How to build and maintain an anarchist study group
This post follows a question asked by ChuckO in response to my last post. How would one go about building an anarchist study group? How has yours lasted so long? (at least 11 years by most accounts, of which I have been active for about 7) It also reflects on getting back to the Bay Area just in time for the anarchist study group.This week the ASG was reading "Marxism vs. Reality" written by Brian Mosely. This is an anarchist critique of marxism written in the 80's. The discussion didn't actually spend much time arguing with the critique. I'm not sure if this is a weakness of the ASG or not but it seems to spend more time looking for points of contention than deeply understanding a concept.
In this case the author (Mosley) counterpoints the economic principle of supply and demand as being right to Labor Theory of Value's wrong. The question that filled most of the discussion for the evening was whether or not we agreed that the 'truth' of value, or economics, should be ceded to the S&D crowd (which pretty much includes the entirety of bourgeoisie capitalists). I think we were looking for someone with a bit more grounding in economics to tell us of of some magical 'third way' that explains value in such a way that an anarchist can stomach. None were forthcoming...
Back to the point of this entry. As far as I am concerned, and I have experience in at least a 1/2 dozen different anarchist study groups over the past 15 years, the key to building a study group is consistency. Say you are going to meet X times a month and then do it. Once a week is optimal, not because every week you are going to come up with something interesting to read, but because a weekly reading group becomes the kind of event that is much easier to fit into ones life than something that is less frequent. You make your decisions based around (or in consideration of) the weekly event rather than the event being the exception that you push other things around for. Even if your study group is not going to be weekly it should be consistent. As important as temporal consistency is spatial consistency is probably even more important. Having a cafe, infoshop or house where you always meets means that you don't spend time confusing possible new people or arguing about logistics. Figure that stuff out early (and probably outside of group).
Maintaining a group is much easier once you have 4-5 people who are interested/invested in it. Reflect everyone's interests. Do things that offend and appeal to everyone. Mix things up with field trips, video showings, and games.
Every once in a while it is important to reflect on the motivation for the study group. Are you working up to an action plan? Do you have a book (or 10) that you'd like to read with other people? Do you have other goals you'd like to share? It is important for the life of the group to address existential questions while also understanding that the structured time you spend with people has its own rewards.
For me, study groups have been some of the most rewarding, and least painful, group activities I've participated in as an anarchist. I enjoy reading but I enjoy the engagement as much, if not more. What ideas I have will always be tested first in study groups. What plans I make is usually with people I meet in study groups. I have found them to be one of the few places where time actually wears off the sharp edges of different paradigms, priorities, and histories to form anarchist relations worth having. Worth talking about and using as representatives of how more of our relationships could be.
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another point is the willingness to bottomline discussions. one of the people who started out as teacher was extremely consistent for years about coming to the group with points to make, questions to ask, and background information to fill people in with.
at this point more people are prepared to take that role, but i think it's important (for the group's motivation and dynamism) that someone do it for each reading.
this particular group is filled with people who have and like strong opinions. so it works for us to have someone have made some decisions about the text (even if we disagree with them). gives us something to bounce off of. i'm not sure if that would be true for other groups, but i suspect it would, even if the style is different.
at this point more people are prepared to take that role, but i think it's important (for the group's motivation and dynamism) that someone do it for each reading.
this particular group is filled with people who have and like strong opinions. so it works for us to have someone have made some decisions about the text (even if we disagree with them). gives us something to bounce off of. i'm not sure if that would be true for other groups, but i suspect it would, even if the style is different.
Thanks for posting this, Aragorn.
Our reading group got off to a good start here in Kansas City. People wanted to meet every week, which suprised me. I wanted to meet monthly. So the discussion was scheduled for every week, which went fine for 2-3 weeks. Then nobody showed up. To be fair, two of us went to SF for the BASTARD conference, so that disrupted the weekly pace.
I'm going to re-start our discussion group in June. We'll meet weekly in the new infoshop space. It's our space and it's big enough for a discussion group, so I think it will do better.
Our reading group got off to a good start here in Kansas City. People wanted to meet every week, which suprised me. I wanted to meet monthly. So the discussion was scheduled for every week, which went fine for 2-3 weeks. Then nobody showed up. To be fair, two of us went to SF for the BASTARD conference, so that disrupted the weekly pace.
I'm going to re-start our discussion group in June. We'll meet weekly in the new infoshop space. It's our space and it's big enough for a discussion group, so I think it will do better.
"Marxism vs. Reality" by Brian Mosely is actually a terrible critique -- he knows nothing about Marxist economics and is not afraid to show it.
In the history of economic theory, Marxism is a side street leading to a dead end. The labor theory of value is essentially just a political (even a moral) judgment. It is a characterization of the bourgeois/proletarian relationship. It cannot be quantified or tested empirically. It does not explain the movement of prices or any other economic phenomena. That does not mean that the alternative to Marxism is "Reality" in the implausible guise of neoclassical economics (marginal utility theory), which explains price movements within certain limited and arbitrary parameters, but so what? it does not identify the uniqueness of the sale of labor-power or the relationship of exploitation (something qualitative, not quantitative) from which it derives. Anarchism has, and needs, no economic theory. Properly understood, anarchism is anti-economic, pointing toward the supersession of the economy as a separate field of activity. Yes, friends, I am leading up to the abolition of work. Let's put Dr. Marx to bed, and Professor Samuelson too.
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Unfortunately, I think that reading groups tend to be much more successful in extremely large cities. This is why internet groups might be better for this sort of thing. I found one or two reading groups but they have been dead for the last few years. Also, they tend to privilege marxist texts (which focus on the economy) over more experimental texts (texts from authors of Journal of Desire for example).
Also, I was involved in a local book "club" -- it turned out to be a disaster, not unlike any other collective project on the East side of Canada: decisions on what books to read, what to discuss, etc, all became manipulated by consensus, etc.