It Could Happen Here - How to Organize a Meeting (And Stay Sane), Pt. 2

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Mia continues her conversation with Margaret Killjoy about how to actually run a meeting and the role of proper meetings as the tools that build a democratic society. https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rules-order Help Primrose & Kim: gofund.me/dda02cc7See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The rest we will figure out later, one day at a time. Thank you for your generosity and Primrose 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.me slash DDA 02CC7 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 rent 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 Happen Here, a podcast about organizing. I am your host Mia Wong,

and in a moment we will 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 was a long digression about the concept of a 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 the digression was going to happen on.

That was, I thought that was going to be the last one we're going to get to. But no taker. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, 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 20 minutes to talk about this. Okay. So like 10 minutes and you go, we have 10 minutes left. We have five minutes left.

We have like 15 minutes left. Yeah, this is really important. And at the end of it, the timekeeper'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? 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

Me as guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this oh god no we're taking we're taking one more digression which is that the anarchy symbol the a with the circle around it is from a Pridon phrase that's the 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 a like, me as 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's the timekeeper. The note taker. Sometimes you need to decide whether you want notes of your meeting. Yeah, 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 where a guy goes, are you taking notes of the criminal conspiracy? So, okay, are you going to have a note taker? And then secondly, like, okay, the note taker takes notes of what's being talked about. I actually, this is also me 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 is, 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 a meeting. And so note taker is a thing that you can pretty easily just like pass to someone else. Yeah, be like, hey, you're you're not the note taker. So the person who is being the note taker can like say that you can pretty easily just like pass to someone else. Yeah. You'd 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 Working Men's Association or whatever, the First International was an organization of a lot of different stripes of leftists. And someone went to someone's friend's apartment, this anarchist 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 is Karl Marx.

And he's like, oh, well, so and so is not here. And he's like, all right, well, you can come too. So when anarchists 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 within the group and makes it the majority

position by controlling the way that a lot of the media and expression and stuff around this was. Because Marx was a good writer. 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 marks. No, no, no, no. This is the story of how marks became marks by taking the note taking job and then becoming the person who could write the declarations for the organization. Yeah. We should note like, this is also kind of how Stalin took power It's like being the person in the back of the room We didn't say anything and keeping track of what everyone was doing and saying and 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 bastards was saying about,

oh, the Cambodian man, the horrible man who killed everyone. Oh, Pol Pot. Pol Pot. It was that he was the quiet guy at the back. Yep, yep, 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. Just never trust anyone. That's the answer. Wait, no. Hold on. Hopefully we're not producing pulp-hot 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 in your role is to figure out like, is everyone in the group OK? Does this meeting feel OK?

Yeah, it is just something we need to do about it. And some of this is like, OK, 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, yeah, I don't know. This is partially a

facilitation job. Like, I don't know if someone says something racist in a meeting and 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, if something is going wrong or if people are checked out or if like stuff's happening, sometimes this is behind the scenes thing.

Sometimes this is like explicit, like you make a, 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 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 more new agey directions.

People take it in like, but like, you know, but 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 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 one of these roles that like, ideally, I guess this person doesn't do anything for a whole meeting, but they're just, they there sort of watching it.

I mean, like it can be good if they intervene, but like 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, um, during the ultra-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. Mm, 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 like was pretty important and I had no idea it 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 that'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 find their seats and figure out how to plug in. Yeah, it's onboarding.

But then the other thing I want to say is that with roles, the larger and more formal 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 meeting structure of like how formal and informal it is changes a lot and that yeah that like changes You know that change of 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 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 this, all the structure is to enable the content. It's not the other way around.

Yeah, totally. Right. Totally. And like, yeah, I don't know, like if you have a timekeeper and someone else ends up doing time stuff too, right? Like that's a significantly better result than. Yeah. We just kept talking. So... the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband.

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boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Okay, can I make one more pitch about a thing that's important at a meeting? Yeah, yeah, 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 a thing that like,

I think food is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort of, again, in-invisibilized 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 potluck or whether everyone just brings snacks or whether it's at someone's house and they're like, fuck yeah, I'm hosting.

I'm going to 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 this time and there's just like a barbecue and everyone does barbecue stuff. And yeah, it's just a standing thing where if you want to come in like, and then okay, just to keep talking about some of the stuff, childcare, childcare, I think when you mentioned at the beginning being like making 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 was like one of the things that I did for some meetings and like, yeah, there were like meetings that happened. There were like tennis 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 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 part, 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. 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, this is, 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. SIDDHARTH 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 watermarks 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 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 section, how to run a meeting, this will be like this will be like 20 minutes, and I could have 20 minutes about like, spokes councils and 20 minutes about general assemblies, and we now like it out. We're now like this is episode two. And then you brought Margaret on. 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 a 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, because you know, a lot of spokes councils 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 the spokes council. Right. This is also a really useful coordinating tool. Yeah. And this is what it's, you know, what it's 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 and you know, the answer to this turns out as a technology that was developed I actually don't know the history of the spokes council. I mean, it's been around for like a long time I don't either like at least like 30 40 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 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. Yeah, it can scale between different kinds of things. It can theoretically you can do this with like your like fucking spokes counsel could theoretically send a person to another spokes council. Totally. Right? And this is, you know, we'll get more into this in a second, right?

But like, this is a way for a bunch of different types of organizations to come together and do something. It's a way for them to coordinate with each other. It's a way for them to 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's different kinds of these. A traditional one is like, okay, there's like a thing happening, right? Like there is a giant protest and like a bunch of people who are going to be, a bunch of the different groups and organizations and affinity groups and whatever we're going to be at this thing come together and they're like, okay, of people who are going to be, a bunch of the different groups and organizations and affinity groups and whatever, who are 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, Margaret, 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 that you're right, there's been a bit of a drop off. Yeah. It's funny, we were talking earlier and I was like, oh, I haven't done this in a while I actually do go to meetings every week 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 and so I don't

Want to be like all people stop doing it because I don't totally know Yeah, I'm not totally plugged in. But I do think the ultra-globalization movement of like 1999 to 2003 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 100% certain about that. But a lot of the ultra globalization movement stuff comes from the Zapatistas and Chiapas. I know you didn't ask for history lesson and I'll speed run it. No, no, no, no, this is good though. The folks in Chiapas and the Zapatistas 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 2023. But they went around the world

and built organizations by saying, everyone send your people, we're 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 ways it's actually just an upside down version of parliamentary democracy, right? Where theoretically, we elect a politician and they go speak for us. They don't. Yeah, that is the concept behind a democracy, right? 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 10 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 14 people that I'm representing kind of want to break shit. And then other people will be like, the 15 people that I represent kind of wish you all wouldn't break shit.

And you can get together and coordinate and then the the break shit people can be like, oh, okay, well, we'll make sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are and, 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 15 people I represent want to break shit or even the 15 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, this is, this is where we're getting, this is, this is what I'm calling the Mia 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.

Cause there's, there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form, right? Of everyone sends their delegates together, whatever, like everyone sends their like spokespeople, and everyone meets each other. You can also do this for like not planning a direct action. Yeah, totally. You can do this as a way to get all

of the different organizations and like affinity groups and shit in a city Talking to each other. Yeah, and this turns out to be extremely useful Yeah, um, I've seen this a lot recently and sort of trans organizing We're like all the trans different like groups in 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 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 now two episodes. But there was a

really, really cool thing in Portland that was called the trans general assembly. Cool. 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. Yeah. But you can do this on a very, very 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 U.S. Yeah. 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 a 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.

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 the scopes and who shows up to them are very different, I think. Oh, and there's also fishbowls. What's a fishbowl? Actually, I've heard this one before. A fish bowl is a spokes council where everyone can come and only the spoke can speak. 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 if only one person from the group is empowered to speak, then it's not a nightmare of trying to have 6,000 people in a room talk.

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That like we haven't thought of yet. Yeah, you could arrange trash pickup in a neighborhood. You can make the government obsolete Yeah with meetings and spokes councils and General Assemblies and Federations and all of these like 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 like, this is the political angle of this, right? Like a free society is one that is structured like this, 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 workerist angle of like, I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant. Yeah. Right. So the way the race treatment plant is run is that the people who do waste treatments have their own like workers council or whatever. 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. And all power to the Soviets was the 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 thing this way. And the indigenous people who lived in Chiapas were like, that's not how we do things. And they were like, this is how we do things. And then the Zapatistas who were 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

Rojava in Northeast Syria, where like basically people were 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 workers model, but there's also people who have 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, you know, 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 beautiful 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 this is like, you know, I have had to learn to shut the fuck up in meetings. Yeah, me too. And by doing it has made meetings better. I know. It's great.

You can learn to shut the fuck up Someone else says the thing and you don't have to say it. Yeah. Yeah, but then also I do want to point this out, right? The things that we're describing here, right? It's okay. Like how do you do the beat work? You need food You need childcare. You need structure that makes 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're trying to get food. We are trying to get child care. 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 U.S. has constantly in protest movements, it's like most Americans don't have a democratic tradition. Right. And so when shit happens and there's suddenly riots and there's suddenly like Like most Americans don't have a democratic tradition. And so when shit happens and there's suddenly riots and there's suddenly like mass protests movements break out, right?

People don't know how to make democratic decisions. So they don't. 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. Yeah. And we can avoid that by knowing how to do democracy, because that's fundamentally what running and beating is. This is what democracy looks like. Yeah.

Yeah. And I also want to say one more thing. This is a podcast that would probably could have used a facilitator, especially on my end right now, because unmedicated Mia is a fucking trip But like you know when we talk about sort of our how do you apply this to your sort of broad vision of society right? It's like okay anarchists How do you run USAID right because like yeah like the destruction of USAID is going to kill an unbelievable number of people because people aren't getting HIV vaccines right right and The way you run that is the way that you run a meeting, right?

The workers who produce, yeah, to act, who are the people who actually figure out how to make an HIV vaccine. Yeah. Distributed, distribute information about it. Those people form fucking, form fucking councils and they form fucking meeting groups. They exist. And they, and they work in collaboration with the people who need them. Yeah. And that is how you build society, right? It's like David Gaber's thing was always 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 it in a more abstract sense But like we do literally make it

Yeah 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 Yeah, and we don't lose that 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 and not for a king.

Yeah, it's like, people ask, how would you make and distribute insulin in an 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 Graber quote is the DeRudy quote,

anarchist general in Spanish Civil 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 boo, I'm paraphrasing, the bourgeoisie can blast and ruin the world on their way out of history. That's fine. We the workers built all of these cities. We can build. We know how to do that. Matthew 5 The part of that I always stuck with me is like, I think the exact quote that I got was, we are not the least afraid of ruins. Yeah. You're the ones who built this world.

And we'll do it again! Yeah. And, yeah. So, I don't know what these episodes are gonna be called, but if they're called, the answer is meetings, comma, sorry. I think that would be that. Okay, I don't know if this is gonna end up being, 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 thing. So I'm sorry I click baited you into this. Right, well then that's the monster at the end of the book is that it's meetings all the way down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Margaret, thanks for talking with me about the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life.

Yeah. Thanks for having me and thanks for talking about this stuff. Yeah. And this has been a good afternoon here. You can go out in your community and you can do these things. You can form spokes 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. Hell yeah. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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