Exercise Development

So you have located your problem. Now the task is to investigate it further, which means reflecting on these problems as they arise in your own experiences, with the ultimate task of working out how you might do something about it.

One of the things we have learned along the way is that problems, even when we’ve done the work of locating them in our own practice in great descriptive detail, are rarely as simple as they first appear to us. Even very experienced communists can’t avoid the necessary stage of consciousness that must rely on intuition when first encountering new difficulties. Problems, when discovered only with intuition, often reveal themselves to be more complicated—or even reveal themselves to be a chaotic ensemble of smaller more specific problems. The main thing to bear in mind is that your initial problem is almost certainly too general to learn about, and must be reduced to smaller problems. You might think of your problem as a geode that you chisel open to reveal an amalgamation of small, curious crystals, or an onion that you peel back to get to the more ripe parts at the center of the vegetable.

When we drill down into our problems even further, we begin to grasp them with a critical consciousness.

It’s these problems, down there, that we are after.

To get to the problems that lie underneath, you might do the following:

Can you write descriptions of times this problem has arisen?
Can you record the times when you have seen this problem outside your political work?
Are there nascent theories you have of the problem (I think this might happen because…) ? Even wrong or crazy theories might be a good starting point - you can just negate them.
Can you think of some writing (books, articles, poems, novels) or stories (that others have told you) about the problem, whether that’s theory that directly relates to the problem, or other things you’ve read that come to mind, even if you are not sure why they are relevant. (Again, eliminating things later on that turn out to be irrelevant will be a good way of clarifying for yourself what the problem is.)
Can you think of examples of when other comrades have faced this problem (contemporaries or people a long time ago)?
Can you locate or make pictures of this problem?

Sometimes, after identifying a problem, we might bring it to the attention of our comrades for a discussion. Or we might do a bit of studying to see what other communists have to say who have run into similar problems in the past (while keeping an eye on idiosyncrasies within our respective material conditions, of course). Or we might move on to developing some written theory about the problem. But the ultimate aim, right here and now, is to practice the art and science of exercise development.

So what is an exercise and why make one?

A popular understanding of the use of exercises in education comes from a typical school setting. Students are set exercises which are intended to test the extent to which the student, willingly or not, has absorbed whatever knowledge the teacher wishes to deposit in their brain. The student must struggle with the problem without direct input. The exercise has lower stakes than a formal examination. If the student gets the answer to the exercise wrong, the teacher will know that further teaching is required.

The thing to note about this example is that, by this definition, an exercise is independent work by the student which is meant to help prepare them for a higher stakes.

Another common understanding of exercise relates to the athlete who is training for the marathon. The athlete follows a carefully planned programme of physical activity which is of lesser intensity to the culminating marathon, in order to grow their strength and stamina to be able to successfully run that final race, when the stakes are much greater.

The analogy to making revolution doesn’t need to be spelled out, but there are two clear ways in which the analogy doesn’t hold. Firstly, in the marathon training, the exercises are training for a big event, a process of transformation of the person (or team) who are going to undertake it. In struggle, we can say that all of the exercises are in fact part of the event - there should not be such a huge distinction, and we know that revolution is a long process, not a fast race. The process of transformation is part and parcel of the revolution - we do not deliver finished revolutionaries to the start line to pull off the task.

Secondly, in the example of the marathon, the path to the end point can be sketched out in an exercise programme which need only be followed. This is not similar in the case of revolutionary struggle. If we were to follow the analogy, if the runner were a revolutionary, this is what the training programme would become:

They plan in the first part of the programme to run a sub-twenty minute five kilometres. They manage to run this through doing hill reps. When they achieve the sub-20 5k, their anatomy changes entirely. They now have much longer calves and huge hands. The next part of the training had been to run a half marathon at race pace. But now, their understanding of what a half marathon is has changed from the understanding in the original plan. It is longer, or shorter, or hillier, or more of a challenge of emotions, furthermore, the actual half marathon has changed distance. It is now 10 miles rather than 13 point whatever. And here’s the weirdest thing - this change in what a half marathon was came about partly because they ran the sub 20 5k. So they must now adapt their plan given their own transformation, the transformation out there in the world that they have made, and the associated transformation in their understanding.

We would recommend that anyone training for a marathon follow a normal marathon training plan. Being a communist is not like that. You are changing all the time, the world around you is changing all the time because of your activity and external events, and your understanding is changing all the time. The art of communism is being able to work in that environment of constant change, dialectics, in order to effect revolution.

Given that our exercises change the situation and our understanding of the situation and ourselves, it would be absurd to think of them as removed from revolution itself. But this distinction is one that is made all the time in all kinds of contexts. We don’t think communists should make this distinction.

We would acknowledge that there is something about exercises, and their value, which pulls us out of the parts of our struggle that most immediately feel like ‘the struggle’, that is to say those parts that are are instinctive and least examined. Exercises are the outcome of determining that struggling is learning and learning is struggling. Everyone can recognise exercises as a learning device, the argument we’re setting out is that they are closer to political activity than they are generally understood to be.

To return to what you wrote in the box on the previous page:

At this point, you should begin to think about a number of possible exercises. Assume that all the exercises at this stage will be thrown out but that you will get beyond them to something better.

See what you instinctively think an exercise should be like for this problem. Be careful not to try and make one exercise for the entire problem, if the problem is large. Most problems are large. Make an exercise for a tiny little piece of the problem, and assume that the participants will themselves make the connection to the bigger problem (they will).

Have a look at the modes. Which mode do you think is most suited to the problem? You might consider the learning conditions.

Have a look at the techniques. Which technique is most suited to the problem?

After you have run the exercise, make sure you write up the results. Look at our exercise criticism guidance.

Below, we have put an example of us working out an exercise from a problem:

Mind Libraries

To begin planning this exercise, we looked at some student responses to some questions:

What problems of liberalism or individualism do you encounter?
Worrying about individual lack/level of knowledge.

What worries your comrades?
Having enough book knowledge, theoretical knowledge

THE FIRST PART: DRILLING DOWN

To identify problems we need to resist abstract concepts. Take for example the question of how to teach children about ‘sexism’ or good relations between men and women. We don’t typically attempt to teach something like “Sexism” by exploring the theoretical literature, discussing its conceptual distinctions and characteristics - this in any case is a highly partial exploration of the subject. Instead, we “teach sexism” by working out how gender in a particular classroom is impeding learning and enjoyment - this will be different in every classroom. The important first step here is that sexism is in itself an abstraction, and rarely useful to students. In a classroom, there might be more specific problems we can identify as outlined in the image.

Once we have identified these, we can drill down further, and begin to make exercises. The process might begin with something like this:

‘Boys talk over girls.’ While we can abstract to a structural problem here if we desire to, this is not appropriate as the first step in pedagogy. We would instead want to begin by getting the students to consider and be conscious of the way they behave as a group, giving them the opportunity to evaluate it and decide whether they want to change it. The problem in this instance, then, is not ‘sexism’ but ‘talking over people’. This would lead to investigating a number of questions: how does talking in this environment confer power? What is the understood mode of discussion (eg. raising hands to talk, talking only if you have an answer rather than a question, jumping in when you have something to say) and do the students have any control over this mode. Do the students have any ability to discipline each other when others break the explicit or implicit rules of discussion (‘Let her finish what she was saying!’, ‘You’ve spoken a lot already’, ‘I wanted to hear what Leila had to say’). If they do not, how are they to learn self-regulation as an individual or a group? More generally, how does the teaching environment favour talking over listening? What kind of cultural power does talking have?

The first thing we had to do was to make sure we were on the same page about the problem. Here, we found that the apparent ‘same problem’ had been developed from two different questions. So in fact, these were different problems. Maybe you were able to figure this out straight away, but for us we had to explain it to ourselves through a few examples showing the difference:

Liberal Behaviour: Comrade A feels that they don’t know about pan-Africanism so they don’t bother contributing to the organization when it is doing that activity, and they don’t bother learning about it.

Communist Behaviour: Comrade B feels that they don't’ know about pan-Africanism and want to study it, but are unsure where to start, or experience continuous problems in trying to learn.

We went round in circles a few times trying to pinpoint the exact difference. In the first example we are trying to correct a strongly held individualist tendency (which someone is clinging to: they in some sense ‘don’t want to change’.) In the second example there is greater self-consciousness and willingness to change. We talked a bit about ‘attitude’ which turned out to be a red herring. At the end of the day, it seemed that the first problem was about overcoming a lack of desire to learn, and the second problem was a technical problem about how to learn when you have the desire.

Having separated the two, we had to decide which one to work on, so we chose the first one.

We then began to explore the first problem, in a number of ways.

Worrying about individual lack of knowledge:

When do we think this happens?

Hearing names you don’t know who they are
Encountering concepts where you don’t know what they mean.

Where do these feelings come from?

Having bad experiences trying to learn new things? Reaction to bad experiences.

OK what kind of experiences are those?

Shaming people who don’t know something ‘Oh my god you’ve never heard of…’ (note how this goes as particular as possible. We were constantly trying to describe real phrases or events. When you are trying to make an exercise with people you don't know, you will need to be even more careful in how you explain the problem. In this case, you won't just be able to refer to a problem that both of you have seen, you will have to try and discover whether you have both witnessed a similar problem in different contexts.)

Being in spaces where learning is venerated but to very individualist ends - so it becomes very off-putting (if you are not an individualist)
If someone has come to a communist or anti-individualist consciousness they will reject a certain style of learning, and sometimes that means they just reject learning altogether, because they can’t imagine it happening any other way.
Others buy into the competitive mode, and are not very good at it (they lose the competition), and so are both competitively minded and also believe that they have lost the competition.
We talked about the distinction between competition and emulation.

This discussion above was interesting, but it seemed a bit reductive. We decided to talk more about how the problem ‘worrying about individual lack of knowledge’ had manifested in our own organization.

Retreating from certain elements of organisational work
Unwillingness to critique or be critiqued
Unwillingness to ask people to explain themselves.

We talked about a comment that someone had made in the mindmap:

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.

We made a distinction between two kinds of paralysis. One comes from the second problem above (the one we’re not working on here). You can be paralyzed from lack of confidence in how to proceed with learning, or lack of confidence in what you know (sometimes, paralysis may also not be a bad thing, it may prevent you from making missteps in your activity). But the kind of paralysis we’re talking about here is one where someone retreats into a kind of anti-intellectualism. I don’t know about that becomes I don’t want to know about that. They become resistant to learning about things that the group is committed to learning about.

Sometimes, people say that engaging with theory, ideas or history is beyond their capability. We don’t think this can be the case, unless one's definition of the things above is very broad. This is a naturalisation of ‘I’m just a person who can’t learn’, which we think has more complex psychological or social causes.

Sometimes this manifests in a form of individualist intellectualism (we spent a while trying to define this). This involves choosing your field, or your theorists, and refusing to engage beyond them. Wanting to be an expert, so choosing a field and intellectual community, and sticking within it. Not wanting to have anything challenged. We discussed how the kind of generalist (and internationalist) learning we favour in Cat’s Cradle is quite unusual to people.

We talked about how some fields (cultural theory in particular) avoid certain kinds of critique, and instead make learning into ‘re-encountering what you already know’, especially through the form ‘we all feel like this, and this is why’. This led us to revisit a text we wrote a while ago to try to deal with ‘bad reading’.

How to Read

FIRST RULE FOR READING

Don’t be misunderstood by the text. Does the text try to bring you in on a feeling? Do you think you share that feeling exactly as described? Don’t assume you are at one with the text because it’s nice to feel understood.

SECOND RULE FOR READING

Knowledge is not an object - when you start reading you can never stop. As soon as you have read something, collide it with something else. A book is not a platform on which to stand in order to move the world. This is a first principle of dialectical materialist philosophy.

THIRD RULE FOR READING

Does the text treat you like a human? Are you allowed to interpret it? Is the text despotic - not in the sense of propounding a clear idea with conviction, but in the sense of doing all the interpreting for you and leading you down a road of tricksy arguments and assumed common feeling? Despotic texts try to avoid ‘good reading’ and so you need to practice good reading more with them.

FOURTH RULE FOR READING

What are you looking for? Do you know what it is you are trying to find in the text? What are you going to make from the text? A conversation with a friend? A piece of writing? A strike?

This is not to say you can’t wander in a text, not all reading has to be like a chase, as if you are hunting an animal. But when you wander in a text, you have to have a sense of what things you might pick up and take with you, and start to build up an idea of where you are going.

FIFTH RULE FOR READING

Stop reading.

SIXTH RULE FOR READING

Write or argue while you read. Produce your interpretations as you consume the author’s instruction. One person’s written word is another person’s read word. Why is the author allowed to write, but you’re not? But do not fail to be generous. As soon as you have convinced yourself that the writer is an expert in a way that you are not or cannot be, you have lost. The writer is simply you: a person interested in investigating something. The writer’s words quite literally have no power without you, without your materially producing their meaning from the dead word on the page,eyes moving their meaning to your brain from where they must be “written again” by you in discussion, argument or your own written word.

SEVENTH RULE FOR READING

Don’t be a hypocritical reader. If you agree with something and then encounter another text or situation that seems to oppose it, deal with this collision. Don’t pretend to hold the former view while acting differently. Grapple with the contradiction.

EIGHTH RULE FOR READING

Don’t read for self-improvement. Reading should depreciate the value of the self and feed the conviction of the collective. Reading is to submit to the reality of error and self-criticism, and to enjoy it. Reading is a form of personal debasement and development of love for the people.

NINTH RULE FOR READING

Notice what kind of commodity the text is, what materially does it do. Does the author write with a self-awareness of the nature of the text. Is the text idealist? Is it a text for bourgeois leisure, or for bourgeois ‘persuasion’? Is it a project in building the intellectual property of the author or the liberal ego of the writer? Know that you cannot transform such texts simply by imagining them to be different.

From this, we came up with the exercise described here.

Once you create and run an exercise, it is time for Exercise Criticism.

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