Premise
- Sports associations, gyms etc. cost a LOT of money which is not immediately affordable for many.
- There is nonetheless a need for physical health, fitness and community in shared sporting activities
- Many sporting places are heavily gendered, have underlying nationalist histories and produce socially competitive collectivities
- Sports pedagogy is frequently top-down instructional
Prior Experiences
- started with Kickboxing and Thai-Boxing in early teens through rural commercial gyms
- Branched out into more traditional Martial Arts from time to time at points also through commercial gyms, civil society associations and university clubs
- Only rudimentary rural competition experience
- Never acquired official instructor licenses
- Changed gyms due to reactionary trainings culture influencing instructional approach to a degree that made it untenable
Tactics & Strategy
Strategy:
- Building a grassroots mass movement with its own institutions, cultural momentum and power that aims toward the abolition of class society.
- Ecological Approach to the Party. Uneven dispersed process of honing capacities, collectives and popular power through synergies of emancipatory groups cohering their efforts through cooperation into a broader social force with emergent properties.
Sports Club as Tactics:
- pre-political
Ethics: a sports club can cohere people around their own interests (health, fitness etc.) into a community based around constantly collectively constructed virtues and values (athleticism, mutual care, etc.) which are not directly tied up with predominant economic and state value-systems.
Socialization: It also can serve as a place of encounters between divisions (by racism, sexism etc.) in the class and provide a room to overcome biases through practical shared effort toward common goals.
- political
Grass-Roots Democracy: in a sports club common resources (equipment, membership fees, facilities, etc.) need to be administered according to common interests. It can therefore provide room to cultivate logistical, administrative and political abilities in the class.
Productive Subjectivity: private property and division of labor wall off whole segments of skills, means and knowledge from the average person. By providing a space to engage with exercise techniques, collectively organized instruction etc. a sports club provides members the opportunity to learn educational, bio-physical, social and other skills which will be necessary to re-construct functional social relations in opposition to capital. It also provides opportunity to re-conceptualize oneself as producer of a social good, rather than consumer of a service.
Context Transcending Resources: Many sports require equipment and resources that can be utilized other than for the sport itself and therefore can become meaningful in other social movement contexts. First Aid kits, protective gear, food & drink, multi-purpose facilities (including sanitary). Additionally competencies are cultivated which can be re-applied in other contexts such as coordination of group activities and movements, in-depth area knowledge, rudimentary health expertise, tactical thinking, instructional design and educational theory, etc.
Summary of Organizational Goals & Functions
- producing different bodies
- providing access to materials & techniques
- countering reactionary dominance of fields concerning team-sports, techniques of violence and athletic excellence
- producing qualitatively different pedagogies
- learning self-management & collective decision making
- overcoming divides in the class
- acquiring functionally relevant skills and resources
Concrete Conditions of Current Work
- A Workers Sports Association existing for over thirty years, whose aged organizing collective made of diverse anarchist tendencies has deteriorated to dysfunctionality
- Recent influx of new instructors with political and athletic ambition has brought in a new clientele of participants to the boxing group Mondays and Wednesdays (even beyond what the space can accommodate for)
- The new audience is incredibly diverse (working students, blue collar and temp workers, lumpen, professionals - including women, queer folks, migrants etc.)
- Potential brings new challenges like professionalization of training instruction, active skill sharing, raising organizational participation of new-comers, overcoming inertia of old-organizer clique, finding political common ground, sharing reproductive tasks etc.
- Within this surge of interest the opportunity opened up to create an auto-didactic MMA Group on Sundays with complete freedom in educational approach
- This group (even though not fully formalized) has already contributed innovations in the conduct of the overall collective
- Multidisciplinary research has started up to critically engage with the subject matter including a first draft for a position paper / educational workshop as well as an outline for the educational conception have already been set up
- Conversations have already brought forward the proposal to create international partnerships and solidarity ties with other independent sporting collectives in the future