While I’ve often tended towards an anti-academic stance within my organizing work, there can be no doubt that educational efforts are an essential part of our organizing activities – both internally and externally. What I found in Argentina was a movement that wasn’t afraid of being intellectual. However, they were intellectual in a way that was empowering rather than alienating. Participatory methods of education were used to simultaneously empower people to discuss and learn while ensuring that the discussions would have a real connection to people’s lives. It was clear, even in vaguely themed discussions, that the collective education process was having an impact on organizing work. The consensus seemed to be that action without reflection is pointless activism while reflection without action is purely alienating intellectualism.
Themes
Much of my time in Argentina was spent participating in the events of the Red Libertaria, a Buenos Aires anarchist organization. So it’s no surprise that a good deal of the educational work was ideological in theme. However, what was surprising to me was that I actually felt the conversations were worthwhile to long-term movement building. In the United States, I had often felt that ideological movements spoke in theoretical circles and built dogmatic organizations that didn’t really do anything. But ideology wasn’t discussed as lines in the sand to identify ourselves as one brand or the other. Ideology was discussed as a history of struggle and with the potential of being an example playbook in our own struggles.
I participated in two discussions that did this: Anarchism in the Spanish Revolution, and the thoughts of Malatesta. While both could have been purely intellectual discussions, they both were used as examples to consider the building of local movements. Anarchism in the Spanish revolution spoke about the needs and possibilities of organizing rural movements and the successes of self-management (a much less theoretical discussion in Argentina right now). While discussion the thought of Malatesta, much of the discussion revolved around working with unions and working class organizations as an explicit anarchist and how that should happen.
While these discussions of history and ideology generally were related to current issue and debates, it was often important for those discussions to be explicit. With the Red Libertaria this meant adding a discussion about the upcoming elections – and their anti-electoral campaign – to the end of the thoughts of Malatesta series. There was also considerable discussion about the current workplace recuperation movement in Argentina in regards to more theoretical conversations about self-management.
Much of the discussion revolved around this reflection of our direction and the larger plan for our movements, but there was also some discussion that explicitly focused on how to go about organizing and the skills necessary to do so. An especially exciting series that I had participated in was called “Experiences in Horizontal Organization: Challenges and Possibilities”. The discussion spoke of organizing student movements, workers, media, and more. There were participants from the unemployed workers movements and the militant media movement of Buenos Aires. This very tangible discussion of movement organization used historical, ideological, and current articles and movements to discuss the on-going movement building within Argentina.
Method
My experiences, which I believe are common, in the US have shown a largely lacking system of education around ideas, issues, and skills that are essential knowledge if we hope for our movements to grow. Educational efforts around a particular theme are often organized into a onetime teach-in. In one night a teach-in would be organized around a subject that is usually incredibly broad (ie. international labor exploitation, corporate globalization, etc.). In two hours, there is the hope that we can explain the history, current analysis, and what people can do to fight the problem. Of course, that generally means two hours absolutely packed with information. It becomes difficult to find any way to present the overload of information in any format other than a lecture, which in the end bores half of the people in attendance and overrides any hopes of real participatory discussion. While, these are often used to inspire people to take action around a particular cause, they rarely engage the audience to activate themselves rather than remain passive observers.
The educational series’ in Argentina were designed to give important topics the time they required to adequately address their depth. Each series was one night every week (for one, every other week) for five to six weeks. To break down the broader topics, each week came with a specific theme to pull out of the issue at hand. The organizers developed a series of relevant readings to go along with each week’s discussion so that the participants were all on a more even level to really discuss the topics as a collective group.
The readers that came along with the discussion series helped to create a powerful blending of participatory and informational styles of education. The basis of the actual series was discussion, but it was expected that people had at least a minor understanding of the topics they were to discuss. They were also useful as simple pamphlets that could be distributed in the future to those that may have missed the discussion series. Or, they could be used to organize the same series again with new participants.
In terms of organizational development, the series helped to educate both internally and externally. Veteran organizers would learn side by side with new or potential members. In their efforts to activate and educate the new members, core members of the organization also found a better understanding of their views, contributing greatly to a real sense of ideological and tactical unity.
More important than any particular topics we could educate one another about however, is one idea that needs to permeate our work and discussions: the world is not static. By organizing discussions in a way that encourage people to step up and participate we can help to show our communities that we are capable of self-educating around topics that are truly of importance to us, while pushing people to prove that they themselves aren’t static. As people recognize their own capacity to continually change they’ll begin to realize the same about the world around them and will find some hope to begin building the world they want to see.
