Assembly Project

Roger Hallam is not known for optimism. The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is quite the fire-and-brimstone preacher when it comes to climate change. But when I heard him a few weeks ago on a call with Assemble and like-minded activists, he sounded genuinely hopeful about the assemblies that they were about to launch, partly to assist the new party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

In the weeks before, Hallam had been released from prison and published an opinion piece in the New Statesman, “My advice to Jeremy Corbyn” on the new party. I highly recommend this essay (also available here) to anyone interested in the new party. It explains his key points plainly. Many observers are predicting it will fail, and they have good reason to, even without the reports that the party is already beset with divisions and not managing to offer its 800,000 sign-ups anything to do. But it could be, as Hallam suggests in his new book, “the biggest moment of our lifetime” that could even lead to “global political revolution”. Sounds impossible? Maybe it is, but not as much as it sounds.

That 86-page book is titled Your Party, Grasping the Enormity of the Moment. By his own admission, it has been rushed. I wondered if I’d read a pirate copy by mistake, because even the e-book title had a typo (“Moemnt”) and the typesetting failed to put proper spaces between some words. The latter made it a headache to read, and if that’s a genuine edition, I hope later ones correct it. But I can forgive him for rushing it out. Big things may be about to happen.

Hallam discusses what the new party would need to do to become a game-changer. While the essay hits the key points, the book reveals some of his deeper thinking behind it. The last quarter, when he discusses the steps for how a new party should organise, will be where readers can get excited.

Foundations

Hallam devotes an early section to political philosophy, studying the political theory of Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher who became a major influence on the New Left. As Hallam admits, this is a surprising move for an activist who has always tended to focus on being practical, designing organisations based on what works. I’m still not quite sure how it fits in given that the concepts are not mentioned much later on. But it is intriguing that a practical man sees value in theory, much like the Rojava revolutionaries.

The key ideas are:

• Negative dialectics: Dialectics is the practice of figuring things out through back-and-forth debate, a common practice in many fields like politics and history but not like the scientific method. Whereas some thinkers like the Marxists saw dialectics as a way of constructing something new (and likely utopian), Adorno discussed negative dialectics as being about discarding the wrong ideas. One reason Hallam admires Adorno is that he remained steadfastly opposed to the tyrannies of both the left and right in the times of the world wars, perhaps because he avoided utopianism.
• Totality: Adorno argues that there should be no “totality” — no system that claims to explain everything. He argued that systems like these lead to domination. The ideologies of totalitarian regimes are the classic example, and once politicians started saying “There is no alternative”, you could argue that neoliberalism had become one too.
• Identity: Adorno used the term “identity” to refer to a specific belief or way of thinking that a totality attracts people in. The challenge then is to find a way to see the world outside this reductive way of thinking, so people may have a revelation like “I am not a left/right-wing voter. The left-right spectrum is a reductive way to describe the complexity of our views.”
• Concept: Adorno saw concepts as like using a map to understand a territory. The map might be useful but it is not the same thing, and expecting the territory to conform to the map is reductive.

He sums up the implications of Adorno’s ideas afterwards:

Look at the world, critique it, go beyond the standard scripts and moves, without fear or favour, and then act, and then do it again. In the teams I work with, we call this “good enough to go”. We are enthusiastic about repeated iteration. The learning never stops. The humility stays in place. This then is the method. So let us do it and see what we can come up with.

Problems

Hallam notes the widespread and mounting dissatisfaction with democracy and suggests that it’s because of the gulf between the people and politics. We have a representative democracy, but it doesn’t represent us. I recently wrote a piece of satire titled “What if politics were a tennis club?“, to show how bizarre electoral politics is compared to how we run other democratic organisations.

As Hallam puts it:

The form of the ‘political party’ in the Western world is a state of living death. It only exists because whatever comes next is being stopped from being born. And if whatever it is that has to be born does not come into being soon then, as we know, another model is happy to take the reins — a delightful choice of different fascistic irrationalisms. The agony of the situation is that you cannot see what you cannot see.

People are itching, scratching, scraping for an alternative. Many are becoming easy pickings for a demagogue who promises to end the bickering by silencing his opponents. But if a more inspiring alternative could be widely seen, the result will be explosive.

Hallam makes the case that the alternative ought to be having decisions made by ordinary citizens’, selected by sortition (random selection), as they do it far better than our current politics. You know, like what we’ve been doing with criminal trials for hundreds of years? But it raises an interesting question: does this mean democracy without elections?

Hallam seems uncertain about this. In some later episodes of his podcast that I have not yet had time to review, he discusses ideas for a new system of government. He wants sortition councils to take over the main legislative work, but he suggests that an elected body may be necessary to oversee the executive functions of the government.

This would be sensible. As Daniel Chandler argues in Free and Equal (2023), despite his support for citizens’ assemblies, there is a strong case for retaining elections, because they are one of the few ways that a democracy can give the masses a direct say and stake in politics (as do referenda, which have drawbacks of their own). Without anything like this, the government may look illegitimate. Even Ancient Athens, which had only a few elected posts, got around this problem by offering other ways for (rich male) citizens to participate. One other reason to retain elections is avoid the mistakes of past revolutions, like France and Russia, where the revolutionaries tried to change too much too soon.

The example of Frome is worth mentioning here. In this Somerset town, Independents for Frome (IfF), a motley alliance of independents who’d never been in politics before, took over the town council and did a good job running it. IfF beat out the traditional parties and eventually discouraged them from even bothering to stand candidates. This is much like the postpartisan democracy that Hallam advocates.

In the case of Frome, the town council is still elected as the law requires, but the two most recent council elections were uncompetitive. The town council was effectively being chosen by IfF’s selection committees. The elections may have become pointless, but this is no bad thing. As I argued here, if Independents for Frome lose support, elections would allow them to be replaced. This still doesn’t solve the participation issue, but IfF gave the locals new ways to participate in the governance of their town, such as a participatory budgeting scheme.

Precursors

But whatever we ought to do with elections, the fact is, a new party will have to be able to win them. So how do they go about it? Can we learn anything from previous movements?

One thing that has puzzled me about people’s assemblies is why the whole idea feels so new. Of course, public meetings aren’t new, but the way they have been run to connect and organise the whole community is.

There had been earlier projects. Hallam was involved in Radical Assemblies, which around 2015 ran assemblies in London and at first drew thousands. But over the next six months it gradually declined. The fundamental problem was, “It was not clear what was the plan”. Organisers weren’t properly trained on what to do, a major problem since a successful assembly depends on getting a lot of details right.

Hallam had also previously led a campaign group that organised rent strikes, and it ran into a similar ennui. He noted that over the years after he moved on, the movement lost momentum, and its chapters turned into talking-shops instead of doing more rent strikes. A movement like Your Party will not immediately think about its long term prospects, but it is important if the party is to last more than a year.

There has to be a balance: a movement needs leadership while avoiding its pitfalls. Hallam makes a clear point about “difficult” people. On his podcast, he suggested that movements should also have a council selected from its members through, you guessed it, sortition. This should provide oversight, cutting through the factionalism and infighting that often plague organisations, especially radical ones.

And then there’s the question of getting the face-to-face meetings right. It is especially important to understand his concepts of proximity and sociability. As maligned as it is, Hallam argues that new communication technology is a bonus here if used in the right way. It allows you to keep people connected to your project outside of face-to-face meetings, overcoming a major limitation for political organising in the days when only letters and face-to-face meetings were possible. Nevertheless, the culture must hinge on face-to-face meetings.

Solutions

Assemblies are not some new fangled election ‘technique’ some weird person like me has dreamed up. They have been the single most important form of human deliberation for tens of thousands of years. It’s just that we have been looking at our screens so much lately, [we’ve] forgotten what living a human life entails.

From page 69 onwards, Hallam offers a plan for how Your Party could launch and grow. This requires a two-pronged strategy:

1. Regional video calls for members of the movement.
2. Local video calls for members, using an online version of the people’s assembly format.
3. In the mean time, sessions are held for “training trainers”, who then train local members to do tasks like canvassing and running assemblies. This is also an opportunity to do the necessary task of spreading the ideas to other countries.
4. Members gather in face-to-face people’s assemblies.
5. Members canvass local houses and run a survey (“a game changer”), asking residents what matters to them.
6. Members hold people’s assemblies in which the wider public are invited.
7. The new invitees are encouraged to get involved in the party’s activism.
8. The assemblies decide on five policies or issues that matter to them most.
9. Higher-level assemblies selected by sortition gather participants from local assemblies and use them to come up with policies for a national and other higher levels.
10. The party sends its vast army of members canvassing at election time, which helps counter a lack of support from traditional power players like the media and wealthy donors.

He estimates that these methods could generate a million extra sign-ups. The exact number is less important than the point, that the growth could be explosive (like Covid!) rather than steady. This is certainly something Your Party should pay attention to, now that its sign-ups appear to have plateaued.

I think he is right too in arguing that an “army” of door-knockers who canvass on behalf of the new party can overcome problems such as a lack of support from the traditional power structures and make it possible to enact policies previously considered too radical. That still leaves the question on how to fund them, but a better democratic culture could make that possible too.

On the call with Assemble, you could tell that some of this movement design philosophy had influenced them, whether or not it came from Hallam. Assemble’s new push to launch local people’s assemblies will start with a training of trainers. We’ll see how it goes, but I think Hallam is right to be optimistic.