Anarchist Pedagogies

Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education

Robert H. Haworth

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781604864847
• eBook ISBN: 9781604861167
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Education is a challenging subject for anarchists. Many are critical about working within a state-run education system that is embedded in hierarchical, standardized, and authoritarian structures. Numerous individuals and collectives envision the creation of counterpublics or alternative educational sites as possible forms of resistance, while other anarchists see themselves as "saboteurs" within the public arena—believing that there is a need to contest dominant forms of power and educational practices from multiple fronts. Of course, if anarchists agree that there are no blueprints for education, the question remains, in what dynamic and creative ways can we construct nonhierarchical, anti-authoritarian, mutual, and voluntary educational spaces?

Contributors to this edited volume engage readers in important and challenging issues in the area of anarchism and education. From Francisco Ferrer's modern schools in Spain and the Work People's College in the United States, to contemporary actions in developing "free skools" in the U.K. and Canada, to direct-action education such as learning to work as a "street medic" in the protests against neoliberalism, the contributors illustrate the importance of developing complex connections between educational theories and collective actions. Anarchists, activists, and critical educators should take these educational experiences seriously as they offer invaluable examples for potential teaching and learning environments outside of authoritarian and capitalist structures. Major themes in the volume include: learning from historical anarchist experiments in education, ways that contemporary anarchists create dynamic and situated learning spaces, and finally, critically reflecting on theoretical frameworks and educational practices. Contributors include: David Gabbard, Jeffery Shantz, Isabelle Fremeaux & John Jordan, Abraham P. DeLeon, Elsa Noterman, Andre Pusey, Matthew Weinstein, Alex Khasnabish, and many others.

SECTION II

Anarchist Pedagogies in
the “Here and Now”

DIALOGUE 2
(In a crowded place, between strangers)

Alejandro de Acosta

A:		Do you, stranger, have the sense that what is foremost in your concerns is echoed in an experiment that is unfolding right now? An experiment in freedom?
B:		In this crowd, everyone speaks at once, stories cross, become confused. It is difficult to stay focused on you, stranger, let alone my own concerns. But, yes, it is as if I had heard a tale of origins, forgotten, then remembered. If we grasp this experiment from the story of its origin …
A:		… or any other story about it with sufficient curiosity …
B:		… if we accept the challenge of a new problem under exploration …
A:		… we see that it could expand in every direction. This crowded place we have traversed so as to meet suggests that to me.
B:		It could invent new directions in which to expand. I struggle to recall the details of the tale. Was it not a question of freedom? Of the will, at least?
A:		The will? New directions? Where have you come from? Where are you going? After all, in a calm pause …
B:		… in the chaos of a street fight … this crowd …
A:		… in intimate moments …
B:		… in foreign and unfamiliar settings … this crowd again …
A:		… there is some delicate opening for a new sort of experience. This crowd, its murmur, deceives in a way that your words do not, stranger. We need many names for what we are discussing … someone said: heteroglossia … Any story will do so long as we can live with the consequences.
B:		We risk not being able to live with the consequences.
A:		We will call it science or ciencia …
B:		… knowledge or savoir …
A:		… its only test will be that of experience.
B:		But we are not all pragmatists, especially not here. Look around, stranger, who are you, so far from what is familiar in this hubbub?
A:		Where else would such an attitude truly make sense? I like to suppose that we share this idea: a discussion, even one as distracted as ours, has its own concrescence before and beyond what is under supposedly discussion.
B:		As you say, we need many names …
A:		As though we could take this crowded place, subtract the crowd, and be witness to a clearing … do you not hear, in the murmur, talk of destruction? Some no-, un-, de-, an- … seeking to make room for … someone said: heterotopias.
B:		But even given the prehistory of destruction and its clearing, the transmission of these names is obviously delicate, face-to-face, intimate …
A:		… which is why I said that intimacy is a time of experimentation.
B:		…
A:		Well, then, humor this as the hypothesis: The lesson is not like money.
B:		I accept it immediately. Look around. It is local, and its transmission is fragile indeed.
A:		That lesson is to be learned one thousand times … we have the time, stranger, in our wanderings through this crowded place …
B:		and one thousand times again … we have the space, stranger, having imagined the clearing.

CHAPTER 5

Street Medicine, Anarchism, and Ciencia Popular

Matthew Weinstein

Introduction

This chapter describes the network of medical personnel organized to support protesters, most notably at meetings of G8, Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the Republican and Democratic Parties, but also more general protests against the war, against immigration policy, and in support of the homeless, and communities in general when states of emergency are declared. This network is known as the street medics and consists of people carrying a wide variety of medical credentials: doctors, nurses, wilderness first responders (WFR), and people having no more than first aid or street medic specific training.

The relationship of the street medics to anarchism is complex. Certainly many of the medics are themselves anarchists. However, often medic collectives declare themselves to be nonpolitical. One of my trainers described the role as being “Switzerland,” nonaligned in the factional battles that are frequent in coalition work. This neutrality leaves the medics free to assist anyone, independent of politics. At the same time the medics exist to enable a politics. They came about (along with legal observers and peace keepers) from within the community of protesters to provide support that is legally denied protesters: traditional emergency medical personnel are barred from entering zones of civil conflict (which in addition to protests includes natural disasters—street medics set up the first clinic in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina (DeRose, 2005). Since the medics derive from these communities, the medics embody the culture of the protesters and practice forms of democracy and practice with deep roots in anarchist struggles including consensus processes such as the spokes council model and more generally a strong emphasis on individual ethical decisionmaking, for example, as to whether to provide medical assistance to the police or counter protesters that the protesters face.

I will first describe the history, social structures, and practices of the street medics (hereafter, just the medics). Next I look at the educational work of the medics. To understand the medics as education workers I locate their efforts within the work of popular education movements in South America and Africa. Within this descriptive material I explore the politics of the medics, briefly noting how their politics have changed over time. I specifically explore the ways that the medics, even when denying explicit connections to anarchism, adopt much of its ethos. Street medicine is as much an educational effort as it is a therapeutic one. Finally, I conclude by building on this theorizing of street medicine as education, by contrasting the kind of educational work the medics do with other efforts to articulate science and lay publics: school science, popular science, etc. I call the particular approach that the street medics take, in contrast, ciencia popular, a Spanish phrase meaning “science of the people.” These different projects position knowledge and expertise in very different ways, and I end the paper by exploring these differences.

This chapter is part of my work trying to map the possibilities for a science education that supports radical visions of social justice, what I term a science education of love and rage (Weinstein, 2010a). For the last three years I have focused on the work of the street medics. I have ethnographically studied one street medic collective; I have attended a twenty-hour street medic training, as well as other street medic educational outreach efforts. I have also collected material from a wide variety of street medic collectives that are available through the web and through zine archives and anarchist bookfairs. This chapter draws generally from this archive of material as well as from the historical work of John Dittmer (2009b) and Malika McCay (2007).

Making Waves over Time

Street medics trace their roots to the organization of doctors and other medical personnel to support Freedom Summer and the March on Selma in 1965. This began a sustained effort to provide medical support to protesters of, first, the civil rights movement, and, later, protesters more generally. This was done under the umbrella of the Medical Committee on Human Rights that also took on the integration of the American Medical Association (AMA) and proxy battles to challenge the military industrial complex (Dittmer, 2009b) in the 1960s. Their support of protesters, sometimes termed action medicine, included, in addition to support for the civil rights movement in the U.S. South, medical support at the Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, and the battle at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 (Dittmer, 2009b; Manriquez, ND; Street Medic Wikia, 2007).

According to Dittmer the MCHR was taken over by radical parties and factions at different times over its organizational life (Dittmer, 2009a). The Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, for instance seized control of the group in the 1970s. In the early 1980s the organization disbanded, though its member medics remained active through the 1980s and 1990s (Street Medic Wikia, 2007). The end of the MCHR marks symbolically the end of the first wave of organized street medicine.

Reflecting the radical political spectrum of the New Left, the medics of the 1960s and 1970s focused both on action medicine, establishing the basic protocols that define modern (i.e., current) street medicine, and on policy concerns regarding the organization of medicine as an institution, especially its racial politics and its collaborations with industry in the Vietnam War, and worked to reframe the war as a medical issue (Dittmer, 2009b; McCay, 2007). It is the action medicine dimension of the MCHR that reemerges as a second wave in the wake of the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Meetings in Seattle. According to the Medic Wikia, which is as much a defining text as exists in the street medic community,

The contemporary incarnation of the street medic movement traces its inception/revival to the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, Washington. During those protests, small cadres of street medics were highly visible and very helpful when police used tear gas and pepper spray against protesters. This alerted activists of the necessity of acquiring training to deal with protest-related injuries. Thousands of street medics were trained in preparation for further anti-globalization protests. Street medic training became more standardized and specialized—they learned how to care for pepper spray, tear gas, and taser injuries, as well as hypothermia, dehydration and other likely complications of protests. (Street Medic Wikia, 2007)

While this origin narrative downplays the continuity of medical practice with the earlier MCHR, it is widely shared in the medic community, and clearly, after Seattle there was a wide spread blossoming of street medic collectives in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. This continuity includes the education of medics on the legal framework that allows them to operate, the limitations of their legal ability to practice, and general standards for care such as the now discontinued use of a protocol called MOFIBA (mineral oil followed immediately by oil) for exposure to pepper spray on the skin.

The continuity was established through the training of younger medics by experienced MCHR action medics, most notably Doc Ron Rosen, a doctor of Chinese medicine, who served at the March on Selma, the Democratic Convention of 1968 in Chicago, and at the siege at Wounded Knee. He founded the Colorado Street Medics and trained many other collectives, including the Seaview Street Medic Collective (SSMC) that I studied. His training program included a variety of standard emergency medical operating procedures, a combination of allopathic and Chinese medical treatments, and a set of ethics and standards for both trainings and practice.

Medics primarily recall the history of the second wave of street medicine as a sequence of traumas, as the medics became exposed to the worst violence and harm at national and local encounters between police and demonstrators. After the Seattle WTO meeting, the Quebec City and Miami meetings (2001 and 2003 respectively) of the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting seemed to be moments of remarkable violence and trauma for the medics I have spoken too. The Republican National Committee meetings of 2004 and 2008 are also critical time markers as they were times when medics gathered nationally to support protesters and faced escalated police response in the form of tear gas and pepper spray, batons, and other weapons. PTSD is an ongoing point of discussion and concern among medics, and many collectives are focusing more energy on what is termed “self care” and “after care,” that is, physical and emotional healing after the excitement and distress of mass demonstrations.

In 2001, medics held their first national conference in Athens, Ohio. This meeting resulted in the Athens Manifesto (2001), a one-page document that collectives generally recognize as important, especially in managing the coordination of care between collectives and noncollective medics. The document is divided in four parts: proposals, rights, responsibilities, and a second proposals section. In the first proposals section medics agreed on a number of critical points. First, they agreed to incorporate antioppression work into their own trainings. Second, they agreed that democratic coordination was just as important a skill as medical technique. In the words of the manifesto: “Oppressive behavior has happened in trainings and on the streets and in the clinics coming from action medical/1st Aid people. We want to prevent it from happening again. You can be a neurosurgeon or the most experienced trainer around, but if you don’t know how to facilitate or are oppressive in your behavior, you are doing more harm than good.”

Third, authority has to be yielded to local medics, since they will be most familiar with the geographic and political history of the site/situation. The rest of the document, a series of bullet points, covers a wide variety of issues: the right to disagree, the right to check medical “references” (more on this below), the value of multiple medical traditions including Chinese, Wiccan, allopathic (a.k.a. Western medicine), and herbalism, and the management of “clinic” areas, that is, relatively safe stable locations at the margins of demonstrations where higher levels of medical care can be delivered.

In the collective I studied, the Manifesto was a point of ongoing conversations in 2008. The collective operated in a relatively isolated rural community. The community formed a street medic collective because materiel for the Iraq War moved through the town. Tear gas and pepper spray (chemical weapons) had been used to squelch peace demonstrations that included the blocking of roads. For the collective, addressing the Manifesto had meant, in their eyes, becoming a part of a larger “national scene.” (Collective Interview, 10/17/2008) While the Manifesto does have suggestions for specific collectives, its primary focus is on how to coordinate between medic organizations when they must work together at larger events. I should note that even in local protests in the immediate area of the Seaview Street Medics, they were often only one of several medic collectives offering support, so that the issues addressed by the Manifesto were certainly relevant to them.

In 2010, medics met for a second time nationally in Conneaut, Ohio. This meeting resulted in a review of the Manifesto. While the changes in language are just now circulating back to collectives, the modifications seem to serve to (1) provide more concrete procedures for resolving disputes, verifying references, etc. and (2) emphasize collective as well as individual responsibilities (e.g., in resolving differences).

Finally, while protests and meetings define time and history in many ways for medics, some singular events also mark time in their history. In particular, one collective famously (within the tightly knit medic community) conducted its own blinded randomized trials to find treatments for tear gas and pepper spray exposure on both skin and eyes. The story and results of the Black Cross Collective trials are preserved on a web site, though the collective no longer exists (Black Cross Health Collective, 2003b). Conducted in 2001, the trials verified the effectiveness of MOFIBA (mineral oil followed immediately by alcohol—now agreed upon as too dangerous to perform in the context of protests) for exposure of skin to chemical weapons such as tear gas and pepper spray and identified new effective treatments for eye exposure to chemical weapons: liquid antacid and water (LAW). (The practice of reducing treatments and protocols to short abbreviations comes from emergency medicine, which uses short mnemonics to try to help responders work systematically in chaotic situations). Subjects were exposed to pepper spray and then treated with a variety of items claimed effective by street medics. Many treatments washed out. LAW was quickly established as the gold standard for chemical weapon treatment of the eyes. The trials were not unproblematic. Nonsubjects became exposed to the chemical weapons, including at least one with allergies. However, the trials represent a high level of ownership of one of the specific skills of first- and second-wave stree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section I Anarchism & Education: Learning From Historical Experimentations
• Section II Anarchist Pedagogies in the “Here and Now”
• Section III Philosophical Perspectives and Theoretical Frameworks
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Index