic
  point of the situation are sometimes anti-social and elitist positions
  amongst feminists like "why should I care about those workers and farmers?"
  In other words, some sort of imagination that workers and farmers are bound
  with social reaction. It has to be said that the media portrayal of these
  groups as singular entities behind some right-wing leaders has perpetuated
  this concept.
 >
  The reality looks a little different. When one of us participated in a large
  Solidarity action a few months before the referendum with anti-EU leaflets,
  she found a number of interesting things. First, there were many women with
  anti-EU leaflets but only a small percentage of them represented right-wing
  or conservative views. The thing she clearly noticed was that most of the
  people marching were women. This probably represents the reality of who has
  been hit by unemployment and poverty most in Poland outside the big cities.
 >
  In this situation, the conservative forces concentrated their anti-EU
  campaigns not so much on xenophobia or anti-homosexual views (which really
  they rarely mentioned - only a few extreme people using it- there was no
  need to focus on that base of voters anyway); they focused on the situation
  of the average person. And, while we do not espouse populism, one could see
  that the critical views of the conservatives could strike a chord with the
  social discontents.
 >
  As we mentioned, a wider range of people participated then in anti-EU
  movements; from libertarian capitalists to some protectionists. In total, we
  can think that some 33% of the population at least took part in anti-EU
  activity. (Although we only saw about a quarter of voters vote aginst - we
  have to remember that many anti-EU people wavered between boycotting and
  voting as people were trying to lower the frequency of the vote, thus mnay
  boycotted, especially as after the first day it seemed like the frequency
  would be too low to have a valid referendum.)
 >
  We were shocked and disappointed however to find ourselves sometimes lumped
  into "the opposition" as if we were proposing any conservative politics. We
  even had a few adventures: on earth day, ecologist friends were violently
  attacked for having anti-EU posters, at the gay parade organizers prohibited
  anti-EU propaganda. We do not accept such divisions as some people tried to
  portray as there being a battle between progressive and conservative forces.
 >
  Conclusion
 >
  We believe that statist organizations exploit wedge issues to channel social
  discontent and exercise more control over NGOs then they would like to
  admit.
 >
  Feminism and gay rights are wedge issues in Poland. Populists would
  definitely seek to abandon them as long as they are unpopular, others might
  try to play them down or make them more palatable to be tolerable to normal
  people.
 >
  Luckily, as anarchists, we find that our ideas as quite exotic to most
  people therefore we needn't compromise on such issues; if someone is
talking
  with us, their minds are already open to a certain extent at least.
 >
  In our anti-EU campaign, we presented new viewpoints, ones based on freedom
  and openness, on self-organization and self-management, on globalization
  from below, not from above.
 >
  We believe that many parts of the NGO community showed its worse sides
  during the EU campaign, in particular showing how they will support statism,
  the elites, etc.. and we wonder what their further role may be in this
  country.
 >
  As for the fight against the EU, we still continue it. We continue to fight
  against the border regimes and immigration policies, we criticize and expose
  the roles of EU-funded databases, we keep track of corruption, embezzling EU
  funds, we are critical of certain development programs, object to and will
  campaign against the militarization of the EU. We do not try to focus on the
  EU to embody all evil in it but we are trying at every point to counter the
  statist ideas that a state or superstate structure works in anybody's
  interests. For us, we cannot combine anarchism with support for such
  structures, nor will we participate in reformist myths about changing the
  nature of the state to a friendlier one.
 >
  If anything friendly for us comes out of the EU, we will be pleasantly
  surprised. If the EU helps some feminist or gay organizations survive, OK.
  But still we suspect that we'll just find ourselves in some database of
  undesirables in the end.
_______________________________________________
Alter-EE mailing list
Check out archives, maps and resources on the Alter-EE web site:
http://www.alter.most.org.pl/fa
To subscribe, unsubscribe and change options:
http://www.lists.most.org.pl/cgi-bin/listinfo/alter-ee


*******
                       ********
       ****** The A-Infos News Service ******
      News about and of interest to anarchists
                       ******
  INFO: http://ainfos.ca/org http://ainfos.ca/org/faq.html
  HELP: a-infos-org@ainfos.ca
  SUBSCRIPTION: send mail to lists@ainfos.ca with command in
  body of mail "subscribe (or unsubscribe) listname your@address".

  Full list of list options at http://www.ainfos.ca/options.html