In 2023, Roger Hallam was clapped in irons, secretly running a weekly podcast from a UK prison called Designing the Revolution, and patiently waiting for the state to silence him. Somehow he got through 50 episodes.

“I’m a bit Celtic,” he says. 

As 40,000 people registered interest, Roger conceived of a more global reach through R21C — revolution for the 21st century. 

“This is a seminal moment in the human story.”

“Gone are the days when we can rely on Greenpeace and others to sort the issue. Nope. You get to your late 50s and realise there’s nobody else but you.”

“People are full of grief. They already know the Paris Agreement is failing to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees. Their biggest issues are becoming fires, floods and food.”

“So the central proposition, once we realise that climate disruption is locked in, is what’s next? The global south will fall under the ravages of debt and climate impacts while the neoliberal regimes in the north will collapse under inequality and greed.”

“It’s not doomsday yet, but it’s way more than a few hot summers and the next step needs people to assert their stewardship of the planet and their own communities. The question is how? We can either do it honourably and without violence or we can let fascism take over.”

The biggest social, economic and environmental issues are not being resolved because the democratically elected governments are no longer in control — capital is driving short-termism, people are becoming increasingly disempowered and angry, and the result feeds fascism, which nobody wants. 

“I think collective deliberation supported by civil disobedience is preferable to fascism,” says Roger. “With a little bit of support to localised assemblies.”

The idea is revolutionary change without resorting to blood on the streets; instead supporting regime and constitutional change informed by citizen’s assemblies that support collective deliberation on local issues, that collect and represent the local voices of people, place-based, inclusive, and driven from the bottom-up. 

“It’s a different form of democracy led by civil society.”

The idea is to create citizen’s assemblies in each local government area to decide the future of Australia and to feed up local demands to put pressure on state and federal governments. It involves a lot of inclusive listening, followed by a list of inclusive demands. But it challenges the current regime precisely because democracy is being subporned by corporate interests, short-termism and the personal careerism of government ministers. If we do this right, there will come a time when we can rightfully claim to be more representative of the people than any government owned by corporate interests. 

“It will fail again and again,” says Roger. “But it will eventually succeed.”

Roger points to countless examples throughout history, one being the people’s uprising in Bolivia in 1820 that failed no less than six times. More recently, the Irish set up citizen’s assemblies on reproductive rights and took only three months to make changes by providing a forum which allowed people to speak openly in small groups. Another example is the village of Hull in Essex, in which Extinction Rebellion assemblies set up an alternative local council with 70 people focusing on 10 reform issues. After a year, these ordinary people stood for local council and won. 

Roger points to last year’s failure of the Voice Referendum and says part of this alternative system makes certain the voices of First Peoples are heard. In post-colonial nations, we must give structural voice to all minorities, not just tokenistically due to DEI policies, but in ways where real change gives power to minority groups across the board rather than a small,elite minority within a broader minority. One way we need to do this is to randomise sortition within minority groups to overcome post-colonial misrepresentation. 

R21C is preparing a global report to help build citizen’s assemblies across countries, including Australia and New Zealand as we move into decades of crisis stimulated by climate, inequality and species extinction. When the big crisis comes, as he says it will, R21C intends to be ready, as Lenin was in WW1.

“History is full of these examples,” he says. 

“Unfortunately, representative democracy is putting in place governments that fail due to commercial and corporate control, so we need to reinstate a form of democracy that speaks for the people. Civil resistance is great, but it needs a pincer action that establishes alternative government — people’s assemblies supported by NGOs and charities that champion demands from the local level. At this point, we can assert that we are the real voice of the people. Of course, government will say no, we will fail over and again, but the alternative is fascism.”

Roger says it could work in Sydney, for example, in which LGA based assemblies, working with NGOs and charities, form a large democratically driven movement that pushes, say, five key demands to government. It might be taxing the rich, antipoverty or antiracism, domestic violence and so forth. But if all come together to represent the people we can occupy local councils and governments to force change.

Roger says what he wants is a ‘little revolution’. He says the kind of incrementalism argued by organisations like the Fabians is simply not working. So a small-scale revolution is needed at the local level supported by a modicum of centralisation and a closed ecology in which coordination strengthens local alliances among people, NGOs and charities. 

“They need to share and reinforce one another’s plans through centralised support because otherwise the atomisation of NGOs is a disaster for change. We need global movements of a similar nature to those before 1989, wherein each organisation and assembly can assert and retain their identities (we’re not Communists!) but at the same time coordinate their efforts. 

Roger says the assemblies will need to meet weekly, guided by a centralised timeline that stategically integrates the needs of different actors and organisations. If managed well, with a focus on coordianting demands and timelines rather than pushing top-down policy, citizen’s assemblies can transform social conflict driven by inequality (and inevitably deepened by climate change) to avoid the rise of fascist degeneration. Part of it requires empowering locals with training them to deal with kickback and even jail. Another part is enssuring the process is given precendence over the subject — that is, the information about climate change and inequality is actually less important than than the emotional reaction it incites.

“As I said before, people are full of grief. We need to give them a forum to express it, work through it and work on solutions. Giving them back agentic power to make change is the only way out of despair.” 

Another important aspect is making sure the framing of the issues give people culutral permission to openly talk about their own grief and anger without censorship. They must be given permission to explore the information, but beyond this, acknowledge what is really happening, have their grief validated and supported, and then provide them with channels for revolutionary change. Even though it’s local the momentum can’t be atomised. It needs to be channeled into a global energy for real world-wide transformation.

“Let’s acknolwdge the objective fuckedness of the situation and then do what’s needed to help people turn it around.”

“It gets to the point where the people have every right to say, and loudly, “I did not vote for this!”