There is a wonderful new world out there, one filled with marvellous things. Workshops, lots of workshops. Charismatic figures. Hot new books that everyone’s talking about. Cutting-edge language. Razor-sharp theories.
…Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
To be clear, movements really do need political education and training; they need debate and discussion; they need activist theory and language; books and newspapers, poems and posters, and all the rest of it. Of course they do: we cannot form collective actors on the scale of a movement without having the mechanisms of thinking and learning collectively.
But – you can do these things brilliantly well or disastrously badly. And it isn’t always obvious at the time which is which. At a certain age, of course, it seems totally obvious that Our Thing is better and brighter than any other Thing which might ever have existed anywhere else before, and that it is so good that it must work. But what this means in practice is that we become prisoners of our own collective self-belief: we’re too cool to fail.
And yet many a cool thing does fail. Some elders reading this may even be ancient enough to remember Extinction Rebellion’s magic number and the Momentum System that was going to change the world – or many another struggle in harder times and places that was rather more tragedy than farce. You don’t need to live through very much history to realise that faith is not, in the end, enough to achieve salvation – although it may feel like it at the time.
So far, so good: movements need our own forms of learning and knowledge production, and it is a constant effort to create and sustain these in a world which continually erodes them. This blog keeps returning to the importance of the means of mental production, but as wise readers will recall
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
German Ideology, I
Put another way, capitalism (along with patriarchy, the racialised division of labour and so on) exerts a constant destructive force on movement infrastructure, turning Indymedia into social media, movement theory into academic specialisms, samizdat into subscriber-only magazines and so on.
But even within movement’s own spaces, there are determinations in the sense of Raymond Williams’ setting of limits, exerting of pressures. The new society (even in embryo) bears the birthmarks of the old: internal competition for attention and money, generations distinguishing themselves through consumption, hierarchies of power and status, common sense dressed up as good sense, pressures towards NGOisation, and all the rest of it.
Of course it does; and in some ways this isn’t the problem, or at least it isn’t the main problem. It is not so hard to notice this, unless you are deeply invested in a way of doing things that makes you part of this particular problem – or unless you leave the movement in disgust when you notice the problem, rather than working for better ways of doing it. The challenge is rather: how can we tell what a better way of doing it is?
I’ve written about this particular challenge elsewhere, but it bears repeating: activist thinking doesn’t come with any guarantees. Or rather, it only comes with negative ones. If you rely on modes of thought that are organic to commercial publishing, or academia, or celebrity, rather than growing out of movement practice, they won’t be able to solve the problems of that practice. If you don’t learn from other people’s struggles – read activist history, make connections with your own movement in other places, build solidarity with other movements – you will be a prisoner of your own provincialism.
If you rely on what sounds attractive, feels morally right, positions you on the cool side, comes from a charismatic speaker or whatever, rather than reflecting on your own practice and its challenges, checking out what other experienced and effective activists are doing … it won’t end well. At least, it won’t end well for the movement, even if it is good for your ego. Because of course at some level effective collective thinking is all about choosing the ground to stand on: is it egos, is it some aspect of the society you think you’re challenging – or is it collective action?
So far, so obvious. But positively, how do we get it right?
A hypothetical history
This is a particular challenge in some of the new generation of European movement training, something I’m tangentially part of. There is some potential in the institutional structures that shape it, but also some risks. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a decent history of these either – so what follows is a first approximation of the situation, but skewed by the aspects that I’m familiar with.
A fairly typical movement training institution in Europe seems to take the form of a small-ish organisation, or even an individual, “delivering trainings” to a range of different movement organisations and NGOs, often across multiple movements and sometimes across countries. Typically these are semi-professional operations in the sense that some people are more or less making a living out of training, while others contribute on a training-by-training basis alongside other kinds of related work (as activists, movement facilitators or researchers, etc.)
Funding comes from various places, directly from the organisations receiving training or from various grant-giving bodies, private and public. Often training will be offered both on a paid-for basis and free as an act of solidarity. To be clear, I think this is all entirely reasonable and the people involved are in my experience deeply committed, often working for far less than they could make with their skills elsewhere.
My impression is that this model has a longer history in the US, where relatively formalised “methods” often took on a life of their own, capable of being “delivered” to all sorts of contexts and presented as independent of the context or movement. That is of course partly what happened to the Civil Rights Movement’s version of non-violent civil disobedience, as with Saul Alinsky’s version of community organising and other approaches like the Movement for a New Society, Gene Sharp’s version of non-violence, the “Momentum Model” and many others.
In the movements and countries I know, it has only really become highly visible in this century. It was preceded by two rather different kinds of movement training processes. One, particularly in the “old left” of parties and unions, was movement-internal political education, training and publishing processes of many different forms, both focussed on the “how-to” of particular activities and on more theoretical and strategic debates. The other, in the less institutionalised spaces of newer movements, was equally movement-internal, but took the form of “skill-sharing” in workshops, gatherings, magazines and at times even how-to handbooks (I have a nice collection of these on my shelves).
Different institutions, different risks
To be clear, all of these forms of movement learning can work well or badly; I’m teasing this out because if we think more about how our institutions work, we can perhaps see more clearly what our particular challenges are. This is of course fairly basic political thinking: can we name the kinds of social relationship that our organisations and movements create, and can we see what sorts of efforts we particularly need to make?
In the old left, for example, a great risk was that of reproducing the orthodoxy that suited organisational leaderships. Training could also often become ritualised, while the real social relationships were more about internal careers. In newer movements, when the big waves of mobilisation faded, there was a strong tendency for knowledge to become siloed within individual organisations and countries. So what are the risks of how we now do things?
One is that – as with the old left – the “external provider” model tends to suit the organisational leaderships who are either paying for a particular training or enabling the paperwork that enables the trainers to include the relationship as part of what they show funders. It is not so easy for training to be part of bottom-up processes within organisations: an interesting case is where union leaderships commission trainers with recent movement backgrounds, hoping to generate greater levels of participation but perhaps not so much a rank-and-file revolt that might disrupt internal power relationships.
Another is the reverse of the siloing created by fragmentation in declining newer movements: external trainers have every reason to present their knowledge as independent of movement, national or other context. This of course is particularly strong in US-derived approaches, both because of American provincialism but also because of the strong moralising character of much US movement rhetoric, whether overtly religious or more psychological in character. What is morally right, of course, is implicitly universally true and effective – not just outside the States, but irrespective of what movement or community is involved.
The STI model of training
The risk that concerns me most is a related one: how do we know that a particular “training” is any good? How can we tell if it works? After all, a typical “training” is pretty short, whether it is delivered in-house in 3 hours or a day, as a residential weekend or even a week, or as a series of online events. If it isn’t organic to the organisation or even the movement, it doesn’t necessarily express what has been learned in other parts of the movement (as unpaid modes of skillshare did) and participants are unlikely to be able to check whether it is having the promised effects within the timeframe of the encounter with the trainers. (This problem is of course shared with most kinds of education.)
A “good training”, then, is often one that people enjoy, one that sounds good, one that makes them feel good about themselves. Activists need this stuff – of course they do. But what sounds right, what boosts our ego or is fun to do may or may not work. And of course the trainers may equally have no real way to check. Everyone enjoys the event, much belief is expressed, everyone goes away feeling happy. Has anything been learnt?
At its worst, you can get the STI model of training: the process of acquiring it is so enjoyable that people go out and share it with others. We’ve all met people who are simply addicted to the process of going to workshops (whether about bee-keeping, alternative health or sociocracy), and probably many of us have noticed the pyramid-scheme nature of some of these.
It is, or should be, worrying that in a period of massive movement defeats – with the far right in state power or close to it in many countries, the collapse of earlier movement alliances, the failure to effectively resist climate change or rocketing inequality, and intensifying violence against ethnic, racial, sexual and gendered Others – there is so little discussion about whether the ideas we are propagating with such conviction are actually worth the data centres they exist in.
Of course, if you make a living through branding yourself and your ideas in books, online or in academia, there are very few ways in which it is really possible to ask yourself whether the particular star you have hitched your wagon to is the right one to follow. It is not that easy as a movement trainer in the situation sketched here either, under the dual pressures of endless “content delivery” and keeping other people happy.
Do we even know what we actually know and what we just like to think?
I have certainly met trainers who show no sign of ever asking this sort of question, or of having the skills to answer it. Not every trainer is able to grasp the context a particular approach comes from (movement, country, history) in a way that might give a handle on the extent and limits of its workability – or to think critically about what they have read or heard. As we know of others (if not always of ourselves) what we think we know from our own experience may be wrong – and it is entirely possible to preach self-doubt and humility without any capacity to critically assess what your experience does tell you. And, on a less personal level, we live in a world where serious understanding of what works and what doesn’t in movements is far rarer than confident claims to know.
One of the most depressing experiences – given the bigger context – is to hear people who do know something about some things speak with equal confidence about things they don’t know about. It is of course more depressing to see other people lap it up and put it into practice. Hallamism in this respect is a symbol for a far wider problem.
Of course the problem is particularly acute when it comes to strategy and social transformation. Questions like “how can we get on better with each other?”, “how can we learn to cope emotionally?” or “how can we recruit more people?” are shorter-term ones, about spaces most activists are more familiar with. Understandably, “how can we transform the world?” is a question that goes well beyond many activists’ range of experience, and often bounces them into a space of cartoon versions of MLK or Gandhi rather than anything they have a genuine, complex sense of. But it is one of the most important questions.
What can we do?
So what can we do? There is good practice in this space too, and if we have a sense of our own context we may be able to do what we do better. One thing which some training organisations do is to try and build long-term relationships with specific organisations, which gives some opportunity for a broader dialogue if many different people from an org have done a specific training over time and there are mechanisms for the trainers to learn from what happens when the activists try something.
Another is to try and work with more experienced activists, people who have been through different organisations or even movements and have lost some of that initial wide-eyed belief through bitter experience. As good teachers know, a genuinely critical audience that aren’t easy to convince represents a far better reality check on what you are saying than a group of desperate people who are new to activism and have no capacity to assess what they are being offered.
Perhaps the most important thing that can be done, though, is to use some form of Freirean or Gramscian methodology which genuinely supports activists to think through their own experience critically and work out their own good sense. This is slow stuff – “lived experience” doesn’t magically speak. Most of the time, it bubbles through “common sense” layers of everyday ideology and collusion with relationships of exploitation and oppression: it takes time, and genuinely radical relationships, to bring good sense out when people haven’t already done the work.
Movement activists are often part of the way along this road: in particular, they can reflect not only on their experience of social structures but also on their experience of trying to change them. That also means that movement trainers don’t need to be salespeople, preachers or confidence tricksters.
And: we can create more egalitarian and democratic learning spaces. We might know some things that others don’t, but we can be straight with them about what we think they might find useful and why, and create spaces that enable them to check these out in a provisional way. Emotional manipulation doesn’t need to be part of the picture.
Time is short, and the thing we’re doing isn’t working very well. Are we able to think together, honestly, as experienced activists, about how we could do it better? And if not, what do we think we’re doing?
Learning from each other's struggles 
You must be logged in to post a comment.