Looking At Flowers On Horseback



This exercise was created and run in the All-Chicago Tenants Alliance in May of 2024 during criticism/self-criticism during a weekly cadre meeting.

Problems (i.e. why the exercise was done):
Problem 1: Vacillating attitudes toward difficulty. Easy discouragement sometimes, and overconfidence other times

Problem 2: Recognizing that our comrades are struggling with a difficult aspect of a collective project, and that we should help, but we favor the easier things and familiar things to help with.

Problem 3: Thinking that because another comrade has volunteered to help out with something, that means I might not have to.

Modes:
Simulation
Intensification

Materials used:
Paper

Weekly  reports or reflections produced by individuals or committees - excerpts taken out about individual difficulties (see below).

Participant numbers:
3 or more

How long does it take?
About 20 minutes

~ Instructions~


Part One: Looking At Flowers

Put everyone in a circle in chairs except for one comrade. This comrade should be someone who will be happy (enough) to be upside down. Hand each of them the following excerpt, except for the one comrade.

Of course, under the rule of the bourgeoisie it is very “difficult” to eradicate bourgeois habits from our own, i.e., the workers’, party; it is “difficult” to expel from the party the familiar parliamentary leaders who have been hopelessly corrupted by bourgeois prejudices; it is “difficult” to subject to proletarian discipline the absolutely essential (even if very limited) number of people coming from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; it is “difficult” to form, in a bourgeois parliament, a communist group fully worthy of the working class; it is “difficult” to ensure that the communist parliamentarians do not engage in bourgeois parliamentary inanities, but concern themselves with the very urgent work of propaganda, agitation and organisation among the masses. All this is “difficult”, to be sure; it was difficult in Russia, and it is vastly more difficult in Western Europe and in America, where the bourgeoisie is far stronger, where bourgeois-democratic traditions are stronger, and so on.

Yet all these “difficulties” are mere child’s play compared with the same sort of problems which, in any event, the proletariat will have most certainly to solve in order to achieve victory, both during the proletarian revolution and after the seizure of power by the proletariat. Compared with these truly gigantic problems of re-educating, under the proletarian dictatorship, millions of peasants and small proprietors, hundreds of thousands of office employees, officials and bourgeois intellectuals, of subordinating them all to the proletarian state and to proletarian leadership, of eradicating their bourgeois habits and traditions—compared with these gigantic problems it is childishly easy to create, under the rule of the bourgeoisie, and in a bourgeois parliament, a really communist group of a real proletarian party.

If our “Left” and anti-parliamentarian comrades do not learn to overcome even such a small difficulty now, we may safely assert that either they will prove incapable of achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat, and will be unable to subordinate and remould the bourgeois intellectuals and bourgeois institutions on a wide scale, or they will have to hastily complete their education, and, by that haste, will do a great deal of harm to the cause of the proletariat, will commit more errors than usual, will manifest more than average weakness and inefficiency, and so on and so forth.

Until the bourgeoisie has been overthrown and, after that, until small-scale economy and small commodity production have entirely disappeared, the bourgeois atmosphere, proprietary habits and petty-bourgeois traditions will hamper proletarian work both outside and within the working-class movement, not only in a single field of activity—the parliamentary—but, inevitably, in every field of social activity, in all cultural and political spheres without exception. The attempt to brush aside, to fence oneself off from one of the “unpleasant” problems or difficulties in some one sphere of activity is a profound mistake, which will later most certainly have to be paid for. We must learn how to master every sphere of work and activity without exception, to overcome all difficulties and eradicate all bourgeois habits, customs and traditions everywhere. Any other way of presenting the question is just trifling, mere childishness.

Tell everyone that no one is allowed to speak until the facilitator says “times up”.

To the one comrade who is not seated, say:

You have 1.5 minutes to achieve your task which is that you need to perform a handstand in the middle of this reading circle and hold it for 5 seconds.

To everyone else, say:

You have 1.5 minutes to read the excerpt in your hand.

Begin.

After time is up, go around the circle and ask each comrade what they read about. After they respond, ask them what caused their comrade to fail handstanding. Don’t respond or allow others to respond to what people say. (If the comrade happens to be a secret gymnast and succeeds at handstanding, everyone should just clap for them and say good job.)

Part Two: Look For The Way To Help

Get in a circle again and put the comrade in the middle and say now you have to hold a handstand for 20 seconds.

Tell each comrade that they need to look for a way to help the handstander so that all together they create a handstanding structure that ensures the handstander is successful. You could say:

Look for ways to help the whole structure as other comrades begin to help. The helpers might need help. Don’t assume that one helper is enough, notice where weaknesses are in the structure and help.

Give them 3 minutes to figure this out. After they succeed before time is up, or they fail and time runs out, reflect for a minute on how everyone helped or didn’t help. Ask them why they helped the way they did. If comrades couldn’t find a way to help, ask them why.

Part Three: Well, What Did You Expect?

Read out loud excerpts from a recent report or a reflection your organisation has produced where the comrades were expressing feelings of experiencing difficulty, or where they were explaining a situation they’ve encountered while implying that it is or was difficult. [Excerpts below are provided as examples. They are the excerpts used in the original running of the exercise, taken from a cadre report]

“I think Dawn is also a little iffy on tenant-tenant solidarity. She’ll say things like, “they just hang out with Marcus and Janelle who shit-talk other tenants. When we first talked, several MJTU visits ago, she told me that she wasn’t in trouble because she didn’t do sketchy things like other tenants. check if your room is clean … but some people …” when talking about the room inspections.”

“Risk, we need to help them to see that it is worth it to organize and put themselves in some danger as it’s their only shot and making things better and safer as a whole. I also would say commitment to attending meetings because this is now an ongoing issue of no one showing up.”

“I am concerned that she would have agreed with anything I said and this is something I want to continue to be cognizant of.”

“It’s not totally clear what the path to autonomy is.” [Referring to how we could help the tenants detach themselves from a liberal tenants rights group that had intervened on their behalf before we did.]

After each excerpt is read out loud, the group should drill down together by talking about what’s being expressed here and explaining more about what made this situation difficult. Then ask:

Did we expect it to be different? What did we expect we would find?      

It should be clear that this isn’t a rhetorical question. People should say whether they expected this difficulty or not. Then ask two questions sequentially:

Is this situation really difficult, and was our expectation unreasonable?  

“What do you think it says about ourselves that we had this expectation?”

Criticism / Results of this exercise
During the first part of this exercise, the circle of readers was pretty tight, so the handstander was quite dangerous because he would fall down repeatedly near or next to the readers. The handstander was also working very hard, it is an athletic task. This really increased the intensity.

During the second part, when the group came together to make the handstand structure. It was both funny and sweet in contrast to the first part, which was intense. Everyone came together, touching each other and laughing. The upside down comrade was very funny.

During the third part, when it is asked what we expected, this produced really strong reflection. People had to think quite hard and confront their own presuppositions. But it was hard to know how to facilitate this section, it was not immediately clear how to get participants to think less about the objective difficulties and more about their own attitudes toward the difficulty. This could be improved with improved and clear questioning. It also seems like there can be a phase where the participants could be asked to imagine how the situation could have been even harder than it was.

Near the end of the third part, the participants had the revelation that they knew more about the economics of the building than about the tenants themselves. This criticism is now being addressed in their strategy by implementing a plan to learn about the housing voucher system with the tenants (a technical detail about Chicago public housing).










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