The assembly revolution

You may be relieved to know that my ultimatum last month paid off. I asked 100 readers of The Ecologist online to sign up for a mini-assembly. We got 200. So thanks to all of you who committed to this world-shattering process. 

Your individual actions are not just a drop in the ocean, but a crucial part of the democratic wave of change we are creating. Well, “maybe”, I hear you say. 

A friend recently told me that assemblies are a bit of a “flavour of the month” at the moment. The problem with a word like “assembly” is that people think it’s just a thing—one thing amongst the thousands of ideas we are bombarded with in our information-saturated society. 

Instinct

But assemblies— communities coming together to discuss what is going on and what needs to be done—are not just a modern trend. They are as old as the hills, with a rich history of at least 10,000 years of shaping political change.

More to the point, they are the central social form of radical and revolutionary political change—much more important than individual action or top-down leaders telling people what to do routinely. Just see the examples of the Mondragon Cooperative or the Rojava Revolution. They are, then, in our present context, the real deal.

In 2018, I told The Guardian that massive civil disobedience on climate would happen within two years. Of course, I didn’t mean it was guaranteed. I meant that the social form was ready—that if the right people planted the seed, it could take off. That’s exactly what happened when XR’s co-founders made the prediction come true in 2019.

I could feel it. But this wasn’t just vague intuition.

Now, I’ll make another prediction: Radical, assembly-based political parties will be the defining movement of the next five years in Western democracies. I can feel this, too. And this time, I have more than instinct to back it up.

Chaos

Alongside civil disobedience, the social form of assemblies has now been developed to the point where it can take off. Of course, the context is enormously fertile for a seed to be planted and nurtured, with disillusionment and a sense of betrayal higher than ever since World War II.

As many of you know, my big thing is that the devil is in the details. That is what I want written on my grave. There are slapdash conversations and then there are organised, revolutionary assemblies. 

To create the latter we need to attend to both micro-design and sequencing to help them lead to a concrete pathway to power: local, national, and then international system change. A fundamental shift in the way our society operates, towards a more just and equitable system.