This is a summary of what happened at Falkland Summer School 2021 – including my own memories, and dreams for the future. I’ve included some references to some of the material I used to put the summer school together. I wanted to describe why I did what I did, and in this order, and what, from my perspective, emerged.

This summary was originally written as a debrief for students, so it might be a bit impenetrable for those who weren’t there. If you wat to know more, get in touch with me. Other tutors have also written paragraphs.

Collecting: In order to create new things in the world, and act in new ways, you need to collect images, moments, emotions, texts, actions, visions etc. the same way a magpie collects objects.

Producing: All workers education should focus on cultural production or the production of actions in the world. The more stuff we put out into the world, the more power we have.

Peer Support and Mentoring: If we want to live in a different kind of world, we have to learn how to support each other to make and do beautiful things.

Reworking: Good ideas need to be reproduced, reworked, evolved into new things.

I like the confusion and general excitement that arises from this game. The mass of nouns and verbs and adverbs that get thrown into the mix make sentences that, undoubtedly, everyone has contributed towards, but also make a nice mockery of the idea of ‘learning-objectives’ – should we really know exactly what our end goal is when we enter into a creative space with other radicals? Can an objective be more of an instinct or a feeling? I also liked how the phrase ‘…and solidarity’ became a meme or an in-joke going forward and even made its way onto the banner.

Everyone took to the second game very well. It is derived from looking at the history of the use of card indexes. You can read more about these by reading Marcus Krajewski’s book, Paper Machines, or by reading a good article by John Maxwell and Haig Armen called ‘A Bird in the Hand: Index Cards and the Handcraft of Creative Thinking’.

The beginning of the exercise imitates traditional note-taking – you are copying out a sentence. When you take notes you are (supposedly) taking them for some future purpose, and this is often something people struggle with – how to transform the note into some new creation or action. Here we make it easy – the note is being transformed by mixing or shuffling it in with the other notes.

It might see random what you pull out from this exercise – but really it’s like those word search puzzles where they say ‘The first word you see is what you crave most’ or whatever. The things you saw in the puzzle were phrases and words that made you excited, that you wanted to make something more from. In that sense it’s a useful exercise to see what people are drawn to. This card-index form of creativity is more personal and complex than similar randomising techniques applied nowadays in digital form (ie a twitter bot).

This exercise also shows you how easy it is to create new phrases that could go on to define your culture and activism. Sometimes the best words and phrases are random and have that air of being ungrammatical. A few phrases emerged from here that came back again later on, particularly ‘They’ve Eaten My Share Again’, which ended up on the big summer school group banner.

Finally, this exercise encourages students to engage with books, particularly texts that are canonical and large (Capital Volume 1) in ways that make the books servants to what they want to do. The book shouldn’t control you – you control the book! So take what the books have to offer you, but don’t let them constrain you, you can mangle them to your hearts’ content, and don’t let the tradition of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

This exercise was designed to get you to think about tactics that might be used by workers in ‘new’ workplaces (ones whose workers are self-employed or on zero-hours). We didn’t go into loads of detail about how the tactics might be deployed (ie with a threat, with a letter, with a collective forming). The exercise also allowed you to learn a little about past trade union tactics, and to meet two French anarchists from the end of the 19th century.

This game was derived in part from some of the work that me, Cailean and Paul Malgrati have done in the past on the Scottish history of workers tactics: the Ca Canny and the Land War. You can take the Sma Shot course on the Ca Canny to find out more. A lot of the tactics can be found in Emile Pouget’s writings, in Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s pamphlet on tactics, and also in a great book by Geoff Brown. You came up with some brilliant stuff here.

Rox: “What was particularly exciting to see was the way you generated ideas for clear practical action, and considered the pros and cons of the ideas. Some of the ideas had clear potentially negative effects, but by thinking about them you worked out what was useful and good, and generated even more ideas for potential practical action. There was a move from generalised tactics to specific ones, and the huge amount of really varied ideas you came up with was truly awe-inspiring.”

Esmond: “This was where I learned the most the whole three days. Firstly just about the wealth of tactics currently available, and then the further riches there could still be out there just from workers being thrown together like this. I am currently building a time machine and brushing up on my French.”

The tactics emerged again later on – in the posters, and in the pamphlet. [Cailean: “They also formed the basis of a verse in the adaptation of Larimer Street.”] The decline of ‘secure’ work means we need new tactics, and it was great to have you all as part of this discussion.

This was an interesting one. The game was to sort the collectives by deducing what went with what. Some people approached it more by looking to see who had what knowledge already, which would never have got you the whole way there.

The aim of this game was to think about what makes a collective – what’s the glue that sticks it together. It was also to figure out what characteristics of groups are particularly French or particularly Scottish, and what characteristics are timeless or are specific to a certain era of the development of trade unionism. Me and Cailean had a good time finding guild characteristics from our respective 18th century research/wikipedia. You can find out more by reading the work of Natalie Zemon Davis, Sandra M. Marwick, and Michael Sonenscher.

Cailean: “One of the things I found interesting was how each group, and sometimes each individual, was drawn into the mystery and mystique of certain collectives over others. You wanted to discover its ‘glue’ and, because the information provided was often not enough, this was sometimes fulfilling and other times frustrating. But I think it helped many of you to see that collectives are not always transparent. Sometimes success depends on secrecy and savvy: inclusive with an exclusive vibe!”

This was a bit of a cool-down from all the activity of the morning. Some really beautiful writing was produced, and I thought it was incredible the emotional openness with which you approached this task.

I’d have liked to have had more opportunity to share everyone’s work with each other, and to think about the nature of memories and dreams, and how they shape our radicalism. One of you said about the creative writing that ‘I thought I’d hate it but I loved it. More time/opportunity to read other peoples’ work would have been good.’ I think ultimately to create the ‘writing workshop’ environment with re-working, discussion etc. we’d have needed more time. I remember some beautiful discussions between participants at this workshop, and I had some great conversations with some of you coming up with ideas.

The structure for this workshop and the workbook was developed with Ross Young who works at the Writing for Pleasure Centre. Writing for Pleasure is partly based on the ideas of Michael Rosen, who has a very short booklet called ‘Writing for Pleasure’ which makes great reading (and which a lot of the ideas for the summer school were based on - well beyond the writing workshop). Me and Ross were influenced by lots of things, but especially by an article called ‘Developing Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space’ by K. D. Gutierrez.

Sarah contributed her maps workshop to the dreams exercise, which really sharpened the kind of imaginaries that we could explore. She based some of her workshop on the ideas of Wilfried Hou Je Bek and Guy Debord.

Cailean: “I really enjoyed gently gliding between scribblers, watching so much emotion appear on the page, and discussing how a little change here and there might make the stories even more effective. Often when we start to write politically, we feel an urge to put our perspective in universal terms. You know the moments and memories that mattered in forming your position but describe the principles instead of the particulars. It was brilliant to see how, after a wee chat exploring this tendency, you re-expressed the very same ideas using vivid moments – and it all came to life.”

Ross: “According to educator John Taylor Gatto: You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s. Writer Sue Monk Kidd told us that our stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here. Finally, Gerald Gregory (1984) talked passionately about the intrinsic value of working-class culture, especially those solitaries that underpin its outstanding and unique achievements (e.g. trade union, political and mutual help associations). There is a determined refusal to stay marginalised; indignation and impatience at being represented, misrepresented, patronised and abused by outsiders; these have fueled the drive to write rather than be written about (or not), publish rather than be published (or not) and, increasingly, to theorise rather than be theorised.”

When we develop campaign messaging, we often end up prodding at the same emotions. I had a conversation with Rox before the school where she described a classic ‘structure’ of emotion as Sad – Angry – Hopeful. We talked about how this was the basis for a lot of political messaging, and I began to wonder what it would look like if we worked with other ‘structures of emotion.’

Given that you had described emotions that were important to you in your creative writing, I shamelessly mined your creative writing for emotions, and wrote them on bricks (as I kept explaining to the other tutors before the summer school – it’s ‘structures’, so it’s bricks, right?)

After you’d come to terms with your emotion, and decided that it was ‘the one’ for radical messaging, I assigned you into random groups (ie I didn’t know what emotions you’d pick, so the emotions ended up randomly assorted). Me and Esmond had a conversation the week before the summer school about randomness vs. non-randomness. We wondered about getting you to choose your groups based on what emotions you wanted to mix together. But Esmond thought that pure randomness would give higher yields in the exercise – it would force people to make unusual connections and work with emotions they weren’t used to working with.

When Esmond ended up in the group that had something like Awe, Gratitude and the Feeling of Victory, he said to me ‘I gave you silly advice, the exact thing we were worried about has happened, and we’ve ended up with three positive emotions that it’s hard to go on a journey through’. But he was proved right in the end, because this group that were tasked with making a ‘purely positive’ poster produced something really joyful and full of hope. It was an interesting exercise for them in what it looks like to work only with pretty ecstatic emotions.

I could say loads here, but I’ll limit myself. One exciting thing to come out of this workshop was the phrase that became the summer school slogan ‘The Fire of the Union Keeps the Shadows Away’. I think we all know that poster was pretty special, and I was chuffed because I felt like the injection of this new emotion, ‘Panic’, had unlocked the ability for this kind of slogan to be created. The group that did the call centre poster worked well with the idea of ‘distance’ (dissociation/absenteness) in a really relatable way, and very nicely followed the instruction to try to get your poster to be a call to action. Both the above were playing into all-too-relatable emotions of anxiety and depression, and did so much more interestingly and engagingly than most social media teams would ever be able to. The group with ‘romantic love’ ended up telling a really compelling and lovely queer narrative, and created an incredible logo/graphic of a fist-heart-squashing-the-boss-to-pulp. The group with the weight of the past emotion pulled together images from different union campaigns across centuries to deliver a wee message about the past and the future, and I thought this was done beautifully.

I could honestly go on forever about the posters. I thought this exercise showed really nicely what you could do with a range of emotions. I was really impressed with the way that everyone drew from their work the previous day, and brought in ideas about tactics and collectives, and stories from their creative writing. I think something clicked for a lot of people here, about how you can take cultural production into your own hands, and about how much room there is for diversity and individuality in radical messaging. You all started working together really well at this point.

This was an exercise in developing ideas of collective. I don’t know what had clicked, but again this produced some really nice pieces of writing. I would have liked to have found ways to link this in again with further creations – and I wonder whether in the future I might do this exercise before the ‘dreams’ exercise so that your crew could be part of your dream.

As I said at the time, a lot of this was about learning to describe to people why they are powerful, using ‘insider’ language rather than generic statements. It’s also about working out what makes a tight-knit group work, and recognising all the diversities of groups, and how all of them move us towards the future in different ways. Reading your letters to your crew back to myself now, I really don’t know how youse managed to do this exercise in such a heartfelt and literary way.

Rox: “The art group were phenomenal. The project way surpassed my initial goals for the session in terms of the ambition of the image, and the way that it was put together. You really made a fantastic piece of art, that’s also a beautiful public image of strength (and solidarity).

Everyone had their own favourite political designs and aesthetics, and the research phase of the project was great in the way that you pulled these ideas together. You managed to collaboratively design very quickly something that had all sorts of resonances with the tradition of political art, propaganda and bannermaking, as well as with the ideas generated at the summer school and all its members’ personal experiences.

The commitment to pulling off the ambitious design in terms of how hard you worked to achieve it was really special. You really pulled out all the stops, congratulations. Everyone’s particular skills were maximised by taking the image apart and each member of the team taking one area. The space and materials made this a challenge, but the constraints felt very fruitful as the banner came together really quickly. The amount of work and thought that went into the banner also just produced a truly beautiful object.

Working together so closely and intensively brought out a great discussion of the characters in the picture. Although it was just fun chatting about Dougie and his personal habits, the time taken thinking about each of the characters’ lives and jobs, and the other parts of the picture gave the banner a whole lot more value. This banner carries more than just the weight of its paint!

All the art-team were fantastic, the talent of design, communal thinking, production and sheer vision that each of you have is really special. I’d feel confident that any of you could run a great banner-making session for another group, and produce a whole array of totally different beautiful art ready for public display. Imagine how cool it would be. I’d be excited to see what trying more sessions like that would throw up - given this was our first try, I think even more exciting stuff could come out of this way of working.

The materials were 2 cheap (£3) shower curtains and 3 sets of shower curtain ‘rail system’s (£10 each), and cheap acrylic paint (£3.50 for 6 x 150 ml)”

Esmond: This was really good fun and informative. I’m especially glad some people took the plunge and opted for this workshop knowing it would be furthest from their comfort zone - it was truly not apparent. There were two basic things behind the workshop’s design. The first was using improvised comedy to approach working with others and creativity in new ways. In the exercises and preparatory skits the participants were really good at giving a few ideas space to breathe and letting them go somewhere. It was a sort of mirror to that other approach to the creative process that demands a brainstorm of ideas, good and bad, which are edited later. Here we took a few ideas and turned them round from all sides. A more relaxing way of addressing the Blank Page, you might say. Above all I was amazed how well you all played the counting game the second time round. It was a bit spooky. I really might start to believe some of that dramaturgical feel the vibes stuff.

The second thing, now I look back on it, probably emerged from all the biblical archaeology videos I’d been watching over the summer (as a starting point I recommend this from David Neiman’s lectures on Genesis). Ancient myth possesses a weirdness and particularity that often seems beyond the imagination of one individual. It is the result of ongoing illiterate cycles of storytelling, anecdote, reminiscence, debate, and social commentary between different people and cultures, until what emerges is an utter fabrication that is truer than the facts. We attempted to replicate this cycle of generations in the space of half an hour, and given the audience response I think we managed to make something that resonated in that way. I loved how the rat became a compelling image that transformed from tactic, to uncontrollable natural force, to personified ally. If I remember rightly, none of the original stories we told involved rats or the Queen, but cycles of improvisation and retelling turned dirty workplaces or letters to management into new characters and stories that could say more than before.

I would encourage you not to forget these characters, or rather, half forget them in the process of retelling them and proudly describing what you invented. Turn them into heroes, villains, and all between. Please share the number game and see if you can beat 50.

Cailean: After exploring moods in the posters, I think it took an extra stretch of creativity to express them musically. It was an ambitious thing to gather songs that spoke to us, rearrange them, and rewrite the words, especially in the time we had. I think the medley beautifully captured the moody journey out of the shadows with Victor Jara, taking up tactics with the lively verses and cheeky chorus of Larimer Street, and reaching a sentimental and universal finale with the Skye Boat union-recruitment song.

Eilis: I think it was really good to build on the content that had already been produced in the earlier activities as it kept everything connected. I had a few aims in the workshop both in terms of the actual music making and the process behind it. There were good discussions to begin with, where we explored what a modern day ‘political song’ can sound like - and it was really brilliant that participants brought their own songs that had meaning to them. Framed as a song writing exercise, we looked at how older workers’ songs were often set to popular melodies of their time in order to make them easy to learn and considered how we could do this in just a few hours. The words that the group came up with were great - they covered a lot of emotions that related to their experience of work and organising. The songs were fun, and the performance worked well. I hope the workshop got the participants thinking about how we keep songs relevant to our movement today - how do we engage contemporary workers through music? A lot of fun was had and I am very grateful to have been part of the school as a tutor.

Meeting such a great, diverse bunch of people.

The creativeness

I liked feeling welcome as a very new member to the union

Unusual and abstract ideas and activities which followed through to practical action

Lots of decoration and books created a great learning environment.

Loved the performances

The rock paper scissors game was an awesome ice-breaker, people were less shy after that.

I liked the exercises where we created the slogan using phrases from different books.

The drama was great - learned a lot.

The show and the game were both fantastic.

The masterclasses and the evening games were such an awesome idea. After the games I felt closer to the group.

Huge fan of the split-off workshop. Waiting and seeing everyone’s pieces was lovely.

Fireside conversations.

The way it introduced me into politics.

Loved the writing and French Anarchists session

The anarchist French time travellers stood out for sure.

Loved the tactics and song workshop

I loved singing songs around the campfire and the zine activity. The creativity was a welcome break from discussions.

Memories and dreams writing - something I’d never have done without prompting but definitely something I want to continue.

Falkland Game was fantastic!

The songs felt important to this week.

Loved the word and poster games, coming up with mottos etc.

The songs, activities (especially the show, zine and poster making, the game), whole second day was a banger and the people were great!

Zine making

Being forced out of my non-artistic/creative comfort zone and producing really good work

The Falkland Game

We actually made things! Coming away with something (a lot of things) so tangible to show for it. I’m really proud of us.

The people!

That being creative doesn’t mean you have to be artistically brilliant. If you just give it a go and finish it, it usually has at least some kind of charm even if it is crap!

I learned about the shared language of union members, that people in unions aren’t scary but v approachable, that art is a very powerful organisational tool.

To be more confident in my creative abilities and to be confident in my opinions.

There’s more that unites us than divides us.

The importance of supporting each other.

Just because something isn’t a natural strength doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.

That creativity also has a place in organising, and you can utilise a wide range of things to promote solidarity. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

Collaboration is really fun, that I should read more left wing literature, that fairy dogs exist (the socialist kind).

I feel like I actually have tools to make some sort of autonomous culture. It’s really that easy huh.