Building a Movement Like We’ve Never Known

From climate breakdown to fascism to runaway capitalism – what would it actually take to tackle our world’s roaring avalanche of challenges? Paul, a veteran of social movements through his work in facilitation, process and conflict mediation, stepped back and asked himself this question back in 2018. He realised that the problems are so vast and self-exacerbating that they require social change on a scale orders of magnitude beyond existing or historic efforts.

This epiphany led to Paul working with his colleagues in facilitation collective Navigate to formulate A Movement Like We’ve Never Known in an online presentation. Something between a blueprint, roadmap, manifesto and a provocation, this talk – accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY – draws on deep wells of specialist experience to propose a new way of thinking about social movements with the scale and ambition we’re going to need.

The experience Paul brings to bear on this work is a topic in itself. As part of Navigate, Paul has spent a decade working to help movements function more effectively. He defines himself as largely drawing on a critical strand of NonViolent Communication; if you haven’t heard of ‘NVC’– or if you have, and weren’t convinced – it’s well worth hearing Paul’s account of it as an indispensable aspect of healthy movement life.

Our conversation is wide-ranging and tends toward the macro – but to repeat Paul’s closing invitation: Navigate is very much open to people reaching out to inquire about ‘movement fight rooms’, conflict mediation in general, and facilitation skills.

We cover:

Frame of collective power: why we need it, why we need to use it differently

Did The Left make an unconscious ‘Sacred Vow’ to not hold power?

“It maybe doesn’t even occur to us sometimes how we are taking on a particular shape of organising”

Framing of ‘higher leverage points’ and causation

The pernicious ‘punitive’ and adversarial dynamics in left/activist culture, and how they undermine our movements in micro and macro

A big takeaway is that we need to spread the orientation towards actually cooperating at scale

Movements are a spectrum, from fragmented to cohesive

Bernice Johnson Reagon: ‘coalition space’ vs ‘home space’

The nature of MLWNK as more ‘meta-movement’ (or mimetic intervention) than movement

Ghandian ‘constructive program’

‘A strategy based on a sensitive awareness of complex systems and is aiming for high leverage points within those systems’

The Fighting Together project: movement fight-rooms!

How do we actually seed change across movements?

The slow cultural shifts already in train: recognition of trauma, burnout, conflict, scale

Sketching an emergent movement-wide collaboration

Limits to the Left and implications of movement ecology

What Navigate can do for you

The presentation itself, A Movement Like We’ve Never Known:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY

Find Navigate – and their potentially free conflict mediation help – at https://www.navigate.org.uk/

Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:02

Alright. Welcome to Making Movements. I'm Douglas Rogers. I haven't done this in ages. I'm here with Paul from Navigate. Yep. And streaming to you live from, I mean, in my case, London, and in your case.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Stroud.

SPEAKER_03 0:23

Stroud. An incredibly sunny looking. Sorry, listeners. Yeah, really enjoying the first first bloom of spring, I I guess.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Yeah, yeah. It's it's really, really warm and so nice today of spring.

SPEAKER_03 0:39

How are you doing generally today? I mean, I I asked partly preempting because I'm uh I'm a bit frazzled. I've just spent like the entire day cycling around London. Uh so if I'm if I'm off the ball, then my excuses for today.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Uh how are you? I am really well. Yeah. I'm like I said, really enjoying that it's spring and have been super busy for the last month with with work, and things are just kind of slowed down a little bit now. Still, still quite full, but I feel lighter and it's nice to be home. And yeah, I'm good.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

Wow. I mean, yeah, commendable, impressive to hear. You don't get that from activists very often. Um, and indeed, I guess that's part of why I've been excited for ages to to talk to you as as representative of Navigate. I've kind of I I think we met in XR in in the day. Uh correct me if I'm wrong. Um, I um if nothing else, we were both in it. And I think especially since then, I've kind of heard by repute of Navigate um being, I mean, I guess you wouldn't say it like this, but like one of the foremost facilitation collectors in the UK. That sounds a bit grandiloquent, but like you seem like, I don't know, I can't think of many other facilitation groups who I don't know, just haven't your level of rep for want of a better word.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Yeah, I guess there's there's sort of four or five. I'm not sure if that's the right number, but there's four or five little facilitation collectives in the UK. And we're we're one of them. And I guess we've we've been around for quite a while and we've focused on a few specific areas that I think other facilitation collectives do slightly different things. So um hopefully, yeah, we have a we have a good level of trust from the from the people that we've worked with. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:53

And yeah, just I guess to set the scene, then I think my first major uh run-in, first and only major run-in with with navigate was uh now three years ago I somehow get sent a like round robin WhatsApp message, like all the best stories begin. Um, and it sounds really cool. I mean, especially back then where we're in the kind of radioactive dust cloud of what used to be XR. And I think you know, it's like we're just coming out of COVID and everyone's kind of like staggering around, like, what do we do next? There's a climate crisis kind of thing. And this message invites one of the I think more cogent attempts to pose that question. Um, the kind of title of the thing, I guess, being a movement like we've never known. And it's an invitation to a two-hour online presentation, um, where you present some, I think, really interesting, like, and I'm not just saying that in a kind of emphatic, normal, like genuinely really interesting kind of movement strategy ideas, I guess. Um and yeah, I I don't hear much about it afterwards. Uh I don't so I don't know exactly where it's where it translated into. I assume a lot of this stuff has kind of complicated uh pathways into the world. But uh yeah, basically since then I've been like, oh, I must, I must check back in with how those ideas are working. Um yeah. So how is it going?

SPEAKER_02 4:37

So one thing I just wanted to say is that I I spent quite a bit of time over maybe a year or a little bit longer trying to support XR, but I never actually joined it because I always felt um like there was some potential in XR in that it brought together a lot of people, but I also always had some quite strong uh concerns or places where I didn't align with it both in terms of what it was internally and also very much in terms of its external strategy. So I kind of got asked in to try and help in a few ways, but particularly with trying to kind of develop a a conflict system, a conflict transformation system within it. And so I agreed to that and and spent some time trying to work on that and did other bits of supporting, but I wanted to just be clear that I I never f identified myself as being part of XR because I didn't feel fully aligned with it, whilst I also didn't feel I I also valued aspects of what was happening or what was trying to happen within it as well.

SPEAKER_03 6:01

Interesting. And yeah, if we have time, I'm I might be tempted to circle back and dig into that critique. I'm always interested in what anyone's like line on XR was. Um, and yeah, if I can actually dig a little further back just while we're we're here, I so yeah, what what put you in that position in the first place in terms of having this kind of fairly specific skill set, like yeah, conflict resilience, facilitation, whatever? It's a whole bundle that yeah, is unusual, I think.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

Yeah, so I the really quick version of how I came to there was I'd been involved in bits of social movements and organizing from sort of like very late teens into my early 20s, and then had sort of stepped away from that after a while with some different focuses, but came across a whole area of work that I really got totally fascinated by and kind of fell in love with around explorations of how how can we work through conflict, how can we collaborate, how can we have dialogue, how can we share power in different ways, yeah, making decisions in different ways, a whole area of work around that. And so I kind of went into studying that for several years, and then was slightly unsure of what to do with like how to apply it or where that could start to contribute in some way. And I spent a couple of years pretty much mostly volunteering full-time as a community mediator, so doing kind of neighborhood mediation, and then I got asked to join Navigate about uh nine, ten years ago now, uh, because they were finding that more and more groups were coming to them with conflict and they didn't have so much experience of working with conflict, they had some, but they uh I happened to know um a couple of the people involved in Navigate, and so I kind of started working with them and then fully joined. So that's the that's the quick version of how I came to be uh working, doing quite a lot of different things, but primarily mediation, so direct conflict transformation work, collaborative decision making, uh facilitation, and supporting groups or communities or organizations to develop systems for how they might collaborate ongoingly. So, how might they make decisions ongoingly or how might they handle conflict ongoingly, stuff like that, and other things in that area around how to work well together?

SPEAKER_03 9:01

I one thing I'm curious about is I still don't really feel I've been immersed in it enough to know the language of like do you have a name for that umbrella of general like internal processes work or like movement infrastructure or this kind of thing? Because it feels like it's so like rare in that the activists reach that level of awareness of like, oh, we need to, yeah, we we need to have conflict resilience processes and and then kind of join them up into this more holistic. I mean, you yeah, you mentioned Mellon Meadows, among others, uh, uh view of like movements as systems that have all these required processes. Like, so do you consider yourself to hail from a like specific tradition or school of like movement function?

SPEAKER_02 9:50

Yeah, so the the I'd say 90 something percent, probably upwards of 95% of what I have learned from and been inspired by and try to base my work around is the work that was primarily brought together by someone called Marshall Rosenberg, who developed this thing that's most commonly known by the name nonviolent communication. Anytime that I mention nonviolent communication, I want to differentiate it from how quite a lot of people have encountered it or understood it or practiced it because there's quite a few things that show up in how some people interpret it that I have pretty strong concerns about and don't feel uh uh aligned with. So I want to be very clear that I don't mean some of the things that people who some people are into NVC do. So just to give one quick example, I could talk about that for a long time, but one quick example of that is that I don't understand nonviolent communication as being about changing the words or the language or the sentence structure of how I I say something in the hope that that would that that in itself would make a big difference to how we would connect or how we would work together on something that's challenging or whatever it might be. I I think that there is for me, there are a lot of really really useful, really practical principles within nonviolent communication, and there are ways of developing our capacity to uh make different choices in how we relate with ourselves, how we relate with each other, how we uh relate and collaborate in groups and in communities, and how we shift and change social systems. All of those layers are there for me within non-violent communication. And they're all super important to me. And the version of it or the interpretation of it that's that's primarily about maybe choosing as the as the intervention point the structure of my sentences or the structure of your sentences, um, is not where I think that that shift or that change that I'm really interested in is very likely to happen. And I think that it can sometimes actually some ways of in interpreting it actually from from my perspective move uh move us further away from the thing that uh that I want. Like if I'm uh really focused on certain uh ways of shifting the language that I use, but I haven't uh really engaged with the different forms of power that are showing up between us, then as just one of many, many possible examples, I think it's quite likely that the distance between us might increase rather than getting smaller for a a very quick and quite abstract example.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

Yeah, that's really interesting. Again, if we've got time, I'll I've I have put that on the list of things that I might further try and pick your brains on. Because yeah, I'm I'm very conscious, you know, I some of our listeners might have not the first clue really, or you know, might just now for the first time be hearing about about nonviolent communication often abbreviated for those in the know as NVC. And it's like it it can I can imagine it sounding to many as a kind of fairly abstract question, but it also feels like it's a really vital part of present-day UK at least activist culture of like the people who are thinking the hardest and most with the most experience often about like how can we actually work together without replicating the same dysfunctions that are so predictable. And then, yeah, then you get this really crunchy cutting edge stuff where, like, oh, maybe we can invent some different dysfunctions by obsessing over MVC language, and that you know, this is this stuff to me feels like yeah, cutting-edge research for one of I'm sure there's a better cutting-edge practice.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

Um yeah, well, I I really like understanding non-binary communication as an ongoing process of exploration. So it's an ongoing, for me, it's an ongoing exploration of what what strengthens connection and what what weakens or diminishes connection when when we want connection, what supports or gets in the way of collaboration, what what what works and what doesn't, what what moves us towards what we want and what gets in the way. And for me, that exploration is not over. And also, maybe one other quick thing I'll say on it is because if someone might be hearing that term for the first time, I want to be very clear that the reason it's called nonviolent communication, which is not necessarily the the name that I would choose for it, it's not the only name that Marshall Rosenberg used for it, but it's doesn't he regret the name?

SPEAKER_03 15:29

I thought or I I think he's since been on record people like, oh, I wish I'd called it something else, but yeah, go on.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Yeah, well, I think I think he he thought a lot about how to how to name it. And one thing that people often imagine when they hear the term non-violent communication is they think of it as how to communicate in a way that's not violent. And that's my in my understanding is not how, which is yeah, it's very understandable. That's what people would would think the name is trying to point to. But I understand it as specifically linking itself with the principles of of the social movements that use the term nonviolence, and non-violence in itself it's it's named in the negative, but it's not not violence. It's it's drawn from a a word that ahimsa that names something in the negative because it's so profound that it uh this is my understanding, is that it's something profound that it's very difficult to actually point to what it is, so it's kind of uh naming it in a very particular way. But it it then you then you can it it leaves it quite open to being understood in different ways. So but basically the uh the reason it's called nonviolent is because it's linking itself with those uh social movements, those that were trying to find liberation not only at the level of uh ending forms of oppression and colonialism and exploitation, etc., but also trying to do that in a way that at an even deeper level liberated from the some of the underlying logic of domination and violence and oppression, so that it wouldn't just replace one oppressor with another, um, etc., uh, or one form of violence with another form of violence. So that's what I believe Marshall Rosenberg was referencing or trying to draw on in calling it that. And the fact that it's called communication for me is is a little bit narrow, but also it's I guess it's also hard to give something a name that that is as broad and as rich in my experience as normal communication.

SPEAKER_03 17:44

And yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean, I asked you this a while ago now, but it's interesting to hear that answer that that's the kind of core thread of what I very much understand as this wider ball of thread around like yeah, decision-making practice, organizational theory, uh and yeah, how you empower people is this underlying question, which is surely is like one of the fundamental questions of movements. And and again, for for any dear listeners who might wonder, like, oh, that's quite abstract. Like, how does that bear on on the rest of the world? I'm conscious we will soon be getting to but I guess the the meat of the man of the movement, like we've never known, and and serious kind of yeah, uh conjuncture of strategic thoughts. But yeah, I mean, I if I can just attest basically that this is this stuff really does translate into real life, that like you like you really know when a group is working well. I mean, and it often, whether consciously or not, is inspired by these ideas and these like will be running some version of yeah, like horizontalist organizational practices. And especially, I think one example that just springs to mind very briefly is on a very small level. I remember being in a a kind of situation in an activist meeting hall in Germany, actually, which felt like it was gonna be a terrible two hours and felt like it was gonna turn into a really difficult, chaotic, acromoneous uh collective process with about 40 people just kind of milling around. And someone stood up, or not stood up, just raised a hand and said, Oh, I'm a facilitator, and I've I if I can just make a suggestion that we actually run the process in XYZ ways, you know, she just spoke for like one minute, two minutes to make a suggestion, and it completely changed the course of the theme. And yeah, to me, that's an example of the sort of Kung Fu-like skill that people who are versed in this practice inversed in it well, and yeah, the opposite can happen if someone's got maybe less ideal interpretations of MVC, like you were referring to. You can also get lost in rabbit holes of language and this kind of thing. So it's yeah, it feels like a yeah, sort of sorcery magical arts. Um yeah, it works on tiny kind of in-person in meeting scales or even in personal scale, but it also scales up, I think, to the to the grand and to the yeah, big picture stuff. Um, so yeah, with with all that frame set, then uh you have this very certain set of skills. Uh, you have already been in it since nine years ago, so you've been around the block quite a few times. I assume cutting your teeth on yeah, all forms of the scale, but including just actually kind of diving into real contexts and yeah, uh XR among others, right? So you've you've seen plenty of people trying to make the world a better place. Um and then yeah, you come out of well, you come out of lockdown, um, presumably. How long uh how long were you premeditating the movement? This this I I don't know how to talk about it, but this proposal.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

I guess I've just always been my whole since I was a teenager, just really interested in what does what uh what what can we do, what is possible in terms of fundamentally transforming the social systems that are devastating life on earth, all forms of life, I think. And I feel like I haven't I've come across multiple examples of things that have really inspired me in in that exploration, and I I feel like I've lived my whole life with the sense of both the possibility of a of a very different way of of living that cares for everyone's needs, the human world and everyone else. And Also this sense of this massive devastation and this this um amplifying devastation of climate climate emergency and uh uh by like ecological biodiversity emergency and social and political and economic emergency, everything trauma, cascading, perhaps just so so many things. And I think for me that that though then just from that kind of always wondering about that and always caring about it, I really was noticing that what I was involved in felt like it was good. I was supporting people to work through conflict, people who were working for progressive social change, I was supporting them to work through conflict, I was supporting them to work well together and agree where they couldn't agree before and all that stuff, and it felt really good. And there's a sort of feeling of like almost like I had my my head down, looking at what was right in front of me, and then looking up to the horizon and seeing oh wow, there's this huge, huge, huge journey ahead. There's this huge mountain to climb. I don't think carrying on what we're currently doing, what I'm currently doing, but what I see the people who care about the same things as me. I don't see what that what we're currently doing is going to get us to where we want to get to. And also that it's not even a static thing because every day that we don't essentially that we don't win, we don't just not win, we lose. Like we're constantly losing ground, we're losing, we're losing lives constantly, we're losing in so many senses, we're losing lives constantly. And not only that, but we are getting into more and more difficult conditions. I think of us as being, if you think of it in terms of systems, living systems, complex systems, that we've got ourselves into a place that is extremely difficult to get out of, a bit like if your car gets stuck in the mud and it's it's spinning its wheel. So the thing that normally would move you forwards is actually in that situation, that that energy that you're putting into trying to get out actually digs you further deeper in. Or I don't know much about golf, but like if if the ball goes into a bunker, it's much harder to get out of a bunker, I think. That that's my understanding of it. So in terms of systems, we've gone into a place where those sort of reinforcing feedback loops are making it extremely difficult. It's that's why it's a a wicked problem or a super wicked problem or whatever people call it. It's it's extremely difficult to get out of the context that we're in. And every day that we don't uh manage to uh make sort of significant progress, uh that uh the level of stuckness is actually increasing and the level of threat is is amplifying. So I think yeah, at the moment we have a window of at least here in on this island in uh in Britain, we have a window of action before we uh cross cross ecological and climate tipping points, but we also have a window of action which is also very, very narrow before we slide. I think in well, there's a there's a real huge possibility of sliding into fascism. And once you go into far right authoritarianism, or really any type of authoritarianism, but I think the far-right version is the one that that I see uh coming towards us pretty fast. Is once you're in that, it takes everything you've got and is incredibly costly to even just get back to where we currently are now. So that for me is a is just a lot of context. We could say so much more about the devastation, the devastation, but I just I just call it the devastation. Uh and part of the devastation is the way that it's uh it's uh amplifying and increasing and increasing. And what we're currently doing to me feels nowhere close to a effective response to get out of that. So from thinking a lot about that, I can I just interject as well.

SPEAKER_03 26:57

I uh was there a particular moment you recall as having become a bit more, I don't know, about disillusioned, but but like starting to think critically look like you raising your head and seeing the mountain above, like yeah, presuming you didn't always think that.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

Well, in in a way, I feel like I've grown, I've grown up, I'm of a generation that's grown up in a climate emergency. So I knew about that to different degrees, like it it increased, but I've I've known about that my whole adult life, and that's one of the first things that I was involved in organizing around when I was in my like late teens, early 20s. But there was a moment in I think it was 2018, like September 2018, and we'd had a really hot summer, I think, which I had enjoyed in the moment, but also it felt scary. And I heard a few there was a few things that came together, and somehow I went into a a kind of next level of what felt to me like sort of waking up to the level to to how close to a cliff edge we were, and maybe maybe I sort of like I just looked over that cliff edge a little bit, and and in a way I'd always been I knew that cliff edge was there, but I sort of looked over it in a way that just made it more real to me, and it's something of that moment really got me kind of back into engaging a lot more with strategy at that at that sort of larger scale, I think.

SPEAKER_03 29:01

Yeah. That's interesting to hear if I'm remembering rightly. Then uh do you know Tadzio Müller, the German movement strategist? Um one of my goats, um I'm I'm I'm a big fan. Uh he I think that same month maybe uh in 2018 had had his uh kind of dark epiphany uh of like oh End of Glenda or like all our efforts haven't haven't got traction, we might be irreversibly, or like the game is going to irreversibly change now. Um yeah, I mean I I can know that about that and the his equivalence uh to your work. He's he's a kind of collapse theorist, um, which I would I wouldn't put you quite in the category of, but it's interesting to uh yeah, you're with the kind of devastation analysis and specifically this recursive flute, then yeah, you're not not miles away from from that that's ring.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

Um okay, so it's yeah, and and I think the the I think collapse could mean a lot of different things, yeah. And it does, um, but yeah, I do that that is definitely a a strong presence, I guess, in in my world is the possibility of a bunch of different types of of collapse, and in a way that we're in a kind of slightly slow but incredibly fast, actually, collapse already and it it's hitting different places and different people and different forms of life at different speeds or in different ways, but it's yeah, it's already happening, and and it was part of that collapse awareness that that was there for me in that moment, definitely as well.

SPEAKER_03 30:56

All right, so there's there's the problem. Now hit us with the solution. So you've identified you've identified that, and because yeah, you've got specific experiences, then you translate them into yeah, uh some sort of a proposal idea.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

Yeah, so uh I just just wanted to be very clear. I don't I don't know the way out of this this um place that we've fallen into but I do have a strong belief that is that doesn't mean I know, I just like my sort of my best guess, I guess everything I'll say is best guesses, and and I feel like we're in the territory of best guesses, not necessarily individual best guesses, but collective best guesses, and maybe that's all that anyone ever does is their best guess. So for me, part of my uh best guess is that something just kept coming back for me or to basically a kind of core focus on collective power. So the belief that in one sense almost everything that we're up against is just a collective human decision. We've we've set off things that are also now beyond our agency, uh perhaps, but essentially every day that we continue to live in industrial capitalism that is uh having all the devastation that it that it is, is a it's kind of a collective human it's yeah, collective human choice, but it's not one that uh people have access to choosing something different for for a number of reasons. But so there's something for me that feels really core, which is that currently our collective power is organized in in some way in serving a purpose which we don't actually believe in or we don't actually want. And if we could organize our collective power for something else, then all of these things are human-made, all of these social systems are human human creations. It's it's very difficult to get ourselves out of them and into some other some other possibilities of how we could organize our lives, but essentially collective power is for me at the core of it. So yeah, I think of it as at the moment that our collective power is organized for things that we don't want, or many of us don't want. And we're also in a situation where it's extremely difficult to organize collective power for something different. So I think of it, this is this is just a very loose metaphor for me, but the way that a traditional classroom is set up, there's one person at the front and say 30 people who are all arranged in a way that it makes it harder for them to organize their collective power or draw on their collective wisdom and intelligence, or even ask themselves questions, and they're sort of organized in a way that makes it hard for them to communicate with each other, and it it increases the power of the person at the front of the room. And in some situations, I think that that's that may be useful if people's if that's what people want. I'm saying it's just a that's a strategy and it might meet certain needs in some situations, but it also a shape that disorganizes the collective power of the majority of people in that space. And if you created uh a circle of the students in that room, the 30 people, they could start to choose what they do with their collective power. And if the person at the front of the room said, Hey, everyone be quiet, they could make a collective decision. Do we want to be quiet or not? They could organize their collective power in in service of what they actually want to do. So I'm really interested in what what are the conditions that we would need to create where people can first of all come together. So one part of collective power is just circling up, I think, whether that's meeting in a town square or meeting in a union or meeting in a social movement or meeting in some kind of radically participatory democracy um kind of thing. So that the first thing is circling up, or or one of the elements is circling up, is having a place because I I, you know, I'll I'll look at my phone and look at the news and see a genocide is happening, I'll see another war is being started, I'll see that that we're crossing every tipping point uh uh around climate change, and and I don't know what to do. I look at I have to have some information coming in and I don't know where to turn. I don't know, like if I see someone fall down, if I see my neighbor fall down on the street outside, I I know what I know I run out and I know where to go and I know who to call, and there's a there's a pathway to action, but in relation to massive national global crises, I don't know where to go, I don't know what to do. So for me, there's something about creating the place where we can go and meet. And then the other another huge element of that is if you just circle up, it could be a real mess. It could be that some of the patterns of of this society will follow us into that space, and we'll end up with someone dominating and someone giving up and leaving, or some some people winning and some people losing, or total chaos, or massive conflict, or lots of different things. So for me, creating the kind of process conditions where we not only are circling up, but we have a way to collaborate. And for me, part of my focus on collective power really came from realizing that that's at a really small scale, that's part of what's the kind of, I think you were using the word magic earlier, some of the magic of what can happen with, and it's not it doesn't only come from facilitation, but it can be something that a facilitator or facilitators can can do is they can create conditions where a group can organize its collective power in a way that without that facilitator they may not be able to, they might get really stuck or fall apart. So that at a group level, I'm really interested in that scaled up to a much larger level. So, how can we organize and sustain collective power to be able to then do much more and also very different forms of action that uh could lead us upstream rather than I think if we if we're divided into really small, really small groups or as individuals even, we we're stuck at responding way downstream. We're trying to pull little bits of the poison out of the river. But if we can organize collective power, then we can actually start to go upstream and change the root causes or the systemic causes of of why would poison even be going into the river in the first place. So that's that's fairly abstract, I guess, but that's part of what I have hope in is the possibility of organizing collective power, and that can be a social movement, I think it can be other things as well, but some way to become powerful by coming together, whilst at the moment we have very little agency, have very little power because yeah, like I'm not really part of something. So as an individual, I can't do anything much, and then in the gap, I end up participating in the systems that are currently dominant and functional and a devastating life on earth. So I actually use my my my power gets organized in in a purpose that I don't want at all.

SPEAKER_03 40:23

Yeah, I so I can reflect some of that back partly through the prism of remembering the uh the the kind of talk you gave three years ago, which I will link in the show notes by the way, so for anyone interested. I I really would well I'd recommend it if you like the flavor of this conversation. But yeah, I I I guess something I'd underline there is the the kind of rubric you've got this under is trying to imagine a movement like we've never known. As in a bit like nonviolent communication from earlier, actually, the it's this kind of negative frame of like, oh no, you you know, you you thought think of the biggest movement you can remember. Like, I mean, for me personally, XR, or like I don't know, imagine CND or like civil rights in the 60s, but like the way you pose it now and pose it at more length in in that video is like, no, the problem is so big it requires a kind of fundamentally different order of like not just a social movement in the sense of like a bunch of gang of like a few hundred or maybe like tens of thousands, but like a a kind of leap in magnitude, a way of aligning yeah, collective action at a scale that is far beyond you know, some elements of the white middle class. Uh so goes the case, you know, uh with XLR. And I yeah, I still remember that that that kind of breathtaking ambition of just saying, look, here's the scale of the problem, the scale of the solution needs to be something that has that self-scaling kind of fractal or whatever uh animus impulse to it, so not to fall into, and I think there are so many pitholes, I mean, in all four fields of knowledge and traditions and stuff, and I think one of the one of the potential pitfalls in a lot of social movement theory, which is this whole related kind of distant chasm to Marshall Rosenberg's MBC, I think, or you know, they map onto each other in interesting ways, but I think one of the common pitfalls is uh a sort of unconscious refusal of that ambition and an embrace of marginality, of being the counter-culture. I mean, this goes back in a straight line to the 60s. And, you know, whether it's because you come at it from a different tradition from the usual suspects who would normally be kind of Marxian or this kind of post-Marxist social movement horizontalism. You know, I I I can't and don't really deign to try and place you of like uh how what's your Marxist level? But yeah, the your analysis seems to cut through or just I I think recontextualize a lot of the ways of thinking about social movements in ways that I find really valuable. Um oh yeah, and the one other bit of gloss I'll I'll add is just when you're making, I think the the original breakout version of this pitch three years ago, it has some quite interesting people in the virtual room. I've aside myself, of course, fascinating as I to be clear, I know nobody there, but uh there's if nothing else. I think there's a handful of Extinction Rebellion co-founders. Um plenty of people I've have no idea about. So it was to me that felt part of the interesting kind of flattening in a bottle quality of of the again, the original pitch you made is like, oh no, that this isn't just idle talk. These are ideas that are connecting to other people with similar ideas.

SPEAKER_02 43:53

Um Yeah. There was something that you just touched on. There, that I thought might be useful to pick up on a little bit, which is what is our individual and collective relationship with power and being powerful, and also being hopeful and being ambitious and a few different things in that area. And I had this thought maybe about five years ago that so maybe I'll I'll explain it by explaining a different thought first, actually, which is that um there's a person whose work I really value called Sarah Payton, and she works, does a lot of kind of uh therapeutic or healing work, also drawing from nonviolent communication a lot. And she talks about this thing, which I think shows up in probably lots of other uh therapeutic modalities and stuff, which is what she calls uh an unconscious contract or a sacred vow, she calls it. So basically it's the idea that a lot of the time, uh often when we're children, if we have a very painful experience or a traumatic experience, we might make some kind of deal with ourselves that we will always do X or we will never do Y as a way of taking care of ourselves or maybe taking care of someone else. So, yeah, if if you had an experience of being really, really honest with someone when you were three, and then you experienced some quite devastating level of pain uh painful response to that. Uh the response was devastatingly painful for you, you might well say to yourself, not fully consciously, okay, I I will always prioritize um connection over honesty, or something something like that. Maybe not exactly the example I want, but something like that. And those things can then sort of be a layer of how we're making our way through the world without us necessarily consciously thinking of them that way. It's kind of like a deep pattern of self-protection or trying to do our best to make our way through the world without needing to suffer something that was devastatingly painful again, and which makes so much tragic sense to me that we might do that. And I got curious about is there some way in which, speaking in really broad terms, the left or the left in Britain or whatever has made some kind of unconscious contract with itself, maybe as individuals or or collectively or both, to not be powerful. And I could see two pro possibly more, but two really compelling reasons why we might have made that deal with ourselves, to whatever extent we we may have done. One would be we're really terrified of what harm we could do with being powerful, and we've seen so much harm done, both by all sorts of power structures and individuals with lots of power, but also we have maybe these huge shadows of where the left has gained power and has done and you know has murdered millions of people or that kind of un un incomprehensible um horror. So we might, whether it's at a really small scale, of how we've experienced power being used or distributed in our personal lives, it was really painful, or in our experience of organizing or in communities or whatever, all the way up to large-scale social whole societies, we might want, we might be very wary of becoming powerful for that reason. And then alongside that, perhaps working together with that, we might also be really aware that if we were to become powerful and actually really hold a lot of power, then it might well be the case that the people who are invested in things staying as they are or going in a very different direction to the one we would want would be coming for us, and that that ultimately puts us in extreme danger. So, like a a really brief way of saying that is maybe we might well be terrified of being Stalin, and we are also terrified of being Fred Hampton, we're terrified of being taken out for starting to become powerful, or we're terrified of what damage we could do if we if we became powerful. So I think that that I for me that's just a is a question. I don't know the answer to that pretty much. I can I can see elements of that within myself. I am I am terrified of both of those possibilities if I if I really think about them. And and I think that that may also be there may be a similar kind of mechanism sometimes around hope or ambition, that there might be a lot of reasons, like really deep, strong reasons why people wouldn't would want to be very careful about where they would dare to be hopeful, because I imagine a lot of people who are on the left or have progressive politics, whatever, they've probably had a lot of pain at seeing how things are playing out in the world, and they probably have a lot of pain at the lack of agency or the dashed and yeah, the the the hopes that they had that didn't um it didn't turn out the way they would have wanted. So yeah, I just wanted to say say a little bit more about that in the context of what you said around are we are we wanting to be powerful? And then I think that also there's a there's potentially just quite a strong thing of at least my generation. I don't know about different people in different traditions, different organizing traditions and communities, but I feel like almost like what I would call an invisible script, the kind of thing that gets handed out, and I'm reading off it, but I don't realise that I am. The invisible script that I've been handed suggests to organize in very, very small either projects or organizations generally, and to sort of focus more on taking on the symptoms and the effects rather than the systemic root causes of things, and to sort of accept a form of organizing where I'm in an organization that has five people and you're in an organization that has 15 people, and we don't even really talk to each other, even though we're maybe we're working on similar issues. And it maybe just doesn't even like doesn't even occur to us sometimes that we are taking on a particular shape of how we organize.

SPEAKER_03 51:40

Yeah, I mean, couldn't really agree more, like protest as usual, or yeah, the kind of default scripts and patterns we, you know, often for good structural and and whatever other other good ideological reasons might fall into. Yeah, I mean that that's something I'm very conscious of. Yeah, as as often, yeah, a limitation we might maybe overcome, you know, within our various groups and efforts. And so I think that's a lot of the value I see again in your analysis. And and again, I'm still even an hour in, I don't exactly know what the kind of language to describe what you're trying to offer to the world with this things framework of a movement like we've ever known. Um, you know, correct me if I'm if I'm misconcepting your your concept. But uh to me, that's how I read it is basically like, yeah, it's a kind of proposal for a slightly different script, or to how come that language from like 45 minutes ago, maybe it's kind of a blueprint of you know a very draft and and you know, humbly offered blueprint slash script for like, okay, well, if you take yeah, this analysis of what what is causing the great unreveling or the devastational collapse polycrisis, whatever. And I think the the analysis is a really important part to go through. You know, I'm glad we've spent 50 minutes going through like you know, the way you understand the problem being a very important uh for how you, you know, what kind of solution you prescribe. Uh but yeah, so assuming that uh account of of your work is is roughly accurate, then can you give me some notes on the kind of what that script looks like closer to closer to practice?

SPEAKER_02 53:29

Yeah, I I will try. So I think going back to the the kind of core element for me of collective power, organizing and sustaining collective power in a way that can then have a complex uh a strategy that is really seeing or sensing complex systems and is is uh looking at ways to a pathway to try and shift a system at its root causes, or in Donnell Meadows' language, kind of higher trying to move towards higher leverage points in changing a system. I so I think maybe there's a couple of things that I would say could could say around that. So one more thing that uh is maybe uh holding us back, I think, and this this sort of then the flip of that is something that I guess I'm uh sort of advocating for, or I believe in, is at the moment, I think we have tragically brought with us, carried through with us through the door as we were trying to find different ways of organizing and living and relating and etc. We've carried some things with us, which is very understandable, but one of the things that we've carried with us is a pattern of how we handle conflict and difference and disagreement and tension and hurt and all these sorts of things. And one word for describing the those patterns or those dynamics for me would be punitive. So the idea that if something happens between us that is difficult, or yeah, I'm I'm upset with you, or you're upset with me, or pissed off with me, or whatever it is, um, or we just disagree on what to do, any of those things that quite quickly we tend to start playing out patterns that are about who is right and who is wrong, and is there some form of a particular form of power or force that we can appeal to or enact that gets us what we want or um makes life harder for the other person, or there'd be a ton to say about that, but essentially punitive dynamics or punitive systems. And I think that there's there's huge human impacts of that, of those systems. They cause a huge amount of pain and hurt for everyone involved. I think they don't they don't get anyone what they need after something difficult has happened. Um yeah, so I guess I'm saying punitive systems and competitive systems or adversarial systems. So if we disagree, we're looking for who's gonna win and who's gonna lose a lot of the time, rather than what we can come up with that would work for for everyone. And I think that both of those kind of competitive adversarial and punitive systems, they not only have huge personal human impact, but also they are very powerful in fracturing collective power or the possibility of collective power, or even the hope for even trying to have collective power. And so I think that there's something about the practice of trying to find really robust systems and processes, and also beliefs and worldviews and orientations, all those sorts of things, practices that help us to practice coalition or togetherness or ways of having conflict that that's productive and actually strengthens our collective power through taking in all the feedback that's come through is coming to us through conflict or taking in all the wisdom that's contained within our disagreement. That if we brought those different things together, those different needs and perspectives, we could build a much, much stronger, wiser way forward that would keep us actually together or bring us more together. So I think that that for me is another core part of collective power is an orientation, and I would say like a fundamental orientation, and taking starting to view that as a fundamental political trans uh political um orientation, which I think is there in the the movement around transformative justice, which has had a big influence over the last few years in the kinds of movement spaces that I'm connected to. I see that really starting to have a cultural shift around it, but starting to hold that how we handle difference, how we handle conflict as a fundamental political value, both in terms of where we want to ultimately get to, but also how do we get there, the means as well as the ends. And so that's again, maybe a little bit abstract, but that's another core element for me. So some things in terms of building and sustaining transformative social movements that could that could actually work to shift systems. I think partly it's the orientation to doing that as becoming one of our uh highest priorities. How like our biggest task being to build a movement like we've never known in a really beautiful sense. And for me that involves circling up, trying to bring people together, whether that's trying to build coalitions of different organizations working on the same kind of issues or different organizations working on or groups working on different issues, so we can start to have, rather than there being a climate movement and a uh migrant justice movement, what what could what could they all achieve if they if they came together? And and this thing where actually if we go upstream, we find that we're we're addressing the same root causes, that upstream we're actually we have a shared purpose, whereas downstream we may not have that much of a shared purpose. So collaborating doesn't even make that much sense downstream. But so the orientation towards that, then starting to in in whatever ways we can bring people together. So that might be if you're in an organization or a group, starting to reach out to your neighbors and start to have conversations with them, it might be starting to call together things that I usually use the term like a movement-building assembly, so trying to bring a lot of different organizations and groups together, different movements together, and seeing is there some way that they could develop a strategy and also ways of working together that could make them far more powerful, and starting to move. I think of there being a kind of spectrum of what people mean by a movement, and one end of that spectrum is there's a bunch of different organizations and groups working on the same issues, and they're maybe barely even talking to each other, but people might refer to that as a movement, and then the other end of that spectrum, there's something that deeply, profoundly identifies itself as a movement, has really strong relationships, maybe a shared identity, really high levels of collaboration. And and I think part of what's fundamental is not just bringing people together, but building the systems and processes. So this is a strand of the work that that I am we do in Navigate is supporting groups to build their kind of living systems for decision-making, conflict, care and support, how they share resources, a bunch of other ones. And so developing those as kind of internal strategy within any kind of coming together, whether that's coming together a coalition of different groups and organizations or different movements, or it could also be individuals, but making that bringing people together, developing some kind of next level strategy, external strategy, and building a really strong internal strategy of really high trust and really strong living systems for how we collaborate and work together, how we handle conflict, etc., so that we can know that we're gonna struggle with those things. If we're gonna work together, we're going to disagree and we're gonna piss each other off, and we're gonna have conflict. It's definitely gonna happen. How can we build the things into that from the very start so that when that happens, it doesn't fracture us, it doesn't get us stuck. We just take that as part of coalition or part of being in a movement. There's this uh organizer called Bernice Johnson Reagan who wrote and spoke quite a bit about coalition, and and I think it's important to remember the context that she was involved in the civil rights movement. And as a black woman, she was talking about coalition not in a sort of nice to have kind of way, but in a in a way that she was seeing it as being really essential, and that the consequences of not having a coalition were huge violence, death, you know, the most terrible things, and that she was willing then to work in coalition with people that she might have massive disagreements with, who she might have significant conflict with, but she was she was making this distinction between coalition space and what she was calling home space, which I guess I see that as a spectrum. But it's really important to me to that we have home space where we feel really safe and really understood and have a lot of shared values and stuff like that, and lots of support, so that we can also then go into coalition space and work with people that we don't totally agree with on everything. And it feels so important to me that we don't we don't lose home space, but we also don't lose coalition space, that we have them both and see them in relationship with each other. And I think that's also something that hasn't been so strongly on the radar in the last while, in quite at least in quite a lot of uh social movement spaces.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:13

I uh I'm delighted to hear that that concept given given an author, because uh I I think I must have heard it actually three years ago in your talk, and it's uh I forgot the attribution and it's been haunting me as but in the last two years of like, oh yeah, there's coalitional spaces and like affinity-based spaces was how I kind of remembered it. Um yeah, so basically same ideas, and it often felt really relevant and really useful in my own kind of actual organizing, but also in discussions. I I remember uh I was at the Well Transformed, if you know you know, kind of important-ish socialist festival in in England. And uh yeah, I was in some large uh discussion where I mentioned that idea, and a lot of people were like, Oh yeah, that's really useful. And uh yeah, I can I can now gladly send those people to to that distinction. And I think that uh that to me seems like an example of again if I can attempt a sort of reflecting of what I think is so valuable about the the work you're doing, even as and because it is kind of amorphous um or kind of difficult to like pin down. Um it's like it feels kind of like among many operations is you're kind of bundling a set of ideas and frameworks and you know articulating them in a useful way. Um in a way that you might almost it feels quite mimetic to me. Like I I don't know if you're consciously going about it this way, but the idea that you have essentially, you know, a video, a Google Doc, a footprint in podcasts, or whatever, where you will offer this as a combination of. Yeah, partly MVC, partly a kind of uh conjunctural analysis, partly, you know, a kind of mostly implicit political analysis, um, depending on what you mean by that. You know, a lot of these elements, which would all be valuable in themselves to a degree, but I see a lot of the value as that they they add up into this quite coherent kind of memetic genome. It's so it feels like you're kind of seeding. I remember yeah, feeling feeling that in the original version, that there's feels of this almost kind of post-COVID um type attempt to synthesize this this cultural DNA that that then works and enables people in, I guess, to bridge the metaphors in the kind of movement ecology, right? Which is a fairly trendy phrase, I think, with with good reason lately, that that like because yeah, that metaphor helps us to understand that, like, yeah, we're all working together, yeah, whether it's a coalition or not, like there's a lot of niches that can either be in complement to one another or they can be in conflict and competition with one another. And yeah, this is uh I'd need to sit down with a fucking pen and paper to draw this out. That like, yeah, so so you you guys are kind of working on a new genetic architect that runs through the a sort of cooperation gene. Reminds me of a novel I read, Tchaikovsky, whatever. Um yeah, I mean, tell me if I'm way wide in the mark with any of that rambling, but but that's that's how it feels to me. But you're not necessarily saying, like, here's a movement in the same in the same way that the Extinction Rebellion founders said, here's a movement that's also in some in a lot of respects, like we've not really known hitherto. You're not trying to be like just another attempt. Although I'm sure we both hope a lot of people do make similar kinds of just other attempts, but you're kind of working on more of a meta movement level, it feels like, and trying to, yeah, meld these many different strands.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:55

Yeah, I think that so I'm I'm really into and sort of outside of outside of being a facilitator in Navigate, I have worked on a project that was trying to um do more of that proposing an actual movement kind of thing. But in terms of within my work within Navigate, because our role in Navigate is a kind of process role of facilitation and telling people develop systems and mediating conflict and all that sort of stuff, what we have been more trying to do is say to put forward the possibility and to try and uh either gather people up to to come together and see can we um organize together more powerfully, and sort of maybe trying to kind of prototype that a little bit as well, and kind of leaving it for others because because our role is more of a process role, leaving it for others within different groups, or someone else, if yeah, for example, if someone started a really powerful social movement anytime, really, um we would be interested in if if it was something that we believed in, we'd be interested in getting really involved and supporting it. And I think that's also for me that's the case not only in terms of things that we might see uh as more uh uh clearly directly fitting with the label of social movement, but I'm interested in different possible uh uh ways of organizing collective power. Like I personally think that there is there is a a pathway that's less has has less sort of left left-wing political ideology, but is more about radically collaborative and radically participatory democracy at a really large scale. So I'm yeah, that's something that we're also working on. Uh and that yeah, that's that's another strand. Uh, I think there's other stuff which is maybe adjacent to that, which is around a level of uh community organizing that could turn into a way of uh bringing together a massive amount of collective power that can not only respond to crises but actually start to develop different ways in what kind of in Gandhian nonviolence is called constructive program. So not just obstructive program stopping the things you don't like, or which is that's a bit of an oversimplification, but actually creating the institutions or the systems or the processes or the community um networks or whatever that that would meet people's needs and stuff. Um yeah. So for me there are there are there are multiple different ways that this could look, but I think that all of them come back to organizing and sustaining collective power as well as having a a strategy that is about uh is based on a sensitive awareness of complex systems and is aiming for uh high leverage points, root causes in those systems. Um yeah, also just to mention another thing. So for me, within the social movement space, there's the idea of like a movement building assembly and another project that we've just been uh it took us, it's taken us a long time to get these things rolling because we're also doing lots of other stuff, like we've been spending a lot of time training up a lot more mediators, so we've spent uh yeah, a lot of our energy over the last couple of years training up because there's there's so few trained uh mediators, so we've we've put a lot of energy into that, for example. But one project that we've been working on, we've we've we call it fighting together, which is is kind of like uh uh uh like a movement fight room. Um so I think I've heard of this. Yeah, that's a that's a term that um we've heard from uh one of our what one of our main sort of teachers and influences, a guy called Dominic Barter, who's done a lot of work in Brazil and um around conflict and building conflict systems. And one kid once, you know, in I think he was building a conflict system somewhere with young people and someone referred to it as like the fight room. And it's like the room where you go to have your fights, but you have them, you have them in a way that actually works and moves you forward and gets you what you want, really, sort of thing. So yeah, borrowing or being inspired by that phrase, the the fighting together project is the idea of a movement fight room. So it's like if you are trying to work with another group and you run into conflict, come to the movement fight room and come and come soon as well. Or if you would would consider working with another group, but you don't because you've got some past conflict that's unresolved, maybe come to the movement fight room. Um so that's another project that we've just we've just started prototyping that. We've done our first, we're well, we're kind of coming towards the end of doing our first process with with that. It's it's been really hard to get people to come and try these things out, a movement building assembly or a or the movement fight room, the fighting together project. And I think a lot of people resonated with what we've been the stuff we've been saying, but it's it's also tricky because we didn't take a leadership role in saying, and we're gonna lead this movement to being, and maybe that's something that was that was missing from us advocating for it. Though I also hope that by doing what we're doing, like you said a few minutes ago, we might be uh strengthening this core element, or at least from our perspective, is a core element of collaboration that and and essentially trying to build collaborative games within our our organizing so that we I mean collaborative game as a as a metaphor that rather than competitive games or adversarial games that that fracture collective power and and hold us back, how can we build collaborative game dynamics, whether that's about handling conflict or making decisions or whatever it might be into the things that that could then be a a pathway to um collective power and upstream strategy. I'm I'm wondering if what I'm saying feels like I'm I'm wanting to not just talk about sort of a general theory, but trying to point to things that I I think this could look like in practice and give people some kind of sense of what do we do with this? Because I think that like having a bunch of ideas is maybe doesn't move us forwards that much, whereas a specific let's try and do this and this and this, or these are the ways that you can interact with what we're trying to do or whatever, uh is is more likely to move us forwards or onwards.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:34

I I was thinking of asking, I mean, I'm I'm confident that there's there's some some portion of my listener base are outright movement nerds who are up for kind of yeah, uncut theory, but yeah, even for yeah, the nerdist among us, then probably a kind of uh cycling dialogue from theory to practice, yeah, helpful. I I mean I've got I mean you you listed some of the kind of uh projects as navigate you're working on, and yeah, I'll just observe in passing. Like I think that's one of the peculiar peculiarities of this whole stuff we're discussing that people might not be used to is it that's it's not the first time I've noticed that like people with a lot of experience in kind of a certain form of progressive organizing have the confidence to not take traditional leadership. I the last time that I was really struck by this was I don't know if you know Adam Greenfields, but uh he's yeah, working on similar wavelengths, and yeah, he's very clear that like he just yeah, in a kind of Taoist or indeed in a sort of uh mimetic way, you know, he just wants to release some ideas and see if people run with them, but he's not like taking on it's him himself to to yeah, lead lead like some general leading a church. Uh and it seems like that, yeah, there's a similar thing which yeah, I'm I'm impressed by as it seems like the product of like genuine wisdom, if I can be so bold. Um yeah, in terms of practical kind of manifestations of these ideas, as I mean, I'm guessing that the readers in the last three years, since you tried trying to seed this into the world, then it's probably been like, yeah, therefore are kind of let's say non-linear or like difficult to check, like yeah, which is maybe more productive than yeah, you guys trying to say, like, let's let's have all movements do things our way, you know. You guys shouldn't be sectarian, you should be in our sect and following our precepts and our special analysis, you know, like that can be unhelpful or so. Um, but one of the applications that comes to my mind, and tell me if this is or isn't an actual application, is um I heard about a meet a kind of summit of movements, not in those, but a meeting of movements in Hebden Bridge quite a while ago now. This must be like at least a couple or a few years ago, which I think you along with some other facilitation outfits were convening. So it was like 20 groups from the climate movement. Uh, were you involved in that?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:08

Um, I think I think I might have been, but I'm not a hundred percent sure from the description whether that's the the thing I'm thinking of. And also, I think we've been involved in a few kind of movement gatherings, but we've mostly not been in the role of convening them. So I think we've then tried to take them try to influence them in a direction that we believe in, but that hasn't been straightforward because that's part of what's been uh challenging for us is that I think there are quite a lot of reasons why people either don't so much want to or aren't very straightforwardly able to shift their strategy or um think about upstream trying to go further upstream or yeah, for example, they have an organization that's got a load of funding and got a lot of people in it and they're already very involved in the projects they're already doing. It's it's a lot for them to change course. And I think that people would change course if they could see something they really believed in, but that's that's a bit of a process to get to that point where they see something more ambitious as feeling robust and real enough that they're willing to put a load of time and energy and capacity and resources into that thing, and there's this kind of gravitational pull of carrying on doing what we're what we're already doing. So I it's been also just our lack of resources. Like we wanted to try and run a movement building assembly that summer that we did that call back in 2023, and then the funding thing didn't work out, and someone who we were working with maybe like switched job role or some had something else they needed to do, and someone in another organization, and we then got some other focuses of what we were trying to do. And so it's this all sounds like CIA interference to me.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:24

I mean, you can be straight with me. If I was the CIA, this is where I'd be starting. You know, I I like to think they're on this level as well. They see that navigate is the main threat.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:37

Well, I I think that I was actually just having a conversation with a friend uh today about some of the things that I see us doing on the left in in terms of how we handle conflict and how we handle disagreement, that this is maybe just me just like exploring an idea, I don't necessarily mean this exactly in this way, but as just a thought experiment, I think is useful sometimes. Like, if someone did want to try and stop us from being powerful, might they do what might they do? And if they wanted to try and do it in a way that was not totally obvious, and sometimes like would would they actually end up doing the thing that we're doing ourselves? So there's there's there's a there's a quote in the slides for the movement that we've never known, which is I saw it in an art exhibition once, which was it just said, You will never defeat us, for we have already defeated ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:44

I mean it yeah, I think that that's I think it's a really useful thing to think about really practically. Like, is the way that we're handling this disagreement who does it benefit? Does it benefit us and what we're trying to do? If it doesn't, is it benefiting the forces that want things to carry on as they are or go even further towards devastation?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:11

Yeah, I it's maybe a bit of a hackneyed reference by this point, but there was that classic uh like a field manual or guidebook for the FBI from the 70s, I think, for yeah, disrupting activists at the activist organizing. And it's it's just delicious reading. I uh look it up if you've if you haven't heard of it, because it's yeah, there's kind of 10 10 bullet points, and it's like, yeah, just insist on ridiculous meeting process and like more meetings, and like uh yeah, essentially a lot of behaviors that would now maybe be short-handed as toxic, but but yeah, still very much in in currency. Um, so you you maybe were present at yeah, he bridge among others.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:57

I so have you had a movement assembly come off otherwise then, or it there was there was something that I would say probably is like the most successful version of that that I was just at last week, and I won't I won't say more specific details of it because I just don't tend I don't normally say who I'm facilitating for and that kind of thing. But it did seem to me, and it's it's really early days, and I think this stuff is hard to do, and it's I think it's particularly hard to start. I think that if we had maybe two or three examples of something like this happening successfully, it would start to be a reference point that I think then people would start doing it a lot more if they if they had some reason to believe in it and sort of lean their weights onto it. A little bit like I I've had this experience where I was with a few friends and we were sort of jumping from this thing to that thing, and we were quite, yeah, quite a different, quite a range of ages from like I don't know, 12 to 55 or something, I can't really remember. And there'd be like a gap, and we'd be like, oh, can we jump that gap? And we thought we probably couldn't, and then someone would jump it, and then within about three or four minutes, everyone was jumping it, although we had different, you know, different levels of ability to to jump that gap. And then and then something would someone would try something even more, and then someone would maybe they'd try it and it wouldn't quite work, and they'd try it again and they'd do it, and then shortly after that, everyone would try it and they would all do it. And it happened several times that the the range of possibility kept expanding itself by someone crossing it and then someone else crossing it, and then everyone crossed it. But we all thought before anyone crossed it that we probably couldn't do it. And so I'm really interested in could after a few prototypes of this, that's one reason why what we've been the way we've been thinking of the fighting together process that we've just been working on, is if we could start to tell the story, if we can manage to tell a successful story of two groups in a movement who had a conflict and they worked through it and they and they have a good story to tell of that was actually really beneficial for us, and we feel good about having done it. Could it start to become a thing that is a reference point for people that people it's like, oh yeah, we we do that, that's a thing we do. I I hope that that might be the case. But yeah, this this one that we just did, it's very early days, but it seemed to me like a much higher level of orientation to working together, and the the level of strategy ideas that came out of it were much more ambitious than ones I'd seen come out of other semi-attempts at this kind of thing that we'd been somewhat involved in before. So, yeah, I wonder, and I I wonder if there is something that I I think I see quite a lot of slow cultural shifts happening. For example, the recognition of trauma or the recognition of burnout that was maybe much less a thing 20, 30 years ago, is much more central now in many forms of organizing. And I think that's been the case also with conflict. I think it's it's not all the way through yet. People we find that people still call us way later, they will call us right, yeah. Not not the ideal time at all. They call us way, they wait till they've been having a conflict for ages and they've all kind of lost interest or or just like it's too much and they don't want to engage, and that's when they call a mediator as a last resort. And we're really trying to shift that dynamic and have people set up agreements for how they'll handle conflict before it happens, like you would set up a kitchen knowing you're gonna get hungry or a bed knowing you're gonna get tired, doing that for conflict and calling in support when you need it much, much sooner. That I think is also a cultural shift that's slowly, slowly happening. And I hope that something around the idea of we're not really managing to win with what we're currently doing and something needs to change, and that collective power and building collaboration and sustaining collaboration and coalitions, etc., all that stuff, I I hope that it is starting to become a thing that is more central for people. And I I don't know if this is if this is a thing or not, but I feel like when I started talking a lot about collective power whatever six, seven, I can't remember how many years ago now. I feel like I didn't hear that being talked about that much. And maybe, maybe it was, and I may maybe it was tons, but I feel like I'm hearing people talk about it a lot more now. And it seems to be, yeah, I keep noticing it as that phrase coming up in lots of different spaces. And I wonder if there's been a few different ways in which that idea has been sort of coming in and it's starting to become understood as a core or just held as a core priority in a way that it wasn't so much 15 years ago or something. But I I don't know at all.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:43

Yeah, it's interesting to hear uh you preempt what was going to be one of my, I assume, final questions around like, yeah, whether you see, you know, due to your influence or just in general, um some of these ideas, yeah, getting traction. And and yeah, I that we might be uh in at least a UK context, so won't impress your own globalness, but like yeah, whether we might be moving towards some kind of a movement like we've never known. So it sounds like in those regards, yeah, certain certain cultural elements around yeah, trauma, self-care, burnout, conflicts, and and around yeah, collective agency or yeah, it sounds like uh yeah, there's some some grounds for optimism there.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:29

I think so. I I mostly have no idea, like I don't know what everyone is thinking, I don't know what everyone is up to, and I don't know what everyone is trying to head towards. But I I wonder if I'm hearing it hearing some kind of cultural shift slowly happening. I've I have no basis for having any idea if what we're doing has any influence on them. And for me, that's that's I guess not really uh the the yeah, it I wherever the influence is coming from, uh I'm just glad about it becoming a focus area more and more.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:11

I mean, I guess one possible kind of black pill uh reading of that would be like we're fetishizing collective agency because we know its lack in a way that we didn't 20 years ago. Or you know, same with language around burnout and trauma and stuff. It's like, well, then maybe there was just a little bit less trauma bumping around 20 years ago. Uh I'm just supposing that. I mean, I do I believe that yes and no. I like it in terms of if I can offer my own reading of that of like of whether we're moving in the right direction movement, kind of meta-movement-wise, then yeah, like uh I'm very struck by I think your party has been an interesting kind of lightning rod for or just sort of cross-section of the ability of of the different cultures on the left to believe in in kind of aggregation or not, or and to believe in like yeah, a sort of Trotskyist conflict to death. Um and I think maybe having gone through that, then it's it feels like there's a bit of scope for a collective learning of like, oh yeah, maybe just internecine conflict is actually bad, and we can all publicly agree on that now, and and and we can't just just backbite our way to to a revolution. And so that requires, I think, a lot of maybe a kind of unconscious reckoning with some of that imprinting unconscious stuff you were talking about something like an hour ago. What is it, sacred commitments and and yeah, ceremony?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:44

Yeah, sacred vow or unconscious contract, but I think you can you can call it anything really, yeah, just the idea of having made some kind of agreement or deal for very good reasons, but that may not be the thing, the basis of what you may not be the actual basis you want to choose for for what you want to do now.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:08

Yeah, sorry, I I could I could maybe posit the your party sort of car crash as like yeah, a new kind of trauma traumatic lesson where we can collectively learn some some useful lessons. I I would add to that, um, having already mentioned the World Transformed, which I think these two are are quite related, kind of important nexuses of probably the most important part of the UK progressive scene. I mean, no offense to the climate movement and the kind of XXR world, but I think like uh the political left, I don't know, are symbolized by kind of Navarra and these places, and now maybe migrating into the Green Party. That's probably where there's more numbers and power ultimately. But I found it really interesting to observe some people there having what was at that point initial conversations around your party and like how do we run this? How do we create a collective agent, a new collective agent that's adequate to the task? You know, it's it's a kind of parallel tracks version of a conversation, a bit like this one, except with more kind of Marxist buzzwords, but not exclusively Marxist buzzwords, because uh there were some people there from the Movement Ecology Collective, uh, who I'm sure you know pretty well. Uh they're you know, for listeners at home, they're some people, not many people, but some people who I hope to talk to at some point as well, actually, um, who also came kind of through Extinction Rebellion and have a lot of the same sort of skill set and facilitation, MVC type sensibilities. And yeah, I don't know, I offer that as a kind of vignette of it felt very incongruous to see me or them at the world transformed in this kind of Marxist heartland. And it was even more interesting to see them being seems to play a really valuable role and having really quite a good reception from at least a lot of the, you know, a lot from what I could gather there and then that there was an enormous appetite for some of their specific ideas that they were trying to introduce and sort of cross-pollinate into that side of the world. So maybe that's me trying to round it out into like whether or not we're collectively on some sort of meta-movementist level heading in a good direction or not. I'm sure on some level it will happen in incredibly mysterious mimetic ways or structural ways, yeah. That we can't second guess, but also, yeah, want to celebrate people in movement ecology collective or you know, work like yours is that like a lot of this, uh, you know, a lot of if we want more functional movements, we can't just rely on on the grand holistic systems. Like, I really wouldn't underestimate how much of movement practice, and you know, I I could spend all day as as I'm sure you could spend more of talking about historical examples like the Quakers uh seeding so much of the ways that we collaborate today, and like where would we be without them? So, yeah, this is a very long way of saying thank you for the work you're doing. Uh I don't know how you are for time, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:09

Um I don't have I don't have to go immediately, probably fairly soon, but um uh yeah, I could I could stay on for another couple of minutes, a few minutes, I think. If there is anything else that feels uh you'd like to talk about more.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:30

I was gonna ask you that. Is there anything that I haven't asked, or is is there anything that feels important to you?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:46

I mean probably like tons and tons more and I'm interested in there there's some amount of intention that that goes into building something and building the conditions and trying to set things up well so that when the thing starts moving it moves well and doesn't fall apart, and there's some amount of just emergence and who knows where all the energy is going to suddenly uh coalesce or come together, and yeah, for example, at the moment there's the Green Party uh becoming a place that uh maybe a a whole set of conditions has meant that a lot of people are uh are kind of circling up in that one place. Not everyone. There's some people who really won't want to join that. There might be some people who won't want to join it now but might join in a while. And for me, there's a big question of can there be a way that something like that can collaborate with other things outside of it in a strategic way where that that's it's it's going. I I like thinking of the thing that seems to happen in a lot of films where if people are trying to break into the castle, someone sneaks in through the the place around the back where the there's some bit where the water flows out and there's some little way in there, and someone can sneak in through there, or they can get catapulted in or something like that, and then they can open the gates for uh everyone else to come in, or that that sort of thing. And the way that uh strategy, I think really deep uh uh uh strategy uh can uh have many, many, many different uh uh uh tactics that are strategically aligned and and and are organized, tactics that are organized by strategy rather than uh uh tactics uh uh organizing strategy, strategy organizing tactics, basically. And uh yeah, I'm interested in uh are there ways that uh there can be uh this strand over here doing this and this strand over there doing that, and they are talking to each other and collaborating in a way that makes them more than the sum of their parts. And I think, yeah, there's there's quite a few different like we've been mostly speaking about explicitly political um someone just started using a power tool. Is that coming through?

SPEAKER_03 1:38:48

Uh I actually can't hear it, so listener is if you can hear it, listeners, I'm sorry, but uh this it's it's sounding great to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:55

Um yeah, the there's um I think that there's uh there's a strand which is about explicitly left-wing, ideologically uh left-wing uh social movements that that lead with their proposal for what they want uh the world to be at a kind of uh sort of outcomes level. And there are other things like radical democracy or uh a particular type of community organizing that blends into sort of mutual aid and the life house stuff and uh all of those things, and then there are uh social movements, and there's lots of different possibilities within that, and those social movements can be uh made up of individuals or groups and coalitions or both. And there's also uh the question of is there a parliamentary uh or uh yeah, using the current system uh to uh then go beyond the current system, and is there some kind of uh blend or uh collaboration across multiple different strands of that? And uh I I personally think that probably the most strategic thing would be to be working on all of those levels, as well as uh playing a really strong media and social media game, and uh um yeah, blending different things together, like how the Black Panthers uh brand breakfast clubs that were uh really a form of political organizing at the same time as really meeting needs for a community that uh had its needs uh systemically uh under undermet and undernourished. So yeah, I'm interested in uh things that could bring together uh quite a wide variety of uh sub-strategies into a a larger whole holistic strategy and where those different uh uh actors within that uh are uh really collaborating and working together uh strategically and making sure they have good relationships with each other and and also respecting that yeah, maybe there are some differences. Maybe some people believe in a uh in a route through uh winning an election and some people really, really don't. And uh is there a place of uh mutual support or even collaboration? I I'm also really interested in like what do we who are we thinking of when we think of who we're trying to organize and and who the left is. And uh sometimes I think about do we actually need to are you familiar with that concept of the spectrum of allies?

SPEAKER_03 1:41:58

Yeah. Our listeners may not be.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:01

Right. So basically the idea of there being a spectrum of people who are actively in support of what you believe in through passive support, maybe neutral, maybe active uh sorry, passive opposition and active opposition. And you could add in more nuance to that, people who are actively opposed but have lots of power, people who are yeah, lots of different places on that spectrum, and maybe it's more than just one line, maybe there's lots of different variables in it. But I'm really interested in are a lot of people ultimately interested in what we could call progressive or left-wing things, but they really don't identify as that, and they won't show up in the subcultural ways that uh many people on the left are are used to, and and and uh it's important to a lot of people, but like yeah, the like just a lot of people who who aren't um identifying themselves as left wing, or maybe don't really identify as political, but if you asked them like if you saw someone fall down in the street, would you help them, they would absolutely help them and they they have an interest in a society in a world where people can meet their needs and there is less violence, and there's there's still a uh an ecosystem that that's still alive and well. And I think that there's there's like a whole much much larger slice of society that we probably need to organize with strategically because we won't have enough collective power if we don't. And also if they're not with us, then who are we doing this for?

SPEAKER_03 1:44:05

Yeah, no, it's it's a topic I've yeah, ruminated on for quite a while and would like to return to on air indeed. Uh, but yeah, the the ways in which we might be limited by the concept of the left. Again, you know, I'll name check Novara Media for the second time. Like it's it's so valuable, but also feels like we lose something sometimes by this quite uh kind of calcified identity, and this it can be kind of exclusive and and rigid in its own ways. And a related observation just from some of what you were saying there, that that I I'm very conscious is not an original thought, but feels kind of germane and worth airing here is like again an analogy. The if if a movement is a kind of organism, a bit like something that you know, how many ants can be combined into just an overall organism, then I don't know how it works with ants actually, but the idea that if you're thinking enough in the terms that that you are are proposing, it's almost like the the passing the threshold from a kind of of self-awareness, an organism or an entity becoming self-aware, which I'm not a psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, sadly, none of those things. So I don't exactly know you know if you can measure that empirically. But it feels, I mean, to me, I find it a useful analogy to think of like I think so many you talk about like unspoken scripts, you know, so many of our kind of routine unmatched social movements and forms of organizing, kind of sub-movement or whatever, uh, I think quite unaware and aren't trying to, you know, haven't gone through the Lukanian mirror stage or or just haven't gone through this process of recognition recognition of like I, that is I a collective agent, or I as a person, frankly, but as a collective agent, I'm one among many, and I must work within a wider ecosystem. And I think it's yeah, I don't know. I I I get excited whenever I see places where it feels like that's happening, and yeah, to just throw throw back to 15 minutes ago talking about the greens, and yeah, the what kind of fulcrum will they be? Since that is where all the energy is. You know, I think with recent party political experience, I hope people have their expectations managed that like they're not going to be a kind of dream silver bullet all the way all the way to the top. You know, it will be a contested terrain much like Labour was under Corbyn, right? I and it will be in dialogue with social movements much like that that was at the same time. But yeah, I'll name check maybe a little foreshadowing for an interview, I hope, to have recorded and up sometime in this month is uh with the Greens in general, but also Greens organize. I I don't know if you're familiar with them, probably they're uh yeah, they feel like an attempt to be a brain, like momentum was in in labor, and an attempt to to be a kind of locus for all of for ex pretty much exactly this for this kind of yeah, situation in relations to others, and like once you see that you can also start considering how you function as an entity. So, yeah, we'll see. Um we'll see if that is for you, lives up to that hype.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:28

Yeah, one other thing that I was just thinking about that I've thought about quite a lot. Um, again, there's another power tool being used right now, is is also just whisper quite I can't can't hear a thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:43

There's these new electric power tools, that's wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:47

Um yeah, one other thing that I have thought about quite a lot is the really powerful social movements that I feel really inspired by. I think that they have both had a level of a level of need that they're organizing around that is really profoundly felt that there's there's not a an easy way to ignore the issues that they're organizing around for the people involved. There's a really direct impact of whether this thing works out or not, and that they have probably much stronger community roots than it's easy for a lot of things that happen in Britain at the moment to have because of where community uh is for a lot of people and uh and how that maps with uh political beliefs and things. And yeah, that the people who uh are on the sh really sharp end of the issues uh don't have a better option than to organize a lot of the time. Whereas uh if people if the people who organize are the people with actually more privilege or more resources and capacity, it just creates a different uh a different environment or a different context. And I think there's something about uh having a way of recognizing recognising ourselves as an us, but a large enough us that for me, yeah, something like Extinction Rebellion, it mobilised a lot of people, but it was a really small group of people, and the way that it uh it's both its external strategy and also it's just its subculture uh was probably uh not something that would draw a lot of people who weren't involved in it towards it. And and the media were very involved in in that as well. And they will be, but then they have very strong agendas. But so how yeah, is it possible for us to find a way for a large group of a a really large amount of this society to come together with enough of something shared that brings us together? And that doesn't have to be forms of identity or culture or tradition that have been shared in other contexts, in other places, but there has to be something I think that really brings people together and they feel that they're part of something and that they feel respect and care and some sense of togetherness with the people that they're coming together with. I think that's it's harder, it's harder to do that in our context than it has been in some uh other contexts. There's probably a few other variables in there that, for example, I think powerful social movements that really inspire me have had quite a strong spiritual basis, whether or not that's that can be understood. I mean that in quite a broad sense, but something of not only shared experience and identity and culture, but also something that they believe in really, really strongly a lot of the time. So I think that that's a real challenge for us to bring people together, but I also think it's possible.

unknown 1:51:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:51

Yeah, I'll note for our listeners to save me asking as I would otherwise be tempted to do, like, well, what what specifically are those movements that inspire you? Um, I think if memory serves you, I mean you you mentioned some of them in the original talk about a movement, like we've never known. So if you're still something like two hours in uh of this stuff, or if you want to take a short break and then dive back in, then uh please do check out the video with with accompanying slides. I should be able to link both. Uh yeah, for for the kind of ge citations, essentially in the the kind of deeper more more pre-planned work on this as opposed to off the cuff. Um yeah, on that in passing, also like this is an awesome conversation. And indeed, just in there alone, there's so many moments where I'm like, oh yeah, I'd love to drill down on that for ages and think about like what yeah, what would it feel like to like what does it mean to like if we need a collective agent that's yeah, famously more than 3.5% of the population, but probably needs to be like half. But like, what what type of thing, what like what vehicle do we all need to be in? Like it's movement is fun because it's such a woolly word and it's a bit more adaptable than like party, much so that did work. And yeah, so thank you, Paul, for I I yeah, just prompting imaginations, I think, on this of like what is it we all need to be doing? Um if you do have like one, two further minutes, I think the last question I would I would like to ask to finally root this, or did maybe yeah, uh root this into if our listeners at home are like, wow, there was a lot of like cool concepts. Uh what's the what's the so what? What is to be done? What's the praxis? If if someone was super enthused by these ideas, would they be able to like join and navigate training? You said you've been churning out mediators. Is that something that like people in general can tap into?

SPEAKER_02 1:54:00

On that specifically, we've we've just run like a whole program over the last couple of years, and we're running a new one that we've just we've just started. So it that's all that's already happening. Um we're running one in Scotland this year through most of this year. And I think we probably probably won't run another one for a while because it's meant that we've had to pause a lot of other stuff, including doing actual mediation facilitation ourselves, which I try to spend most of my time doing it rather than training other people in it. Um so we probably won't be running any more anytime soon, but people are welcome to get in touch if they're if they really passionately want to uh learn that kind of work, and we can see either put them on a list of people or that we'd get in touch with if we do decide to run another one or uh uh help them find other ways of doing that. And uh I do think that if uh if anything does take off in terms of uh some big coming together of collective power that's that's organizing for the things that we believe in, then if it was strategic, we would run more um to build those capacities. In general, I think that uh the things that practically people could take away would be I think just looking out for any moment where that's within a group that you're in involved in, looking for the moments where there's some kind of disagreement or there's some kind of conflict or there's some potential of splitting of the ways. And I don't think splitting is always a thing to avoid in some situations. If you find that you have a different purpose, it may well make the most sense to go separate ways if you're trying to climb to different mountaintops. But in general, just really paying attention to any difference or conflict that you come across, how are you handling it, how are people around you handling it, how are you handling how they're handling it. So it's quite easy to be like, well, we need to be uh trying to stay together, and that person over there is not staying together, so I'm now pissed off with them, and and and actually I've then ended up separating myself from that person. So it's it's it's it's tricky, but I think really paying attention to that in terms of how we show up in the groups that we're part of, really thinking about is what I'm currently involved in more downstream? Is there some way of moving upstream? Is there some kind of conflict within or disagreement within this group, but also between this group and other groups that we could potentially try out calling calling the movement fight room the fighting together project, and um trying out working through a conflict between one group and another, one movement and another in that space. Is there some opportunity for a movement building assembly where you could imagine getting a load of different groups that are working on similar issues together to see if they could come up with some kind of strategy or build some sort of coalition and way of collaborating to become much more powerful? And yeah, I mean that in the broad sense, I think, of not only if you're in a uh really clearly political social movement group, but also if you're working in uh mutual aid and community organizing, or uh in your in unions uh uh involved in union work or uh you're involved in a progressive political party. All of those sorts of things. And to just try and spot what you're doing. Yeah, there's this person who called Mary Parker Follett, who uh from what I know of her and finding her quite amazing, but there's a thing that she said that I like to uh mention a lot, which is that she's I'll just paraphrase what she said, which was basically there are three ways of handling difference basically win-lose, lose-lose, or win-win. And I like the simplicity of that because she called it domination compromise, meaning lose-lose, and what she called win-win was integration. And so if any time if there's even a small disagreement with you and a and uh someone you're working with, or a massive disagreement across your group, or your whole movement that you're in, which of those are you doing, and what are the consequences in terms of the trust and the relationships and the outcome? Are you ending up in some sort of win-lose or lose-lose? And trying to spot those moments and see if you can get the support you need to interact with them in a way that's more likely to build trust and togetherness and collaboration and collective power. And if it feels like you don't quite know how to do that, then ringing ringing someone up to get support like the kind of support that we offer, and doing that as as soon as you can, like reach out much sooner and address it sooner. And and I think the quality and level of support that is that we get is fundamental to anything that we can uh hope to achieve. Yeah. Also, one just uh uh a number that I like uh thinking about sometimes is in the Indian farmer's strike in a few years ago now. Um I've I've struggled to get as much information about it as I would like, and I don't end to I don't tend to like go around reading loads and loads of stuff, but I came across the figure that 400 I think it was 472 unions worked together in that strike. And for me, that's really really inspiring, and it was such a successful movement in the face of really really challenging um stuff, it it achieved something amazing, and that as a as a number, like it if if we try to make that what we're aiming for, that level of collaboration or coalition.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:48

Yeah, almost more so than I remember hearing that it was tens of millions, I loosely remember, or like in the millions of people, but it's it's nice to hear it measured in in groups as well in unions as well. That's the even more aspirational version of it. Uh thanks. This has been awesome. I mean, the only plug in terms of practice I'd add is listener review into this stuff, then yeah, like the this is a lot of the conversation I I aspire to have. So yeah, hopefully, hopefully more where this came from. So yeah, thanks so much, Paul. This has been great.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:22

Yeah, thanks, thanks so much, and thanks for putting the time and energy into exploring these things with people and trying to figure out together collectively what what's a way forward that can really transform things. So thank you for inviting me to the transition. Okay, cool, see you right.