Making Movements: Voices from a World of Change

Building a Movement Like We’ve Never Known

From climate breakdown to fascism to runaway capitalism – what would it actually take to tackle our world’s roaring avalanche of challenges? Paul, a veteran of social movements through his work in facilitation, process and conflict mediation, stepped back and asked himself this question back in 2018. He realised that the problems are so vast and self-exacerbating that they require social change on a scale orders of magnitude beyond existing or historic efforts. This epiphany led to Paul working with his colleagues in facilitation collective Navigate to formulate A Movement Like We’ve Never Known in an online presentation. Something between a blueprint, roadmap, manifesto and a provocation, this talk – accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY] – draws on deep wells of specialist experience to propose a new way of thinking about social movements with the scale and ambition we’re going to need. The experience Paul brings to bear on this work is a topic in itself. As part of Navigate, Paul has spent a decade working to help movements function more effectively. He defines himself as largely drawing on a critical strand of NonViolent Communication; if you haven’t heard of ‘NVC’– or if you have, and weren’t convinced – it’s well worth hearing Paul’s account of it as an indispensable aspect of healthy movement life. Our conversation is wide-ranging and tends toward the macro – but to repeat Paul’s closing invitation: Navigate is very much open to people reaching out to inquire about ‘movement fight rooms’, conflict mediation in general, and facilitation skills.   We cover: Frame of collective power: why we need it, why we need to use it differently Did The Left make an unconscious ‘Sacred Vow’ to not hold power? “It maybe doesn’t even occur to us sometimes how we are taking on a particular shape of organising” Framing of ‘higher leverage points’ and causation The pernicious ‘punitive’ and adversarial dynamics in left/activist culture, and how they undermine our movements in micro and macro A big takeaway is that we need to spread the orientation towards actually cooperating at scale Movements are a spectrum, from fragmented to cohesive Bernice Johnson Reagon: ‘coalition space’ vs ‘home space’ The nature of MLWNK as more ‘meta-movement’ (or mimetic intervention) than movement Ghandian ‘constructive program’ ‘A strategy based on a sensitive awareness of complex systems and is aiming for high leverage points within those systems’ The Fighting Together project: movement fight-rooms! How do we actually seed change across movements? The slow cultural shifts already in train: recognition of trauma, burnout, conflict, scale Sketching an emergent movement-wide collaboration Limits to the Left and implications of movement ecology What Navigate can do for you   The presentation itself, A Movement Like We’ve Never Known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_bVh3bjpY] Find Navigate – and their potentially free conflict mediation help – at https://www.navigate.org.uk/ [https://www.navigate.org.uk/] Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

Social movement MANIFESTO

What and who is this podcast for? Why are social movements the best way to change the world? What kinds of hideous baggage and assumptions is host Douglas bringing to this work? What's with the upload schedule? Is it ok to think about things from London? (short answer: no!) Can a podcast be more than a podcast? Some of these questions will be answered in what is essentially a retroactive launch episode! Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

Build the Lifehouse! Mutual care, movements and spiritual politics

One of my favourite interviews!  I sit down with Adam Greenfield, activist and author of the book Lifehouse, for a deep discussion of his work, its underpinnings and its implications. His book explores anarchist success stories for inspiration in the face of a ‘Long Emergency’ of climate and political instability, featuring classic case-studies like the Black Panthers, Occupy and Rojava among others. Instead of just duplicating a book I’d love people to read, we delve as much behind Lifehouse as into it. We consider the ideas and realities shaping his thought: primarily a certain version of anarchism, but also an unusually askance and informed perspective on social movements in general, from Extinction Rebellion to Your Party to Collapse tendencies to the incipient Lifehouse movement itself. From there we reflect on the dynamics – at once highly personal and deeply structural – configuring today’s collective politics. Throughout, Adam retains a deeply grounded orientation towards practicality and action, replete with unusually un-theoretical suggestions on the things we can do and the ways we can do in this chaotic context: chiefly a kind of practical spirituality, inquisitive politics, and a dash of conventional prepping.   Something I could have got into with Adam but didn’t is his plenitude of past lives: his stint in the US Army’s psy-ops unit (!), his work first implementing and then criticising information technology, and his study and writing on urban design. Maybe another time!   Snippets: ‘A movement is a way of avoiding doing the thinking and the work for yourself’ ‘If your assembly does not have dispositive power over resources – I think it’s counter-productive. It is not you developing your muscles - it’s simply re-inscribing your own impotence. Because ultimately there’s this dynamic of supplication’ ‘We’re here to care for one another! We’re here to care for one another and anything that expands our capacity to do that and to extend the frame and the fabric of our ability to care is something I’m interested in’   Writing we mentioned: Gail’s Lifehouse piece: https://buymeacoffee.com/gailbradbrook/so-now-what Tadzio Mueller’s leadership piece: https://steady.page/en/disrupt/posts/3f4ac939-b805-431d-93e7-b8ff498f4242 [https://steady.page/en/disrupt/posts/3f4ac939-b805-431d-93e7-b8ff498f4242] End music: Roses and Bread, sung by Penny Stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZbkK6DGft0 Check out Penny's work! http://www.singlouderthanguns.com/ Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

Care and critique in Kollapscamp

Kollapscamp may well turn out to be a significant moment in movement history, with the climate scene evolving into new forms to meet the new realities of ‘long emergency’. At the same time – and very much relatedly – the camp was a physical and social space with real people bringing varied and sometimes rivalrous motivations, identities and needs. As the camp packed up, I caught up with Scully to discuss both parts of that work. Internal tension is pretty much a certainty in any gathering of this scale and ambition, but it’s rare to find such a lucid example of those tensions being raised and processed – and even rarer to debrief it all with one of the core organisers! If you want an understanding of what holding a serious movement space looks like in 2025, and/or a snapshot of the complicated collapse-politics constituency, stay tuned.   Editor’s note: we talk a bit about Tadzio Mueller, one of the Camp’s foremost organisers alongside Scully, and a pre-eminent voice communicator on collapse politics. He’s been a significant social movement presence in Germany since the early noughties, involved in alter-globalisation activism, LGBT struggles, and the climate movement – notably helping to set up Ende Gelande.  To get a direct sense of his inimitable style , check out his collapse pitch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODlnqPvpv8 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODlnqPvpv8]   How we’re feeling at the end of camp What the camp’s aims were and if it met them Minor tensions in the camp The critique session The contested place of Tadzio Mueller Accessibility questions How racial diversity can come down to money How racial diversity can have deeper roots Comparing Just Collapse to Deep Adaptation The wider marketplace of collapse politics projects The importance of cultures of care in collapse   Some further reflections on the camp from its organising team:  https://steady.page/en/friedlichesabotage/posts/7323dbfe-5ce4-421f-b9f1-3a7922201ef7 [https://steady.page/en/friedlichesabotage/posts/7323dbfe-5ce4-421f-b9f1-3a7922201ef7]   End music: people at Les Résistantes singing Le Pieu, a Basque song of collective resistance https://www.lesglottesrebelles.com/le-pieu/   Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

Flooded People UK

The water is coming. By 2050 8 million homes in England will be at risk of flooding - that’s *one in four*! But for hundreds of UK communities this existential threat has already arrived. Flooded People UK is an innovative organising project which aims to recast the people in flood-hit places from passive victims into active citizens with expertise, collective interdependence, and policy demands. I talk to FPUK organisers Harry and Sanjay to learn about this project’s unusual movement composition, the work it does, and its orientation in the bigger stories of climate and collapse. We cover: How FP is a convergence of the cultures of professional disaster management with the grassroots climate movement What FP does: creating national scale political pressure, alongside fostering networks of direct support within and between flooded communities How flooding can impact a person, household and community Re-imagining the policy position of flooded people - into a proactive political constituency What needs to be done policy-wise How climate framing is and isn’t valuable in flooded contexts How mitigation relates to adaptation Thoughts on Kollapscamp and its collapse framing See more at floodedpeople.org.uk End music: People Gonna Rise Like Water, sung by XR Bristol Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing