The Long March


This exercise was first run in September 2023 for a land workers union in the South of England. It was run for a second time in Dundee in May 2024 with people who had signed up to learn about the Students Federation of India.
Problems (ie. Why the exercise was done):
Problem 1: The strikes in India in the last five years have been the largest that have ever taken place in the whole of world history, but peoples’ understanding of this can be highly abstract. This exercise aims to help people understand the quotidian (daily) practices involved).

Problem 2: When people are building organisations, particularly unions or any other labour organisation, they can become fixated on ‘organising around workplace issues’ and lose sight of what the full extent of proletarian struggle looks like (and even the goal of proletarian struggle). This exercise helps the participants think about what the point of a union or a proletarian organisation is, and how they would understand (from seeing the union function in daily life) whether it was serving its purpose.

Problem 3: There can be an anti-intellectualist or anti-theoretical culture on the left and particularly in trade unions, which ignores that large parts of the organised proletariat see study and mutual education as a critical part of the struggle (and the only way to build functional mass organisations of the kind that most imperialist countries seem to find difficult to build.) This exercise places study directly into the reproductive process of the wage struggle, and gets the participants to consider how it would feel if group study was a regular part of life.

Problem 4: Trade unionism and organizational work can at times become highly technical, even rational or Fordist. This exercise reminds workers of the role of culture, the subconscious, friendship, in the process of proletarian struggle.

Problem 5: The struggles of agricultural workers can be an unfamiliar topic in countries that are ‘post-industrial’, and this exercise aims to engage with the reality of agricultural struggle now, avoiding the tendency to treat it as an old form of struggle.

Techniques:
A Day in the Life

Modes:
Surrealisation
Simulation
Imagination
Particularisation
Production

Materials used:
Dream Pack, Study Pack, Evening Pack (available to print in this linked document)  Note that this pack was originally created for land workers in the UK, and was intended to get them to apply a critical lens to land struggle and farmers struggle in the imperial core - you should make modifications according to your context, and may want to include more material that covers the Indian struggle in particular, rather than introducing so much British and American material.

Participant numbers:
Minimum 3 people, if a large group split into groups of 3-5.

How long does it take?
Minimum 30 minutes, maximum 1 hour.

~ Instructions ~

This exercise has traditionally been run by handing out a sheet of paper with information about the three steps. However, these could be spoken instructions, with the caveat that if many groups are doing it at once then a facilitator would have to go round judging when a group had reached the end of one phase and was ready to hear about the next phase.

Handout Text:

In India, after general strikes in various parts of the country, with transport workers and many others stopping work in support of the farm workers unions, in 2020 agricultural workers marched to Delhi. There had been a ‘long march’ before, when, in 2018, 70,000 farmers marched to Mumbai, covering 124 miles.

During these long marches, people travel together for long periods, and new people join the march when it reaches their town. The march has a whole system of organisation of life - kitchens, food and medicine procurement, schools, study groups, libraries, musical performances. We’re going to imagine we’re on a long march - maybe it’s last year in India, maybe it’s some event in the future - that doesn't matter so much. You are now in a small group - perhaps you knew each other before, or perhaps you banded together on the journey.

Tell Each Other What you Dreamed About

You’ve woken up in the morning and you’ve all remembered bits and pieces of your dreams. You dreamed about workers in the past and in other parts of the world, perhaps mixed in with your friends and family.

Spread out the ‘dream pack’ and have a look through the material. Pick two or three things out that you’re drawn to, and imagine what it would be like to dream about these images or moments. Remember that dreams are often strange, with odd things spliced together that don’t make immediate sense.

Now ask your comrades about their dreams. You can start with ‘What did you dream about last night?’ Then proceed in the same way you would if you were asking a friend about a dream - perhaps you think there are hidden meanings in them, or perhaps you just want to be told a weird story - so ask for the details and the feelings. When you’re being asked about your dream, don’t panic. Remember that dreams are weird, vague, and have lots of missing details. People appear in dreams as other people, and strange out of place things happen. The less you know about the image or story, the more dreamy it is going to be. You can always just describe an image as you see it. Let your dream analysts guide you.

Afternoon Study Group 

You stop marching for a couple of hours in the afternoon. You have decided with your fellow workers to study together so that the organisation becomes stronger - and you have each chosen a different thing to look at. Spread out the study pack, and rummage through it. Pick out anything. If you like, you could also pick from the dream material, after all, some people study dreams.

Take five minutes to read and think.

- What questions is the writer trying to answer?
- What are the other answers to this question besides the author’s? Who might answer that way?
- Do you have answers to these questions?
- What do you not understand in the piece?
- What might an opponent of the author—but not an “enemy” (someone who is also pro-union)—write about the same situation?
- Why is it that you have stopped to study together in the first place?

Now talk together as a group about the above. Write down together the questions that have been raised, both by the author and by you? Which do you think are important or unimportant? As a union, how will you seek answers to these questions? Will you study together in the future, and how?

Decide what you are going to cook together for tea

Evening Poetry and Songs

You have stopped to sleep at the end of the day. Before bed, the group has made a habit of reading and singing to each other. Look at the songs and poems pack. Pick out a couple of lines that you would like to read to the group. Or, perhaps you have a song or a poem you ken that you could share.

The End of the Day

Talk together about what you learned from this day. In what ways are you acting with workers from the past or from other parts of the world? What do you want to learn as a union, and how will you learn it? Can you make something commemorating your day together? You can use any of the materials - feel free to chop things up.

Criticism/Results of this exercise
This exercise went generally very well. Groups that do particularly well will in some way step into the character of the workers who the group are trying to emulate. This might be made easier if films or clips of the farmers march are shown beforehand: we recommend these ones.





There can be a tendency with the dreams exercise that people start talking about conscious dreams (‘I have a dream’ dreams) because they’re in a political workshop and they are used to ‘dream’ meaning that in this context. This just requires facilitation to pull people back to real dreams. If you have one inventive and confident person in the group, then they can often make this part go very smoothly by launching into some imaginary dream. But many people will be reticent to ‘make up a dream’. The best way to get people to do it is to ask them questions, as the instructions say to do. The dream section is the most difficult part.

We have found that working through these three sections produces some incredibly interesting conversations, and we recommend the exercise as a way to engage with the farmers march.










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