July 1, 2025 • 34 mins
Mia continues her conversation with Margaret Killjoy about how to actually run a meeting and the role of proper meetings as the tools that build a democratic society.
https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rules-order
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
As media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi everyone, it's James here and I have an update
on Primrose and her daughter Kim. Primrose, if you do
not remember, was one of the people I met the
Darien Gap, whose story we shared in our dairy En podcasts,
and we later updated people that she has arrived in
the United States.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Have an update.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
From her lawyer here. I'm going to read that out now.
Primrose and Kim were detained by Ice approximately two weeks
ago and sent to a quote family detention center in Texas. Yes,
that's right. It's country put single mothers and children seeking
refuge in prisons due to a settlement agreement that's still
in place involving miners only being able to be detained
(00:40):
for twenty days. Primrose and Kim may have an opportunity
to be released. They are, however, in need of housing funds.
The lawyer has been raising funds for their legal fees,
but we'll gladly allocate some of these funds so that
she can at least have a place to stay for
the rest of July. The rest we will figure out later,
one day at a time. Thank you for your general Ross,
(01:00):
and Primose and Kim thank you as well. Obviously, I
would add that I thank you. It means so well
to me when people support these things, and you know,
we use our little podcast to help people. The address
to donate is gofund dot me slash d d A
zero to CC seven. That will of course also be
(01:22):
in the notes for this podcast. You can just click
it on your phone. Give a few bucks. It's vital
that she gets some money to make rents so she
can stay in the same place as the address that
she's given to the court. If you'd like to contribute,
that would mean a lot to all of us.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Thank you. Welcome to it could appen hear a podcast
about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and in
a moment we'll be continuing our episode about how to
run a meeting, which is one of the fundamental tools
of building democracy and free societies. Here we go, okay,
(01:56):
so other roles. So we talked about that. That that
was a long digression about the concept of stack taker,
which is at a very simple level, you write the
names down, you call the names in order. Yep. Yeah,
we're gonna move on to some of the other ones.
Those are like the two I don't know if most
important is the right word Funnily enough, stack takers, not
(02:17):
the one. I thought that digression was going to happen
on that was. I thought that was gonna be the
last one we're gonna get to.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
But oh no, taker, Oh.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is vibes checkers.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Oh shit, the vibes checker. Okay, but okay, okay, please continue.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Okay, let's do timekeeper. Timekeeper extremely important person you want
someone with like a watch or something, and the timekeeper's
job is to give people reminders of like how much
time things are taking. So you know, a thing you
can do is like, okay, so we know we have
this much time allocated for something, right, so we have
twenty minutes to talk about this, Okay, so like ten
minutes and you go, we have ten minutes left, we
(02:52):
have five minutes left, we have like fifteen minutes left. Yeah,
this is really important. And at the end of it,
the time keeper's job is to go like, hey, this
is our allotted time. Do we want to keep talking
about this and use more time or do we want
to move on? Yeah, And that's a really important role.
It's also kind of why you want to generally have
like an idea of how long you want to talk
about something in the agenda. It's also worth noting that
(03:13):
like this is all guidelines, right, Like these are all.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
MIA's guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this?
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Oh god, no, we'll take it. We'll take you on
more digression. Digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the
A with the circle around it is from a per
Dawn phrase that's the circle is actually an o because
the original thing was anarchy. The original saying is anarchy
is the mother of order. Yeah, and that's that's where
that comes from. So I was gonna make it like
(03:38):
MEA's VIA's like procedure disorder whatever joke, but it's like, no, no, no,
this is actually like anarchy is order, baby.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I believe in an organized society. I just believe in
an organically organized society. That is from the to use
the Zapatista phrase from the bottom and the left yep okay.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So that that's timekeeper the note taker. Sometimes you need
to decide whether you want notes of your meeting.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, it depends on how crime you are.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah. I hear this all the time from people making
jokes about the scene for the wire that I've never
seen the Wire, but everyone's making jokes as the scene
for the Wire, Right, guy, guys, are you taking notes
of their criminal continracy? So okay, are you going to
have a note taker? And then secondly like, okay, the
note taker takes notes on what's being talked about. I
(04:22):
actually this is also mea going into a little bit
more advanced stuff. I actually like the practice of kind
of rotating this throughout the meeting because the problem with
being the note taker. So if you're the timekeeper, right,
you can be involved in the conversation. Stack taker is
also hard to But the thing about the note taker
and it's you know, if you get good enough at this,
you can rotate all of these roles during the meeting
(04:45):
so that everyone has a chance to participate. So you
don't just have a group of people who perpetually can't
be in the meeting. And so note taker is a
thing that you can pretty easily just like pass to
someone else and be like, hey, you're not the note taker,
so the person who's being the note taker can like say.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Things yeah, although okay, so there's two weird funny things
about this one. Sometimes people who tend not to want
to talk much in a meeting, but also maybe have
an attention span where they would prefer to be doing
something at all times, prefer to be note taker.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
But famously, the International Workingmen's Association or whatever, the the
First International was a organization of a lot of different
stripes of leftists. And someone went to someone's friend's apartment.
This anarchists went to this anarchist friend's apartment and was like, Hey,
I want to invite my friend to this meeting. And
this guy answers the door and his name's Carl Marx
(05:38):
and he's like, oh, well so and says not here,
and he's like, all right, well you can come too.
So an anarchist invites Marx to the International. I don't
have my notes in front of me, don't at me.
But then Marx goes and he becomes the note taker,
and by means of that takes a minority position which
within the group and makes it the major already position
(06:01):
by controlling the way that a lot of the media
and expression and stuff around this was because Marx was
a good writer. Yeah, and for better or worse, I
have my opinion about whether it's for better or worse,
and so there's a power within note taker that actually
is a reason to rotate this task.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
On the other hand, if you're like not worried about that,
you can just have a person who's like, I just
really want to be the one who takes notes. It
really depends on everything's going to be contextual. I just
wanted to tell that story about Marx.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No, like this is this is the story of how
Marx became Marx by taking a note taking job and
then becoming the person who would write the declarations for
the organization. Yeah, we should note like this is also
kind of how Stalin took power was by being the
person in the back of the room. He didn't say
anything and keeping track of what everyone was doing and saying,
and you being able to manipulate like the inner workings
(06:49):
of these sort of parliamentary procedures that the Bolsheviks were using.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
That's what the Robert not of the rules of order,
but of the behind the bassards was saying about, Oh,
the Cambodia man, the horror Bolga man and killed everyone
pullpop pot. It was that he he was the quiet
guy at the back.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yep, same kind of guy can be extremely dangerous. The
guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous.
Quiet person also can be very dangerous.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, just never trust anyone, that's the answer.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Wait, no, hold on, hopefully we're not producing pulepot in
these meetings. Okay. So the last like official role that
I want to talk about, and there's a lot, there's
like a million other roles that people use. I want
to talk about the vibes checker. So this is the
one that's kind of not obvious from like the name,
but the vibes checker is someone who actually has a
(07:37):
really really important role, and your role is to figure
out like, is everyone in the group okay, does this
meeting feel okay?
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:46):
And is just something we need to do about it?
And some of this is like okay, everyone is clearly
really tired, let's go get lunch. And that's like a
pretty easy sort of vibes checker thing. But then also
like I don't know, this is partially a facilitation job,
Like I don't know, if someone says something racist in
me in a bunch of people are uncomfortable, it's like
now you're suddenly glad you have the person whose job
it is to be like, hey, what the fuck? Like
(08:07):
and that's also that's like obviously, like that's a blatant
enough thing that everyone can be like hold on, hold on,
like don't like say a slur or whatever. But like,
you know, the vibe checker's job is if there's a
lot of people who are uncomfortable with something, or if
something like they're kind of there or something is going wrong,
or if people are checked out, or if like stuff's happening.
(08:28):
Sometimes this is behind the scene things. Sometimes this is
like explicit, like you make it, you bring it to
the group to be like, hey, this is okay, we
need to address this. Yeah kind of thing. I don't know.
It's a hard role to sort of like explain it's fuzzy.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, I mean, but it's it's in the name. How
are the vibes? And vibe is a fuzzy word, and
you know it's a the word that people are going
to interpret in different ways.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, and like I as a very sort of materialist,
godless atheist, I it's like, okay, this is how people
are feeling.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
People also take this in sort of when new agy directions.
People take it and like but like you know, like
the important thing about this is right you can feel
in a meeting when it's really tense or when things
are like just weird. Everything feels off. Everyone is like
pissed off or tired or like just grossed out or
(09:24):
like you know, and that's this person's job. This is
why I'm putting it in here because it's it's one
of these roles that like, idally, I guess this person
doesn't do anything for a whole meeting, but they're just
they're sort of watching it. I mean, like it's it
can't be good at the interviewing, but it's especially important
if something is going wrong in ways the group isn't addressing.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Totally this, it is good to have someone who's ready
to step up and say, yeah, this is this is
what's going on. Can I make a pitch for another role?
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Have a name for this role. The very first activist
meeting I went to when the world was young, during
the alt globalization movement. I went into a meeting for
New York City indie media and I had no idea
what was happening, but it was a public, open meeting,
and I was a young activist anarchist or whatever, and
I went to this thing and someone sat next to me,
(10:15):
knew that I was new, and sat next to me
and explained what the fuck was happening.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
That's a good role.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
And I don't know if I would have become an
activist if that person hadn't done that, because I went
in and it was the middle of a contentious meeting
about people talking about some stuff that was pretty important,
and I had no idea what was happening, and someone
explained it to me. I think it is very important
to have someone know who is new and help them
(10:43):
feel comfortable. You could call it like an usher if
I was going to have a word, But it's like,
because I'm really into this idea that our movements don't
need gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help
people figure out find their seats and figure out how
to plug in onboarding. But then the other thing I
want to say is that with roles, the larger and
more normal a meeting, the more likely you need these
to be formalized roles. But I also think that these
(11:04):
as generalized skills can be dispersed through Like I think
that a lot of groups, especially if they're kind of
comfortable with each other, you maybe have a rotating facilitator.
You maybe have a stack taker and you maybe are like,
who's taking notes right now? But stuff like timekeeper and
vibes check might be a thing that everyone feels empowered
to do. I think that understanding these as roles is
(11:27):
different than saying at the top of the meeting, this
is the way it is done. You must assign these things.
It is always contextual based on the meeting.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, the range inside of the meeting structure of like
how formal and informal it is changes a lot. And
that yeah, that changes you know, that changes the roles,
That changes how all of this stuff works totally. And
that's one of the most important things about this is
like being flexible, because the point of a meeting is
not everyone followed the exact parliamentary procedures. The point of
(12:00):
a meeting is we did the thing we came there
to do, or sometimes we did we did a different thing, right,
But it's like we all did something together and that
thing happened, but we figured out how to make that
thing happen. And that's the actual important part. The content
of the meeting is what's important. Not all of the
structure is to enable the content. It's not the other
(12:20):
way around it totally, right, totally and like, yeah, I
don't know, like if you have a timekeeper and someone
else they're doing time stuff too, right, Like that's a
significantly better result. Then. Yeah, we just kept talking, So.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Okay, can I make one more pitch about the thing
that's important at a meeting?
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Food. I think that it's not always going to be
appropriate in every specific situation, and there's a lot of
things around dietary restrictions and all of these things, but
making the meeting feel like a place that is worth
going to and the thing that like, I think food
is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort
of again invisibilized. Yeah, feminine labor things goes a really
(13:11):
long way towards making everyone feel comfortable. It also helps
people's attention spans and blood sugar, like whether every meeting's
a pot luck or whether everyone just brings snacks, or
whether it's at someone's house and they're like, fucking I'm hosting,
I'm gonna make a bunch of food and you know
whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, I've been theorizing this for a while that like
we need because like obviously a lot of this technology
has been worked out already, but also we have so
much further to go in order to like be able
to make decisions together in a free society, And like,
I think we need to just have an initiative of,
like how do we make meetings fucking rip. One of
my ideas has always been, like, you have a meeting
(13:49):
that's just like the standing barbecue meeting that happens like
every like it's like the endless meeting, and it's like, okay,
you have it at like yeah, this time, and there's
just like a barbecue and everyone one does barbecue stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
And yes, a standing thing where if you want to
come and like and then okay, just to keep talking
about some of the stuff childcare. Childcare, you think when
you mentioned at the beginning being like making sure that
the space is accessible to everyone. And there's a lot
of stuff that gets forgotten about. In particular, I would
say that single parents are often forgotten about. And I
think that having or parents in general, or children in
(14:23):
general are often forgotten about. And I think that having
a plan in place for accessibility of all kinds of
different people often includes childcare.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
I used to do this. Oh that's cool, Yeah, that's
like one of the things that I did for some meetings,
and like, yeah, there are like meetings that happened. They're
like tens meetings that happened because like people stayed and
played with everyone's kids. It was a good time.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
And yeah, there's also this idea where sometimes meetings people
can come in and out of the society that I
want to live in has neighborhood assemblies that then move
up to larger structures and make decisions right and in
those there's also this thing where it's like you don't
always have to go to meetings. There's a thing that
about democracy that people don't quite always get, which is
that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do for
(15:05):
each other is give our agency freely to other people
to make decisions for us that we trust. Working groups
are actually a good, big part of this where I'm like,
I don't actually want to have a say in every
single decision that affects me. I want to be able
to have a say in every single decision that affects me. Anyway,
I'm again going kind of meta on this.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Sorry, no, no, well this is important, right, you know.
And also like doing the childcare was part of that
because like, yeah, it meant like, you know, I was
kind of I was like trusting my people in the
group to like do the meeting without me while I
was just sort of like taking care of like just
taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful
(15:45):
thing and it worked really well. It fucking ripped.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah, and you can build multi generational movements, which are
the only movements that accomplish That's not true. Sudden movements
also accomplish things. But when I look at some of
the real high water marks from the bottom and the
left organizing around the world, you're talking about people who
are drawn from hundreds of years of radical legacies, or
at least a couple of generations.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, speaking of generations, I don't know. I don't have
a good pivot into this, but okay, so we've been
talking a lot of about a lot of the technology
that's been used for meetings. I want to talk about
a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have.
When I originally was writing this, I was like, oh,
I could fit this whole, this whole section how to
run a meeting. This will be like this will be
(16:30):
like twenty minutes. Then I can have twenty minutes about
like the spokes councils of twenty minutes about general assemblies,
and we're not like an hour, we're not this is
like this episode, Margret, and we have not even started talking.
So okay, that's going to be another the general assembly
episode is going to be another episode completely in and
of itself. But I do want to talk about spokes
councils because this is the thing that I've been finding
really really useful that I think people just don't know
(16:53):
about anymore. And because people have lost the knowledge of this,
a really valuable organizational tactic has been lost. So Okay,
the thing that a meeting is there to do is
so a group of people can come together and make decisions.
But how do you make decisions between groups or And
this is also often more important less than having like
cause you know, a lot of spos counsuls aren't usually
(17:16):
supposed to be like we're all making like we're all
sort of like this is like a binding decision handed
down by like spost council, right. This is also a
really useful coordinating tool. Yeah, and this is what it's
you know, what it's like actually designed for is how
do you get groups to sort of talk to each
other and work with each other in a way that
also lets them continue to be like their own groups
(17:38):
and not you know, a sort of.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Like subservient to the larger coalition. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, And you know, the answer to this turns out
as a technology that was developed. Actually don't know the
history of the post council. I mean it's been around
for like a long time.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
I've done either like at.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Least like thirty forty years in anarchist circles, but it
hasn't really made it out of them. And so spokes
council is a meeting of groups. And so it's it's
a meeting of spokespeople. Right, So your group sends like
one or two people to a thing. You send like
a couple of people, and all of the other groups
send some people and you come talk about a thing.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
And this is really useful for a number of reasons. One,
it's a way for different kinds of groups to interface
with each other in ways that they usually don't. So
this can be anything from like an affinity group to
like an NGO, to like a union. It can scale
between different kinds of things. It can theoretically you can
do this with like you you're like fucking spokes council
(18:36):
could theoretically send a person to another spokes council totally, right,
And this is you know, we'll get more to this
a second, right, but like, like like this is a
way for a bunch of different types of organizations to
come together and do something. And it's a way for
them to coordinate with each other. It's a way from
other share information, it's a way for them to and
this is like one of the sort of secrets of
organizing is that like actual organizing is built through personal
(18:58):
relationships with people knowing each other. Yeah, and so this
is a way for like people to like meet each
other and get to do things. There are different kinds
of these. A traditional one is like, Okay, there's like
a thing happening right, Like there was a there was
a giant protest, and like a bunch of people who
are going to be a bunch of the different groups
and organizations, infinity groups and whatever we're going to be
at this thing come together and they're like, Okay, how
(19:20):
what are we doing? How are we going to sort
of do this and how do we coordinate this with
each other?
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
And yeah, Mark I assume you've been in like a
million of these, you.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Know, I have been in a lot of spokes council meetings.
I've been in a fewer of them, and I think
you're right, there's been a bit of a drop off. Yeah,
it's funny. When you were talking earlier, I was like, oh,
I haven't done this in a while. I actually do go
to meetings every week, but I like, but I used
to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests, and
that is a thing that I used to have more
(19:51):
direct experience with. Yeah, and so I don't want to
be like, all people stop doing it because I don't
totally know, because I'm not totally plugged in. But I
do think the altigl mobilization movement of like nineteen ninety
nine to two thousand and three or so is where
a lot of modern protest tactics and stuff were developed,
or rather it came to a head. The tactics had
been developed for decades by various different groups, and actually
(20:13):
a lot of the technologies around spokes councils and stuff
they come from a lot of different sources, including I
think anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. But I'm not
one hundred percent certain about that. But a lot of
the alter globalization movement stuff comes from the Zapatisas in Chiapas.
I know you didn't ask for history lesson, and I'll
speed run it.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
No, no, no, no, this is good though.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
You know, the folks in Chiapas and the Zapatisas have
developed a lot of different ideas about how to have
bottom up democracy, and they've been moving through different ones.
They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they
were doing about two years ago, in twenty twenty three.
But they went around the world and built organizations by
(20:51):
saying everyone, send your people. Were getting together, the People's
Global Alliance, like all of these like you know, Global South.
I'm putting air quotes here. We're getting together and we're
building direct action movements together. And that is where the
ultra globalization movement comes from, at least as much as
anything else. And some of that is that technology of saying,
send your representatives and do this thing. But it's interesting
(21:14):
because in some ways it's actually just an upside down
version of parliamentary democracy, where theoretically we elect a politician
and they go speak for us. They don't that is
the concept behind a democracy. And so theoretically you can
send a delegate, and there's two ways of doing it.
(21:35):
There's a decision making larger body and there's a coordinating
larger body. And if you want to maintain every group's autonomy,
it is a coordinating body. You get together and at
the spokes council you say, the ten people I represent
who will remain nameless, are all willing to get arrested tomorrow,
and we're all willing to lock ourselves down. And someone
else will say, we don't want to get arrested. The
(21:57):
fourteen people that I'm representing kind of want to break
And then other people will be like, the fifteen people
that I represent kind of which y'all wouldn't break shit.
And you can get together and coordinate, and then the
breakshit people can be like, oh, okay, well we'll make
sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are,
and all of this stuff. And whereas a decision making
body would get together and your spoke would have a
(22:20):
mandate from your group, they would be empowered to make
decisions for everyone, knowing that the decision has to be
within a certain framework. And then basically when they're done,
you'd be like, Okay, you did or didn't succeed at
your mandate, We're gonna send someone else next time, or whatever.
So there's two different ways of doing spokes Council meetings.
I think one of the reasons that they fell out
of favor is that by and large, open organizing of
(22:43):
direct action has diminished in the movement because it may
or may not be legal to show up somewhere and say, well,
the fifteen people I represent want to break shit, or
even the fifteen people that I represent want to lock
ourselves down into big puppets with lock boxes, right and
disrupt global trade. Because of the ramping up of repression,
(23:04):
people have backed off of certain types of open organizing. Yeah,
I have opinions about that, but that's kind of I'm
actually not trying to tell anyone what to do about it.
But so I think that that's part of why the
spokes Council has a little bit diminished. And I actually
think that we just need to adapt the spokes Council
to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still
do them.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
So this is where we're getting this is this is
what I'm calling them bea technology which is there have
been spokes councils recently that are not like that are
not this, that are using the idea of the spokes
council but are kind of a different thing. Okay, because
there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form,
(23:42):
right of everyone sends their delegates together or whatever, like
everyone sends their like spokespeople. Yeah, but everyone meets each other.
You can also do this for like not planning a
direct action.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
And you can do this as a way to get
all of the different organizations of like affinity groups and
shit in a city talking to each other. Yeah. And
this turns out to be extremely useful.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
I've seen this a lot recently in sort of transorganizing,
where like all the trans different groups of the city
will be like, fuck it, we're showing up to a thing. Yeah,
this is a different thing that we will be talking
hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was
originally supposed to be part of this episode before I
realized that it was impossible to fit this into this episode,
which is that two episodes. But there's a really really
(24:26):
cool thing in Portland that was called the trans General
Assembly where they people were just like, fuck it, we're
running a general assembly for like all of the trans
people come. You can say things and everyone meets at
the end, and that was awesome. But you can do
this on a very, very on a targeted level with
like Okay, I know a bunch of different orgs that like,
for example, okay, we need to we need to coordinate
a response to like the situation of trans people in
(24:48):
the US. So you can go through all of your networks.
You can be like, okay, I know this person who
is in this org that does this thing right, and
you can bring all of those resources together and then
you can turn that into a spokes council. That's not
quite the same thing exactly as as the kind of
like direct action spokes councils that have been organized.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Right, it is closer to a general assembly maybe, but
maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, it kind of is, but it's well, so okay.
So the way I've been conceiving of it is like,
if you're specifically getting people together who are there as organizations,
it's a spokes council.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
If they're there as themselves, it's a general assembly. Oh
that makes sense even if they are sort of like
representing a thing. But like, yeah, like like the scopes
and who shows up to them were very different, I think.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Oh, and there's also fishbowls.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Well, what's a fishbowl? I actually I've heard this one before.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
A fish ball is a spokes council where everyone can
come and only the spoke can speak. Hmmm, so you
can look in on the fish. Oh that's what that's called.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Interesting?
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Okay, Yeah, anyway, which is a way to do it.
It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still
open meeting, but only but if only one person from
the group is empowered to speak, then it's not a
nightmare of trying to have six thousand people in a
room talk.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
The basic beating technology, all of these things can be
used for a whole bunch of different things in a
whole bunch of different ways that we haven't thought of yet.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
You could arrange trash pick up in a neighborhood. You
can make the government obsolete. Yeah, with meetings and spokes
councils and general assemblies and federations and all of these
levels of bottom up organizing. And there are places in
the world where people have done this.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah. And you know, if we want to close on
sort of like this is the political angle of this, right,
Like a free society is one that is structured like this,
where a bunch of where things happen by people coming
together to do them.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
And you can take the sort of like I don't know,
I guess you'd call it the workerrist angle of like
I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant,
yeah right. So the way the brace treatment plant is
run is that the people who do waste treatment have
their own like workers counselor or whatever, right, and they
decide how they're going to do it, and they go
do it. Right.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Almost every I would say, every real revolution and revolutionary
movement in history is doing a version of this. You
can even look at the Soviet concept. The Soviet was
the decision making body, it was the assembly yep, and
all power to the Soviets with this slogan that literally
(27:31):
was inverted by the Bolsheviks, where the entire idea was
a democratic but revolutionary movement. And this happens constantly even
when societies break down on some level naturally, and a
ton not all, a ton of indigenous societies this is
the default model. And so you know, in Chiapas with
(27:52):
the Zapatistas, what happened was is that you had this
like Marxist Leninist army and they were like, oh, we're
going to do this, think this way. And the indigenous
people who lived in Shapas were like, that's not how
we do things. And they're like, this is how we
do things. And then those Appatistas, who are good people,
were like, you're right, that's how we do things, you know,
and they like built up this model. And you have
a similar thing happening with the area called Rojeva in
north east Syria, where like basically people are like, actually,
(28:15):
the indigenous Kurdish model of doing things is much more
this egalitarian method and democratic method and then okay, and
the other thing is you can do it in the
worker's model, but there's also people who've messed around with
it and done things like you know what, maybe the
school isn't run by the teachers. Maybe the school is
run by the teachers, the parents and the students, And
maybe the food distribution center is a combination of the
(28:37):
workers of the food distribution center and the people who
make use of it. So maybe the trash pickup is
both the workers and the people who need the services.
But the specifics almost they do matter, and we can
but we don't know, we don't know the actual formulation.
But this is the core of bottom left organizing and
(28:59):
it is a full thing. And it is funny how
it all comes down to meetings and making sure that
there's food and childcare and not one person taking up
all the time, which is really hard when you podcast
for a living.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
I will tell you that, yeah, but I mean this
is like, you know, I have had to learn to
shut the fuck up in meetings. Yeah, need to, and
but doing it has made meetings better. It's great you
can learn to shut the fuck up someone else says
the thing and you don't have to say yeah. But
then also, I do want to put this out right,
the things that we're describing here, right, it's okay, Like
how do you need a beach or you need food,
you need child care, you need structure that make sure
(29:30):
one person isn't running the thing. Yeah, this is the
entire political situation of the modern United States. Right. We
are trying to get food, we are trying to get childcare,
we are trying to have a place to do our thing,
and we're trying to have to not be ruled by
like a fucking king Yeah, totally. Again, this all seems
like very very basic like shit, right, But if you
don't have this, and this is a problem that the
(29:51):
US has constantly your purtuse movements, It's like most Americans
don't have a democratic tradition, right, and so when sh
happens and there's suddenly riots and they're suddenly like mass protests,
we've just break out. Right, people don't know how to
make democratic decisions, so they don't, right, and that means
that nobody's talking to each other. That means that everyone
is locked in these very small circles of extremely violent paranoia.
(30:15):
And that sucks. And we can avoid that by knowing
how to do democracy, because that's fundamentally what running and
meeting is. This is what democracy looks like. Yeah, And
I also want to say one more thing. This is
a podcast that would probably could I could have used
the facilitator, especially on my end right now, because unmedicated
(30:37):
mia is a fucking trip. But like you know, when
we talk about sort of are how do you apply
this to your sort of broad vision of society, right,
and it's like, Okay, anarchist, how do you run USAID? Right?
Because like, yeah, like the destructure of USAID is going
to kill an unbelievable number of people because people are
getting ach of v vaccians right right. And the way
you run that is the way that you run a meeting. Right.
(30:58):
The workers who pre deuce yeah to act, who are
the people who actually figure out how to make an
HIV vaccine? Distribute it, distribute information about it. Those people
form fucking form fucking councils, and they form fucking meeting groups.
They and they work in collaboration with the people who
need them, and that is how you build society, right.
(31:21):
It's like David Graeber's thing was was like the ultimate
hidden truth of this world is that it is something
we make, and we could just as easily make differently.
And when he says something we make, he was talking
about in a more abstract sense, but like we do
literally make it. Like all of this stuff is the
product of stuff that we did, right, Like we all
physically built every aspect of this world, right, Everything, everything
(31:42):
that you see and touch and hear right now are
things that we designed and engineered and built and we
don't lose the capacity when we cease to be ruled.
We can still do that. And as long as we
have the ability to do democracy right and we have
the ability to make decisions with each other, we can
fucking do those things. And we can do them for
each other. Yeah, and not for a king. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
It's like people ask how would you make a distribute
insulin in anarchist society or an anti capitalist society or
a bottom up society, and you're like, well, we know
how to make and distribute insulin, and we just need
to change some of the social technologies that are doing it.
And I think we could probably do it better because
it's currently not working great, you know. And my other
(32:28):
like go to quote I love the graver quote is
the Derudi quote, anarchist general in Spanish of war. Probably
didn't actually say this, It was probably a journalist put
these words in his mouth, but we're not actually certain.
And he says, like the boot I'm paraphrasing, the bourgeoisie
can blast and ruin the world on their way out
of history. That's fine. Yeah, we the workers built all
of these cities. We can build We know how to
(32:52):
do that.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
The part of that I always stuck with me is
like I think the exact quote that I got was,
we are not in the least afraid of ruins. Yeah,
built this world and we'll do it again. Yeah and yeah.
So I don't know.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
I don't know these meding these episodes are gonna be called.
But if they're called, the answer is meetings. Comma.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Sorry, I think, Okay, I don't know who's gonna end
up me. The provisional title right now is the most
important organizing skill. You don't know, because unfortunately we do
need people to click on this and they won't if
it's a meeting.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Things of the answer is into this, Well, then that's
the monster at the end of the book.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Is that.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Uh, it's meetings all the way down.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, Margaret, thanks for thanks for talking with me about
the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Thanks thanks for having me, Thanks for talking about that stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, and this this has been it can happen here.
You can go out in your community and you can
do these things. You can force pokes, councils, you can
form assemblies, you can go work with the people around
you to do things, and you can use structures to
do it and you can change the world.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
The secret is to really begin.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Hell Yeah, it could Happen Here is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could
Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
As media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi everyone, it's James here and I have an update
on Primrose and her daughter Kim. Primrose, if you do
not remember, was one of the people I met the
Darien Gap, whose story we shared in our dairy En podcasts,
and we later updated people that she has arrived in
the United States.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Have an update.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
From her lawyer here. I'm going to read that out now.
Primrose and Kim were detained by Ice approximately two weeks
ago and sent to a quote family detention center in Texas. Yes,
that's right. It's country put single mothers and children seeking
refuge in prisons due to a settlement agreement that's still
in place involving miners only being able to be detained
(00:40):
for twenty days. Primrose and Kim may have an opportunity
to be released. They are, however, in need of housing funds.
The lawyer has been raising funds for their legal fees,
but we'll gladly allocate some of these funds so that
she can at least have a place to stay for
the rest of July. The rest we will figure out later,
one day at a time. Thank you for your general Ross,
(01:00):
and Primose and Kim thank you as well. Obviously, I
would add that I thank you. It means so well
to me when people support these things, and you know,
we use our little podcast to help people. The address
to donate is gofund dot me slash d d A
zero to CC seven. That will of course also be
(01:22):
in the notes for this podcast. You can just click
it on your phone. Give a few bucks. It's vital
that she gets some money to make rents so she
can stay in the same place as the address that
she's given to the court. If you'd like to contribute,
that would mean a lot to all of us.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Thank you. Welcome to it could appen hear a podcast
about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and in
a moment we'll be continuing our episode about how to
run a meeting, which is one of the fundamental tools
of building democracy and free societies. Here we go, okay,
(01:56):
so other roles. So we talked about that. That that
was a long digression about the concept of stack taker,
which is at a very simple level, you write the
names down, you call the names in order. Yep. Yeah,
we're gonna move on to some of the other ones.
Those are like the two I don't know if most
important is the right word Funnily enough, stack takers, not
(02:17):
the one. I thought that digression was going to happen
on that was. I thought that was gonna be the
last one we're gonna get to.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
But oh no, taker, Oh.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is vibes checkers.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Oh shit, the vibes checker. Okay, but okay, okay, please continue.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Okay, let's do timekeeper. Timekeeper extremely important person you want
someone with like a watch or something, and the timekeeper's
job is to give people reminders of like how much
time things are taking. So you know, a thing you
can do is like, okay, so we know we have
this much time allocated for something, right, so we have
twenty minutes to talk about this, Okay, so like ten
minutes and you go, we have ten minutes left, we
(02:52):
have five minutes left, we have like fifteen minutes left. Yeah,
this is really important. And at the end of it,
the time keeper's job is to go like, hey, this
is our allotted time. Do we want to keep talking
about this and use more time or do we want
to move on? Yeah, And that's a really important role.
It's also kind of why you want to generally have
like an idea of how long you want to talk
about something in the agenda. It's also worth noting that
(03:13):
like this is all guidelines, right, Like these are all.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
MIA's guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this?
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Oh god, no, we'll take it. We'll take you on
more digression. Digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the
A with the circle around it is from a per
Dawn phrase that's the circle is actually an o because
the original thing was anarchy. The original saying is anarchy
is the mother of order. Yeah, and that's that's where
that comes from. So I was gonna make it like
(03:38):
MEA's VIA's like procedure disorder whatever joke, but it's like, no, no, no,
this is actually like anarchy is order, baby.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I believe in an organized society. I just believe in
an organically organized society. That is from the to use
the Zapatista phrase from the bottom and the left yep okay.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So that that's timekeeper the note taker. Sometimes you need
to decide whether you want notes of your meeting.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, it depends on how crime you are.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah. I hear this all the time from people making
jokes about the scene for the wire that I've never
seen the Wire, but everyone's making jokes as the scene
for the Wire, Right, guy, guys, are you taking notes
of their criminal continracy? So okay, are you going to
have a note taker? And then secondly like, okay, the
note taker takes notes on what's being talked about. I
(04:22):
actually this is also mea going into a little bit
more advanced stuff. I actually like the practice of kind
of rotating this throughout the meeting because the problem with
being the note taker. So if you're the timekeeper, right,
you can be involved in the conversation. Stack taker is
also hard to But the thing about the note taker
and it's you know, if you get good enough at this,
you can rotate all of these roles during the meeting
(04:45):
so that everyone has a chance to participate. So you
don't just have a group of people who perpetually can't
be in the meeting. And so note taker is a
thing that you can pretty easily just like pass to
someone else and be like, hey, you're not the note taker,
so the person who's being the note taker can like say.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Things yeah, although okay, so there's two weird funny things
about this one. Sometimes people who tend not to want
to talk much in a meeting, but also maybe have
an attention span where they would prefer to be doing
something at all times, prefer to be note taker.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
But famously, the International Workingmen's Association or whatever, the the
First International was a organization of a lot of different
stripes of leftists. And someone went to someone's friend's apartment.
This anarchists went to this anarchist friend's apartment and was like, Hey,
I want to invite my friend to this meeting. And
this guy answers the door and his name's Carl Marx
(05:38):
and he's like, oh, well so and says not here,
and he's like, all right, well you can come too.
So an anarchist invites Marx to the International. I don't
have my notes in front of me, don't at me.
But then Marx goes and he becomes the note taker,
and by means of that takes a minority position which
within the group and makes it the major already position
(06:01):
by controlling the way that a lot of the media
and expression and stuff around this was because Marx was
a good writer. Yeah, and for better or worse, I
have my opinion about whether it's for better or worse,
and so there's a power within note taker that actually
is a reason to rotate this task.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
On the other hand, if you're like not worried about that,
you can just have a person who's like, I just
really want to be the one who takes notes. It
really depends on everything's going to be contextual. I just
wanted to tell that story about Marx.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No, like this is this is the story of how
Marx became Marx by taking a note taking job and
then becoming the person who would write the declarations for
the organization. Yeah, we should note like this is also
kind of how Stalin took power was by being the
person in the back of the room. He didn't say
anything and keeping track of what everyone was doing and saying,
and you being able to manipulate like the inner workings
(06:49):
of these sort of parliamentary procedures that the Bolsheviks were using.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
That's what the Robert not of the rules of order,
but of the behind the bassards was saying about, Oh,
the Cambodia man, the horror Bolga man and killed everyone
pullpop pot. It was that he he was the quiet
guy at the back.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yep, same kind of guy can be extremely dangerous. The
guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous.
Quiet person also can be very dangerous.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, just never trust anyone, that's the answer.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Wait, no, hold on, hopefully we're not producing pulepot in
these meetings. Okay. So the last like official role that
I want to talk about, and there's a lot, there's
like a million other roles that people use. I want
to talk about the vibes checker. So this is the
one that's kind of not obvious from like the name,
but the vibes checker is someone who actually has a
(07:37):
really really important role, and your role is to figure
out like, is everyone in the group okay, does this
meeting feel okay?
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:46):
And is just something we need to do about it?
And some of this is like okay, everyone is clearly
really tired, let's go get lunch. And that's like a
pretty easy sort of vibes checker thing. But then also
like I don't know, this is partially a facilitation job,
Like I don't know, if someone says something racist in
me in a bunch of people are uncomfortable, it's like
now you're suddenly glad you have the person whose job
it is to be like, hey, what the fuck? Like
(08:07):
and that's also that's like obviously, like that's a blatant
enough thing that everyone can be like hold on, hold on,
like don't like say a slur or whatever. But like,
you know, the vibe checker's job is if there's a
lot of people who are uncomfortable with something, or if
something like they're kind of there or something is going wrong,
or if people are checked out, or if like stuff's happening.
(08:28):
Sometimes this is behind the scene things. Sometimes this is
like explicit, like you make it, you bring it to
the group to be like, hey, this is okay, we
need to address this. Yeah kind of thing. I don't know.
It's a hard role to sort of like explain it's fuzzy.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, I mean, but it's it's in the name. How
are the vibes? And vibe is a fuzzy word, and
you know it's a the word that people are going
to interpret in different ways.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, and like I as a very sort of materialist,
godless atheist, I it's like, okay, this is how people
are feeling.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
People also take this in sort of when new agy directions.
People take it and like but like you know, like
the important thing about this is right you can feel
in a meeting when it's really tense or when things
are like just weird. Everything feels off. Everyone is like
pissed off or tired or like just grossed out or
(09:24):
like you know, and that's this person's job. This is
why I'm putting it in here because it's it's one
of these roles that like, idally, I guess this person
doesn't do anything for a whole meeting, but they're just
they're sort of watching it. I mean, like it's it
can't be good at the interviewing, but it's especially important
if something is going wrong in ways the group isn't addressing.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Totally this, it is good to have someone who's ready
to step up and say, yeah, this is this is
what's going on. Can I make a pitch for another role?
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Have a name for this role. The very first activist
meeting I went to when the world was young, during
the alt globalization movement. I went into a meeting for
New York City indie media and I had no idea
what was happening, but it was a public, open meeting,
and I was a young activist anarchist or whatever, and
I went to this thing and someone sat next to me,
(10:15):
knew that I was new, and sat next to me
and explained what the fuck was happening.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
That's a good role.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
And I don't know if I would have become an
activist if that person hadn't done that, because I went
in and it was the middle of a contentious meeting
about people talking about some stuff that was pretty important,
and I had no idea what was happening, and someone
explained it to me. I think it is very important
to have someone know who is new and help them
(10:43):
feel comfortable. You could call it like an usher if
I was going to have a word, But it's like,
because I'm really into this idea that our movements don't
need gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help
people figure out find their seats and figure out how
to plug in onboarding. But then the other thing I
want to say is that with roles, the larger and
more normal a meeting, the more likely you need these
to be formalized roles. But I also think that these
(11:04):
as generalized skills can be dispersed through Like I think
that a lot of groups, especially if they're kind of
comfortable with each other, you maybe have a rotating facilitator.
You maybe have a stack taker and you maybe are like,
who's taking notes right now? But stuff like timekeeper and
vibes check might be a thing that everyone feels empowered
to do. I think that understanding these as roles is
(11:27):
different than saying at the top of the meeting, this
is the way it is done. You must assign these things.
It is always contextual based on the meeting.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, the range inside of the meeting structure of like
how formal and informal it is changes a lot. And
that yeah, that changes you know, that changes the roles,
That changes how all of this stuff works totally. And
that's one of the most important things about this is
like being flexible, because the point of a meeting is
not everyone followed the exact parliamentary procedures. The point of
(12:00):
a meeting is we did the thing we came there
to do, or sometimes we did we did a different thing, right,
But it's like we all did something together and that
thing happened, but we figured out how to make that
thing happen. And that's the actual important part. The content
of the meeting is what's important. Not all of the
structure is to enable the content. It's not the other
(12:20):
way around it totally, right, totally and like, yeah, I
don't know, like if you have a timekeeper and someone
else they're doing time stuff too, right, Like that's a
significantly better result. Then. Yeah, we just kept talking, So.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Okay, can I make one more pitch about the thing
that's important at a meeting?
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Food. I think that it's not always going to be
appropriate in every specific situation, and there's a lot of
things around dietary restrictions and all of these things, but
making the meeting feel like a place that is worth
going to and the thing that like, I think food
is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort
of again invisibilized. Yeah, feminine labor things goes a really
(13:11):
long way towards making everyone feel comfortable. It also helps
people's attention spans and blood sugar, like whether every meeting's
a pot luck or whether everyone just brings snacks, or
whether it's at someone's house and they're like, fucking I'm hosting,
I'm gonna make a bunch of food and you know
whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, I've been theorizing this for a while that like
we need because like obviously a lot of this technology
has been worked out already, but also we have so
much further to go in order to like be able
to make decisions together in a free society, And like,
I think we need to just have an initiative of,
like how do we make meetings fucking rip. One of
my ideas has always been, like, you have a meeting
(13:49):
that's just like the standing barbecue meeting that happens like
every like it's like the endless meeting, and it's like, okay,
you have it at like yeah, this time, and there's
just like a barbecue and everyone one does barbecue stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
And yes, a standing thing where if you want to
come and like and then okay, just to keep talking
about some of the stuff childcare. Childcare, you think when
you mentioned at the beginning being like making sure that
the space is accessible to everyone. And there's a lot
of stuff that gets forgotten about. In particular, I would
say that single parents are often forgotten about. And I
think that having or parents in general, or children in
(14:23):
general are often forgotten about. And I think that having
a plan in place for accessibility of all kinds of
different people often includes childcare.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
I used to do this. Oh that's cool, Yeah, that's
like one of the things that I did for some meetings,
and like, yeah, there are like meetings that happened. They're
like tens meetings that happened because like people stayed and
played with everyone's kids. It was a good time.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
And yeah, there's also this idea where sometimes meetings people
can come in and out of the society that I
want to live in has neighborhood assemblies that then move
up to larger structures and make decisions right and in
those there's also this thing where it's like you don't
always have to go to meetings. There's a thing that
about democracy that people don't quite always get, which is
that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do for
(15:05):
each other is give our agency freely to other people
to make decisions for us that we trust. Working groups
are actually a good, big part of this where I'm like,
I don't actually want to have a say in every
single decision that affects me. I want to be able
to have a say in every single decision that affects me. Anyway,
I'm again going kind of meta on this.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Sorry, no, no, well this is important, right, you know.
And also like doing the childcare was part of that
because like, yeah, it meant like, you know, I was
kind of I was like trusting my people in the
group to like do the meeting without me while I
was just sort of like taking care of like just
taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful
(15:45):
thing and it worked really well. It fucking ripped.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah, and you can build multi generational movements, which are
the only movements that accomplish That's not true. Sudden movements
also accomplish things. But when I look at some of
the real high water marks from the bottom and the
left organizing around the world, you're talking about people who
are drawn from hundreds of years of radical legacies, or
at least a couple of generations.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, speaking of generations, I don't know. I don't have
a good pivot into this, but okay, so we've been
talking a lot of about a lot of the technology
that's been used for meetings. I want to talk about
a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have.
When I originally was writing this, I was like, oh,
I could fit this whole, this whole section how to
run a meeting. This will be like this will be
(16:30):
like twenty minutes. Then I can have twenty minutes about
like the spokes councils of twenty minutes about general assemblies,
and we're not like an hour, we're not this is
like this episode, Margret, and we have not even started talking.
So okay, that's going to be another the general assembly
episode is going to be another episode completely in and
of itself. But I do want to talk about spokes
councils because this is the thing that I've been finding
really really useful that I think people just don't know
(16:53):
about anymore. And because people have lost the knowledge of this,
a really valuable organizational tactic has been lost. So Okay,
the thing that a meeting is there to do is
so a group of people can come together and make decisions.
But how do you make decisions between groups or And
this is also often more important less than having like
cause you know, a lot of spos counsuls aren't usually
(17:16):
supposed to be like we're all making like we're all
sort of like this is like a binding decision handed
down by like spost council, right. This is also a
really useful coordinating tool. Yeah, and this is what it's
you know, what it's like actually designed for is how
do you get groups to sort of talk to each
other and work with each other in a way that
also lets them continue to be like their own groups
(17:38):
and not you know, a sort of.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Like subservient to the larger coalition. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, And you know, the answer to this turns out
as a technology that was developed. Actually don't know the
history of the post council. I mean it's been around
for like a long time.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
I've done either like at.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Least like thirty forty years in anarchist circles, but it
hasn't really made it out of them. And so spokes
council is a meeting of groups. And so it's it's
a meeting of spokespeople. Right, So your group sends like
one or two people to a thing. You send like
a couple of people, and all of the other groups
send some people and you come talk about a thing.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
And this is really useful for a number of reasons. One,
it's a way for different kinds of groups to interface
with each other in ways that they usually don't. So
this can be anything from like an affinity group to
like an NGO, to like a union. It can scale
between different kinds of things. It can theoretically you can
do this with like you you're like fucking spokes council
(18:36):
could theoretically send a person to another spokes council totally, right,
And this is you know, we'll get more to this
a second, right, but like, like like this is a
way for a bunch of different types of organizations to
come together and do something. And it's a way for
them to coordinate with each other. It's a way from
other share information, it's a way for them to and
this is like one of the sort of secrets of
organizing is that like actual organizing is built through personal
(18:58):
relationships with people knowing each other. Yeah, and so this
is a way for like people to like meet each
other and get to do things. There are different kinds
of these. A traditional one is like, Okay, there's like
a thing happening right, Like there was a there was
a giant protest, and like a bunch of people who
are going to be a bunch of the different groups
and organizations, infinity groups and whatever we're going to be
at this thing come together and they're like, Okay, how
(19:20):
what are we doing? How are we going to sort
of do this and how do we coordinate this with
each other?
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
And yeah, Mark I assume you've been in like a
million of these, you.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Know, I have been in a lot of spokes council meetings.
I've been in a fewer of them, and I think
you're right, there's been a bit of a drop off. Yeah,
it's funny. When you were talking earlier, I was like, oh,
I haven't done this in a while. I actually do go
to meetings every week, but I like, but I used
to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests, and
that is a thing that I used to have more
(19:51):
direct experience with. Yeah, and so I don't want to
be like, all people stop doing it because I don't
totally know, because I'm not totally plugged in. But I
do think the altigl mobilization movement of like nineteen ninety
nine to two thousand and three or so is where
a lot of modern protest tactics and stuff were developed,
or rather it came to a head. The tactics had
been developed for decades by various different groups, and actually
(20:13):
a lot of the technologies around spokes councils and stuff
they come from a lot of different sources, including I
think anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. But I'm not
one hundred percent certain about that. But a lot of
the alter globalization movement stuff comes from the Zapatisas in Chiapas.
I know you didn't ask for history lesson, and I'll
speed run it.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
No, no, no, no, this is good though.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
You know, the folks in Chiapas and the Zapatisas have
developed a lot of different ideas about how to have
bottom up democracy, and they've been moving through different ones.
They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they
were doing about two years ago, in twenty twenty three.
But they went around the world and built organizations by
(20:51):
saying everyone, send your people. Were getting together, the People's
Global Alliance, like all of these like you know, Global South.
I'm putting air quotes here. We're getting together and we're
building direct action movements together. And that is where the
ultra globalization movement comes from, at least as much as
anything else. And some of that is that technology of saying,
send your representatives and do this thing. But it's interesting
(21:14):
because in some ways it's actually just an upside down
version of parliamentary democracy, where theoretically we elect a politician
and they go speak for us. They don't that is
the concept behind a democracy. And so theoretically you can
send a delegate, and there's two ways of doing it.
(21:35):
There's a decision making larger body and there's a coordinating
larger body. And if you want to maintain every group's autonomy,
it is a coordinating body. You get together and at
the spokes council you say, the ten people I represent
who will remain nameless, are all willing to get arrested tomorrow,
and we're all willing to lock ourselves down. And someone
else will say, we don't want to get arrested. The
(21:57):
fourteen people that I'm representing kind of want to break
And then other people will be like, the fifteen people
that I represent kind of which y'all wouldn't break shit.
And you can get together and coordinate, and then the
breakshit people can be like, oh, okay, well we'll make
sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are,
and all of this stuff. And whereas a decision making
body would get together and your spoke would have a
(22:20):
mandate from your group, they would be empowered to make
decisions for everyone, knowing that the decision has to be
within a certain framework. And then basically when they're done,
you'd be like, Okay, you did or didn't succeed at
your mandate, We're gonna send someone else next time, or whatever.
So there's two different ways of doing spokes Council meetings.
I think one of the reasons that they fell out
of favor is that by and large, open organizing of
(22:43):
direct action has diminished in the movement because it may
or may not be legal to show up somewhere and say, well,
the fifteen people I represent want to break shit, or
even the fifteen people that I represent want to lock
ourselves down into big puppets with lock boxes, right and
disrupt global trade. Because of the ramping up of repression,
(23:04):
people have backed off of certain types of open organizing. Yeah,
I have opinions about that, but that's kind of I'm
actually not trying to tell anyone what to do about it.
But so I think that that's part of why the
spokes Council has a little bit diminished. And I actually
think that we just need to adapt the spokes Council
to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still
do them.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
So this is where we're getting this is this is
what I'm calling them bea technology which is there have
been spokes councils recently that are not like that are
not this, that are using the idea of the spokes
council but are kind of a different thing. Okay, because
there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form,
(23:42):
right of everyone sends their delegates together or whatever, like
everyone sends their like spokespeople. Yeah, but everyone meets each other.
You can also do this for like not planning a
direct action.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
And you can do this as a way to get
all of the different organizations of like affinity groups and
shit in a city talking to each other. Yeah. And
this turns out to be extremely useful.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
I've seen this a lot recently in sort of transorganizing,
where like all the trans different groups of the city
will be like, fuck it, we're showing up to a thing. Yeah,
this is a different thing that we will be talking
hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was
originally supposed to be part of this episode before I
realized that it was impossible to fit this into this episode,
which is that two episodes. But there's a really really
(24:26):
cool thing in Portland that was called the trans General
Assembly where they people were just like, fuck it, we're
running a general assembly for like all of the trans
people come. You can say things and everyone meets at
the end, and that was awesome. But you can do
this on a very, very on a targeted level with
like Okay, I know a bunch of different orgs that like,
for example, okay, we need to we need to coordinate
a response to like the situation of trans people in
(24:48):
the US. So you can go through all of your networks.
You can be like, okay, I know this person who
is in this org that does this thing right, and
you can bring all of those resources together and then
you can turn that into a spokes council. That's not
quite the same thing exactly as as the kind of
like direct action spokes councils that have been organized.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Right, it is closer to a general assembly maybe, but
maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, it kind of is, but it's well, so okay.
So the way I've been conceiving of it is like,
if you're specifically getting people together who are there as organizations,
it's a spokes council.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
If they're there as themselves, it's a general assembly. Oh
that makes sense even if they are sort of like
representing a thing. But like, yeah, like like the scopes
and who shows up to them were very different, I think.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Oh, and there's also fishbowls.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Well, what's a fishbowl? I actually I've heard this one before.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
A fish ball is a spokes council where everyone can
come and only the spoke can speak. Hmmm, so you
can look in on the fish. Oh that's what that's called.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Interesting?
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Okay, Yeah, anyway, which is a way to do it.
It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still
open meeting, but only but if only one person from
the group is empowered to speak, then it's not a
nightmare of trying to have six thousand people in a
room talk.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
The basic beating technology, all of these things can be
used for a whole bunch of different things in a
whole bunch of different ways that we haven't thought of yet.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
You could arrange trash pick up in a neighborhood. You
can make the government obsolete. Yeah, with meetings and spokes
councils and general assemblies and federations and all of these
levels of bottom up organizing. And there are places in
the world where people have done this.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah. And you know, if we want to close on
sort of like this is the political angle of this, right,
Like a free society is one that is structured like this,
where a bunch of where things happen by people coming
together to do them.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
And you can take the sort of like I don't know,
I guess you'd call it the workerrist angle of like
I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant,
yeah right. So the way the brace treatment plant is
run is that the people who do waste treatment have
their own like workers counselor or whatever, right, and they
decide how they're going to do it, and they go
do it. Right.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Almost every I would say, every real revolution and revolutionary
movement in history is doing a version of this. You
can even look at the Soviet concept. The Soviet was
the decision making body, it was the assembly yep, and
all power to the Soviets with this slogan that literally
(27:31):
was inverted by the Bolsheviks, where the entire idea was
a democratic but revolutionary movement. And this happens constantly even
when societies break down on some level naturally, and a
ton not all, a ton of indigenous societies this is
the default model. And so you know, in Chiapas with
(27:52):
the Zapatistas, what happened was is that you had this
like Marxist Leninist army and they were like, oh, we're
going to do this, think this way. And the indigenous
people who lived in Shapas were like, that's not how
we do things. And they're like, this is how we
do things. And then those Appatistas, who are good people,
were like, you're right, that's how we do things, you know,
and they like built up this model. And you have
a similar thing happening with the area called Rojeva in
north east Syria, where like basically people are like, actually,
(28:15):
the indigenous Kurdish model of doing things is much more
this egalitarian method and democratic method and then okay, and
the other thing is you can do it in the
worker's model, but there's also people who've messed around with
it and done things like you know what, maybe the
school isn't run by the teachers. Maybe the school is
run by the teachers, the parents and the students, And
maybe the food distribution center is a combination of the
(28:37):
workers of the food distribution center and the people who
make use of it. So maybe the trash pickup is
both the workers and the people who need the services.
But the specifics almost they do matter, and we can
but we don't know, we don't know the actual formulation.
But this is the core of bottom left organizing and
(28:59):
it is a full thing. And it is funny how
it all comes down to meetings and making sure that
there's food and childcare and not one person taking up
all the time, which is really hard when you podcast
for a living.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
I will tell you that, yeah, but I mean this
is like, you know, I have had to learn to
shut the fuck up in meetings. Yeah, need to, and
but doing it has made meetings better. It's great you
can learn to shut the fuck up someone else says
the thing and you don't have to say yeah. But
then also, I do want to put this out right,
the things that we're describing here, right, it's okay, Like
how do you need a beach or you need food,
you need child care, you need structure that make sure
(29:30):
one person isn't running the thing. Yeah, this is the
entire political situation of the modern United States. Right. We
are trying to get food, we are trying to get childcare,
we are trying to have a place to do our thing,
and we're trying to have to not be ruled by
like a fucking king Yeah, totally. Again, this all seems
like very very basic like shit, right, But if you
don't have this, and this is a problem that the
(29:51):
US has constantly your purtuse movements, It's like most Americans
don't have a democratic tradition, right, and so when sh
happens and there's suddenly riots and they're suddenly like mass protests,
we've just break out. Right, people don't know how to
make democratic decisions, so they don't, right, and that means
that nobody's talking to each other. That means that everyone
is locked in these very small circles of extremely violent paranoia.
(30:15):
And that sucks. And we can avoid that by knowing
how to do democracy, because that's fundamentally what running and
meeting is. This is what democracy looks like. Yeah, And
I also want to say one more thing. This is
a podcast that would probably could I could have used
the facilitator, especially on my end right now, because unmedicated
(30:37):
mia is a fucking trip. But like you know, when
we talk about sort of are how do you apply
this to your sort of broad vision of society, right,
and it's like, Okay, anarchist, how do you run USAID? Right?
Because like, yeah, like the destructure of USAID is going
to kill an unbelievable number of people because people are
getting ach of v vaccians right right. And the way
you run that is the way that you run a meeting. Right.
(30:58):
The workers who pre deuce yeah to act, who are
the people who actually figure out how to make an
HIV vaccine? Distribute it, distribute information about it. Those people
form fucking form fucking councils, and they form fucking meeting groups.
They and they work in collaboration with the people who
need them, and that is how you build society, right.
(31:21):
It's like David Graeber's thing was was like the ultimate
hidden truth of this world is that it is something
we make, and we could just as easily make differently.
And when he says something we make, he was talking
about in a more abstract sense, but like we do
literally make it. Like all of this stuff is the
product of stuff that we did, right, Like we all
physically built every aspect of this world, right, Everything, everything
(31:42):
that you see and touch and hear right now are
things that we designed and engineered and built and we
don't lose the capacity when we cease to be ruled.
We can still do that. And as long as we
have the ability to do democracy right and we have
the ability to make decisions with each other, we can
fucking do those things. And we can do them for
each other. Yeah, and not for a king. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
It's like people ask how would you make a distribute
insulin in anarchist society or an anti capitalist society or
a bottom up society, and you're like, well, we know
how to make and distribute insulin, and we just need
to change some of the social technologies that are doing it.
And I think we could probably do it better because
it's currently not working great, you know. And my other
(32:28):
like go to quote I love the graver quote is
the Derudi quote, anarchist general in Spanish of war. Probably
didn't actually say this, It was probably a journalist put
these words in his mouth, but we're not actually certain.
And he says, like the boot I'm paraphrasing, the bourgeoisie
can blast and ruin the world on their way out
of history. That's fine. Yeah, we the workers built all
of these cities. We can build We know how to
(32:52):
do that.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
The part of that I always stuck with me is
like I think the exact quote that I got was,
we are not in the least afraid of ruins. Yeah,
built this world and we'll do it again. Yeah and yeah.
So I don't know.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
I don't know these meding these episodes are gonna be called.
But if they're called, the answer is meetings. Comma.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Sorry, I think, Okay, I don't know who's gonna end
up me. The provisional title right now is the most
important organizing skill. You don't know, because unfortunately we do
need people to click on this and they won't if
it's a meeting.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Things of the answer is into this, Well, then that's
the monster at the end of the book.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Is that.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Uh, it's meetings all the way down.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, Margaret, thanks for thanks for talking with me about
the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Thanks thanks for having me, Thanks for talking about that stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, and this this has been it can happen here.
You can go out in your community and you can
do these things. You can force pokes, councils, you can
form assemblies, you can go work with the people around
you to do things, and you can use structures to
do it and you can change the world.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
The secret is to really begin.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Hell Yeah, it could Happen Here is a production of
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