Hi everyone,
thanks to Richard for prodding me to say something about this. I'd been trying to get round to it, but life gets in the way....
Richard wrote:
> 1/27/2000, Laurence Cox wrote:Richard:
> Your framework for the conference (retreat?) looks great.I suppose for myself I'd really given up on holding an IFB 2 anytime soon, particularly thinking about the Easter dates that would have made it possible to connect up with Alternative Futures in Manchester. Here's why.
Partly it's just personal exhaustion: IFB was one of the toughest things I ever did, which probably says more about me than about the event in itself, but there you go. Over these last few months (among other things) I've been writing a book, defending my PhD thesis, setting up a meditation group in Waterford ... and trying to pick up some of the pieces of my own life that have tended to fall by the wayside under activist and academic pressures.
Having said that, I'd have been (and still would be) happy to help organise such a thing if I was convinced that it was really needed. For a once-off, or starting something, it's OK to be convinced of that on your own: for making a habit out of something, particularly something that demands so much of other people, it needs to be clear that it's making sense to them, and sense in terms that at least connect with your own purposes.
This seems (to me, at least) to be the root problem. On the one hand, particularly after Seattle, after the Glen of the Downs, and watching the politics of the PPF, the orientation of IFB seems to be an important one: how can social movements work together? where do we go from here? are we really allies, or can we make real alliances? do we have some kind of shared vision of the future? These are all important questions, or at least that's how it looks from where I find myself.
At the same time, having talked quite a lot to some of the participants, my sense is that they fall quite neatly into two groups. On the one hand, there were people who seemed to connect with this agenda, understood the kinds of politics and process implied by it, and so on. These tended to be precisely the people who didn't have the time even to come to another event because of the amount of other activist responsibilities they held - and of course the two things seem to go together: experience and understanding tend to entail a hell of a lot of work.
On the other hand, there were people who were strongly enthusiastic about IFB, but as far as I could tell from the kinds of things they were saying really hadn't understood what it was about. This may be a real problem in communication, in that it's possible they were saying a lot more than I heard, but what I gathered was a general sense that it'd be cool to meet up with each other again because we had fun the first time and we were such a nice bunch of people ... and no sense that the process needed to make connections with anyone beyond us, no serious political critique of what we'd done the first time or whatever.
I should say straight away that the latter group includes some people I respect enormously, both as human beings and as activists (even though they wouldn't all necessarily want to be called that). And some of the problem is definitely down to my own problems in communicating the concept: IFB was the result of me really pushing my thinking as far forward as it could go after about 10 years of doing this kind of thing, so I was struggling for words rather than able to communicate clearly what it was about.
But still, from where I was standing at least it seemed like a bit of a dead end to try and organise anything supposed to be important to anyone other than ourselves - whether that meant an IFB 2, a magazine or some kind of political organisation - if doing that meant losing the people who had the experience and the language to talk about what the project was about, as well incidentally as most if not all of the community-oriented people.
Part of the problem obviously has to do with my own position in all of this. On the one hand I was pretty definite that I didn't want to become the organiser for what would have been quite a restricted (socially and politically) group of people without much engagement with the wider world. I'm not the right kind of person for that - I prefer a more democratic political mode in which the skills are shared more or less evenly and people are reasonably able to engage with and discuss all the important issues together, something we've notably failed to do on this list, for example - and to my mind it would run counter to the anti-sectarian and non-organisational logic that I've personally become convinced is necessary. We don't *need* yet another organisation, we need to build networks *between* different social movements!
On the other hand, I wound up sticking myself in as organiser in any case ... insisting that people who got involved in this or that weren't committing themselves to anything more also meant not building any kind of long- term organisational core to the thing, for example. Trying to voice organisational concerns that I felt (rightly or wrongly) mattered to some participants - like not being asked to join yet another organisation when they already had more than enough on their plate - meant in effect setting myself up as having a veto over what did happen. And trying to preserve something of what I felt was specific to IFB meant in effect becoming the person identified with the project - and finding that different people basically tried to collar me off-list to get me to sign the whole project up to their personal agendas, whatever those were.
Now, I don't really know what the way out of this is. The nice, democratic and participatory thing to do would be to have a good on-list discussion about "who are we, what are we doing, how should we go about that, etc.?" But from the last year or so of discussion this really doesn't seem to be that kind of list. Many, if not most, subscribers don't post in that vein - some don't have the time, some say they can't handle this amount of email - so that it winds up becoming the preserve of a few netheads. Which isn't good.
Another possibility would be for me simply to drop out and leave other people to do with this what they will. In a sense this is something I should have done ages back - once we actually had a group going in Cavan there wasn't any justification for me still speaking on behalf of the process or whatever it was. And certainly at this point if there's any kind of coherent alternative I think I should respect that and leave you to it - because the alternatives I've heard up to now aren't things I'd want to be involved in, but that's no reason why they shouldn't happen anyway!
A third possibility is that we start thinking now about some kind of face-to-face get-together, maybe in Killorglin if that possibility's still open, maybe with a view to planning some kind of IFB for the autumn. I have to say that there wasn't exactly massive feedback on this - or anything else - when I made the suggestion Richard quoted above, so I'd wonder about its viability.
But hope springs eternal, as they say, and if we still have the house and a handful of interested people it might still be worth doing, particularly if we can manage to get a reasonably broad cross-section of participants. This is crucial to building links between movements - that we start from people whose organisational experiences are very different. The forward planning team for IFB one - Richard, Maeve, Monica and myself - was good from that point of view, in that we represented at least 3 quite different organisational strategies, and I think this was one of our strengths.
So there's a fair mouthful, but if IFB is to be anything more than a private in-joke we need to be able to talk and think in something more than 3-line emails along the lines of "cool, let's do it". To plan IFB one we needed a lot of serious emailing backwards and forwards and at least two face-to-face meetings, maybe more (I can't remember at this stage). But that's what's involved in actually taking each other seriously, recognising that we're starting from different places, and putting time and effort into the communication.
We're still waiting for news on the proposal to get funding to publish the proceedings of IFB one. This would not be a bad time for it - having seen what alliances across movements can do in Seattle (and a lot of serious thought and planning went into making that work!), having seen the Glen lose the fight, and watching stirrings of unease across the country at the new partnership proposals, there are going to be a lot of people out there who could be interested in a record of people making connections from one movement to the next: ecologists, community activists, trade unionists, feminists, anarchists, socialists, the broader left and the counter culture can make links with each other, but they can equally carry on coming to private arrangements with the system at each others' expense.
As Ben Franklin put it, "We must hang together, for if we do not we shall most assuredly hang separately." But that means doing a lot of thinking and a lot of talking. It's taken Irish movements a lot of effort just to get to the stage they're at at the moment. We won't manage to make any kind of break beyond that if we can't even manage to communicate intelligently with each other. At that point, we might as well just wait for the aliens ;-)
There must be some kind of way out of here....
Laurence