(IFB list and people who'd expressed an interest, 29.4.99)
Hi everyone,
Several people have been asking me how the weekend in Cavan went. To be honest, I hadn't thought of writing anything about it just yet (partly because I'm still trying to think it through & digest what went on), but it's true that as Richard said we were a microcosm of something larger, and the process was never intended to be a purely private event among the individuals who were actually there.
Now we'll hopefully be putting together some kind of publication from the various papers, rapporteur's notes and cassettes that Maeve and Monica collected there, along with people's own thoughts, feedback, ideas for next time etc., and I'll do something a bit more formal for that. So this is very much just a personal set of "first impressions" which I imagine a number of participants might disagree with massively! For the moment at least, I'm only circulating it to participants, on the IFB list (sorry for double- postings) and to people who'd expressed an interest in being there but for one reason or another couldn't make it. With any luck it'll spark a bit of discussion on the IFB list at least (details of this in the section on follow-up).
OK, on with the show:
The point of Ireland From Below was to bring together people from as wide a range of different social movements within Ireland as possible to explore areas of common ground and differences around three questions:
The reason for asking those questions here and now (on my part at least) was the perception that the nature and situation of social movements in Ireland is changing rapidly, that we need to reflect on that, and specifically that the political context is now such that if there is to be any alternative to "business as usual" it will come from us - social movements - or nobody.
To make this discussion possible, it seemed important not to start with any preconceived views as to which movements were or weren't compatible with one another, but to allow that to emerge from the process itself; to enable as wide a range as possible of different ways of interacting with one another - from formal talks through workshops to rituals to doing the cooking together; and to be definite that the Ireland From Below space was a communicative space for activists to reflect on the nature and context of their own practice, not an organisational event and not an event aimed at mobilising people who weren't already active.
There were twenty participants in all, though some arrived late or left early. Perhaps the most important thing about the event - and for me the best indication that we were asking important questions - is that with hardly any exceptions, all of the participants were deeply impressive individuals, with long histories of activism and pretty amazing life-stories. The single thing I've heard most frequently from participants in the way of feedback is that they were impressed and inspired by each other and that they came into contact with people, ideas or issues that were new or challenging to them. Even the handful of people who described themselves as not being active were, I think, misrepresenting the case: all without exception had put in some kind of sustained and challenging involvement or encounter with movements from below.
One way of describing the participants would be to say that there were women's community education activists, ecological and DIY activists, engaged academics, people active in the alternative spirituality scene, people from the alternative press, feminists, and people on or from the left there. But in fact a major part of what made the discussion possible was the extent to which the people who came were active or interested in several of these areas at once, so that it wasn't a defensive encounter between "Representatives Of Movements" but a meeting of minds.
We started pretty slowly on the Friday, partly because people arrived over something like a six hour period and partly because tiredness on most people's part at the end of the working week and the various strains on the organisers meant that we weren't in any position to go through with the original programme. This may not have been a bad thing, in that (for example) rather than starting with self-presentations which might have been quite defensive in that opening context of uncertainty, we had to find common ground with the people we were going to be spending the weekend with in a more interpersonal way.
So by the time we did do a formal round of introductions on Saturday morning, people were much more ready to loosen up and talk about their activism and their intentions for the weekend in a human and personal inflection rather than a bureaucratic and defensive one. This session was one of the highlights of the weekend for me at least, and really built up trust and respect for the rest of the conference. Since our organisation (or more accurately, me!) was patently not up to imposing any structure on the weekend, people were ready at that point to take control of the process and we then managed to bash out a schedule for the rest of the weekend which fitted in everyone who was there at that point and wanted to do a presentation, and avoided splitting the group into different streams (I'd argued for separate streams while we were planning the whole event, but even with that size of group we managed to work well in plenaries throughout).
After lunch we opened up with Shane Dunphy's presentation on the history of social movements in Ireland, which illuminated an intelligent reflection on class and gender relations in pre- independence Ireland and how they were challenged and changed with the "voice from below" provided by family history and traditional songs. Shane emphasised both how social movements have been a normal part of Irish history, and the extent to which they've made a difference.
Alex Plows then took over with a workshop on what we as activists want and what motivates us to take action. These were quite challenging questions, and though the responses to the first question were diverse many of them were straightforward enough and in a sense "ordinary" enough that it was possible to recognise each other's needs and demands both as sensible and as valuable. There was, I think, a fair amount of reflexivity about the responses to the second: it's one thing to have reasonable aims and another to find the strength to keep working towards them, but again there was a sense of an ability to recognise ourselves in each other. As Alex said, there was a widely shared rejection of oppression and exploitation which provides a context within which these struggles make sense. (See also the report from Alex's session).
In the next session Máire Dorgan took the floor first and spoke about the empowerment model of community education and the politics of state intervention in this area. The crucial challenge is how to find ways of incorporating that model of education into the system without losing control and turning it into a process of disempowerment. The issue of power, class (class needs, class mobility) and co-optation was central in the debate that followed; as Máire put it, "You need resources, but the lack of resources never stopped us doing anything".
Continuing this theme, Maeve O'Grady talked about the problematic area of partnership in community development. As community development projects became funded and started to employ people, those jobs were going to graduates rather than to long-time activists. The process of gaining accreditation for activists' knowledge through courses in academic institutions was fraught with problems and resistances; over time the group working on this has learned more about the subtle power relations within the institution and has managed to gain ground (e.g. in getting places for activists on the course board). The discussion highlighted the sense that the community education model in academic contexts can only work and remain intact if the groups involved are already politicised; one solution is to run pre-entry courses to achieve this.
Mary O'Connell talked about learning models in community action which aim to empower by encouraging and supporting people to take action, from the basic level of accompanying women to court to encouraging activists to stay active after tough meetings. A key concern is making sure that women who become empowered go back into the community and empower other women; the danger is that e.g. assertiveness training may lead to an individual empowerment only. This highlights a more general issue, which is that feminists with a class analysis need to be highly critical of the interface between participative (CD) and representative (state) democracy: the community sector is very vulnerable to the state. Discussion revolved around the possibility that alliances between movements might be able to overcome this weakness.
After dinner we faced what I thought was probably the biggest challenge of the weekend: Grahame Whitehead's presentation on water and healing, which combined discussion of the threat to the biomagnetic properties of water from chemicals with conspiracy theories inspired by David Icke, which were strongly challenged by many participants. My own assessment of this session is that it was perversely useful in enabling participants to agree on a very clearly-defined boundary to what they were prepared to go along with.
Pauline Maguire and Donal Quirke finished the evening with the difficult task of transforming the emotional atmosphere. Their workshop centred around the use of Buddhist meditation techniques as a way of cultivating skilful mental states. The point of this is to learn how to respond creatively to the world, to avoid burnout through giving time to ourselves and our relationships, and ultimately through a rejection of the dichotomy of self and other which underlies suffering and exploitation. Donal and Pauline led participants through basic exercises in physical relaxation, in calming the mind and in developing positive emotions, followed by a lively discussion on how activists could use these skills. (See also Pauline's notes on meditation.)
Sunday morning opened with Isolde Carmody's workshop on taking back control over our own lives, which "brought things down to basics" in highlighting both our necessary interdependence with other people - in which lack of control is not a problem - and the areas in which lack of control is an issue of power relations. I think the basic issues that people brought up in these areas - the food and water we use, transport, health, children etc. - were areas in which it was easy to bridge in particular the gap between "community" and "environmental" issues. This led into an extended discussion about how we can get back control when we want it, talking about the strengths and weaknesses of individual and collective action.
Richard Moore's presentation highlighted the structural power relations at the opposite end of the scale: how the shift from a capitalism organised around nation-states in the age of imperialism mutated into the "collective imperialism" of the post-WWII era and since the 1960s the new era of neo-liberal revolutions and globalisation, which represent the realisation by the capitalist elite that the nation-state is not only no longer necessary but that democratic movements in the West were now posing unacceptable threats to investments and profits. The global revolution, in other words, is now happening but from above; the question is how movements from below respond to this. (See also the report from this session.)
After the break, Monica Heynen led a discussion on how "work" is defined, returning to the historical to discuss the exclusion of women from the world of "free individuals" through their consignment to the private domain and their role in housework. As this public / private division has been challenged, it has become clear that certain aspects of the work traditionally done by women cannot be effectively commodified - "love labour", that kind of work which is geared towards developing effective bonds between people. We need a new definition of what work actually is.
The final presentation of the workshop was Jason Kirkpatrick's "voice from Ecotopia", presenting the projects and the successes of Arcata in N. California where Jason is part of the Green majority on the town council. Jason covered the history of the change from a logging town to a college town, the rise of radical politics from the 1960s on and the end of conservative domination in the 1990s, before covering an enormous range of projects pursued by the council, from the opening up of city politics to more participative models of democracy to challenges to corporations and the creation of a McDonalds free town - for a number of people apparently the most inspiring idea of all!
Over lunch we auctioned off the remaining food as a way of covering the overrun in the conference budgetting, which was a much-needed giggle, tidied up the hostel the conference was held in and reconvened for a feedback and what-next session. In the feedback session, participants talked about the things they'd learned or gained from the conference - a desire to connect with issues they hadn't previously focussed on, inspiration from hearing other people's stories, and a sense of not being alone in their activism among other things. I curtailed the what-next session pretty brutally because of time constraints (travel times etc.), but there was certainly a background sense that we hadn't been wasting each other's time and a desire to pursue the contacts we'd made and the process further. So we agreed to circulate the address list to each other (which has already been done), that those of us from the SE would look into turning the notes from the sessions into some kind of publication (more soon!), and that this would make it possible for us to think about follow-up under a bit less pressure.... Kevin Hayes then closed the conference with a short group circle.
(Participants who didn't give presentations were Anna Mazzoldi, who performed the crucial task of overseeing the food with Isolde; Liz Curry, Tim Crowley, David Malone, Dave Breslin and Kevin Hayes, who arrived after we'd agreed how we were going to organise things, and John Forrest, the owner of the hostel. Hopefully some or all of them will get a chance to contribute something to the publication!)
There was an enormous diversity in where participants were coming from in terms of their activism and their own life- circumstances which made it completely unpredictable whether we would be able to find common ground or not. In the end of the day my own impression (largely from the outside, because I was mostly too caught up in organising things to spend much time talking to people) was that as a group process at least it was a resounding success.
Some part of this obviously has to do with the fact that the people involved were a very impressive bunch of people, meaning things like the fact that each of us necessarily had a lot of respect for the other people there and the fact that shared histories of activism and personal transformation gave us a lot of common ground. Obviously this was a starting assumption for Ireland From Below - that social movement activism on one "issue" is not totally different from activism on another, even though obviously the contexts are massively varied.
Beyond this hoped-for result two areas stood out for me at least as potential common ground. One was a shared recognition of the existence of structures of power and exploitation, which we confront both in our activism and in our daily lives. While assessments of their exact nature and how they can best be tackled were obviously varied, this is clearly a good starting-point for further discussion.
The other was a particular kind of grounding in and attention to everyday life, running from discussion of the politics of shopping and looking after kids through issues of health to a more overtly spiritual (and perhaps also artistic) interest in working with emotions, our relations with others and the world. I think this is important not only for meeting each other as whole human beings and for inspiration and "emotional fuel", but also as a means of opening up the range of questions we're asking as far as possible and bringing in areas of our lives which are not normally seen as "public" or "political". Many participants mentioned the phrase "the personal is political": the way in which we do the personal has power implications, and power relations happen in "personal" as well as "impersonal" areas of the world.
My impression was that people not only made a lot of effort to hear what other people were saying, but also that (perhaps because it was a first effort) potential sources of disagreement were on occasion avoided: time constraints may also have played a part here, in that we may sometimes have avoided raising issues that would have taken too long to deal with effectively. There were of course a whole range of explicit disagreements, and on occasion people were able to make quite sharp boundaries visible, as in response to Grahame's presentation.
For myself, I think we may have accepted the idea of "community", even in its inflections as working-class, women's, intentional, etc. a bit too uncritically; I would have liked to enter into the ethnic and social control implications of "community", as well as its scope for parochialism, a bit further; but perhaps a follow-up event might make the space available to explore those issues further.
So from a political point of view I think IFB was successful in demonstrating that a reasonably wide measure of common ground can be found between different movements from below in Ireland around potentially radical directions. To say this is obviously not to create the kind of communication and cooperation which can make that a living reality, but it is to say that for me at least the weekend amply demonstrated that it is well worth putting more energy into this kind of process and into feeding it back as far as possible into our own activism and our own movements. I'd add that I think this potential has to be historicised: if a wide range of movement activists can come to this kind of result under these circumstances at this point in time, it's because the other people in the movements and the communities or social contexts they're coming from are also moving in convergent directions, perhaps less explicitly and with less awareness of each other. Creating the kinds of contexts in which this kind of thing can happen explicitly and be fed back into movements from below is then a way of contributing creatively to a process which is in a sense already happening "below the ground".
Well, if I was doing this again I'd do almost everything differently! I will at some point sit down and write a more formal kind of "notes for next time", because I think it might be useful; in the meantime, here are a few basic points.
One is that we underestimated the actual cost: we were trying to hold it to a minimum and simply totted up the cost of the food and hostel and divided by thirty, which on all indications seemed a fair estimate of the number of participants. In fact, food cost a bit more than we'd expected, particularly once we were unable to find a participant with a car who could take it up from Dublin and needed to give a bit of money to a "man with a van". We were out in terms of numbers, partly I think because the cost was so low that people didn't worry about it in advance. We'd been concerned to be as inclusive as possible, but since the people from the community sector were able to get funding from their organisations to go I think there'd be a lot to be said for charging a higher rate next time (to be sure to cover costs and to possibly encourage people to be clear about whether they are or aren't coming) and making concessions available when necessary.
As it was, we had a substantial shortfall which we were able to make up by a bit of hassling people for contributions and notably through the auction (thanks to Dave and Monica and to whoever came up with the idea!) which covered the rest of it. In fact the shortfall was rather more than this, because various people had paid for bits of the food and for the van beforehand and were happy to treat those as contributions, so the total cost of the event was something in the order of 600 pounds, more like 30 a head than 15. In future I think we should charge something in this area so that we're not bringing people up under false pretences and then doing our best to get extra money out of them. (In fairness I should say that a lot of work went into trying to work out what it would cost, and neither the total inability to find car space for the food nor the last-minute absence of people who in some cases had booked months beforehand were predictable. But we need to leave a better margin of error!)
Another is the question of timing. Weekend events bring tired people down at the end of the working week, and it's not unusual that we basically spent Friday evening "arriving", both physically and emotionally, particularly given the presence of so many challenging strangers! I was looking at this with a couple of other participants afterwards, and as far as we could tell everyone who'd come would have been able to come during the week - either because they could treat it as work (paid activists, academics), or because they're in a position to organise their own work schedules (students, self-employed, etc.) I'm told that for community activists the weekend is sacred as the one time of the week when they're not going to meetings and when they have time for their family, even more so the long weekends etc. (which was another idea). This approach would exclude full-time workers and employees who aren't working as activists, organisers, academics etc., and we need to think whether that fits with the idea of a get-together for activists and what kinds of activist mightn't be able to make it. Certainly the idea of an event running from say Monday lunchtime to Wednesday lunchtime, like the Alternative Futures conference, has some attractiveness in terms of the likely flow of ideas and interactions!
The last thing I've flagged for myself at least is that of group process. I felt the Friday night opening session was a bit of a disaster, but by that point I was totally exhausted, both physically and emotionally (not to mention having a bit of a flu), so wasn't in any position to judge, or to run the session. I'd be genuinely interested to hear - privately or publicly! - what other people thought of that session in particular and of the group process as a whole. Was it good that "we" (the organisers) weren't really able to impose much of a structure on it until people had got together on Saturday morning and taken control of it for themselves? Or could we have handled the opening and closing sessions in particular more constructively?
Our original plans had included two experienced people as on-the- spot "organisation gurus" on the spot to take over the structure of the event, but for reasons beyond their control both of them had to back out towards the last minute. In comparable events held in the same place I've seen a teaming up between a practical organiser and someone responsible for the overall flow of the weekend work well. Certainly I think there needs to be someone there at the start with a certain amount of emotional and intellectual energy to open and focus the event.
Yesterday I circulated the address list to all participants as agreed. There's also a mailing list for IFB which Richard set up - (to join, send a blank message to ifb-subscribe@cyberjournal.org (if there are difficulties, email ifb-owner@cyberjournal.org). With luck, we'll get something of a discussion going here over the next couple of weeks as people digest what happened and think about what they'd like to do next.
Something that might provide a focus for this is publishing the proceedings. We're still talking about this, but with luck we'll be able to suggest something concrete next week which may give us something practical to talk about, as well as a good way of feeding the discussions back into the wider movement and political scenes we're coming from.
Finally, there's the question of a follow-up of some kind. For myself, the weekend certainly proved its own worth in pretty much the original terms we'd conceived it, and on that basis I'd certainly be interested in helping run another one next year if there's sufficient interest - ideally finding ways to take what happened this year a bit further (different questions, more effective group process, more time, different structures or whatever) rather than simply repeating the exercise. I should add that it's quite a mammoth amount of effort on the part of large numbers of people to make such a thing happen!
Other people may have more ambitious ideas, and I'd be delighted about that - organisational spinoffs, one-day events or whatever. The only caveat I'd enter is that making "IFB" itself into an organisational process is likely to kill its attractiveness stone-dead for a lot of people who are already up to their eyeballs in movement organising. There's a space for discussion among activists, just as there's a space for an alternative press, which makes an important contribution to movements that can't be made by the creation of new organisations. So I think it's important that organisational spinoffs - as opposed say to shorter communicative gatherings like the IFB workshop we did at the Sustainable Earth Fair, or even straightforward social events - be clearly marked as things that result from the process, as some participants' way of taking things further, rather than as an integral and necessary part of the process. Thought certainly leads to action, but most of us are already active. Communication between movements leads to cooperation, but they're different kinds of activity.
OK, that's as much as I can think of to say about the weekend for the moment, except to thank everybody who contributed to it in any way, including the people who gave us feedback at an early stage while we were still thinking about it and planning it. The whole thing was a mammoth collective effort over about 6 months of planning and a weekend in which everybody helped plan, took care of the communication process, looked after each other, did the cooking and the washing up, ran workshops and presentations, contributed to the costs and gave lifts to people who were stuck. The ability to cooperate between groups and movements depends not just on having shared interests and goals, but also on trust, which is built up importantly by actual cooperation. When we do a full credits list in the publication I should think it'll run for a couple of pages!
Thanks again to everyone,
Laurence