Socialism is Love


This exercise was run on 6th May 2023 at an assembly in Hebden Bridge, England. We ran the exercise after having spent two initial days getting to know each other.

Problems (i.e why the exercise was done):
Problem 1: Sometimes it is unclear how our everyday lives, habits, and expressions of love for each other relate to our broader struggle for socialism.

Problem 2: Sometimes it is unclear how people we revere as ‘past revolutionaries’ acted in their day-to-day lives and looked after each other.

Problem 3: Sometimes “Without love, we are exposed to the enemy” (Illeana)

Problem 4: People who undergo hardship, and especially incarceration, must be looked after and be able to look after others.

Problem 5: Sometimes we struggle to express gratitude and admiration for our comrades.

Problem 6: Sometimes we might find ourselves ‘representing’ love rather than really feeling it or doing it. For example, when we give many political speeches we might find ourselves saying words that become trite rather than real.

Problem 7: People talk a lot about solidarity, but need to explore what it might mean - in the past, in the present, between friends and strangers, more than generic declarations of common interest.




Techniques:
Portals
Social Division of Labor
Silent reflection/no talking
Simultaneous work
Borders
Each group works at their own pace within the timeframe
Soft Closing
Materials:
Sheets of printed A3 texts / in the US 11 x 17 inches (tabloid). Each text should  have printed on it a different ‘scene’. You can use the scenes we provided below, or you can choose your own.

Each A3 text should be backed by another blank A3 sheet, attached with double sided tape (as described in the Portals technique)

Instructions printed

Coloured pencils, markers or pastels

Cards that have written on them:
  • The Framer
  • The Gilder
  • The Cornersmith
  • The Wordsmith

How long did it take?
Approximately 90 minutes

~ Instructions ~

Put people into groups of four or thereabouts.  Put each group at a table with:

  • Written instructions for the entire exercise
  • 1 portal
  • Role cards
  • Coloured pencils, markers, or pastels.

[5 minutes] Read scene
Get started as soon as your group is assembled.

In front of you, there is a ‘scene’. The first thing we’d like you to do is read it - you can read it aloud or in your head.

[3 minute] Reflect in silence
When you have.  all read it, sit quietly together for three minutes. Facilitators can time it. Think about the love you find in the scene

[5 minutes] Put a border on it
Now spend five minutes decorating the text, probably with a border. You are not allowed to communicate with each other about the form of the border. Think of this as time to reflect on the text. Pay attention to what other people are doing a little, and see if you can join what you are drawing to what they are drawing. You can do the border as decoratively or as simply as you like, using whatever material you like. You can choose to evoke the scene you just read, or you can choose to put a frame around it, or not even think about that. And you could bring out words you like in some way.

Take a role card to get a suggested role.

[2 minutes] Rip a portal


Instruct the group to now rip through the scene, creating the portal. It’s good to get everyone’s hands on the paper for ripping it open. Do not try to destroy it, comrade. Be gentle. Socialism is not a hammer at this moment, despite Mao. Specifically, do not tear it all the way through the edges of the paper, this should be easy because you’ve just drawn a border; stop before you get there. Rip it as if you’re peeling a banana halfway down, so you can still hold it to eat.

[20 minutes] Think about your comrades
Think about the people here (who are not in your group).

Go through the questions one by one - systematically. First jot down some personal notes on your answers to the questions (for about 3-5 minutes), then spend time talking about it as a group. Allow everyone to respond to the questions of which people, build on each other’s observations, talk about as many people as possible. Take your time.

  • Did someone here do something that really struck you, over the past few days?
  • Has anyone brought aspects of character or radicalism that you hadn’t known before?
  • Is there one moment that you can really visualise from the past few days?
  • What kind of scenes do the people you have talked about tend to show up in the assembly?
  • Who gives you reassurance?
  • Do they remind you of anyone else you know? (What reminds you?)
  • What part of your political life do you wish they’d been around for?
  • If you lay on the forest floor and imagined the revolution, who would you want to be by your side.
  • If you were pamphleteering, who would you want to be doing the opposite block of flats.
  • Who has shown communist love to others and how?

[20 minutes] Think about one comrade
As a group, pick one person who you just talked about. Perhaps it’s someone you had a particularly long discussion about, or you can choose them at random (write a list, close your eyes, point to the paper).

Now draw or write in the portal some things that express how you feel as a group about this person. It can be abstract - you don’t need to draw them as they are or anything. You might simply write about the things you talked about in step 4. You might draw a portrait. You should make ‘a scene’ here that your comrade is in. This might be something that happened earlier at the assembly, or something yet to happen at the assembly, or something from a totally different place and time entirely.

You have twenty minutes.

[20 minutes] What is to be done for them?
Now think about what you want to do for that person.

There are lots of options.

  • Something you say
  • Something you do over the next few days
  • Something you do over the next few weeks
  • Thinking about them
  • Giving them something
  • A gesture
  • Really anything at all. 

Figure out what you would like to do, and then, if it’s an immediate thing, do it. You have twenty minutes.                          

[15 minutes/soft closing] How will we move forward?
In the final 15 minutes (or however long you have left), would you like to reflect together on the continuum of socialist acts of love? The ways that the love here at this assembly might spill out into other places, and how your love for others might inspire your activity and your struggle.

Scenes

The cells were open, with a short curtain over the toilet as a concession to privacy. In each cell there was a narrow iron cot with a thin mattress, a covered toilet which also served as a seat before a small iron table, a washbowl, and a couple of stationery wooden hangers for clothing. The blankets were old and worn beyond all possibility of real cleanliness, though they were disinfected regularly. It was a filthy place, overrun with mice and cockroaches. The food was indescribably revolting, unfit to eat. Water spaghetti, half-cooked oatmeal, coffee that was hardly more than lukewarm water, wormy prunes, and soggy bread baked by the men on Welfare Island, very little meat and that unusually an unsightly bologna - are items I recall. There was never any fruit. Sugar and milk were scarce and both had to be bought in the commissary by inmates. 

One pleasant episode lighted up our stay here. A 19-year-old Negro girl, discouraged and lonely, happened to mention that the next day would be her birthday. We bought a cake, cookies, and candies from the commissary and Betty persuaded the officer, a Negro woman, to allow us to eat last, after the other corridors had finished, so that we could give her a little birthday party. We made candles of tissue paper for the cake, covered the table as nicely as possible with paper napkins, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’. We made speeches to her and she cried with surprise and happiness. The next day we received a note from her as follows (exact spelling):

‘Dear Claudia, Betty and Elizabeth. I am very glad for what you all did for me for my birthday. I really don’t know how to thank you. I can just write what I feel on this paper. Yesterday was one of the best years of my life. I think even thou you all are Communist people you all are the best people I have ever met. The reson I put Communist in this letter is because some people don’t like Communists for the simpel reason they think the Comunist people is against the American people but I don’t think so. I think that you all are some of the nces people I ever met in my hol 19 teen years of living and I will never forget you all no matter where I be. I will always remember you Betty and Elizabeth in my prayers and I do hope our father God will help you three as well as me and everybody else. I hope you all will get out of this trouble and never have to come back to a place like that. I just can’t get over yesterday. Long as I live I will never forget that I met three nice people. Well this is all I have to say except that I hope you will all go home soon. May God bless you and keep you for many more years to come. Good night. Trust in God, He will show the way. Jean.’ Feb. 7-1953

Thomas was very disciplined and meticulous. In his car, he always had his wax and brush to polish his boots. He carried with him a needle and thread to sew buttons. When he got out of the car he was impeccable. This was how Thomas was with everything, demanding a certain rigor, morality, and perfection. But on that day, I was surprised to see how messy he looked. I told him everything that was bothering me about the revolution. I just told him from the heart what I thought. Then he called his son Auguste and asked him to bring a piece of paper and pen. We talked for three hours straight, as he took down notes. But there were moments when I was talking to Thomas that day and it seemed like he wasn’t even there. He was looking at me, but his gaze was far away. I had the impression that he sensed danger but couldn’t define it or counter it.

Soon after his release, Negm met the old blind singer, Sheikh Imam. The meeting was a turning point in the life of both. Until then Imam had been singing old forgotten songs to a small group of admirers in a Cairo slum, and Negm had been writing lyrics that nobody sang. The two could now count on each other and work for each other. Imam proceeded to put Negm's lyrics to a music synthesising two great traditions: Qur'an recital and peasant group songs, and Negm proceeded to write more melodic lyrics. However, finding an audience remained a problem. The two would roam the streets and cafes of Cairo slums, tirelessly singing' for Egypt' to amused, sympathetic passers-by. Negm would write and Imam put to music one or two songs a day, and the two would then' invade' a theatre or public function and start singing until they were removed by force. A widening circle of friends began to promote their songs, the students of the Cairo universities started asking them to appear and sing on the campuses, and the cassette tapes of their songs began finding their way to student gatherings and left-wing circles in the Arab world at large. In January 1972, a student protest movement erupted to find in Negm a chronicler of events in poetry. The movement was, however, harshly suppressed and the two men once again arrested. Since then, the poet and his singer have been alternately cajoled, harassed, imprisoned and on the run. The intimidation failed to deter the two men, nor has it diminished their optimism and their faith in Egypt and its people. 


I remember my mother telling me about the battles between the police and miners. Around 12 of the miners were jailed at Dunfermline Sheriff Court for between 10 months and a year. What happened then was that the Communist Party, which was huge in the mining communities at that time, struck a medal for each of them.

When they got released from Saughton Prison and then got the train back over to Fife, the pipe band went up to meet them off the train at Lochgelly station. It then played them through the town and the Communist Party presented them with medals at the Institute. The whole community turned out. These were working class heroes!

That evening we arrived in Paris in a prison carriage. As we were being transported from the Gare de l’Est to the Gare d’Orléans, I peered out and could see the little shop on the rue Saint-Honoré where my mother planned to live with a relative after my departure. We left almost immediately from the Gare d’Orléans, and the next day around four in the afternoon we arrived near the Atlantic coast at the prison of la Rochelle. On August 8 we were put aboard a vessel, the Comète, to go the last thirty kilometers to Rochefort. Aboard the Comète we were treated like a vanquished enemy, not like evildoers, and some friendly people in small boats followed the Comète the entire way. We answered their salute from afar. As my last farewell I wanted to wave a red scarf I had saved since the Commune, but it was buried deep in my baggage, hidden from any search, and on deck I had only my black veil. In the harbor at Rochefort we were put aboard the old warship Virginie. On Sunday, August 10, the crew let out the sails and weighed anchor while they sang the old war songs of Brittany. The rhythm of their songs multiplied their strength, and the cable rose while the men sweated. Their harmony became a force without which it would have been impossible to raise the anchor.

When she gets up again to fetch more hot water from the samovar in the common kitchen for her tea, she runs into Indian comrade Al in the hallway. He greets her but today he doesn’t initiate a conversation. No doubt he, too, has heard about her husband’s arrest. Last month, when he was still new in Moscow, she and her husband had gotten into conversation with him while they were cooking, first he had leaned up against the kitchen table, still standing, then at some point hopped up on the table’s edge, his legs dangling, and finally he’d drawn his legs up beneath him, still talking, like a very-much-alive Buddha sitting there on this worn-out tabletop where the Russians had no doubt cut their pelmeni in the age of the Czars, and later Chinese comrades had rolled hard-boiled duck eggs in ashes, and Frenchmen dipped meat in a marinade of garlic and oil. She herself, on the occasion of the Seventh World Congress two years before, had used this table to make apple strudel for her Danish, Polish, and American friends. This congress had been like a powerful amorous coupling, all of them melting into one another, conjoined in their common battle for a humanity finally coming to its senses. After these meetings, she and her husband would often go on deliberating deep into the night, lying in bed, discussing what this new world order should look like, whether it was still an order at all, and what new bonds should replace the old bonds of coercion. 

A love letter to my brother: Revolutionary teachers and their students grow to love writing and reading. It is not unusual for them to write love letters to each other. For the very young students there is great joy in reading simple love notes from a teacher. “A Love Letter to My Brother” was written to a six-year-old blood who reads everything he can get his hands on. He is also the only child in a family of ten children who is “different.” He is the most oppressed child, the “nigger of the family”; he is, at the same time, the most sensitive and perceptive. Brother, you may feel a lot of pain now, but it only makes you stronger in the long run. Your strength has taught me never to underestimate the power of the soul, the inner self. Your hurt and my hurt are one. Brother, the power you have kept you from being destroyed by the phonies—especially the ones that live with you. I’ve watched you shut your family off, keep them out of reach—which forces them to turn on each other. So you see, brother, you win every time, you have the power.

There was a time when they launched a campaign for the children to go to the mission’s school. But it was a lie; they wanted the children in order to put them to work on the mission shambas and in the colonialist’s houses. Women were not respected, even married women were abused in front of their husbands. If the husband reacted or she refused, both of them were badly beaten. The colonialist’s argument was that it was an honor for a black woman to be wanted by white man. I could tell you many more evil things to which we were subjected by the colonialists.

In 1962 when i was in the hospital at the Imbuho mission, an old man came who talked to us secretly, saying that the Mozambicans had created an organization called FRELIMO to fight the Portuguese and win back our freedom. We listened very attentively. Later in 1963, my father came. He called me and my sister, and explained to us about FRELIMO, warning us to maintain absolute secrecy.

In 1964 there was already a great deal of FRELIMO activity in our region. The FRELIMO organizers told us that we should prepare everything to go to the bush because soon the Portuguese would start arresting and massacring the people owing to our support for FRELIMO. Two days later we went to the bush. And some days later, on the 25th of September, the war started in our region. The people were given the task of blocking the roads with big trees and holes. We also cut telephone wires and cut down the poles.

Since that time I have been very active in FRELIMO. The first mission that i and the other girls  were sent on was to go through the villages and explain and mobilize the people for war. We explained what FRELIMO is, why we have to fight and who are the enemy. We also encouraged boys and girls in the village to join our forces. Later on, the late Comrade Kankhomba taught us reconnaissance and security work, to detect the enemy agents who tried to infiltrate our zones.

When we girls started to work there was strong opposition to our participation. Because that was against our tradition. We then started a big campaign explaining why we also had to fight, that the FRELIMO war is a people’s war in which the whole people must participate, that we women were even more oppressed than men and that we therefore had the right as well the will and the strength to fight. We insisted on our having military training and being given weapons”  -by a militant from the Women’s Detachment


Pictures




Before ripping - you can hardly see the craft knife slit in the middle.








During the workshop of one of the groups gave the gift below to a participant in another as part of “What is to be done for them”




Criticism and results of exercise
Some participants seemed to quite immediately relate to the theme of the text - one of our comrades from Panama at the very beginning said a few words on socialist love -  “Without love we are exposed to the enemy.” We were happy to see that the spirit of Che had come to join us.

One group thought a lot about imprisonment and the feelings of love that grow between prisoners, and for people who are inside. This led to some consideration of how you prepare people for the possibility that they may end up inside when these chances are high.

Another group talked a lot during the border making portion of the exercise. It’s possible that this felt organic because of the character of the groups which were composed of people from different parts of the world. But this kind of small talk can take people away from the spirit of the exercise. It’s not always clear in groups of relative strangers that everyone in the conversation wants to be in the conversation rather than doing the exercise. On the other hand, it is definitely plausible that this kind of talking could also produce important results of comradeship that could be consistent with the theme of the exercise.  In hindsight we recommend encouraging this period to be silent so that there is adequate time for close reflection of what has been read. This group ultimately suffered from a very surface level reading of the text having distracted themselves with friendly banter. We would chalk this up to poor facilitation.

The sharing of gifts during the end of the exercise amongst the participants was a really positive moment that brought all participants, not just those who had exchanged gifts, together in what was a difficult teaching environment. This also affected the reflections on the session immediately afterward. The circumstances that made the exercise difficult were lack of cohesion and common sentiment in the groups.

One of the facilitators thought that the portals could be constructed slightly differently in the case of students meeting for the first time. First, they could be placed in small groups and given a text just like we did before, then each student shares a story about a person in their lives that reminds them of the scene. So instead of selecting one person that everyone knows, the group selects multiple people to place in their portal - these people were once strangers, but now they’re together in the portal that’s been created. A portal of future solidarity.


Appendix - Other times it has been run
An unusual application of the exercise happened when a member of Cat's Cradle ran the exercise in Jamaica, as described above, with two older comrades at the beginning of an oral history project. The aim was to set the intention for the project as one focused on the experiences of historical moments that people were involved in more so than any facts or information about a sequence of events. This was to help in the translation of the oral history recordings into pedagogical material for trainee teachers in England.

The text chosen was the first scene which takes place in the prison and which mentions “Claudia, Betty and Elizabeth”. The Claudia who is being referred to is Claudia Jones whom of the elder comrades, Ricky Cambridge, had been an young assistant to in London for 18 months.

The exercise ended prematurely when both were reluctant to participate, one identified this type of thing with his childhood, that he is either bad at or hates. He used to be a trainer that used exercises that were silly and out of which little were gotten. Fortunately the co-interviewer helped in the formulation of questions and encouraged each other, and without having done  anything past the Read Scene and thinking about where the acts of love are, Ricky started reflecting on his comrade, Claudia.

“Claudia was someone who always worked at two levels as far as I am concerned. The level of love and the level of commitment. Serious commitment to the cause of communism and Black struggles. Her act of love towards me concerned the invitation to work with her in a personal capacity and to show me what it means to be someone who knows how to agitate verbally, but also in the written sense etc. And it was always kindness, an expression of gratitude…So yeah she was full of love.”

Ultimately the portal in the text, without any border or frame, was ripped through and the oral history interview was properly launched with the first set of questions.

“Did someone do something while you were a child that really struck you?”





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