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Hi, and welcome back to the Working Class History Podcast. As you may know, we don't get any sort of funding from any wealthy benefactors, corporations, governments, or political pies. Our work is funded by you, our listeners and readers on Patreon. In return, our supports on Patreon get access to exclusive content and benefits like ad free episodes, bonus podcast episodes, and a couple of exclusive discussion podcast series, fireside chats and radical reads. So here is a little
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You also have a bunch of international wings of the project. Ada. You're part of the Persian language wing. Maybe you could talk about the work that you all do and also what other languages is the project available in and how are you organized? You know, how is the project organized across the world.
Well, for the part of the we do the Persian language, we provided in tweeter Instagram and telegram Telegram tweeter both are censored in Iran and so people usually use proxy. But most of the people have the proxy, so they can have access to it. When we wanted to start it, we were actually thinking about how we can work in group, so they were first of all, I have to say that our group consists of usually around seven people, but
it sometimes varies from ten to four. Some of us will mostly inspired by worker cooperatives of Richard Wolf, and some of us also were inspired and influenced by work of atomist Antonio Negri and Michael Hart works of assembly. Their concept which they're saying that basically this network, any sort of network, would also in the twenty first century in the now liberties era, need to carry the material reproduction of themselves as well. So that was the aim.
The form the form. It was basically our first priority, and one of our friends introduced us. We thought that it would be a great idea to adopt it because it has some sort of continuity, and we thought that it would be equally spread the division of labor that they live. We have to do it one of us, and so it would be a good practice for us to work on it and to do the thing spontaneously without any middleman in between. Our coordinator and we also developed a bots that would just call us out and
do the coordination a bit. Yeah, well this is something which is always is still in progress, and there is always these ups and downs in it. But I personally, I am actually proud of it. And in our group we so one of the very important thing about posting or publishing a post is that you need to you need to think about the narrative. We do it in a way that so it doesn't really matter, like I really don't know exactly about the stands of my fellow members.
We put something in our group and then we send it out, we publish it if we all agree on it. So and this is something that I'm really like, I really glad about this, but we haven't really reached our aims yet. But yeah, this is this is the idea that how we come about about working class history?
John, How did you go from you know, as the host of a relatively unpopular but in my opinion, quite good podcast. It's not easy to build a base of listeners online or a base of followers around, especially serious political history. That's global, right. A lot of people want cynicism, they want sarcasm, They want to be reminded that the world is shit and everything's fucked. They don't want. Usually, you know, there's not a lot of young lefties out there who are trying to get inspired when I was
when I was younger. At least, maybe that's changed as the world has shifted in recent years. But how did you go from taking this idea? I don't know if it started with the idea of posting a daily you know, this day and history for the radical left, but how did you scale that to where you now have half a million followers and people. You know, there's little collectives around the world who are trying to participate.
It's really interesting for me to hear as well and to learn more about how they organize. The English language pages are a collective effort. So I can't take credit for all that. But essentially, a while ago, some of us had the idea of posting anniversaries would be a thing that might go viral on social media and might prove quite popular, and then that might be quite a good way of essentially propagating radical ideas and trying to encourage people to organize and get active and stuff and
learn from past struggles and things like that. And that basically was just more successful than we anticipated, and so as more and more people started kind of following we started and thinking about what more could we do with it, and so we started a Patreon where some people started to essentially support us financially, and this enabled some of us to start taking time off from our day jobs to do more in debt work, which is how we were able to start a podcast and cover the costs
associated with various online platforms which kind of mount up, you know, social media tools and things like that. So essentially it was support from a readers on Patreon that
enabled us to take that to take that step. And because we did think that a podcast talking to people who were involved in struggles in the past are primarily and some historians as well, to try and tell those stories and learn from those experiences was something which wasn't being We thought there was a bit of a gap for that, at least in terms of the international scope the wh has and the perspective that WCH has focused on ordinary people and not like political parties or governments.
Can I ask another question about that perspective because one of the you know, as a songwriter, I've always been a huge fan of the two to three minute history of some thing, you know, the ballad maybe six minutes is more accurate. But you know, you guys do a really really good job of compressing really big stories into
a couple of paragraphs that people are actually going to read. So, you know, one of my goals as a songwriter is can I tell you enough about a subject that makes you want to learn more about it without giving you, you know, a fifteen minute long song that just goes on and on and on. That's an art. It's very very hard. I don't always do it correctly, you know, but you guys do a really really good job of that.
And I'm interested to know if that was something you know from the get go that you all decided would be a more digestible way to propagate these stories. Was their conversations about the length of posts, you know, because because another thing you do that ties into that is you don't necessarily propagate the way you know, like think of a kind of classical left party sort of narrative where you're telling people at the end what to think
about it. You kind of leave it open to the reader to interpret what the story means, but you tell it in a way that makes it hard to not sympathize with the subjects of the story.
Oh well, well thanks, I mean with the English language stuff, yeah, I mean we did decide that in terms of stuff, we wanted to be succinct, and we wanted to speak clearly without using specialist terminology where we can avoid it,
or explaining any specialist terms that we use. And yeah, and we really we just had a genuine dislike for so much lefty history telling, which you get trock groups or whatever, and they have history articles in their papers or whatever, and they typically end and that's why and this failed because they failed to have the correct revolutionary leadership. And so we are that correct revolutionary leadership, so if you join us, it will all be good next time.
And then on the other side of that, you've got like anarchists or an archo syndicalists who do the same thing and they end it with and this is why you should be in an arca syndicalist, you know, and which you know, if people want to do that, that's fine, but that's not really how we wanted to go about things. And with the length, we don't actually when we started, the posts were a lot shorter for the most part, but we kind of discovered that to our surprise because
especially so much. Social media, especially Instagram, is such a visual medium that people seem to really prefer once where we go into more detail. So over the past couple of years we've been rewriting a lot of stuff to give more detail and to give more background because the posts where we give more context and do things like you know, try and include quotes from participants and things do prove more popular. So we are trying to add
more depth there. But you're restricted by the character limits, so you can't go over two thousand characters and including spaces. So that's the limit set by the format.
Don't they know that history has no character limit oday? What about in the in the Farsi language version of working class history? What are the main projects that you do? Do you have an Instagram as well? Do you focus on you said earlier, a few of the things, including telegram.
Basically, as John also mentioned, there's a character limit, especially in Twitter, and I think we are most emphasizing is in telegram because it's very popular in Iran. Telegram is basically kind of do the job of like WhatsUp as well, so people really use it for their daily and there they really have interaction with it at the beginning it was it was little, but it slowly grow to be more.
There is also this limit, but if I'm not mistaken, the limit of telegram is less than the other platforms, especially our domestic local stories are longer than the than the more international.
And you focus on the same kind of stuff.
Though well, so our principle that like how we're gonna choose, we prefer those who are about movements than like birthday or the death date of a scholar or activist. And if it is about movement, those who are more about the victory, who were successful than those who failed. We wanted to have this theme as like an honorable or pride, a sort of sort of theme, not to make audience feel pity, but to encourage them and gave them responsibility as well.
Yeah, that brings us to the end of this episode preview. Hope you enjoyed it. To listen to the full thing and help support our work researching and promoting people's history, join us today on Patreon, Patreon dot com slash working class history. That's p A t R e o n dot com slash working class history link in the show notes. Catch you next time.