Or, Why antifascists should stop training like fascists and have fun instead
The Importance of Play for learning
Play is the basis of learning. Play is to learning what water is to the river. It’s the asking of what if? It’s the fucking around, and the finding out. This is the key idea.
The problem is, children bounce while adults have bad knees. As adults under late capitalism we all still play, although sometimes we don’t even recognise it. Think about the games people make of repetitive tasks for example, such as finding the appreciation for the pallet on a pump truck sliding into place in the chiller just right. Sometimes you clip the banana boxes and shrug (next time!). Even in an office we will find play. Maybe you’ve been playing around with a bunch of different spreadsheet layouts until you find the one that serves your practical and aesthetic needs. I bet at some level you value the process of ‘finding the ones that fit’.
Its fine to enjoy ideas, but people learn physical skills by doing them in an engaging way, not by being told how to do them. And people learn to improve at games by playing them. Unfortunately for human animals such as yourself, in order to play and learn we have to be neither bored nor stressed. What does this mean? There are basically 3 (relevant) states of the body-mind:
Body-Mind State 1:
BORED
Looking around, thinking about what you had for breakfast, fiddling with the string on your shorts, playing with your hair, aka trying to get more input/stimulation. This can happen in martial arts games too, people start looking to the coach when they’re bored with the drills they’ve been doing for 10 minutes. The students are right to want to move on, the body is done with this for today. If you are struggling to stay focused then you aren’t learning. I don’t have to tell you this. You’ve known it in yourself, we’ve all just been taught to repress it and do what the padron tell us.
Body-Mind State 2:
STRESSED
The famous ‘fight/flight/freeze’ response. What does this mean? Your body percieves a threat. It is gonna respond by one of a handful of ways. Fight/flight are the same, freeze is still relevant here but suffice to say if your parasympathetic nervous system overwhelms your nervous system you will neither train nor learn.
When the fight/flight response is triggered a chemical reaction passes through the body instantly, your palms are sweaty, your gross motor skills will improve, your fine motor skills will get worse, your vision will narrow, as will your thinking, mom’s spaghetti, you’ll be intensely focused on the thing that you perceive as a potential threat (this is why silly distractions can work sometimes!).
Your memory will also turn to shit, you’ll likely remember things as flashes rather than continuous coherent movements. Not being able to remember what just happened is obviously very bad for learning, but the body is also directing energy away from the learning functions of the brain and towards surviving the threat.
Body-Mind State 3:
PLAYFUL
Between Bored and Stressed, we can Play (and learn!). This is what we’re looking for, this third state of play, presence and openness.
The stress cycle and why that’s a barrier
Unfortunately for our purposes, getting punched in the face is quite stressful. So is whatever stress responses you brought into the room with you. Your body can hold onto the chemicals from the stress cycle for days, weeks, months or even years until your body decides you have dealt with the threat and are home and safe.
In summary: stress response, not what we want, but it is inevitable. I’m not a neuroscientist, I can’t tell you if any of this is really true. I’ve tried to read some of the science and I don’t understand it, but if the educators I have listened to on these subjects are right about what I’ve presented above, then hopefully the logic of the following claim will make sense:
The average gym can better be described as a filter for those who can survive the process rather than a teaching space.
There are some good reasons for this, mostly to do with injury prevention. People who have done martial arts for a long time have many disabilities. Most adults do. Of course in martial arts they are called ‘long term injuries’, disabilities are for the soft.
For those of us who train, when you are badly injured you can’t do your favourite thing in the world. Often these injuries become chronic problems that can be exacerbated easily. New people are likely to move much more chaotically when put under the stress of martial arts training. This can lead to and worsen injuries. In order to address this facilitators tend to restrict new members to certain types of accepted movements until they ‘get good enough’ at those to play with the rest of the class.
If they enjoy the company and the movement endorphins then maybe they’ll hang around for long enough that they’ll get to actually play the game of kick boxing or jujitsu or whatever. A good coach will include some relevant games which are fun and help the student be engaged, but mostly its rote learning (repeating what you’re told or shown rather than exploring for yourself) according to whatever the coach believes the correct things to teach to new people are.
That’s more or less the model modern combat sports training takes. Self defense classes run a bit differently, but I actually think they are often worse when it comes to rote learning over play, often justified by the claim that its even more dangerous and therefore can’t be played with.
But this misses the actual point. If the point was to reduce injury while helping people learn then you would be much better off doing training at the speed that the new person can process rather than making them repeat predetermined movements poorly that they don’t know how or when to apply. Even if it succeeds in creating a person who can deliver good power, you’d have given that skill to someone who knows nothing about how to use it, when to control it and how to process the attacks coming towards them without panicking. Basically you’ve made them far more dangerous to their partners when they do start doing dynamic sparring games. Better to get them learning to play the game safely first and then if they want to develop more power later they can do that.
These arguments actually serve to run cover for a pedagogy (teaching method and underlying logic) that is patriarchal, colonial and hierarchical. This looks a bit like the following scene – there is an older man at the front of the room who has the secret important knowledge and must fill his students’ empty heads so they can learn The Truth which has been passed on by earlier great patriarchs. It can get much worse when you look into the cultish stuff that is common and the exploitation and abuse and all sorts of nastiness in the martial arts world. Look up McDojos for example if you wanna learn about some of that and what to avoid.
I would also like to stress that we aren’t saying that many martial arts spaces aren’t serving other really important functions and in fact are often the heart of a community. It is exactly these functions we think are the most important, we just want to bring our teaching philosophy in line with a lot of the amazing work already being done.
Intro to the Liberation Martial Arts approach
Liberation Martial Arts (LMA) is a pedagogical approach to learning skills, through the medium of martial arts. It was created by Sam from the Southpaw Podcast, and contains hundreds of short articles and videos detailing a completely different approach to movement skills training. Grounded in play, as I’ve simplified above, but with a very strong emphasis on centering our partners rather than ourselves in our training, and taking the modern conceptions of how we learn to their logical conclusions through the lens of materialist dialectics.
They run their classes in a much more personalised way than our club, which is why I felt it would be useful to adapt the LMA approach to our conditions so that other people had a single article they could point to as a guide for how to create these kinds of community martial arts spaces. I finally looked into LMA while I was working on the door at a bar in Barcelona, on a year-long break visiting family in Spain and working before I came back to our community club in the UK where we started experimenting with it in our training. After 3 years I feel confident that it is a far more appropriate training method for the vast majority of people. This especially applies for disabled people, queer people and other marginalised and traumatised people. It creates a space that can actually allow learning to happen for people who usually would come to one or two sessions and then decide its not for them without seeing much improvement. Some of my newer training partners are improving so fast from zero experience that they are gonna be kicking my arse in a few years, if not before!
I cannot strongly enough recommend reading through the stuff yourself. It’s designed to be about 4 minutes a day of material that you can work through that applies to new people but also to help those of us who have been in the martial arts world for decades and need our brain rewiring from all the right wing bullshit we’ve had to sift through to find the useful information. It’s a process of unlearning to learn. If you want to know why I’m using the phrase martial arts instead of “self defense” or “combat sports” or something else you can listen to this or read the transcript.
This guide is simply designed as a taster and an explanation of why you should get started in reading the LMA theory, even if you aren’t into martial arts, along with the first steps and things to think about if you did want to start a community class.
I want to stress that there is no one way to run a session. LMA provides a beautiful set of concepts and strong scaffolding to help people teach themselves movement skills, but the possibilities are endless, as they should be. Human movement contains and infinity of possibilities and when it’s two bodies moving together the infinities only multiply.
I will touch upon a few of the concepts here with my own thoughts, and provide an example class structure, just to help people get an idea of how it all works.
LMA has demystified my understanding of learning as a whole, and explained why the skills I’m the most competent at are more likely the ones that I simply played around with for years on end – cycling, cooking, massage, chess – rather than had much strict training. I’ve had plenty of training from martial arts senseis, instructors and coaches but it was only when I was confident enough to take control of my own learning that I improved much faster, and LMA provides the perfect lens and praxis to help you and your crew do it.
Partner Centering
LMA reframes partnered work away from the self. When you go to classes of any kind you are often going there with only one person in mind, yourself. The goal is to better yourself. This is a valid goal of course. But when it comes to martial arts the thing you’ve gotta be paying attention to is the source of the danger.
In one on one combat sports – which is most but not all of what we do, cos its fun and easier to moderate the chaos – there is a person in front of you who is hitting you and trying not to get hit. If you go into this with a self centred mindset, then you can be stuck on thinking about ‘what should i do’, rather than allowing your partner to be the guide of how you must deal with them which is far closer to reality. Like commentators are fond of saying, each new person is a puzzle to solve. There may be multiple good moves, but some are clearly better than others. You can only work that out if you are learning to give your partner, through your senses, your full attention. In addition, by paying full attention to the other you also humanise your partner and take care of each other.
Role of the facilitator
For organisers, the role of facilitator should be familiar. Their role is to help the time flow from one step to the next, building a structure for the people present to get the most out of the shared time. This isn’t easy, it can take a lot of confidence, patience and awareness of everyone in the room. Personally I’m often completely exhausted after a session, good for nothing but a blessed night’s sleep. You are both trying to undermine the teacher-student dynamic through participation and at the same time building space for the autonomy of others, all the while punching and kicking and clinching and all that good stuff. The good news is that the better you get at being aware of the whole room the better your ability to process lots of information in a chaotic physical space… now that’s a skill for antifascists!
Every coach wishes their students would spar with control, and move slowly at first. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. Coaches remind their students to ‘go light’ (except the coaches who don’t, which are even worse of course) or encourage training at lower speeds. This rarely works in my experience, but a pedagogy that starts with partner centering begins by slowing us all down, where the aim of the game for the ‘coach’ is to get everyone calm enough to play safely together. That is a class where things move slowly enough at first for adults, often unathletic or autistic or traumatised adults, to actually learn to process what’s happening. If your learning method doesn’t lead to learning in most people it’s not a learning method, its a filtering system. More crucially, this filtering system can all too easily filter out those people who are the very targets of racists and fascists.
How to get started?
Liberation martial arts has an entire curriculum – organised through the lovely metaphor of a sapling – of concepts, activities, breathing exercises, games and videos to help people plan sessions and have a scaffold to build on, designed for adults. Obviously I’m not saying having experience wouldn’t be helpful, I’m lucky enough to have two decades worth of martial arts classes under a bunch of different teachers to draw the best from and adapt to the LMA framework, but you’d probably do just as well if not better just making your way slowly through the curriculum. YouTube has a wealth of different games and exercises you can make work, once you understand the method. As you get better as a martial artists you’ll want to expand your horizons, explore new movement. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t learn from what’s out there, just that information is different from embodied knowledge and physical capability. Below I have detailed one of my classes from earlier this year as an example, and then after the conclusion you can find an FAQ with extra information.
I strongly recommend keeping some kind of record of what you’re doing. It is very helpful to have a record of what you have done, how frequently and when, perhaps adding who was there can also help. This is just an example. I have lots of classes that look completely different to this, but hopefully this can help clarify how we can implement some of what we’ve talked about above. Of course it can only be an example. Times are very rough and are often not stuck to in the class but serve as a guide. I try to let people’s enjoyment set the rhythm of the class. If people are having fun, why move on, they are clearly getting something out of it.
We meet new members before they come to their first class, so we can go through our class code of conduct, and talk to them about the approach, find out what they want out of the class and give them a chance to ask questions. One aspect of our class for example is that all activities are opt-in. If it’s a partnered activity everyone puts their hand up if they want to be included after the facilitator explains the rules and aims. If it is a whole group activity then anyone who doesn’t want to be involved should move to the side. We value people’s autonomy more than it being a high tempo exercise class. Indeed those kinds of classes can be a barrier to learning when they don’t allow people to be clear headed and relaxed. Hopefully explaining a bit about the thought process will reveal how different this class feels to your average ‘antifascist’ muay thai or self-defense class.
Example Session Outline
3-3:15: We have a room booking in a community centre, and at the start of the session we have to put out the mats and gear. Because (some! not all?) leftists are always late this also gives 15 minutes of leeway so that’s good. I always start with some kind of go round question with names and pronouns (cos we’re a bunch of queers) with questions such as ‘how’s your body feeling and how’s your week been’ as a standard ice breaker. This serves 3 functions: gets people noticing their internal experience, the internal experience of others and gets people speaking early, which helps with people feeling like they are able to speak up for their needs and ask questions.
3:15-3:30: Articulations: I mean this in the sense of your joints, gently starting to move your body around, as is common in most muay thai classes, yoga, or whatever. I encourage the group to self direct or follow me or anyone they want to, and I’ll usually outline a bit of what we will be working on to make sure we don’t miss warming up appropriate areas (such as your neck for clinch work). During this time I will remind people about partner centering and start to work on our ‘soft gaze’ expanding peripheral vision to take in as much of the room as possible.
3:30-3:45: Sapling Stance, moving around, shoulder touching: Next we go through some kind of Sapling stance visualisation/movement exercise, the first few times longer, then shorter versions just to get people in the headspace. Sapling stance is about learning to notice tension in the body, and releasing it, learning to use our skeletal structures to conserve energy and be loose enough to move freely and quickly. Then we walk around, laying our palms on each other’s shoulders as we pass, without it making a sound and without looking directly at the shoulder, only using peripheries. This does many things, but crucially it breaks the ice in terms of touch, and gets people to start modulating their movements with other people.
3:45-4:00: Thigh Parking, Knee Finding: These are LMA activities that form part of a bridge towards clinch work (stand up wrestling above the waist) and throwing knees. Notice even the names of the games serve to de-emphasise what we are doing as any kind of violence. When it comes to training with vulnerable people, as little as unfortunate turns of phrase can raise people’s Cortisol levels, and create a barrier to learning. This isn’t a fight. It’s a game. In fact, it’s all a game anyway. Treat it as such, games should be fun and can be silly but also often require safety considerations! Throughout the session I often ask people to stand on one leg and close their eyes, this is primarily a grounding activity (you can’t be stuck in your head when you are busy thinking about your standing leg so you don’t fall over) but also always good to work on balance and stabilizing muscles and a good way to bring the class back together when people are chatting.
4:00-4:15: Shoulder pushing then ‘minimum sugo’: We partner up and take turns pushing each other’s shoulders, learning not to resist or dodge but simply notice and accept the force, moving exactly as much as they pushed you and no more. Sugo is a series of LMA games that derive from a lost Korean folk art. They are designed to safely teach you clinch fighting by boiling it down to its basic body movements, while keeping it fun from the beginning. It translates roughly to good effort, or good struggle, it’s an affirmation and a method. Minimum sugo is our variant of that where the aim is to use the minimum possible energy to move your partner.
4:15-4:30: Finding the hinge (sugo): This game involves taking it in turns lifting our partner onto our upper thighs, from whatever angle you like, in a controlled manner. This simulates a throw but stops just before the fall. Often we will do small games like this, with the aim to progress the game over a number of weeks. Sugo works so well because it is a progressing game which opens up more and more movements while always functioning as a game. We work on this stuff from the beginning with people, not tacking on the clinch fighting at the end because it’s hard. We bring it in from the beginning precisely because it takes a long time to master. It also gives us a huge advantage over other clubs which are often lax on clinch training because they don’t know how to do it safely.
4:30-4:45: Clinch with knees: for those with more experience they can start doing full clinch fighting with controlled knees allowed. For newer members we can progress to more sugo games. Often the class will have deviated by now, as members are always encouraged to suggest what they’d like to do, or we are exploring someone’s question or thought.
4:45-5:00: Closing: I usually have people lie on the ground in the dark, doing some breathing exercises, and then we form a circle while we do self directed gentle stretching, and we go round asking for feedback, what people liked, what they’d like to do more of, or whatever else they want to share. Then we tidy up together.
Frequently asked questions
Please be aware these are just my suggestions to give you something to think about cos that’s how we do it. Customise to your own conditions.
How long?
Our sessions are 2 hours long, as you can see from the example session more than half the session is dedicated to calming people down in a way that is still engaging. We do shorter ad hoc training sessions sometimes, but a slow paced longer session suits the teaching in my opinion. We have considered trying to run 4+ hour long sessions but we think that would terrify new people and those who see themselves as not fit enough to be in a martial arts class.
How much?
We pay for a room so we ask those who can afford for £20 per month for one class a week or £7 an individual session. No one is turned away for lack of funds. We use an Open Collective to keep the money fully transparent. I strongly recommend setting up monthly payment as it eliminates the worry of having not enough people to pay for the sessions in quieter periods once you have enough people paying monthly to cover the costs.
How often?
The more hours of dynamic play together you get the faster you will learn. However we are mostly very busy organisers and activists, so we train mostly once a week plus in the park when it’s good weather (British conditions being what they are). What’s amazing is that despite training far less than the average martial artist new members are improving incredibly quickly. At various times over the past 8 years we have done more sessions, and hopefully will again, but we’ve always maintained one session.
Where?
Anywhere really, but if you are somewhere like these god forsaken isles then booking a room is crucial to be able to train regularly. Otherwise outside is a perfectly good place to start. Remember your material conditions shape everything, and must be taken into account. Diversity is good though!
What equipment?
Given the focus on material conditions, the LMA approach has a tonne to say about equipment. Suffice to say here that when you understand that the person’s internal sense of safety is linked to their ability to learn – because the stress response is caused by a feeling of being unsafe – whatever can make you (and your partner!) feel more safe will help both of you learn. This leads to the understanding for example that you should try to always train kicks with elbow pads, as it will make the kicker’s toes safer, and therefore make them feel safer and more relaxed as they throw them, leading to better control.
Who the fuck are you?
I’m just someone who has trained for a long time, albeit sporadically. For many reasons I really struggled to improve at the different gyms I trained at. I’ve never claimed to be a great fighter, but i’ve improved much more in my thirties than i did in the periods when I was training in my teens and twenties. LMA has greatly improved my relationship with the world, and I want more people to look into it.
Is this a self defense class?
No. There’s far too much to say about this so I tried to stay away from the topic here. As Sam says: Self-defense is an infinite matrix. It’s a promise no one can keep. All I’ll say for today is that if the self defence people can’t see the value in at least implementing some of the learnings presented here then I just shrug on that one. We learn movement skills, wrestling, striking, self regulation, breathing, processing dangerous information under stress, balance and more. Hopefully some of those could also come in handy for you in a sticky situation but that’s just a side benefit of having a great time with your mates.
Conclusion
Antifascist mobilisations are a numbers game. It’s not about a handful of antifa supersoldiers with the GREAT MAN KNOWLEDGE who will protect the HELPLESS IMMIGRANTS, FEEBLE WOMEN and PATHETIC QUEERS. Its about having thousands of bodies blocking the far right. When we outnumber them a hundred to one, its a steamroll that becomes a street party and a great chance for recruitment. The fash proceed to tear each other to shreds. Job done. Otherwise it becomes at best a weird cop-mediated-shouting-match or worse a violent clash that sends many comrades home with physical and mental injuries, some of whom may never go out to protest again. For what exactly? To show that we ‘opposed them’ at a demo that no regular person even knows happened and will be basically forgotten in a few years even by half the people there?
The way to outnumber them by the thousands every time is to have trust networks deep into society, not just activist subcultures. Building community isn’t a tag line, its social infrastructure that allows us to respond locally to the world around us. Its the local cafes, the drag king nights, the WWE shows, the food coops, the singing groups, the allotment crews, the park football teams and everything else. People do things week in and week out because they are fun, because they bring joy and friendship and trust. Fear is a poor substitute. Antifascism is truly the friends we make along the way. So get out there and play!
