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