The initial aim of this blog was to attract interest by other teams and collectives to engage in an organized inquiry of how to develop a set of practical solutions material for developing or enhancing an autonomous community anywhere in the world. But goals sometimes are either set too high to achieve, or take too long to materialize. In such cases people who may initially share them may loose interest. The system has altered our internal clocks to work in the rhythms of industrial machinery. This has been partly our experience here, which we would like to share without the specifics of who, where, when. Some of us have grown to cleanse our internal clocks and are more patient in watching change take place in human terms, not in capitalistic industrial rhythms. Some have not been able to do so and are impatient and try to force things. While doing so what they are forcing are their ideas on other people who are unable to share them or are unable to commit to a process where those ideas can collide, blend, and evolve into a collective product.
Some of us participated in an assembly about libertarian education which initially attracted significant interest. Slowly and while discussing what we are interested in doing and what can we mutually agree to do we started realizing various axis of dispute. The primary one was on focusing on the individual and the individual's consciousness about freedom and the model of libertarian education that has developed over the past two centuries in various attempts worldwide. It is our position that this model has left some positive inspiration to many people and still is perceived as a utopian model of education but we greatly disagree on the premise this claim is made. We would agree that in a "free society" such would be education, but we do not live in such a society. One can not isolate one aspect of living in a free society and try to reproduce it within a society of dependence and oppression, as the social environment around the school does not exist. This would be an other effort of voluntarism and progressive alternativism. It is exactly what the system would want you to engage in, a non-threatening form of collective action, that it would allow and maybe incorporate and regulate so it does not impose any threat. Such schools did get organized, some worked as private schools for the middle class and teachers were paid to provide this alternative libertarian education to the middle class students. Teaching freedom to individuals does not necessarily help create a free community or society. Some may even argue on the contrary that those free individuals within the parameters of an oppressive society become oppressors themselves.
An other axis of debate was organization and priority setting. There were many happy-action minded people who were bored out of discussing things and were eager to do things before discussion, agreement, collective decision was made. Various proposals of classes and projects, the possibility to be hosted by a squat to do those things based on interpersonal relations with the squat, and combine all those things and "do" them without being able to produce a document that would be the ground of why we would be doing these things. It is not unrelated that the particular squat these people proposed is not clearly politically defined. A squat is a squat and may have some political attributes being a squat, but unless you come out and state what those are you may never really be sure. Even while participating with others inside a squat does not necessarily mean you all politically agree. Avoiding disagreement is never a good approach for political organization. It has been failing for the past two centuries that we know of.
There are all kinds of interesting and colorful things happening at this squat, as in most squats people never seem idle. Arts, crafts, projects, discussions, theater, concerts, book presentations, .... happening things. But when we inquired for political content there seemed not to be any in particular. Nothing that ties all this activity up. Just people in various forms of "loose groupings" doing things but not really saying of what is the purpose of their activity. To their defense we were bureaucrats who would rather sit in a room for hours and discuss organization, how we congregate, how we set and prioritize an agenda, what and how we discuss, who can talk for how long, who takes notes/moments, and when a topic/proposal is discussed to the point an agreement is made, how we write down this agreement in terms of a specific written decision that can all agree so we can proceed to execute and materialize.
We defended our bureaucratic tendency as "good bureaucracy" coming from below, against the bad bureaucracy coming and imposed from above. We argued, and still do, that not all bureaucracy is bad and some bureaucracy that we can agree on is necessary for real organization. Bureaucracy is not a characterization with necessary negative content. The same people who held this as a point of debate had collectively agreed in the terms of where we met and how we operated. It seemed as their tendency to agree on things so we can all move into what they were really interested in having all of us do started catching up with them. They went back and refuted their own decision. As if a trade was taking place, their team agreeing on things they did not accept as correct and necessary, so we "the team outside their team" we would agree on what they wanted us to do without really believing we should do those things.
It is essential we all understand, that within horizontal non-hierarchical organization, any form of sub-group and teaming will form some kind of hierarchy among the supposedly equal members. If the reason for being in a sub-group within a libertarian assembly are political agreements, then we have a political team imposing on those who are not members of their group. This is what political parties and political teams have been doing to libertarian organization and eventually have either controlled or destroyed the nature of libertarian organization. Alternatively people who do belong to a certain political group can participate as autonomous individuals, independently, and have respect and make a collective effort not to violate this premise, of horizontal organization.
Eventually those people just couldn't convince others that their "do-happy" alternative things tendency meant anything to anyone else. They are now doing things elsewhere. They came as a team and left as a team without being able to "recruit" anyone in their "nameless" a-formal collective. But the few that were left to fight this to the end started acting as the "assembly" was some form of object in possession of those who run it. An other form of sub-group, the inner core. This became an other axis of engagement and disagreement. They grew increasingly protective, of the assembly, even though conceived as an open-assembly, they treated new-comers with suspicion and as agents of other departing groups who wanted to demolish the existing assembly. Suddenly the assembly fell in the hands of a few members who although refusing such identity acted as a stalinist militant brigade against outside threats. We joked, but it is not really a joke, that the libertarian KGB was formed to defend the structure.
It is not that hard to collectively convince each other that outside threats exist and materialize in the presence of anyone who is "new" and not part of the gang. Once this form if internal militancy is formed it is only a matter of a small period that all the content of a libertarian assembly is lost. "The system" has managed once again to isolate such a project from society as to not pose a threat. It is repression built in from inside, without attacks and security forces pounding from the outside. A viewpoint of those who believe that all wars, even the struggle for social organization from below, are fought in a militaristic field where structure must resemble those of the enemy's army. Non warriors are excluded from such fields. Society is excluded. Therefore there is no real purpose for winning the battle. Winning becomes useless and valueless for all others but the members of the militant group.
There are all kinds of interesting and colorful things happening at this squat, as in most squats people never seem idle. Arts, crafts, projects, discussions, theater, concerts, book presentations, .... happening things. But when we inquired for political content there seemed not to be any in particular. Nothing that ties all this activity up. Just people in various forms of "loose groupings" doing things but not really saying of what is the purpose of their activity. To their defense we were bureaucrats who would rather sit in a room for hours and discuss organization, how we congregate, how we set and prioritize an agenda, what and how we discuss, who can talk for how long, who takes notes/moments, and when a topic/proposal is discussed to the point an agreement is made, how we write down this agreement in terms of a specific written decision that can all agree so we can proceed to execute and materialize.
We defended our bureaucratic tendency as "good bureaucracy" coming from below, against the bad bureaucracy coming and imposed from above. We argued, and still do, that not all bureaucracy is bad and some bureaucracy that we can agree on is necessary for real organization. Bureaucracy is not a characterization with necessary negative content. The same people who held this as a point of debate had collectively agreed in the terms of where we met and how we operated. It seemed as their tendency to agree on things so we can all move into what they were really interested in having all of us do started catching up with them. They went back and refuted their own decision. As if a trade was taking place, their team agreeing on things they did not accept as correct and necessary, so we "the team outside their team" we would agree on what they wanted us to do without really believing we should do those things.
It is essential we all understand, that within horizontal non-hierarchical organization, any form of sub-group and teaming will form some kind of hierarchy among the supposedly equal members. If the reason for being in a sub-group within a libertarian assembly are political agreements, then we have a political team imposing on those who are not members of their group. This is what political parties and political teams have been doing to libertarian organization and eventually have either controlled or destroyed the nature of libertarian organization. Alternatively people who do belong to a certain political group can participate as autonomous individuals, independently, and have respect and make a collective effort not to violate this premise, of horizontal organization.
Eventually those people just couldn't convince others that their "do-happy" alternative things tendency meant anything to anyone else. They are now doing things elsewhere. They came as a team and left as a team without being able to "recruit" anyone in their "nameless" a-formal collective. But the few that were left to fight this to the end started acting as the "assembly" was some form of object in possession of those who run it. An other form of sub-group, the inner core. This became an other axis of engagement and disagreement. They grew increasingly protective, of the assembly, even though conceived as an open-assembly, they treated new-comers with suspicion and as agents of other departing groups who wanted to demolish the existing assembly. Suddenly the assembly fell in the hands of a few members who although refusing such identity acted as a stalinist militant brigade against outside threats. We joked, but it is not really a joke, that the libertarian KGB was formed to defend the structure.
It is not that hard to collectively convince each other that outside threats exist and materialize in the presence of anyone who is "new" and not part of the gang. Once this form if internal militancy is formed it is only a matter of a small period that all the content of a libertarian assembly is lost. "The system" has managed once again to isolate such a project from society as to not pose a threat. It is repression built in from inside, without attacks and security forces pounding from the outside. A viewpoint of those who believe that all wars, even the struggle for social organization from below, are fought in a militaristic field where structure must resemble those of the enemy's army. Non warriors are excluded from such fields. Society is excluded. Therefore there is no real purpose for winning the battle. Winning becomes useless and valueless for all others but the members of the militant group.
Surprisingly though, all this experience left some of us more conscious of what "libertarian" education really is about and what it should not be. We are now more convinced than ever that as liberty is a goal for a community, and of communities and humankind in general, and not the goal for the individual. The object of the school is not the student as an individual but the community as a whole. The teacher as well can not be an individual but be the same as the student and among the students. The student decides what it needs to learn and why, defines what it is needed to be learned, and pursues a way to educate itself. This rationality although simple is very rare. So rare that we have not really found it existing yet in a conscious effort. Or at least we have not been able to locate it as an effort as we perceive it. It possibly existed in small native communities that addressed real life problems together, decided they needed materials and knowledge to solve a problem, and engaged in an organized manner to acquire the knowledge and material that was needed to solve the problem. It is possibly happening in Zapatistas' communities and the process is not even called a school, but it is.
So, in order to move on, we realized that the first step of creating a libertarian school, is an initial group, that is trying to form a community that will become free and autonomous someday. Either we start our own, or we join others who are in the process of doing so and convey our collective findings. (It is beneficial to actually try things with real people and develop this form of understanding than to be reading it as theory from a book.) Till then we can only try and work towards the goal and arm ourselves with more knowledge. We are open, listening, and together with all those who are trying to do something along these lines. No flags, no symbols, no big words without content. Content should exist before public statements are made about the content.
Sometimes it takes real lifetime engagement in things to realize that the best discoveries are so simple that once made you can not believe you discovered something. It is hard to imagine that no-one has thought of this before, or have they? We are still wondering! The libertarian school, libertarian education, does and can exist but it has been wrong all along. True Libertarian education is the education of the community by the community, not the education of the individual. The individual's education may be an effect, not a cause, of a class of the school. It is the realization that a community must teach children (not an age group, but a condition of a human being that still has much to learn about her/his social and material environment) what the community needs children to know. But that is only a small aspect of what libertarian education really is.
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