Assembly Project

When people come together in small groups to discuss what matters to their community.

I’ve been reading lately about the French Revolution and seeing so many parallels to politics today, from the fracturing and paralysis of the elites to the weather problems. Are we on the cusp of a revolution? It is hard to say. In foresight, revolutions look impossible. In hindsight, they’re inevitable.

One lesson of France is that a revolution is often far from a good thing. But even if it isn’t, it is futile to try to stop it. Instead, a better example to learn from is how Britain and America’s parliaments helped them avoid a similar upheaval. We should prepare for the change that is coming, by finding new ways of doing democracy and spreading them widely.

The Community Assembly Project (CAP) is one of several projects by Assemble, a British campaign group which promotes democracy through citizens’ assemblies and people’s assemblies. Besides the House of the People and the planned work with Your Party, they have started the CAP to spread local people’s assemblies more widely. It could well tie in with Your Party, but they are prepared for the scenario that the latter won’t go anywhere.

How does a movement spread? In the current age, it is often assumed that the answer is to secure backing from powerful figures like wealthy donors or political parties or to go viral on the internet. But there are also innovative organising methods without their drawbacks that have been trialled by a new generation of protest movements, like Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil. Roger Hallam was a co-founder and the most influential figure in devising their strategies, drawing on his extensive research into political organisation.

Even just earlier this year, I dismissed XR as yet another dead-end protest movement. It has dawned on me since at how incredible it was that they mobilised so many people to engage in disruptive protests rather than merely standing in a public square, and I’ve read more about their innovative organising methods. In the last few weeks, I’ve had a few chances to speak with Hallam and Assemble, to hear about their plans with the CAP and methods of creating a movement. I believe that, while there may still yet be missing pieces of the puzzle, these methods could be revolutionary.

These methods work by creating a movement that can spread by growing exponentially. To go by the useful but rather unfortunate analogy of a virus, the movement needs an ‘R number‘ greater than 1. If it’s less than 1, it declines; if it’s greater, it grows explosively. In a hypothetical scenario, if every participant could bring in one new participant each week, the movement would have millions of participants in about 5 months. Just like how Covid threw countries into lockdown less than two months after the first cases.

Reaching that point requires a set of conditions to be in place, keys as I might call them. There are maybe 10-20 known conditions but likely others that we have yet to discover. It may take a bit of experimentation to find the remaining keys to unlocking change.

This is what they’ve learned so far.

Getting the team together

The first challenge, and the one that has stumped me so far, is finding a team to run assemblies. They have been trialling their methods in Brixton, a neighbourhood of inner south London. A once troubled neighbourhood that you may have heard of in The Clash’s song “Guns of Brixton” or news stories of riots in the 1980s, it has since had a similar trend of gentrification to the East End. Based on their experience there, two hours of promotion work brings one person to the assembly. Perhaps it would be easier in neighbourhoods with a different social make-up.

As a result of their experiments so far, Assemble take the view that it is better to have a busy, committed and well-bonded local team, in order to build and maintain its momentum, tying in with Hallam’s concept of proximity. It would need 4-6 seriously committed people to start with and they should aim to run 10 assemblies, 1 every week (or perhaps fortnight). They should aim to do 40 hours of work per week, which would thus bring in about 20 people. Assemble are hoping to pay staff who can help, and once assemblies are held, they can hopefully recruit some new volunteers from among their participants. Previous assembly projects have often struggled to maintain this momentum because they relied on existing community organisers who were busy with other things.

Besides keeping the momentum of organisers running assemblies, what about keeping the momentum of locals coming to them? There is no instruction yet on how often to hold assemblies in the neighbourhood, or how the concept of proximity might fit in with this. For the team to hold assemblies every week, this will likely mean running them in more than one neighbourhood or at least bringing in different people, rather than trying to get the same people in each week.

One idea comes from organisers of a similar German project who used a ‘pudding and fork’ event to kick things off, in which people come to sit down and eat pudding. By starting out with a clearly non-political event, they can drum up interest in something more political.

Promoting the assembly

One of the biggest reasons why past assembly projects had lost momentum is that they only attracted the people with the most left-wing views, turning into a left-wing talking shop rather than fully representing the community. So you need to promote a local assembly in a way that can attract everyone.

It also takes a lot of work to get people to come. Door-knocking (canvassing) is the best way to do it. It costs no money, unless you’re using paid staff, but takes a lot of time. It should be done in close proximity to the event, maybe in the week before.

A few tips:

• No-one wants to have a visitor come to their house to explain to them what to think. Your goal when door-knocking is to connect with them and listen to what they have to say.
• The first 10 seconds of the interaction are crucial. They may be frosty at first, but this should ease off. Ask them about what matters to the local area, then explain what the assembly is about, and they may become very talkative!
• Make it clear that you’re part of a well-organised movement. I’ve more recently done ‘putting out a feeler’ door-knocks and found there was a lot less interest than ones where I was part of a larger movement.
• Ask what local issues matter to people. As usual, activists often want different things to the wider public. The CAP is on a democratic mission, but most people will be less concerned with an abstract concept of democracy than bread-and-butter issues like housing and the cost of living. Once you can get them talking about these things, it can be very hard to shut them up!
• Get the data. Throughout the project, keep track on things like how much door-knocking you’ve done. This can give you some idea of what methods work or don’t work, and how much activity you need to do to promote an assembly.

It can be good to have local councillors at an assembly, as long as they understand its purpose.

One people are signed up, add them to a WhatsApp group. There is still some uncertainty about what is good practice for these groups. They are useful for announcing events, and not useful for contentious discussion.

Holding the assembly

When it comes to holding an assembly, getting the fine details right is crucial. There is more information on it in this document, but I’ll put a few crucial tips below.

Firstly, you should hold assemblies in local neighbourhoods rather than city centres, otherwise working class people will be reluctant to come.

When someone arrives, they should be welcomed straight away, “Hi? Who are you? What brings you here?” They should be offered tea, coffee and biscuits (cupcakes are also nice), then introduced to someone to chat with. These may be small details, but they matter.

The assembly should have two rounds of discussion on the small group tables, each about half an hour, followed by time for feedback to the wider group. A good suggestion for an initial assembly is to ask: “What’s good about [the local area]?” for the first topic and “What’s not so good?” for the second.

You should make it clear that the assembly project needs money and new volunteers so that future assemblies can be run, so encourage both during the assembly. Probably more than once during the course of the assembly. If this is done properly, the number of participants who donate is typically about a third.

After your first assembly, hold later ones on subjects that people have highlighted as issues. After 10 assemblies, hold a bigger one.

Turning the assembly into action

Another critical problem with earlier assembly projects has been that they have lacked have a pathway to doing something next.

These are a few routes that assemblies can turn their work into action:

• Civil disobedience campaigns
• Starting community projects such as mutual aid groups
• Standing in elections, perhaps following the “flatpack” model

Do something that will cause a stir and get you noticed. People would rather see lively and rapid action than years and years of meetings, and civil disobedience is the only real way to do that. But how do you persuade people to do it?

For one thing, avoid activist language and framing. Propose it with the kind of language that the wider public use. Don’t suggest a protest to “Occupy” the council chambers but to have a “Sit down” in them. Instead of speaking of a “Council tax strike” say, “Don’t pay your council tax!”. As Hallam describes it, it’s about “Translating their emotion”.

Furthermore, don’t force people to take part in disruptive protests like these. Make it clear that those who don’t fancy it are still welcome to come to future assemblies.

My thoughts

Overall, this is very promising.

Certainly, these discussions did resonate in explaining why previous assembly projects had lost momentum. The Salisbury project I was involved with was an enjoyable democratic experiment, but the organisers have not organised another for four months, in part because they’re an existing community group that is busy with other things. While they are still working to ensure there are some good outcomes, we haven’t seen the kind of impactful action needed to take on something like an unpopular housing development on a flood plain.

Holding 10 assemblies in 10 weeks sounds like a lot. As noted above, while Assemble have some idea on how the proximity principle applies to assembly organisers, it is not yet clear on how it would apply to participants. Could you really have the same regular people coming weekly to a meeting on local politics? Is that too frequent?

My view on this is that, at an absolute minimum, you should do one event per month. If this is too frequent for holding meetings on local politics, you could perhaps hold less political “neighbourhood catch-up” events as a filler, to make sure you hold something once a month. This is what an assembly group in Exeter are doing. But Assemble are clear that you shouldn’t allow all your assemblies to turn into the latter kind. There is still some uncertainty here.

Another interesting question is whether counter-revolutionaries could use these tactics. But there are many catches. Like Roger on his podcast, I have no qualms about talking openly about these plans; I believe the possible gains of spreading hope to more people outweigh whatever risks that opponents will read about them.

The political right is often, well, conservative, and the far right is especially unlikely to use this kind of organising. The latter think they’re winning, and in the mainstream political arena, they are. They’re not going to rethink their methods. And as Hallam as pointed out elsewhere, the far right cannot pull off pro-social organising. Their organising results in hierarchies that are rigid and brittle, easily collapsing into infighting. If they tried a pro-social approach, they’d probably find out that they’re more concerned with the cost of living than immigration. The centre right has used pro-social organising brilliantly in the past, but it is now dying.

I’ll second the advice to concentrate your promotion efforts in the week before. The Salisbury project did its door-knocking three weeks before, and despite a positive response and many sign-ups, none of them came.

Then there is a question: perhaps we shouldn’t be using the term “assembly”. For many, it may evoke something like school assemblies or radical student movements. Perhaps it’s time to call it something a “neighbourhood chat” or “gathering”? This is something I’ll discuss in a future post.

Interested? Go to Assemble’s welcome call, currently running every Thursday.