Simultaneous Work
On The Same Problem
Exercises used in:
Mind Libraries
Socialism is Love
Who are you guys?
Building a house is typically sequenced, with the design work frontloaded and undertaken by architectural workers in an office somewhere far away from the building plot. Once their work is mostly finished, only then does a different team of construction workers arrive on site to erect the house. Any remaining dialogue between these two teams is limited to occasional site visits and design tweaks arising from problems as they arise.
Imagine the scenario if architectural and construction workers went onto the site together, and at the same time as architects are drawing, builders are laying down foundations, and the two teams are in the presence of and constantly looking over each other’s work, and adapting how they progress accordingly - not just the builders following drawings but also the architects following constructions. The work is not chaotic. Each worker is knowledgeable, conscientious and sincerely concerned with producing the best house possible for that site with a view to every worker’s contribution. This is Simultaneous Work On The Same Problem.
Under Simultaneous Work, each participant’s contribution relates to and is in conversation with everybody else’s contribution, and the contributions are in a constant state of being adapted, altered and reworked. This is also how revolution is made.
For example, say that we decide to write a story together in the chat box of zoom. The story is about an imaginary activity the group did in the past:
Participant 1: Where were we?
Participant 2: We were in a cave.
Participant 3: There were ten bats in the cave, with ten wooly hats on.
Participant 1: I think we were there after our party’s defeat in the election, we wanted to be sad together.
Participant 4: What did you say to us at the start?
Participant 2: I said ‘Let’s go for a long long walk until we are more tired than we are sad’.
Here everyone is typing at once, responding to each others’ questions. In other examples, people can be studying together on the same google document, responding to each others’ problems and investigations. Or, people might decide to make a poster that needs a crowd of people, and everyone will go off and draw individual people to put in the crowd.
It seems as if there is never enough time to do all the things we must do to make revolution and yet people have done them in the past, people have made revolutions. This technique addresses a practical factor in teaching that there are often more problems or more participants than time would seem to allow for.
It also addresses a problem of individual and collective work, especially when making ‘artistic’ things, where particular people with more skill or confidence will dominate at the expense of those who have commitment and willingness.
Simultaneous Work should not be confused with techniques like simply splitting the group for different or parallel work to happen simultaneously, or asking participants to all work on something individually that might then get presented or reflected on afterwards. We assume in simultaneous work that there will be an end-product that is clearly the result of collective work.
Criticism of this technique
This technique requires concentration and engagement from the group - often an already-invested group. It can be a difficult technique to work when there is the risk of people drifting away from activity, or in an exercise where people are coming and going, and not staying for the whole thing. It requires the group to sit down together and be determined to complete whatever it is.
This technique can make those people frustrated who are highly accustomed to the divisions of mental and manual labor found in most industrialized societies. The “chaos” of the dialectical process of collective work can overwhelm or paralyze people who are used to having clear instructions given from outside of or in advance of the production process (especially at the very beginning, when there is the mayhem of a “blank canvas”). Of course, there is an element of risk that this technique can give way to anarchical and individualistic behavior. But with experience, a group trained in this combines this technique with skills of paying attention and helping their comrades find ways to participate. The point is not that everyone should do what they want, but that they should train in learning from the developmental process itself what the group needs as a collective and learn to take pleasure in figuring it out.
What’s the time?
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -