Assembly Project

I’ve written earlier about an article Roger Hallam wrote on the revolutionary potential of assemblies. I’ve more recently been listening to his podcast, Designing the Revolution, mostly from 2023 with some more scattered episodes since. Though it appears to be aimed at starting an environmental activist group, it has important lessons for starting a people’s assembly.

For those who don’t know, Roger Hallam is a British activist who has previously been a founder of two controversial environmental protests, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. It was for his work with the latter that he was sentenced to five (now reduced to four) years in jail, one of the highest ever given out in this country for a non-violent protest. More recently, he has shifted his emphasis from creating protest movements to starting assemblies. He is due to release a book on assembly democracy, and it will likely contain much material discussed in these podcasts.

Jail hasn’t stopped Hallam from continuing his research into historical movements of revolution and protest and producing the Designing the Revolution podcast in the last two years. Hallam argues that the conditions are developing for a revolution, thanks especially to the climate crisis. Wisely, he argues that a revolution is not necessarily a good thing, only that it is something inevitable that we should prepare for.

There is a lot to listen to. The early episodes are dominated by climate doom and gloom. If you are turned off by that, you can skip and start with Chapter 5 (“So What’s the Plan?”). Even David Wallace-Wells, no slouch to climate pessimism, has argued that Hallam overstates it. But as Hallam gradually reveals in the podcast, he is no defeatist. And I agree that the possibility of revolutionary upheaval needs to be taken seriously.

I’ve listened to the end of the original 12 chapters (17 episodes), which is followed by episodes explaining concepts and lessons for aspiring revolutionaries and activists need to understand. It’s clear that he has read a lot about historical disruptions and he is good at explaining concepts and using them to underpin what he suggests as the course of action. A journalist from The New Republic summarises his philosophy:

Movements must dedicate themselves to nonviolence, for spiritual as well as strategic reasons. Typically, only highly disruptive protests, maintained over time, can force change on a Western regime. Like business start-ups, movements need to experiment, learn from failure, and rapidly iterate. And finally, they need to strike a careful balance between accountable leadership and individual empowerment by allowing a small group to make the big decisions—to create the “DNA”—and then giving participants maximum autonomy within those guidelines.

While I’ve tended to assume Extinction Rebellion was yet another disorganised protest rabble, I was fascinated to hear of how it had been more organised and ingenious than I realised, especially during its early rise.

The medium of the podcast means it takes longer to explain points even without overt meandering. Sometimes he colours it with stories from his own experience in activism. It can be dry and theoretical when he doesn’t. While podcasting services like Spotify provide AI-generated transcripts, it would be helpful to see them converted into essays.

Proximity

Two concepts stand out as being particularly important to organising. The first is proximity, the subject of Chapter 8:

So that could be time, something happening now, and then something else happening in five minutes rather than five or ten days’ time. Proximity in terms of space, something happening here in this cell, in this jail with me, rather than happening in another jail or another country. And then this emotional proximity, which is a little bit more sort of vague, but it means that there’s some connection between two things, two people, because of some emotional content, something that arouses attention, as you might say.

This may sound like combining several different things at once. The point is that an assembly or activist group isn’t quite the same thing as the sort of band society that humans are designed to live in, so what’s important is that it resembles one as closely as possible. There are three tips that emerge:

For starters, advertise a short time in advance. Campaigning less than a week before is implied to work better. This appears to have been the problem when I took part in a door-knocking campaign for an assembly in Salisbury. It got an astonishing response. Many people I spoke to on the doorstep wanted to come and signed up, but none of them came. There was a gap of a few weeks between the two, allowing plenty of time for people to become detached from it, even if they didn’t outright forget.

Secondly, design your meetings to bring people together. Hallam recalls two meetings of university activists he went to in a short space of time, with two different formats and two different results:

• One meeting used a format where people sat round tables in small groups, implicitly encouraged to socialise with each other. This was coupled with added social touches such as a volunteer to welcome people at the door and going off to the pub afterwards. People enjoyed the meeting and most went on to the next one.
• Another meeting was more like a traditional political meeting. People sat in rows and listened to speakers, followed by an open-ended Q&A session where most questions came from a few people. There was no follow-on, so most didn’t go to the next one.

Research on jury trials suggests that seven is the ideal size for a discussion group, so 6-8 is a good ballpark to aim for. If it’s smaller, you don’t have so many perspectives. If it’s larger, it becomes long, unwieldly or dominated by a few assertive speakers.

Thirdly, have a good follow-up plan. This addresses the challenge of persuading people to come to future assemblies. Hallam argues that the event should clearly mention the next meeting and establish its purpose and discusses an example of a plan for follow-up contact:

[W]ithin 24 hours, the people receive an email. They receive a telephone call. During the meeting, they’re given a piece of paper with the times and places of the leafleting and the next meeting. So they can stick that on the fridge. They’ve got a physical thing and what have you. And on the day of the next meeting, they get text in the morning to remind them.

Sociability

In Chapter 9, Hallam introduces another concept, sociability, though it does overlap with points he already made when talking about proximity.

As humans, we are social creatures. Like our ancestors in band societies, we want to belong to a small-ish social circle. Hallam also mentions the concept of a meaning system, that we crave a way of thinking that can “provide purpose, identity, respect, and such like.” A sense of meaning and purpose beyond what we’re encountering physically.

So it is no surprise that a successful activist group or assembly needs to provide a social experience. But more surprisingly:

50% of people aren’t actually that bothered about what the meeting’s about. They’re going for sociable reasons. They’re not going for political reasons, as you might say. So, for instance, they might be going because either consciously or subconsciously they want to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Maybe they, you know, often are going with a friend anyway, so they’re just supporting that friend. That happens a lot. Maybe they’re just feeling a bit depressed and they want to get out of the house. They want to make some connection with other people. 

The kind of activists who start an activist group often differ from most people in that they hold a strong opinion and usually a lot of knowledge on a particular topic where most people hold neither. It is thus easy to forget that most of the wider public do not think the same way.

This is good news for the assembly movement. It shows that even if assembly organisers tend to be activists of the radical left, you’ll be able to attract a variety of people. Even if the assembly is widely seen as having a politically-charged purpose, that doesn’t mean that the people who come necessarily will.

Hallam also touches on several topics relating to how people build a sense of social activity:

• Ritual. A repeated activity can deepen people’s sense of social ties.
• Disagreement. Hallam recounts how a talented campaigner fell out with a progressive group because he disagreed with their support for gay rights. That’s a shame because had he been more welcome, he might have changed his mind. This is something that left-wing groups typically struggle with more than right-wing ones.
• Overbonding. Sometimes sociability can go the other way, where a group becomes so tight-knit that it no longer accepts outsiders.

When a sense of social solidarity is established, it can have powerful results. Hallam notes how during the Arab Spring, stories of protestors being attacked did not scare others away from protesting but actually encouraged them to stand up.

Conclusion for now

In a future post, I’ll talk about lessons learned or themes raised by later episodes.