A

Foreign.

B

From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam, co founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, while serving a five year prison sentence, wrote his book the Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. It is a searing indictment of a legal and political system that is designed to punish those who resist while protecting those who propel us towards mass extinction. In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act. He and his four co defendants, who each received four year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short term aim was to stop traffic. The long term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses. This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh's sunflowers preserved by protective glass in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protesters who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years. Roger, like a reviled biblical prophet, warns that we are already experiencing fundamental shifts in climate patterns that are destroying the foundations of human society. Our infrastructure and social structures are increasingly based on climate models that no longer exist. Seas are rapidly rising. Tens of millions of people once considered safe from coastal flooding are now considered at risk. Global warming has nearly doubled in only a decade. Ocean overheating is accelerating over a two year period, ocean heat waves with temperatures up to 3 to 5 Celsius above normal lasted for 500 days non stop, covering 96% of the world's oceans. Antarctica is undergoing the fastest glacier collapse ever recorded. Thawing permafrost is belching out greenhouse gases. If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced by 50% within the next six years. By 2030, Roger writes, average global temperatures will exceed 2 degrees Celsius, displacing an estimated 1 billion people. That's 20 times the number of homeless at the end of World War II, amounting to 1 in 8 people on Earth. There's a 50% chance the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will collapse by 2050, causing temperatures in Europe to drop by 10 to 30 degrees Celsius. The Arctic is expected to be ice free in summer between 2030 and 2035. And by 2040, forest fires may destroy 20% of woodland annually. This is just the beginning. Joining me to discuss the climate crisis and his book, the political and legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass death, is Roger Hollum. So Roger, I, as you know, visited. I wrote the foreword to this book, so I have to be upfront about that.

A

It's a great book.

B

I wouldn't have written for the forward if it wasn't. And when I was in London, of course, visited you in prison, I wondered how that prolonged period in prison changed your perspective, if it did, you know, not just on, you know, your role, your social role, but also on British society.

A

Well, yeah, I was in prison for about 14, 15 months and then I was in prison on remand for about four months. So I've been in and out of prison basically for three or four years now for various matters. I mean, how it's affected me is I'm just a lot stronger. People might think that's peculiar or, you know, unusual, but I don't think it is. I think there's been a recent study come out that people who've been to prison and about 250 people have been put in prison in UK, so that's the equivalent of, you know, 1500 plus in America, if you take in the increase in population. Yeah, the study showed people come out more committed, not less committed. And there's reason as we can discuss why that's the case. But it certainly gives you a visceral sense of what an authoritarian state looks like now. And in terms of doing action on the mass death projects that we face, we're already in an authoritarian state in the UK and obviously similarly in America.

B

I remember when Craig Murray spent much less time in prison or jail than you did. But I remember when he got out, he told me he was just stunned at the bankruptcy, if that's the right word, of the kind of lives that many of those who were incarcerated led. The lack of opportunity, the poverty, the even illiteracy. Was that something that you. I mean, it may not have come as a surprise to you. I'm just curious whether it gave you a window into this rapidly expanding social inequality which defines certainly the United States and the uk.

A

Yeah, I think it does. It didn't particularly surprise me or strike me this time, it's the seventh time I've been in prison. I went to prison in the 1980s when I was 1920, for the peace movement. So I've sort of seen, you know, I've had plenty of experience with the British class system, let's put it like that, and the class British society has been characterized by extreme inequality for centuries. And that's sort of baked in, I suppose. I think what we need to understand, though is that people have the opportunity and the courage to deal with their circumstances. Not always, of course, and often terrible tragedies and great injustices happen in prison, as you know, you all people are aware, like Chris, but at the same time, people get on with their lives and people are capable of taking control of themselves and living with some dignity in spaces of extreme provocation and deprivation. And I think this is what we need to understand, as you know, that's my. I have a generally positive attitude of the human, you know, like we are capable. We're not just pieces of dead matter that get hit on the head. We are capable and very capable of fighting back both internally and externally. And otherwise history wouldn't happen, as we know. So for me, yeah, it was a place of reflection, really, an admiration really for some of the guys that I was incarcerated with. I was on a, I was on a corridor with, with people, lifers, as they call them in the uk, I don't know if that's the word in other places, but you know, people that been sent to prison for 25 years plus, so many of these people have done terrible things, no two ways about that. But, but many of them had, you know, decided they were going to live their life anyway. And they were very spiritually solid. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of them were. And this is, this for me was a lesson that whatever the bad guys do to us, we always have that opportunity to choose how we're going to react and how we're going to live our lives in response to the involuntary, involuntary, you know, hell that's imposed upon us by the powers that be.

B

You have long made this point, which of course is correct, that you have the, let's call it the liberal wing of the political establishment that will acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis, but essentially do little to nothing. Perhaps symbolic gestures. And then you have the Trump, like climate denialists. But both sides of this political equation are dangerous. Explain.

A

Well, I'm with Martin Luther King, as you know, Chris. Right. You know, the, the enemy is the liberal moderates, not the Ku Klux Klan, you know, as per the Birmingham. A letter from a Birmingham Prison. And I don't mean that in some provocative way, you know, just to get attention. I mean it from the heart of my being that what makes me furious beyond words is not the evil people in the world. There's always evil people in the world, as various people said. The problem is those people that facilitate that evil in full of knowledge that it is evil and pretend to be good while they do it. Right. And this is, this is the liberal class. And, and this is the class that perpetually undermines the ability to bring along the objective revolutionary conditions which are strategically and ethically undeniably necessary at the present time, given the objectivity of the number of people who are going to die in the next 20, 30 years due to the whole, you know, shit show of things that are going to be brought down upon us that everyone, you know, listening to this knows about. Right? The problem is the lack of leadership, the lack of revolutionary leadership which will call out the liberal class and make clear that if people are not going to die, then they need to join together to create a revolutionary movement. And I don't mean, again, I don't mean that in some romantic, put a poster in your, on your wall way. I mean in the classical 20th century Civil resistance way, right, of having a leadership structure, having a mass organization, having an explicit strategy of regime change, and having a rhetoric of rage and determination. And until we get those things in place, we will be continually sabotaged by what I would call the administrative class, recently been mobilizing in inner city London. And this is the problem, right? There's so many people that are furious, like just about everyone that you speak to, and I've knocked on the doors of thousands of people in the last eight months. The problem is that all the, the vast majority of the campaign spaces, the vast majority of the deliberative spaces are basically controlled by this administrative class which exists to prevent any collectivization of resistance. And as soon as you do that, they're down on you, right? And they use various methods to make sure you don't. You're not successful. That's the problem. I'm not interested. As you know, I'm coming on podcasts and saying how bad Donald Trump is. It's like, we've done that. We've been there. What we need to do is organize and we need to understand how you organize. And we've got a 200 year tradition of organizing since the French Revolution. And we need to start being humble enough to realize people in the past used to do it a lot better than we did. Rather than thinking, you know, we can just mess around on social media and such like, you know, these are. Anyway, there's a bunch of things you can, you know, to be discussed there, I guess.

B

Well, I know, I think you have pointed out, I think quite astutely that this organization requires that you show up, that you invest significant time in speaking to various groups in programs of education, that it's not done online, that it's done through personal connections and that it's labor and time intensive.

A

It is. And there's no sort of mystery about why that is the case. Humans are functions basically of what's happening around 5 meters around them at any one time. In other words, what the other humans are doing within your immediate space. And I did years of research, you know, in academia about this before I co founded Extinction Rebellion. And I'm not saying anything unusual. There's 40, 50 years of psychological research. Individuals don't read books and then decide, you know, to do a. What they do is they talk to people who they respect and if they are doing X, they'll do X as well. And if they're doing Y, they'll do Y. So people can be enormously courageous and enormously evil depending upon what's happening around them. So the, the, the role of the revolutionary is to design those spaces. We're not talking, we don't need to talk about individuals, we need to talk about spaces and dynamics and there's different units of spaces. You know, what you say to people on the doorstep, what you say to people in assemblies, what you say to people, you know, in interviews like this and such like. And they all need to come together and the big message needs to be if we don't join together, we're going to die. And I mean that literally, right? I don't mean you get together and say, hey guys, we've got some problems and Trump's a big, you know, a terrible person and various like abstract nouns. We need to say, you are going to die and your death is going to be appalling and you need to go through your dark night of the soul and come out of the side and become a mature human being like millions and billions of people were in the past who confronted the same situation. This is nothing unusual in the human experience, as you know. What's unusual is we've had 30 years where we've fooled ourselves do we don't face mass death and now we do because we're in 2025. So it's a matter of getting over ourselves. And this is the role of prophetic leadership. And there's not enough prophetic leaders out there because that sort of function is not valued. There's this idea everyone will spontaneous join together. They won't, unfortunately. Which doesn't mean I'm justifying, you know, some patriarchal, traditional, top down, you know, crap leadership sort of model. What I'm pointing to are the great leaders of the past who you know, stood up and died for the cause, as we know, which is what usually happens. But that, again, that is not a problem. You know, If I had 30 years of saying, oh, we don't want leaders because they end up getting shot. Well, obviously they end up getting shot. That's what, that's what the life of the human involves is sacrifice. We haven't ended history. We're still in the midst of it, and we're about to come to the final chapter of it. And one of the reasons we're going to fail is because we pretend the old. The old logics don't apply, which is, you know, you live a good life and if you get shot, so be it. That's. That's the way we need to approach the future. And that's not going to happen unless people, you know, act like me and you, Chris. You know, we're one of the few people in the Western world that gets up and tells people. And this is what Larry Kramer did. You know who I think is the most important American of the last hundred years? Not Martin Luther King, it's Larry Kramer who got up and said, get out in the streets, otherwise you're going to fucking die. And he said it again and again. And as you know, you know, he turned around the campaigns against AIDS and the obscenity of what was happening in. In the late 80s with gay guys, you know, dying in corridors. He turned that around. How did he turn it around? By getting angry? It's not complicated, you know, you just need to get a grip and do what you need to do. Really?

B

Is. Is there a parallel between the worse or the. The faster we move towards ecocide, the harsher the repression. That certainly seems to be your experience.

A

Yes, it is, but we take the wrong message from that. We take the materialistic capitalist message, which is life isn't an accounting system, you know, and you've got, you know, $10, Chris, and I take five from you, and you've only got five left. You know, this is what the left does all the time to get colonized by neoliberal, capitalistic logics. If you get put into prison, it doesn't mean you've lost $5 and you've got five left, it means whatever you want it to mean. You see what I mean? Humans are not accounts. When the. When the neoliberal left says, oh, repression is really bad because that means people cannot rebel, not only are they betraying the essence of what it is to be human, they're just talking empirical bollocks, as you know. History is absolutely full of societies becoming more authoritarian. And because they're more authoritarian, people rebel. Not despite. Because it's an obscenity. I mean, you've got Trump in America, and what are the numbers, like 5, 10 million people have been out on the streets? Why is that? It certainly isn't because, you know, the repression, despite the repression, is because of it, isn't it? People didn't all rush indoors in Minnesota going, oh, dear, you know, there's a chance I might. I might, you know, lose my liberty or whatever. They were going this, let's go. Because some things are more important, right? Which is self respect and all the rest of it.

B

How. How do you see the. The movement moving? You have had. We won't name them. Maybe you'll name them. We have had movements that embrace this kind of radical response, confrontational response, essentially become domesticated. Most of the environmental movements, the mainstream environmental movements, Sierra Club, and I've already have. But how do you. How do you. How would you kind of judge or explain the health of our radical movements in terms of confronting power?

A

Well, I think we're in the darkest hour before the dawn. That's my analysis. I think the state of the radical movements is massively immature in the presence of the objectivity that we face. But important to understand is this is nothing new. There's a cycle of resistance in response to repression, and you can have a cycle of resistance and then everything collapses because you can't keep that level of energy up for, you know, for a long time. And what we've got now is. Is in many ways like the last. The last spasm of denial right before it becomes absolutely obvious what's going on. In the words of a university professor whose name I've forgotten, was on social media last week saying everything won't change until white people die. And this was a professor from a elite university. Right. Obviously, he was retired. He wouldn't say that he was in a job, but that's the fundamental tipping point, as we know. And white people will start dying, obviously, I'm talking about rich white people here as well. They will start dying because the climate crisis is a suicide prospect. Which is why my book is called Suicide. My book isn't called, you know, the ruling class are gonna do us in and, you know, they'll be fine and we won't.

B

Right. They think they'll be fine, don't they?

A

This is. This is a unique moment in the human experience because since 1945, you've had the capacity to destroy every human on on the planet. It's not like previous work. Ruling classes were worse than this one. Obviously they would have destroyed themselves as well. The point is, is this ruling class will destroy others and also they'll destroy themselves. And by destroy I mean we're going extinct. And they will go extinct. And you know, we can have little obscene conversations about whether a few of them survive in a bunker for a few decades, but that's not the point. The point here is that the whole way our civilization sees reality is intricately combined with why we're going extinct. And what we need is a fundamental new way of seeing what it is to live a human life. And this sounds ridiculous at the moment because we had the darkest night before hour before the dawn. But I can 100 guarantee that in 10 years time there'll be a revolution in the ways in which we see the nature of our civilization, in the ways that prophetic explosions have happened at times of extreme distress in human history. It's, there's nothing unusual about this. What's, what's happening at the moment is it's like, you know, we're having the last dance in the, in the, in the, Hitler's bunker before the Russians arrive. You know what I mean? That's the logic that's being promoted by the liberal left and, and the conservative spaces is let's not, let's forget about reality for another 10 years, pretend. And then, you know, and then we'll have to deal with death.

B

And yet there are movements within societies that face imminent death. You know, the ghost dance or something, where people retreat into crisis. Cults. I look at the Christian right as a cris. You unplug yourself from reality. You embrace magical thinking. That's also a phenomena of, you know, an overwhelming existential crisis.

A

Yes, yes. I mean, we need to be, you know, I'm not some mad madman, Chris. You know, this is going to happen and it's all really straightforward. I'm a sociologist, as you know, right. And it's not complicated. This issue is not complicated. It's emotionally appalling. But analytically it's not complicated, which is in times of massive distress, a society will fracture along several key lines. One of them is towards internal destruction, personal suicide, nervous breakdown, domestic violence. Another fracture will go towards external hedonism. You know, live now, forget the future. And another element will go into some form of collective, collective cult like behavior or some fascistic, you know, worship of death. And what, you know, which is what fascism basically is. And the last fracture will be the fracture that turns towards the prophetic love of life and the human. And obviously it's the last one that we're putting our bets on, right? But it's naive to think that the others won't exist. The point is everything will be up for grabs and any of those fractures could become hegemonic. But no one can predict beforehand how it's going to go. Right? That's the point. But what we can predict with absolute certainty is the center will collapse. And it is collapsing. It's a zombie space already, as we know. It's only there because of institutional support. So that's the prospect, you know, in the next two decades.

B

Let me ask a little bit about the climate crisis itself as it accelerates. You of course see the solidification of climate fortresses. This is what Europe is doing, what the United States is doing, essentially locking out those who are fleeing northwards. Talk a little bit about the crisis itself and the increasing pressure it's bringing on human societies.

A

Well, first of all, we need to deal with the liberal left idea that the climate crisis is complicated. Right? You know, there's lots and lots of talk shows and podcasts about the climate crisis. And what's communicated is this is just a vague idea. There's nothing vague about putting CO2 into the atmosphere. There's three facts we need to just establish and then we can just move on to what's going to happen on the human scale. Right? We're at 1.5. No one can dispute that. We're going up 0.4 per decade. So we're going to be hitting 2 around 20, 35, maybe a bit before, maybe a bit after. At 2 degrees, we trigger all the tipping points in the Earth system again. Maybe one or two will be earlier, maybe one or two will be afterwards. That will create runaway climate collapse. Everyone knows that. That means we'll go up to 2.5 and 3 and 3.5 and such like. And once we pass 2 degrees, a quarter of the world's population will be on the move again. Not immediately, not all of them, but who's counting, right? As you said in the introduction, that's 2 billion people. That's 2 billion people on the go. And in the future decades it will rise. There is a get out clause, which is revolution that collapses the carbon, which is what weimo revolutionary, because that's the only way out. And then as a technological fix, you know, geoengineering and such like. So it's not 100 guaranteed that we're going extinct, but we have to accept that's now the main scenario, because it's quite difficult to have a revolution and there's no guarantee geoengineering will work. But if you want to be a realist out there, if someone's listening to them, to this and they think, okay, I'm a realist, then you have to be a revolutionary and you have to consider to your engineering. That's it. And obviously added on to that, we've got AI and you know, nuclear war and various other wild cars. But this isn't a wild card. It's physics. It's like you drop a ball and it drops to the ground, right? You put CO2 into the atmosphere, it warms up and we're at 1.5 and we're going to reach 2. So once we've got that established, then we can look at what it means to have a billion people on the move. And we know what that looks like because 50, 100 million people are on the move in World War II, and basically it destroys the world economy. That's the first thing to say. There's going to be no pensions. The second thing to say is unless there's a revolutionary religious transformation, there'll be genocides of a scale many, many times greater than what happened in the 20th century. Because we know what fascists do is they kill the outsider and that's what's coming down the line. And they'll kill those who try and prevent it. So we're going into a period of history where unless we do something fundamental with ourselves and our society, we will plunge into the greatest spasm of horror the human race has ever experienced. And it's super important that people don't avoid that, because the only way we're going to avoid it is by facing it, which means facing up to death. And this is why I'm spending more of my. More and more of my time talking about religiosity in the widest sense of the word, that unless you come to face what it is to be a human, I. E. A conscious entity that's going to die and accept that reality whenever it's going to be, you're never going to grow up and be able to be fully human in the face of horror. And it's entirely possible to do that. Right. But it's not going to happen by avoiding the realities that we face. And this is difficult, to put it mildly, but it's not impossible.

B

Well, we have. Consumer society is completely oriented towards the fantasy of eternal youth. I mean, we're for fighting against a culture that, you know, essentially does Everything it can to mask or hide the fact of our own mortality,

A

which is why we've got a massive mental health crisis. Because the mainstream culture is saying, you can live forever. That's the subliminal message. I know. We don't. We don't. We sort of know that in actuality. Well, that's the message. The idealization of youth. The idealization of youth, of life without death, which is a contradiction in terms, obviously. And then we've got the reality, which is people below 30 are facing a slow death by starvation and death in social breakdown and all the rest of it. And the solution to that is prophetic witness, as it always was in the past. And this is why the new movements that are going to emerge when, which are going to be in a position to actually concretely deal with the crisis materially and spiritually, have not yet been born, to be honest with you, Chris, they're going to come out of. They're going to come out of the edges of the social space. The reason I come onto shows like this is not to talk to the 90%. I'm talking to the 1% of people who have it at the back of their mind that they're going to be the people who are going to provide the prophetic witness. And there's nothing wacky or weird about this. I had a chat with Paul Engler. You know, you may know, he's one of the, you know, most skilled movement organizers in, in the States. You know, we both compare notes every now and again because I do similar work in Europe. And we both agreed the single biggest determinant of. Of movement growth is prophetic leadership. You need someone to go around and say, you're gonna die. Get out there. You don't want people to start giving you facts and figures. You know, when I do talks, I do that, what I've just said. You know, it takes. It takes two minutes to tell everyone where we're up to after that. The key question is, how do you want to live your life? The key question isn't, what are we going to do? That's like a machine question, right? You know, Lenny was a machine revolutionary. It's like, no, the question isn't, not, what are we going to do? We're not dealing here with a broken car engine. We're dealing with a spiritual being called the human. And the key question is, how are you going to live your life? And the great thing about that question is, doesn't matter what the, what the outcome is, because the outcome is above your pay grade. As we all know, it's only like humanist arrogance that thinks, you know, we control this with. We most certainly do not control this world, which isn't to say we shouldn't give a good life, but the reason we live a good life is because we believe in the good. And if you don't believe in the good, you get mentally ill. You know, it doesn't take long to put your ducks in a row. You know, these. You know what the ducks in a row looks like, Chris. Right. And many of your viewers, you know, and listeners know what having your spiritual ducks in a row looks like. But someone needs to go out and talk about this rather than, you know, why the. Why the rich are terrible and all the rest of. Obviously, the rich are terrible. People don't need to be told the rich are terrible. They've known that for the last 5,000 years. What they need to know is what is it to live a good life?

B

Well, you mentioned the word religiosity. And, you know, to. I know that that's important to you as it is to me, not in an orthodox kind of way, but I think it is vital for a successful movement where one is judged not by the outcome finally, but by one's integrity and commitment to justice. And I just, you know, I wondered if you could kind of flesh that out.

A

Yeah. Well, the first thing to establish is orthodoxy, as you called it, is what secularity is imposed upon us. Like the whole idea of religion is a modern concept, as I think, you know, many of your listeners may know. The word religion didn't come in until the modern period. Before the modern period, the notion of religiosity, as you might say, was. Was impregnated in all aspects of life. And what modernity did, what secularity did, what the capitalist regime did, is stick religion as a noun and stuck it as something that happens on Sunday and some weird belief in some concrete other called God. Right? That's nothing to do with religion. That's like what secularity has done. And the tragedy and the appalling criminality of secularity is to prevent people engaging in the sense of the transcendent and the enchantment of what life is, because they're told that that's, you know, child's play and all the rest of it, and it's some weird belief, as if secularity, modernity isn't a belief itself. Right? The outlier is modernity. For 99% of the human history, people have believed in transcendent phenomena or the transcendent within the material and Other related ideas. And even today in today's world, you know, for the sake of argument, 80% of the world's population is aware there's something other than going out and making money. You see what I mean? Like we need to get, we need to understand this history here. Just as there's history in, you know, imperialism and there's history of the oppression of common people, there's also the history of the stripping of a sense of the transcendent from, from culture. And this is the primary reason why we are not resilient, why people burn out because they think they're just themselves. But being just yourself is just some weird cult idea of, you know, Newtonian physicist. It's obvious that we're not just on our own, we part of some universal thing that's beyond words. And just because someone's something's beyond words doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just go and read some quantum physics for God's sake. You know, you see what I mean? So we need to start battling back and this is a big battlefield of saying it's obvious and it's natural and it's absolutely needed that we start understanding what it is to be who we are, which is to be part of something greater than what we are, because that's objectively what we are. It's not some postmodern whim, it's a reality. We are objectively part of something bigger and we always are and always will be. And once we start engaging with this, and I've got great hopes that the younger generation, you know, in the 30s are ready for this because they, you know, it's intolerable to live in a world where there's just you on your own. So people will be looking for it. And if we don't provide a progressive pro social orientation of what the transcendent is, we know what will happen is, you know, the Nietzschean Nazi space will come and gobble everyone up and get everyone to worship death and destruction as some sort of perverted form of transcendence. So the race is on, but the idea this is just about, oh, you know, inequality, secular leftists is just appallingly self sabotaging. People need to believe in something greater than themselves and it's already there. Right? You know, I mean, I'm better people than me, no doubt will design what that looks like over the next 20 years. But there's absolutely no question that we're not, we're not going to win by pretending we're dead matter because we're not

B

so just to close, ideally, what does this revolution look like, how is it built, how does it come about and how are the ruling global elites dethroned?

A

Well, first of all, by not asking the question. I mean, if you ask the question, Chris, we, without doing the spiritual work before you ask the question, you're going to burn out in six months. This is why Gandhi said you have to go and like do self purification before you go into battle. You know, everyone does this for the last 2000 years. You can't send your troops into battle thinking about, oh, you're going to hit the left wing and then the right wing and then, you know, do X, Y and Z. First of all, you have to pray to God. The praying to God is the important bit, right, because that gives you the courage to do everything else so that when it looks like you're losing, you don't turn and flee because if you do, then everyone dies. I mean, obviously that's the military version of it, but there's a non violent Gandhian and, you know, version of it as well. So as I said, the first question is to ask the question with other people in some form of collectivity, in an assembly or what do we want to do with our lives? What are our obligations to our parents and our children? What's our obligation to our countries? You know, what is it to be good? Those are the key questions. Only when you've spent a decent amount of time asking those questions and you've got a practice that reintroduces you to those questions on a regular basis, can you then go into battle. And when you're going to battle, then there's a few basic rules, right, which is to concentrate all your resources in one time and space. In other words, you have to create a mass collectivity. You have to elect or choose who your leadership, your generals will be, who will go, go there. We're going to go to Washington, you know, on the 2nd of October, we're not going to go to Washington, you know, a little bit in September and a little bit in November, a little bit in December. Someone needs to make the big strategic decisions and you need to choose wise people to do that, obviously, but you can't avoid that. And then once you go into battle with the powers that be, then you need to have a positive message of what you're going to do afterwards. You can't have all the neoliberal civil resistance movements over the last 20 years, you know, that overthrow some dictatorship in Egypt or Ukraine and then just reinstitute liberal capitalism, which morphs into monopoly capitalism. You have to have a fundamentally revolutionary demand. And that revolutionary demand is sortition, which is the original meaning of democracy, which is people are selected randomly from the population in order to make the decisions of the society. Which is what they did in Athens and what they did in Florence. Right. It was only the last 200 years we got this perverted idea that voting in elections was democracy. It's not. That's aristocracy. It's oligarchy. And you only need to look at America to see how it works out. So we've just been told a big lie that we've got a democracy. We haven't. But there's no point complaining and trying to make voting better. You need a whole new system, which is you select people by sortition, randomly. So 70% of the people in the decision making assemblies are working class people because 70% of people in the population are working class or whatever you want. And you know, that's a whole new other discussion, of course, Chris. Right. But the point is, is that's the revolution for the 21st century. And unless you make it explicit, then people obviously degenerate back into liberal logics and, and then you'll have fascism because obviously there's no point voting for the Democrats or the Labour Party yourself. Those just facilitate a bigger fascist surge, you know, next time round. And this is why you need strategic and prophetic leadership. Otherwise people will go, oh yeah, you know, let's give the Democrats one more chance. Like those days have gone, haven't they? Or am I?

B

Yeah, yeah, well they went a long time ago. But you know, the liberal class is quite good at hurting people in every election cycle back into the dead embrace of the political system. I mean, that's probably why they're there.

A

Yeah, yeah. Which is why you need to start, you know, if you want to talk concretely, you know, if you're doing your spiritual preparation, what do people do? You need to organize in your communities, simple as that. And everyone thinks, you know, oh, this is a hard grind. Obviously it's a hard grind, but also it goes non linear at a certain point. You know, like in the community that I've been organizing, we organized about five or six of us, three or four nights a week. And then we started community campaign and we had 20, 30% name recognition within six months. And you know, this is my day job. Right. It's not like I'm making this stuff up. My day job is how to organize mobilizations. But that's what needs to be done. There's no point talking, going to conferences or sitting on social media, that's just going to let the fascists win. Because the fascist strategy is to get out into communities and organize those communities. And if you don't organize them, then the fascists will organize them. And this is one of the biggest problems with the secular left is they don't actually like human beings. Right?

B

Yeah.

A

You know what I'm saying? You need to decide whether you're a democrat or not. If you're an elite anti human leftist, then fair enough, but at least be honest about it. And if you're, if you actually genuinely love the common people, you need to go out and talk to them, for God's sake. You see what I'm saying? You need to go, you know, you need 100,000American young people to do a big freedom summer, which is spend the summer knocking on the doors of working class districts, listen to people, get them into assemblies, allow them to create their own political realities like Paolo Ferreri did in Brazil, and then put their candidates up, organize mutual aid projects, organize local campaigns, aggregate them, build a mass movement and then off you go. It's really not rocket science. Right. Sitting around moaning about it is just like suicide strategy, as we know.

B

Great, thanks, Roger. And I want to thank Max Thomas and Noel who produced the show. You can find me at chr dashed.substack.com.