Mind Libraries


This exercise was run on 19th November 2023 on the internet during an ‘Introduction to Pedagogy’ course.

There were three facilitators and six participants, including four participants who were members of the organisation. Everyone was based either in the UK or USA.

Problems (i.e. why this exercise was done):
Problem 1: sometimes people are paralyzed by a lack of knowledge and end up with an anti-intellectual attitude to work.  In this case, the problem was identified by the class participants in an earlier session. They wrote:

"I’m worried about having enough book knowledge, theoretical knowledge"

"I struggle with this a lot. We've done ice breaker exercises establishing the okayness of forgetting names. I'd like something similar for the okayness of feeling a lack of theoretical knowledge."

"I worry about individual lack/level of knowledge"

"I see this in a lot of my comrades and it paralyzes them to the point of keeping them from engaging with education and theory. I wonder if the attitude of more theoretically knowledgeable comrades has an effect here."

"Yeah, it seems to me that has a large impact, the attitude of the more-learned to the less"

Problem 2: drilled down from problem 1, comrades not helping each other to learn things.

Problem 3: Siloed knowledge acquisition - comrades do not share what they have learned.

Problem 4: People are not aware of the questions that their comrades have, so when they encounter avenues to answer those questions, either in book-learning or in practical activity, they do not even know that they have the potential to help their comrade.

Problem 5: People do not have the humility to share things they don’t know.

Problem 6: People believe it is insulting to teach each other things, there is an assumption that doing so is an attempt to show that they are superior.

Techniques Deployed:
Writing instead of talking
Simultaneous work

Materials:
When we ran this online, all we needed was video call software e.g. Zoom.
This exercise could be run in person with paper and pen for each participant.

Participant numbers:
We ran this with 6 participants

Minimum participants: 3

Maximum participants: n/a

Group size: All run in one group.

How long does it take?
10 minutes

~ Instructions ~

[1 minute] Theme Posing
We’d like someone in the group to share a burning question. Something that keeps coming up in their day to day political work.

If no one shares quickly, a facilitator should chime in with an example.

[2 minutes] Suggestions
Now we will give everyone two minutes either to suggest some reading or some way to learn about this, or write ‘I have no suggestions’.

[2 minutes] Reflections on suggestions
Now we will type how useful we each think our recommendation was. If you had no recommendation (or you feel the recommendation wasn't very useful) write about how you might be able to find or come up with something useful in the future.

[2 minutes] Helpful comrades?
Do you think there is someone, perhaps a comrade of yours, that you could ask about this burning question? If so, explain why you think that person might be able to help.

[2 minutes] Future you
When will you next confront this question in your own political work? Will you remember to reflect on it at the time and to tell your comrade about the things you thought?

Criticism / Results of this exercise

When we ran this exercise:

Someone posed a question about engaging lots of people in organising such as tenant-unionism or gig work organising when they are not already politically active, and how this can be done in a communist way through the form of organisation.

There were suggestions of other people working on these questions, they were very broad:

The Students’ Federation of India, other people in the group, friends who are tenant organisers, the North Spaulding Renters Association

Through these suggestions, some key theoretical distinctions emerged:

  1. People who know about theory vs people who know about practice
  2. The ideology behind different approaches (whether Marxist-Leninist or ‘community organising’ or forms of ‘mass work’). 
  3. People you might consult who ‘love to talk’ or ‘love to help’. 
  4. How to learn from historical examples, either through reading or consulting people with knowledge or experience of them. 

People wrote about different organisational structures they are currently involved in revamping, or ones that they think will come up in the future.

To our knowledge nobody shared thoughts with the comrade after the exercise ended. We did not attempt to follow up on this.  In the situation where this was run, the group was a class running for four weeks, rather than a political group that would continue working together.  We think that this exercise is best suited to an ongoing political group, and that the person posing the question could rotate week to week.  As a ten minute exercise, it could be run regularly as part of an organisational meeting, in order to keep track of the questions people have. However, some follow-up mechanism might be required to determine whether it was really collectivising peoples’ learning behaviour or just giving the impression of doing so.



What’s the time?
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -