Assembly Project

If you had to guess what “the defining movement of the next five years in Western democracies” would be, the far right would appear a sure bet. But in a piece from few weeks back in The Ecologist, Roger Hallam suggests it could be something else: “Radical, assembly-based political parties”.

For those who don’t know, Roger Hallam is a founder of two controversial protests against climate change: Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil. Hallam is currently serving a five year prison sentence for involvement in a Just Stop Oil protest that blocked a motorway, one of the longest ever given in the UK for a non-violent protest.

Among the protest movements that Britain saw in the 2010s, XR stood out for their determination to occupy spaces, a spirit that has since been continued by Just Stop Oil. I sympathised with their desperation to have something done about climate change, but was unsure if they were helping; a pollster found that while many sympathised with XR, most disapproved. What’s clear is that like most protest movements of that decade, they didn’t achieve their goals. But perhaps some good did come out of those protests, especially because of the role that XR activists had in the now-stirring assembly movement.

Instead of protests, Hallam has lately been calling for assemblies. So much so that two months ago, he announced to The Ecologist that he would cease contributing there unless 100 signed up to start mini-assemblies. As he discussed here, these are like people’s assemblies but among a smaller circle rather than inviting the wider public. A month later, he announced that he would continue contributing, as 200 had signed up. He also announced a book on the revolutionary potential of assembly democracy, to be titled Out of Nowhere: Assemblies and Revolutions.

What interests me the most in his recent article is when he reveals research findings on how much potential assemblies have to spread, although the details are missing about where it came from. The linked excerpt from his book matches with the instructions provided by Assemble and XR.

The results are eye-opening:

• One hour of promotion (door-knocking, stalls) leads to one person attending a local assembly.
• More than half of those who attend donate.
• 60 per cent sign up to help promote future assemblies.
• With 7-8 iterations of this model, you can reach the 15,000 votes needed to win a UK parliamentary seat.

Does this sound possible? I think Hallam is onto something. We live in an age when the small can go to big very quickly. And my limited firsthand experience promoting assemblies suggests that “one hour of promotion” could if anything be underestimating how easy it is to attract people to assemblies. More on that in my next post.

Does this sound like something you’d like to do? If so, go to Assemble for instructions. At the moment, they are hosting a welcome call every Thursday evening, accessible from the ‘Events’ section of their website. While Assemble is a British campaign group, their calls can still be informative if you live in another country. The welcome call I joined had two guests from the Netherlands.

Many new, transformative ideas start out among people whose radical beliefs landed themselves in prison — freedom of religion, votes for women, gay rights… They often start out with less support than what assembly democracy has now. Radicals are not always right. But a society that ignores what they say is always wrong. Sometimes, they come up with ideas like these.