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Sam here again with another edition of LMA Talk, where I discuss my thoughts about building the Liberation Martial Arts curriculum and really everything I've learned from running the Southpaw project over the years.
When the Southpaw project first started back in 2018, rather than just being a place for lefties to talk about martial arts, I thought if we were to take socialism and Marxism seriously, we had to apply them to how we think about physical movements and the pedagogy around martial arts.
If we were to take Taoism seriously, then frameworks had to be stretched, adapted, and applied broadly. From this flexible framework, I could see that the UFC is to MMA what the NFL is to football. It's top-down. The movements and behaviors you see in the octagon emerge from the material conditions of the cage as well as the political economy of the UFC.
Even before Southpaw, as an athletic trainer and martial artist, I was already writing about material conditions and political economy as they pertained to training. Capitalism and really Western hegemony want you to believe everything is about ideas in your head, and so long as you want something, you can make it happen.
However, all the scientific literature and real-life experiences showed that people will be healthy if the conditions to be healthy are there. If the conditions for better eating are there, people will eat better. If the conditions for more walking are there, people will walk more. If the conditions for biking are there, people will bike more. If schools feed kids for free, fewer kids will starve.
Making it all about ideas in your head, idealism, sounds nice in theory, but in practice, it's often cruel. Idealism in the world is often victim-blaming. So, if this was true for health and physical activity, why wouldn't material conditions and political economy apply to martial arts training or just learning, teaching, parenting, and skill-building?
Then, I thought about how to reimagine the teaching and training of martial arts. If we take organizing seriously, then the instructor should be more like an organizer— someone who organizes, designs, and facilitates. If we take Paulo Freire seriously, then we must think about the oppressor's theories on learning and the banking model and throw them away.
If we take Frantz Fanon seriously, we have to think about the influence of coloniality not just on teaching and learning but also on the body and how we think about movement, skill-building, and "talent."
If we take the ancestors seriously, we have to think about wayfinding. If we take Western hegemony and capitalism seriously, we have to think about how we mistake colonial practices as features of the universe. We assume they are "natural" rather than something that's been foisted upon us and beaten into us.
I couldn't go back to the standard Western ways, and all the recent scientific literature on motor learning (how we develop physical skills) confirmed my observations. My experience and the experience of fellow LMA practitioners confirmed the same.
Liberation Martial Arts needs to live in the material world, not just in theory, and the results have blown us away. Results are a byproduct of proficiency, and for us, proficiency is a byproduct of joy, support, and fun.
You really don't need to tell us about the standard Western methods. We know them better than you. The LMA approach is not a system we grew up in; it's a system we adopted because we recognized the problems of the methods we learned in the Imperial Core, and even to make that recognition took years of unlearning.
Sure, people can recognize problems when it comes to the government or capitalism, but applying that recognition to learning, motivation, and how we think and move proved difficult even for radicals. Maybe compartment by compartment or single domains, people could see an issue, but seeing it as overarching, seeing that anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism meant challenging not just some things but everything, literally everything, is difficult.
We still get resistance from some radicals who push for the colonial ways. They won't say it explicitly, but there is this tacit underlying belief you need a taskmaster to learn anything and that people only work hard when you make them. It's deeply ingrained.
With regard to new research and even older underlying research, white Western academics won't frame it in radical and Marxist terms (even when much of the research originated with Marxists in the Soviet Union). They'll sterilize it, compartmentalize it, and deradicalize it. They won't point the finger at coloniality and capitalism, but they will however, agree the current methods are oppressive and abusive and broadly say they're Western methods and not natural to the rest of the world. Listen, it's not natural for anyone.
They will look at how the non-Western world went about learning but won't speak about how they lost those methods. Rather than making it about liberation, they're making it a performance and growth hack to increase productivity of labor, including athletic labor. They're using it to train cops and the military. If you're a radical and interested in challenging the status quo, you're much better served following LMA literature rather than the neoliberal application of radical knowledge.
Nonetheless, this conclusion that standard Western conventions and thinking don't work is across the board, from parenting, mental health, and education to how we even acquire physical skills. Parent-led, instructor-led, instruction-led, and technique-led are damaging and ineffective because they force the learner to conform to the methods rather than the methods conforming to the learner—conforming the fish to the tree, rather than the learning environment to the fish; conforming the feet to the shoes rather than the shoes to the feet.
They're called methods, but they're really conventions because a method, in theory, is flexible and adaptable, whereas conventions are not. This is just The way rather than the Way.
I have severe scoliosis, arthritis, trauma, chronic pain, training injuries, and other debilities. I may also be undiagnosed neurodivergent. I say undiagnosed because it's hard and expensive to get a diagnosis as an adult on Medicaid.
Movements and practices have to conform to my conditions, both mental, physical, and cultural. I spent most of my entire life in the conventional Western training system, and trying to conform myself to that system, superstructure, and prescribed movements only led to injuries and trauma, both mental and physical. Injuries happen when things aren't right for you. As one practitioner put it, we need LMA to heal our relationship with martial arts. That's real. Martial arts doesn't always save us from trauma, just as PE classes don't often make us healthier. In practice, they most often cause trauma.
Learning and skill development must be about the individual, their peers, and the conditions. So many domains and so much research all say the same thing.
I've been saying these things for years (literally). Maybe decades. But sometimes, it takes a million tries before people can finally hear us past their colonial conditioning. If we are to take self-determination seriously, you're not going to hear anything I have to say about Liberation Martial Arts until you're ready.
To access the Liberation Martial Arts curriculum and contribute to the sustainability of this project as my family and I navigate some recent health and financial challenges, consider upgrading your membership. If you've been putting it off, now would be a great time to sign up. Find other ways to support us here. – Sam
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(I write daily about martial arts and other topics from a liberatory perspective. If you like my work, upgrade your subscription. You can also support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation on Ko-fi. Find Southpaw at its website. Get the swag on Spring. Also check out Liberation Martial Arts Online.)
LMA Talk 4: It's Always Been Material Conditions (Audio + Transcript)