United Kingdom - Michael Reinsborough

Interview Details

• Region: North America
• Language: English
• Interviewee: Michael Reinsborough
• Interviewer: Leen Amarin
• Date: June 7 2023
• PGA Affiliation:
• Bio: Michael Reinsborough was involved in various Global Action Days in San Francisco, Dublin and other cities and participated in the PGA European network from 2002 onwards. He is involved in the Peoples Global Action Oral History project, and currently works in London, United Kingdom.
• Transcript:

Transcript

Leen: Okay, so I’m going to pull up my– just will, just share my screen to share the consent form with you. And then we’ll go through that quickly together. And then we’ll get right into it.

Alright, are you able to see the consent form?

Michael: Yep.

Leen: Okay, perfect. So as you know, the researcher for this particular project is– so this project is in People’s Global Action Oral History project. As you know, the main researcher for this project is Lesley Wood at York University and Department of Sociology. I’m sure you already have all of her contact information, but it is also just right up here. And I will be emailing this consent form to you as well, after our chat.

So as you know, the purpose of this research is to understand the history of the People’s Global Action, the dynamics that surround international solidarity and to really provide a touchstone for contemporary and future activists and social movement historians and academics as well.

So what you will be asked to do in the research is to reflect on your activist history in relation to the PGA in particular. And of course, as I had mentioned earlier, the idea is that the interview will likely take about approximately 90 minutes, however, that’s not necessarily going to be the case. It may take longer, it may take less, it’s completely up to you. As far as risks and discomforts, we do not foresee any risk or discomfort from your participation in the research. And as far as the benefits of the research and benefits to you, particularly as we mentioned, the idea is that the archive will be publicly accessible, it will also be accessible to you, of course, so you will have access to the archive of oral histories in relation to the PGA as well.

Your participation in this project is completely voluntary. And to, of course, ensure that your participation is consensual and an ongoing informed consent. It’s completely up to you when you choose to stop participating. If at any point, you change your mind. That is also of course totally okay, you can let me know when you would like to stop at any time. There’s, of course, absolutely no consequence as to whether you choose to participate or to stop participating anytime. Your decisions not going to affect or influence the nature of the ongoing relationship that you may have with Lesley or other researchers or other people that are involved within the project, or your name, your relationship with the university or anything really moving forward with that as well. And of course, to ensure that your consent is informed and ongoing, it is completely up to you to be able to stop or withdraw from the study at any time, you can stop at any time just by letting me know and I will stop recording and we will stop the interview immediately. If you do choose to stop participating or you choose to to not answer any questions. Of course, that’s also okay if you’d like to skip over some questions and only talk about certain aspects, that is totally okay as well. Again, it will not affect your relationship with the project or the researchers or any other group associated with the project. If you do choose to withdraw from the study, all the associated data collected will be immediately destroyed wherever possible.

In terms of confidentiality unless you choose otherwise, all information that you supply during the research will be held in confidence. And unless you specifically indicate your consent, your name will appear or will not appear in the report or publication connected to the research. We are using zoom to collect the data and interviews. So that is of course going to come with its own risks and its own– its own risks around confidentiality considering that we are using cloud based service. And so we are assuming that if you consent to moving forward with the interview via zoom that you are okay with taking on some of these risks as well. All of the information that is going to be collected will be saved in password protected files, and all of it will be codified as much as possible. Like we mentioned, everything will be analyzed unless you provide us with explicit consent. So whether you would like to share the audio recording, the video recording, or just the transcript, it’s completely up to you. We do also ask that as you are answering any of the questions in the interview that you do keep in mind, trying not to maybe get anybody else in criminal or legal trouble. Just to kind of keep that in mind. Of course we will be sharing the transcript with you after the interview. So you will have an opportunity to look over it and perhaps take a look and see if there are any issues with the transcript itself if there’s any legal issues that we were are going to need to edit out or redact or anything like that.

If you do give permission for your own oral history to be shared publicly, then the recording and the transcript will be uploaded and accessible to our digital archive, which I mean, you’re helping us create. So I’m sure you’re familiar with that. And of course, confidentiality will be provided to the fullest extent possible by law. If you do have any questions at all about the research, or about the project itself, or about your involvement in the project, and what we’re doing with the interviews or anything like that, feel free to get in touch with Lesley. You can also get in touch with the Office of Research Ethics at York University, the number and email are also up here on this consent form. So as I mentioned, I will be emailing this to you.

But before I do send this email to you, I just wanted to make sure I ask you, if you have any questions about anything that’s in the consent form, and if you can provide me with your consent, and it’s up to you, by the way, if you would prefer to give us your permission to use your audio and video at this stage, or if you would like to currently only provide us with permission to use the transcript for now and then provide us with permission later on. Or to change your mind at any time.

Michael: That sounds great.

Leen: Did you have any questions for me regarding the consent form?

Michael: No, no, I kind of know it pretty well.

Leen: Awesome. And do you consent to be interviewed for the PGA Oral History Project?

Michael: Yes, that’s fine. I think the the audio and the video should also be fine as well. Like, I suppose, I can go back and look and say, Oh, my goodness, I’m just having a bad hair day. Take that video down! But assuming you don’t have a a retrospective fashion concern, I think it’d be fine.

Leen: No, I don’t think so.

So um, could I ask you to please just state your name and say that you are consenting to whatever aspects of the interview you’re consenting to?

Michael: Yep. My name is Michael Reinsborough. And I’m consenting to be not anonymous, and to do an interview and to share it. And probably the video and audio should be fine, as well. I’d prefer that there’s more than just a few audio, or video before people use my video, I wouldn’t want to be one of the only few. And today is June the seventh 2023.

Leen: Thank you so much. And just to confirm you are okay with us using your name and publicizing that in the archive as well?

Michael: Yes.

Leen: Okay, perfect. Thank you so much.

Okay, so I’m going to stop sharing now, I will be sending you a copy of this consent form, as soon as we’re done with the interview by email. And if you can just send me that signed at your earliest convenience, that would be great.

So we will just go ahead and get started with the interview, if that’s okay.

Michael: Sure.

Leen: Awesome.

So to kind of get started, as you know, we are mainly interested in kind of learning a little bit about the PGA, about your involvement around that. And you know, understanding a little bit about what can be learned from what the PGA was involved in. So to kind of get us started and maybe thinking a little bit more about that and a little bit more about internationalist movements and social movements. Could you maybe tell me a little bit about the kind of work that you’re currently working on, if you are still working in the space? Michael: What I currently do, I mean, I’m, I work at a university. And I am also involved in trade union activity. And I do work, on a little bit of work on politics of technology. And then I also do a little bit of research in the politics of technology.

Leen: Is there a particular project that you’re really excited about or that you would like to share a little bit about?

Michael: I work with the the New Lucas Plan, which was in, the Old Lucas Plan was the 1970s. A labor union that… Lucas aerospace made bombs and missiles, and they were consolidating or rationalizing industry. So they built together a multi site combine and argued for protection of their jobs, but they also argued to reorganize the factory and wrote a factory plan from the bottom up which would be based on socially useful production. So instead of bombs and missiles, which… It costs a lot and end up hanging out in a warehouse ideally, or worse, they get used. They would build kidney machines, windmills, on road off road vehicles, a lot of submarine vehicles, heat exchange for public housing. So all kinds of these things that were designed from working people. So that’s one of the projects I work in.

I work a little bit with Museum of care, David Graeber Institute type work on kind of promoting his work on sort of the anthropology of social movements. And then I’m, I’m also involved in other types of politics occasionally.

Leen: that sounds so very interesting. Do you feel that your involvement with the PGA has kind of influenced what you’re working on now? Or kind of maybe led you to the path that you’re on now?

Michael: Um, I mean, I certainly– from being involved with the PGA, I certainly know a lot more about global work and global interactions and how you build kind of non-hierarchical movements. But I was already involved in non hierarchical movements. Before I start– I got involved with the PGA.

Leen: Amazing. I feel like that dovetails perfectly into our next question. Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about how you became involved in the PGA and maybe, specifically, where, if you were involved globally in the PGA or if you were involved in a particular locale?

Michael: So in the 90s, I was involved in the Industrial Workers of the World. And, and, certainly, and as part of that I did some of the first international organizing an I 99, where people I knew in San Francisco, had put together an international conference for anarchosyndicalists. And the IWW is technically industrial unionists, if you if you’re train spotter on all those little ideology types, but it’s more or less the same without a name, without the same name. And so I was involved in the i 99, which happened San Francisco, and there was an i 2002, which was happening in the Ruhr area. So I went to a union. And at the same time, in 2002, there was a meeting of the PGA it was in, not Amsterdam, but it was in, the sort of big arrea– forgetting which city it was, but it was what it was there. The 2002 European Conference of The People’s global action, and I looked at it and I thought, wow, that looks really cool. These are the people who do kind of consensus process politics involved in international organizing. So the anarchosyndicalist framework was very interesting and useful. But I’d also worked with a lot with Food Not Bombs, which is a lot more consensus-based strategies and had slightly different frameworks for, because it has slightly different purpose, for how you organize in and involved in lots of anarchist politics. So I went to that. As soon as I finished the i 2002, I went straight over to join this week-long event. And I thought it was pretty amazing.

I mean, that’s one way to say I got involved. That’s first time I really heard about the PGA. I was also part of social movements working in California in 99. I was at a J 18 event in San Francisco with- where we did a street party, and there was, in confrontation against capitalism and the global trade agreements, we kind of, there were networks of people where you received this information you passed it on. We were all organizing these types of things. I was involved. I didn’t really organize that stuff. But I knew all the people who did like Chris Crass and various people were involved in organizing that the San Francisco thing and when the police came, I was there to hold them back a little bit. Just being politely, you know, standing in the way while we got our sound system out of that.

When the actual event happened in Seattle, I’d been organizing and telling people and helping people quickly with the IWW, people were organizing to be part of that. And it was a quite a big event all across, that everyone knew– I was actually in Ireland at that time. And so I went to Dublin, which was the biggest event there. And we had a huge, joined the huge street party for that event, and saw the speakers for it. And so and so that was exciting.

So, in some sense, all these events that were related to calls of action that the Peoples’ Global Action movement made, I was involved with them. I was part of this anti-globalization movement. But, you know, I didn’t know about who the PGA was. So I was involved in something that I didn’t know some of the people who were key to making it happen.

Leen: So you kind of, kind of feel like, maybe kind of fell into it by just being involved in the different international movements and the different parts of the world that you were happened to be in like, and like when you were in the European Conference in 2002, or that was, you said, the first time that you’d formally understood or heard about the PGA, right, like as the PGA?

Michael: Yeah

Leen: kind of feel like you kind of fell into it, rather than actively seeking it out or actively kind of–

Michael: Yeah, I saw a flyer, and I said, Oh, that’s great.

It had circulated that this European event was happening. So I went, went to that 2002, I think I was living in Northern Ireland then. And so, I participated in that week event, made friends. I, it was a huge event that they had put on all kinds of workshops and talks, there was like seven or 8000 people. So I’d never seen something that big, with that many radical people involved in it. And with a very careful process of planning and organizing and allowing people to be involved. And many people did, and I actually followed how the process worked. I kind of map that, and I ended up in some of the decision making and process meetings.

Let’s see. Yeah, I’d have to think about it. And then I was, I had volunteered to be on the…, an Info Point Committee, there was this kind of weird idea of having Info Points all around Europe. You weren’t really representative, representing, but you could be information, and some kind of new theory. And there’s a group of people that were facilitating the meeting about Info Points, I volunteered to be an Info Point, and volunteered to help out.

I mean, I think one of the problems with those is, that lots of people volunteer, but like, we didn’t actually do a lot. I didn’t provide an Info Point into some people who did that work and all that. But it was very good. Because it got people involved in the, in the process. ‘Cause when you have that very open organizing, there’s a lot of stuff that falls down from people saying, ‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ but they don’t actually do it. But there’s also a lot of stuff that is enabled or allowed, because people are putting things together.

I then went to the 2004 conference in Belgrade and met even more people. As part of that I helped open up the event. So I was one of the early speakers in this giant tent, which had multiple languages and we had to address gender issues. And it was very challenging. I had to open up the conversation on gender issues, as a man, saying the appropriate things and allow that kind of thing.

I think because there was kind of clear signals that the People’s Global Action movement was, um, had a very feminist grounding, that’s what I thought that’s much more of a safe movement.

There was a ways in which there was a public email list for the Europe um, there was also something called the caravan list Caravan ‘99. I was never on that email list. I’m still not on it. I think it still exists, but many of the people who are key people were, were on that list.

I went to the whatever the ,the the the, um, Serbian event and and helped out in that. You would see that, you know, there’s all kinds of endless meetings. It’s like a week of meetings and week of workshops, you could do various things. And people say, ‘Oh, the next process meeting is on Wednesday. And we’ll do that.’ So I got involved quite a lot in the process group, I’m just was that type of person for my sins.

And those kinds of things I supported. I became part of, I was on this email list, and that shared lots of stuff. And I helped with that email list. I guess, after like, whether or not in 2009, the lead up to the big Copenhagen event was the PGA, there were certainly people from that same network who had organized the PGA also went to Copenhagen and set up this particular thing, which was the climate justice action. And I became one of the facilitators for the email list in getting that together and did a huge amount of work from Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I was at that point a student. And, and, or, or just finished as a student.

And so those are kind of things– I became more involved as I was, as I went along, but it really was part of being a network, like when the MaHA Raba, Marhaba, did I say that word right? Info tour, I was contacted, ‘oh, we want to try and get this person out to Northern Ireland,’ and or when they did some project that was like, a big democracy consulta, the PGA consulta, I think it was called and went around, I came in helped support that.

Some of those projects were like, Oh, that never worked. And you kind of like thought, Oh, here’s all the clever people talking about some projects. So let’s all go see what it works. And it didn’t actually work. But other times, oh, here’s the new clever thing. And all the clever people talking, you went to it and was a huge event or as a giant protest.

I was involved in, you know, went to some of the, the global confrontations with capitalism, I, probably Gleneagles was the 2006, I think, in Scotland was the g8. And that was very much organized in the same manner and took up the PGA hallmarks.

So I wasn’t a particularly important person in the PGA, I was just, like, inspired by it and excited and got involved. And I knew that that was the type of politics that I liked.

Leen: So you did mention you were already involved in social movements and already involved in like similar organizing, when you found out about the European Conference in 2002, which kind of led you to formally decide to engage in that.

Michael: Yeah

Leen: You did also mention that you kind of felt like maybe the PGA had some roots in feminist ideology or feminist values. And that felt safe to you. Was that something that kind of was already attractive to you, when you learned about it through the flyers? Like, was there something particularly interesting about what PGA was saying or doing that made you want to get involved in 2002?

Michael: Um, I guess I, when I looked at what they did, I don’t remember. But I remember thinking that oh, this is… The trade union, anarchists. syndicalist kind of frameworks, of course, endorsed that, that type of stuff, but they’re not– their history doesn’t traditionally have as strong a role in feminist organizing, obviously, there is a huge history in that, including the IWW, but those are–

Leen: that’s amazing. So I guess the next question that we have here is a little bit vague. And I think we did kind of touch on it a little bit, when you were kind of telling me a little bit about the different actions that you were involved in different conferences and different aspects. So I’m curious if you could maybe tell me a little bit about what happened in the PGA if there’s a particular maybe event that you feel, or a particular action that you feel you’d like to share about or talk a little bit about. And again, this could be something that happened in the PGA locally if you were organizing with more local organizations or networks, or globally if you, when it comes to the global days of action or the conferences or anything like that. Michael: Um, you know, like, so I share some funny events in in in Belfast. We just did small organizing and did like social events, and gave information about the PGA. There was a grassroots gathering, which when you go back in Belfast, I saw network of grassroots gatherings. So if you go back in the history of where the PGA came from, apparently there was conferences in in Spain. And the Zapatistas came out and said, ‘Oh, here’s you, it’s not about us, you all should organize where you are.’ And so people in Ireland, people in Ireland said, ‘oh, like we like, we’re going to do this grassroots gathering thing.’ And the student movement through Gluaieseacht which is a Irish word that means movement. And, and some of the anarchists down there. And they had called the anarchists in Belfast to come down. So two of us came down from Belfast, and there’s some other… Worker Solidarity Movement, and Gluaieseacht and there… and had a meeting about oh, the grassroots gathering.

So I didn’t think that meeting was going anywhere. Because I was like, well, good luck, y’all. You should, because it was like five men in a room. And I just thought that’s probably a bad place to start if you’re doing your first meeting, and you don’t have any of the women’s movement. And I said, Okay, great. And and then I, it was like, three, a couple years later that the grassroots gathering kept going, it was quite successful. And it came to Belfast. So when it was in Belfast, I helped organize it, did a lot of stuff.

We actually used in some of the workshops, some of the literature that was distributed on the PGA. Even used one reading that had been hotly debated and sort of banned, somebody had said, Oh, no, that’s that. We shouldn’t have that link, that one discussed and was okay. And it was controversial. So we, we use that one as well. Let people decide for themselves.

Yeah, so that those are some of the stuff that I would have been involved in. Certainly, the Gleneagles, I went to Gleneagles and decided to be on the media team. I didn’t really know what that was about. But that was, you know, international organizing for that. Some of that, like the skill set up putting together a small team of people that will put an international gathering together with something I learned well, I’m a good facilitator of meetings. And so I helped those to happen. And I think, on the like the days of action that you actually have, by the time you get to the days of action, you’ve already, there isn’t a decision making process, per se, it’s basically people have been in long meetings, and you know your team, and what people will disagree, so people actually can act with the group’s and knowledge of how the group will feel about this, on this specific day, because there isn’t really time to adapt to something.

So and then I’ve been involved in other global gatherings and how you put together a team and, and plan that and have a consensus process that builds a meeting and publicize it in a way which is open.

A lot of what the PGA used to do, is if you look at what the PGA did, it didn’t actually do anything, it held meetings. Sometimes it called for actions, but basically held meetings, um, set up a meeting at a location that there was going to be a global gathering. And it… and those, those, but like it was really just the process of building together a meeting that make like that allows people to work, has an open set of meetings, but it also has conflict resolution and kind of decision-making process that’s works. That’s… if you can do that, well, people will just do this stuff themselves.

Like I got involved in Food, Not Bombs in the 90s. And we went up and down California, and all we did was workshops on anti sexism, anti racism, a little bit of facilitate facilitation, facilitation, but or, but really conflict resolution. People were eager to go do this stuff.

Leen: Yeah,

Michale: you know, so we just did these workshops so that they had the skills to not get in arguments with themselves, and then movements happen. And that’s really all it took. And PGA was also doing this type of thing. Or when… Yeah, I’m not sure how that the actual where that all came from. have the links to the PGA

Leen: it definitely sounds like you’ve also been, like, personally quite involved in the processes of organizing around the PGA. So I’m particularly interested in what you’ll have to say about this. But in your opinion, your experience, what aspects of the PGA and how the PGA organized, do you feel worked? whether for your particular organizations or movements, for your particular regions, or just generally, what is it about the PGA that worked?

Michael: So, I can only speak to the PGA in Europe, the PGA existed, all kinds of places. And many of them don’t organize, organized quite differently. A lot of the PGA were probably Marxist, you know, they might, you might, they might have been autonomous Marxist. And whereas most of the European kind of crew were anarchists, there’s very small distinction between those, those groups. Um, some of the Marxists would be statist, whereas anarchists aren’t but more and, anarchists focused much more on a non hierarchical or horizontal organizing, per se, that were probably emerged after much after the PGA that’s a more recent word, but people have been doing that type of organizing before the word horizontal existed.

And so in Europe, there was a great, it was a good example of how you build horizontal processes. It was. And the other, the other thing to mention is in other countries where there’s less of a class divide, and like people are really just all poor. Or, or maybe there’s more of a class divide, but there’s not a class divide in the way you have a Western countries, we have many more middle class people, Marxism is much less damaging than it is in Western countries, because people are basically in the same cultural milieu, in the same status. So the idea of building having particular hierarchies that are formal, you know, you know, and actually, particularly, in something like the IWW, you would have definitely had a formal hierarchy, because that was about accountability. And some, some horizontals things have had in have not… have pretended that they don’t have any hierarchies. And that’s obviously not true. Because there’s core core people involved, wh’ll have more information, but the idea is building something,

I think one of the great things that the PGA did, and it’s part of that milieu, is a credit structure. Basically, people, you know, said no one can represent the PGA. It’s like, People’s Global Action is just a big group of movements. And, and it’s this kind of quibble about who is in charge. So they basically said, people did something and said, inspired by the PGA. And that I think, was really useful.

The only, the only problem with I mean, in a grassroots movement, you want to build a credit structure that is, in some sense, it has to be as true as possible. Because to give someone credit for accomplishing something might mean that the resources come back to that person or that group, and they can re-accomplish something. But the other thing that happens really, is you want to, basically what happens is people do a lot of work as a small group, and get a bunch of people to come out inspired. And when they claim, look, this was successful. They encourage everyone to take credit, look what we did, and they hide the credit that they have, they have put there. And so that enables more. And then because of that people say, ‘Oh, wow, look what I did.’ All they did was show up to this movement, and we were so successful, and then they get involved.

And that is a credit structure that builds something rather than political party processes where a bunch of people do the work, and the politician, or the elected official takes the credit. And everyone’s like, ‘wow, we did a lot of work.’ And all we got was this guy, and he, he or she does the stuff. So that reverse of credit structure. So the PGA was really good at that. It was very conscientious. This is what the Info Points were about. It was quite kind of clever radical as an idea. Did it always work? No. But that’s mainly because you have a meeting. Everyone’s involved. Great. Do you want to volunteer do that? Great. I, you know, I think I was personally assigned to do be helped coordinate the PGA Info Points in 2002. And I got to 2004 and at the same meeting and like, “oh, wow, that’s two years. We haven’t done anything on that.” Right, you know, and there were other people who did something.

So there’s people who pick up the pieces Huh, even though you have some people who just jump in and say, ‘Oh, I volunteer,’ right. But those are all learning experiences for the many people that were involved. So I definitely did a lot of work. It’s still taking the email lists and public newsletter for the lead up to the 2009 event at the what it was at COP. COP 15 in Denmark, I was kind of key person for putting the more radical. And and that was a quite an interesting one because it wasn’t as easy as what the PGA hallmarks had named these organizations that were illegitimate. Whereas the politics of the climate conferences, people didn’t really want to say this climate conference is illegitimate, even though only the actor, the actors were all national bodies, there still wanted it to be. Um. More legitimate in that sense.

Leen: Yeah. That’s really interesting. I think it sounds to me like this reversal of the credit structure, maybe made organizing a little bit more accessible? Do you feel that that’s kind of maybe the success of the PGA and that by making it so that nobody necessarily represented the PGA but rather people who are inspired by the hallmarks, Or the values or things like that… Do you feel that it made organizing feel more accessible and more, I guess, yeah, something that people can get involved in, without necessarily being super political or anything like that?

Michael: Oh, um, I, I. I’m not sure it helps people get involved per se. It can also make it slightly confusing, like, Who’s, who’s doing something? But like, I think I mean, the type of people who are organizers, as opposed to just activists come in, and they try to figure out what’s going on who’s doing things? Where is the process? How’s the decision being made, and I met people like that, in the People’s Global Action, by being one of those people who’ve done that elsewhere came there. And it was a useful process, I think what it enabled is that the PGA would have a good reputation in some sense. And a good reputation is crucial for a movement going forward. Rather than people saying, oh, that’s all those people.

There were issues like, oh, that’s all those people’s issue. Right? So there was a fairly glib critique at some point, oh, that’s just summit hopping, like we’re, you know. One of my friends used to say, Ryanair, and call it Riot Air, we take you right there. hat cheap flights have enabled people to go to public gathering these public meetings and confront them.

And I think, towards the end, and particularly in Europe, when the European crowd got this clever idea had really come from the global south about how that, that this was an important issue, and how could we kind of do something about it? There was like a type of critique like that. I didn’t know if it was necessarily a critique of the PGA per se, but it was a critique of the anti globalization movement as it had been taken up in Europe by the Euro radicals who didn’t have the same global class base that say, the peasant movements or the indigenous peoples’ movements associated with the Zapatistas, or would have had.

Leen: So I’m curious if there was, I know you mentioned a little bit about Info Points. And I’m wondering also, if you feel like there was a particular structure that the PGA, or framework that the PGA kind of took on, in terms of organizing across borders in many ways. I know that you mentioned you were mainly involved and can mainly speak to the PGA in Europe. But even in that, do you feel that maybe, for example, the internet played a big part in how you were able to communicate and how you’re able to organize? Were there particular frameworks that you feel, or particular like historic events or issues that were happening that allowed the PGA to organize the way that it did?

Michael: I mean, it certainly took advantage of the of the internet. I mean, I got involved in the internet because I was involved in the IWW in California and the very first organization that re-sold its T1 and allowed people to take a piece of the T 1 connection, and then resell. Which it was called the Little Garden, it was in San Francisco. And one of the workers there was the San Francisco, became the San Francisco branch, treasurer, Secretary Treasurer. In San Francisco of the IWW of getting used to the idea was, was right there at the beginning of the internet.

Had workers at the key place that changed the fabric of the internet, that meant the internet was this vastly different network. And, you know, so that, I was quite used to like, organizing with people where you knew all kinds of people’s names. And the Worker’s Solidarity Movement in Dublin was also a group that put together a quite a lot of stuff, like an email list that was really crucial to the entire, I don’t know, it was an English speaking list, but it was pretty crucial to the, to building an anarchist movement that really like, and if you kind of knew people’s names, they had little things they learned they didn’t necessarily put their name, and we had these conferences were coming together, and you’d chat with people. And you’d find out after the meetings that over the coffee, ‘oh, you’re T44, or whatever it is, you know, you know, and you suddenly have a name on a face. And that was the dynamic of this of the 90s, how the internet started to become a new dynamic.

I think there’s always been that dynamic. You know, people say, Oh, the internet changed everything. Right? Like, I think people had magazines and conferences and letters and correspondence. And those networking just happened slower. But there’s certain characteristics of how humans organizing thing, the dynamic of it being faster, and creating a lot of information was maybe surprising for a lot of people. And it’s certainly the Zapatistas were one of the early people on the internet, we were all impressed by them.

And so that was– certainly email lists was the key thing that helped me understand it. Usually, it was a poster that circulated some type of flyer for the big events, like we all like I still have a poster from the 2004. One. And I think it was I thought it was a great poster. I think someone also once commented, ‘oh, that poster right there that is that’s a raver culture, poster,’ and it would have been particularly aesthetic, quite dark and, and colorful. And people would have said, If you want a much broader kind of community, you know, that would bring in certain people. So those are kind of potentially boundaries along gender, ethnicity, cultural background, to try to be language.

But like it was youth culture, so there was a huge amount of youth culture and youth culture is and they just use that youth culture. People join, bring the youth culture, youth culture is imperfect. youth culture has all kinds of problems, and braver culture, you know.

So those are types of things that are strengths and weaknesses of the movement. So poster that circulated before event, having a public email list, and the policy of the email list was to discuss setting up the event, it was no, this event is going to make a policy statement, or we’re going to do something it wasn’t that’s very old style, people who are like, ‘we’re building the party and the party will be this machine, which will make policy statements and we will pronounce’ and when you have that you have all these people who scurry to figure out how they can be the leader. And one of these events, those people don’t know what’s going on. Right? And you have a bunch of people are like, ‘Oh, well, that sounds cool. But like, I hope there’s going to be good food, I think I’m going to join the kitchen.’ And the actual infrastructure becomes the topic of debate. And if you can, as a group, have no argument, not have no arguments, but work through the infrastructure, the planning, you’re gonna get the resources, announce it, and actually have an event. You build a movement by building an event, and then that movement will go on and do other things.

At the Serbia conference, there was a bunch of things that went on they, for example, built a big set of picnic tables are in a big circle. And I’d never seen this but like it was a huge meeting with all these people. And you had a facilitator or a co facilitator or maybe three people in the middle, only one of them was the facilitator talking. And then each picnic table had a group of people at it and only one person at the picnic table could talk, they were at the front, you could change your person who was at the picnic table. But then they would say, read out this thing, and you have paper to support the agenda. And we’d have a consensus process meeting with like 300 people through this picnic table, circle of picnic tables, you know, every picnic table would then have little discussion. And then there would be statement, you know, raise your hand if you’re involved in people bring out that comment. So you had both a consensus within a picnic table, and then a consensus between picnic tables. And that process was like, Wow, that’s amazing for people to learn how to work, large groups make decisions include everybody.

There was also a convening of the labor unions in Belgrade, all these trade unions that were working, because part of the process was that area of the world at the same time as the area of the world, the Zapatistas were from, were both subject to capitalism in a particular way. And for whatever reason, the organizing and the cultural background, within the Chiapas region, ended up with people being a community and fighting back and resistance, where as in the Yugoslavia area it had become a war.

So, you know, I mean, there were, so there’s, and there’s lots of writers who have kind of compared those two areas. Why is that? PGA chose specifically to have its European Conference in Belgrade. Pretty tough place to do that conference, we had kind of fascists come in, at the meeting and say, ‘Hey, and talk, hey, well, you shouldn’t be doing’ but like, I mean, it, you know, it went out, it went alright. So, and those, that kind of that’s that meeting technology.

So the technology is like a poster, an email list. There’s a name, there was a caravan structure. I didn’t I wasn’t participated in that I know about it. I don’t think it’s useful for me to talk about the I 99 caravan, but that went all over the place. And that was another way in which bringing a bunch of people together from different places to go on tour, and talk to people get them excited and have people from different countries speaking about why it was important to oppose the WTO’s multilateral investments, multilateral agreement on investments, etc, etc. Why the World Bank was doing wrong things in terms of debt creation, why the IMF was, like, you know, being a bad scene on structural adjustment, so that kind of global politics came out, but also trying to link that global politics to local trade unions, to those movements.

Leen: That sounds really, really quite, I think, a sophisticated of a way to organize for sure. So I guess you did mention a lot a, little bit about the consensus forming, the different kinds of forms of of organizing that would kind of happen within the PGA networks. And I’m wondering if you felt that this was distinctly different than the other types of organizing that you were doing before? Did it feel like the processes of decision making, the processes of organizing were distinctly different? Or did it like that? Like maybe they were inspired by different? Maybe they were inspired more by the Zapatista movement or more of the Global South and things like that? Or did you feel like it kind of… organically kind of evolved or grew out of the movements that you were already involved in?

Michael: Um, I think it organically evolved. I don’t know how they did things in Bolivia. I doubt they did it like we did it. I mean, I’ve been in lots of places and the local organizing culture has a character or a stamp. I was in the Arizona for a year in 2013, and worked in the No GMO movement, and they, they were organized like a real estate firm. I kid you not, because a woman who worked in real estate had gotten ill from that, had told, her doctor had quietly to the side to her to just cut out GMOs, got better. She was like committed to ending GMOs. And so it was all volunteer organization, but she was one of the structurers and she would get people, promote people or take on the role, it was all free, but it was organized like that.

In L.A. the Anarchist movement started from a punk concert. So it always had the character of a punk somebody speaking on stage kind of saying that very much quiet scene like and y’all, like jump forward, do your thing. But in that, as a group, but it wasn’t quite. In other places, you have a lot of college kids who have a high degree of kind of social capital in terms of talking, I guess that’s the fancy word, the college kids would use social capital in terms of talking, organizing meetings and stuff like that.

So the anarchist movement has generated and the feminist movement, in particular, a lot of this around California, but has quite spread. And I don’t really know the full history but like, consensus process in various types of frameworks.

And and I think the PGA did them better. In many ways. If you look at– I wasn’t in the Seattle event, I was not there. In Seattle, I was in Ireland, but I know from talking to people that the Seattle spokes council for the direct actions. Yeah, maybe this is maybe maybe this is the boundary or crossover because Direct Action Movement, like they didn’t have per. There’s some ways in which you bring people together, and you don’t necessarily assume a common purpose. Whereas some of the other things that have used that method, like Climate Camp, they made a statement at the beginning, here’s all the principles you agree with, or disagree with, which kind of tends to exclude people. And part of the PGA process, which I’ve never participated in was the global meetings that happened every two or four years, really depends. And there’s supposed to be one that happened in Nepal in 2006. But it failed.

Basically, because it was the Maoists that were sponsoring it and and they were just like, a month before the conference where all these international, really important global activists were going to show up. The government threw them all in jail.

Leen: Oh, wow

Michael: they were later let out and they become a really key part of running that government, but. But initially, like the some of those exclusions, like that are very typical of kind of middle class Western movements, like, ‘Oh, we’re about non violence.’ That wasn’t an option for people in the Chiapas region. So you’re excluding people.

There was often conversations about whether or not a movement would be violent or nonviolent. ‘Oh yu know we had, should have a statement of non violence.’ And it was, I always find those so stupid, because one, we were never going to be violent, because none of us were any good at violence. The state is good. You don’t choose your tactics based on what the other team is really good at. Right? And having a statement , ‘we’re non violent’ kind of calls attention to it, it makes, it was always just silly debates, and you had to learn how to move around those. I’m not sure where. But that was certainly remind me again, of what the specific question was. I guess it’s about the character of movements.

Leen: — [inaudible] was different than other types of movements. And maybe that played a role in its success or not.

Michael: Yeah, I suppose I always think of hearing the phrase that the Zapatistas use, which is ‘walking and talking.’ And when you, like, people basically adapted, kind of these methods. Definitely the hallmarks and things like that, and really saw it as an example. But, and but like, and but some of the methods were already there, it just empowered a group of people who are already using that to go and bring that further forward.

Leen: Yeah.

Michael: But I suppose there were some logics of interacting in multiple communities with multiple languages like ins- in the conference in PGA, Belgrade, they had a sign language for L or language, and set it up. How do you have a region where somebody talks and there’s a translator that speaks out to all these places, they now do that on the internet. But those were some of the early times of trying to figure out that language— it early for me. Countless people have been doing that, you know since that the labor organizing on the Tower of Babel construction site, but it it was it’s definitely now you see that on the internet where you have conferences that are well organized and have that simultaneous translation but those, that’s the type of thing that happened.

The walking, while because you were working with so many people, but you’re also trying to do something you don’t know what people’s politics are, what they’re doing. I think the hallmarks, really like this idea of a confrontational rather than a lobbying strategy was key to what made the PGA project s successful on the walking while talking. Because you didn’t actually end up getting involved with people who were just going to try to lobby.

You and like, some of the events, like the WTO, was screwing over so many people that you didn’t have to have the same politics. These people are worried about sea turtles. And these people are worried about trade union rights, they all would benefit by stopping this organization,

Leen: Right.

Michael: Would be much harder to come together and say, oh, let’s plan the world from here. People say, well, we need to work on sea turtle stuff. Oh, well, labor rights first, you know that when you’re trying to do something, That way. It’s it’s much harder than when you are acting as a pincher against something, that was often articulated in movement of ‘one No, and many yeses.’

Leen: Yeah, I’ve heard that a couple of times. Now. I think that’s a really interesting phrase. I really like that.

So I am curious, as far as I understand, the PGA was really kind of inspired by the Zapatista’s kind of call to a global action or global strategy against this common enemy of capitalism, whatever it may be at the time. But I also I guess, I’m wondering, as far as I understand, the PGA was really meant to be kind of focused on global south issues, or kind of maybe, as far as I understand, was attempting to kind of maybe, challenge Eurocentrism around the movement strategy. Did you feel that that was the case in PGA?

Michael: we came from the global south. So the it was the global south that put together these sort of meetings, although obviously they’re in Geneva, there was a number of people across Europe that helped.

Europe had a lot of resources. And there, I think there was kind of a group around that. But that was all more much I much before my time in many ways. So I don’t want to really speak to what I don’t know about. But I definitely know when there was global conferences. They’re set to be like, ‘Okay, well, who is going you need to put decide some people,’ because all the people with money could go fly around the world. That wasn’t an issue for me, because one I was already had enough to do I didn’t want to go to a global conference. And two, I wasn’t that central or important or relevant. And, but they it was it was clear that it was limited. How many people from Europe could go to the global conference. Right?

It was often a kind of a joke about like, oh, you in these meetings, you have somebody from Europe, and he represents a anarchists Climate Action Group, and ‘we have 20 members, and we did this action last year, shutting down an event,’ and somebody else’s ‘Oh, oh, I’m a Indian peasants movement, and we have three or 4, 40000 members.’ And, you know, it just differences in scale. Which, when you have a consensus process, it’s it’s, it’s it’s not a voting process where those two people have equal rights. It’s a consensus process where they have to develop a conversation where someone who says, well, that’s not really what we’re willing to agree to, because it doesn’t work for our 50,000 members that we do this. And somebody else will say, well, we want our space to not help because some of those small groups in Europe were kind of key because a lot of the meetings and the targets were in Europe, and in America, that was where kind of the money and exploitation was coming from.

Leen: Yeah, that sounds really, really interesting. So I guess that kind of maybe helps us jump into the the next bit or the next kind of question. So we’ve kind of talked a little bit about what maybe made the PGA successful, maybe some of its particular key features that really led to its successful strategy as a social movement. I’m curious if you could maybe share a little bit about what you feel didn’t work. What are the lessons learned, you know, the failures that the PGA had that maybe contemporary and future social movements can learn from?

Michael: Um, well, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, the PGA didn’t continue. Does that mean it didn’t work? Some people would say, look, it was an organization created by people in the global south as a specific vessel to accomplish something, it did accomplish that and then carried on quite a bit. It… I mean, it was kind of, I think there are still people using the PGA hallmarks and name in, even today in… on migrant rights in East Asia. But I don’t know them, I don’t have contact with them.

But generally, the 2006 conference in Nepal, which was an international conference in which maybe discussed the hallmarks, all that kind of stuff didn’t happen. And then the Europe conference in 2008, was in Greece and had some difficulties in terms of getting itself organized, and having all the resources so that it needed, and coming off coherently. So at that point, there wasn’t, there was there was more stuff that happened, but like, there was no PGA name really associated with the Copenhagen kind of COP COP15 event organizing, but there were PGA people and those networks came. And it was actually organized in almost the same manner by some of the same people who put it together and involve the walkout of the some of the Bolivian delegation and those kind of negotiations were all there. So that kind of legacy stuff.

So what did they do wrong? I don’t know maybe. Obviously, the one of the hazards of a very open, non hierarchical framework is people volunteer and then don’t accomplish something that has to be measured against, like, top down processes where there’s somebody assigned to do it only a few things go to really, actually limits what happens.

I I do think there’s always going to be problems with wealthier and and European organizers and activists and people with more access to power, cultural capital kind of resources have a bigger impact on these networks. So you have to build a lot in to kind of say, how are we going to do make this a very much a radical network that works on on these issues? And for whatever reason, the PGA was that maybe because it said we have, we have a confrontational attitude not lobbying.

I’m, I’m trying to think of other like, particularly weaknesses, that PGA might have had.

Obviously, if you have a non representational structure, you need to represent yourself enough, such that if you’re going to, if you’ve done something, you get the credit in terms of movement resources, back to you so that you can do it again, if you just represented as ‘Oh, it happened,’ and no one knows who the PGA was, and why that movement was successful. For example, the real role of peasants’ movements in India, you know, Zapatistas people in Geneva and Europe coming together to kind of really plan a global movement that has a specific strategy. Yeah, then you don’t, you can’t, it’s harder then to represent that, which is maybe one of the reasons the PGA oral history project is, you know, they say History is written by the winners. Well, we won. So maybe it’s about time that we kind of etched ourself in there. So that’s definitely an important point.

Leen: So I’m curious, then do you feel that the non representational structure may be contributed to challenges with continuity as far as organizing or did you feel that because you were still organizing around the same hallmarks that it actually made it easier to keep working towards whatever goals that you were working towards?

Michael: No idea. Good question, though.

Leen: Fair enough. Fair enough.

Michael: Non-representational structures have challenges and they have advantages. Play those off against one another.

Leen: Do you feel that there is maybe a particular lesson or a particular strategy that the PGA can teach contemporary social movements, especially ones that are trying to be more internationalist and horizontalist, today?

Michael: Yeah, ask the global south first. They’re doing that work from the, you know, the people who are, who are on the bottom of the scale. And whereas their thinking in this and how you represent that. It wasn’t necessarily the people who are all PGA activists were definitely a global south or at the bottom of the scale, because they have some resources to do the organizing, and organize and put together meetings and, and discuss and they knew the network, so. But the priority and that emphasis was there. And that’s in many ways, what made it successful.

Leen: Yeah, that’s really great. So actually, the next question is basically the same question that we were already chatting about. So maybe you can tell– I’ll kind of modified it a little bit. But do you feel that there are maybe specific challenges in organizing through the PGA framework that we haven’t touched on that you feel are important for contemporary and future social movements and social movement historians and the academics to really focus on or to pay attention to?

Michael: Yeah, I mean, it’s not easy to do grassroots organizing in this open process. So one of the things that one does is one builds a group that will build a direct action, right, for example. And that group has, like has to work together over time, you have to kind of really make a call out that establishes like a feminist politics, that establishes an anti racist politics, that establishes radically, grassroots and bottom of the economic scale oriented politics that has an international solidarity, and and then do all the kind of work to build a how to, to make sure there’s conflict resolution and decision making processes that are built in that into that. And it’s a very subtle stamp of doing that work to bring people together that demonstrates them, and then they will go and do it. I think it doesn’t necessarily go all by itself, once it’s thing, does it regenerate? Because I mean, roughly speaking, you have all kinds of other international networks, then that occur. And some of them are successful. Some of them are not. Some of them are successful in certain ways. Some of them have a huge amount of representation. But they were designed to kind of put themselves forward and be representational. ‘Look, we represent all these people, we want you this say things’ and they didn’t think some of them were quite as successful.

Some people would, I mean, I think probably the some of the core people in the PGA would be very pro the world social movement. World social movement, like no one goes to like– has petered out now, but the world social movement, events, didn’t have any circular meetings where it was kind of a consensus, and everybody was on equal. So it basically had square meetings all the time. It had an organizing committee, it was very much done in that old architecture of kind of Marxist political parties. ‘I’m the chairman of the committee.’

So you can do a lot on a world social movement, and people are positive about them about those events, because you meet tons of people, but you’re never going to accomplish something with the thing. There’s always just a cluster of people trying to pass a motion and convince everybody that they will now do that, you know, it just silly.

So what people do is they go, they make contacts, they share ideas, they do workshops, and they build their own network sideways. That was like, I worked on water politics, there’s a lot of water politics in Belfast, we’d met with International Water politics. And that’s where we did that the world social movement stuff. Those are the types of stuff.

Also the world social movement had a clause for what you must be and the Zapatistas were inherently excluded from it. Because in order to defend themselves, their land, they had taken up arms. So it was a silly to have an anti globalization movement, as a key organization that excluded one of the key players that most famously, was powerful in starting that.

Obviously, the Zapatista were one part of many puzzles. They happen to be for Europeans, the most glamorous, clever part, but there’s a lot of peasant networks around the world that were also part of working in putting that network together.

Leen: Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s really helpful to hear and to kind of maybe begin to kind of parse the differences and how the PGA organized differently than so many other movements that may be attempted similar goals, and similar challenges.

So the next question is a little bit, a little bit different. I think it goes into a little bit of a different direction than the questions that we’ve been kind of answering so far. But some people have said that some movements move faster and others move slower. Some expect change to come quickly. And others expect slowness when it comes to social movements. How did you feel that such differences played out for you or your organization within the PGA? And whether these differences affected the organizing work? Did you feel that some people were waiting for maybe that instant gratification of like a quick qin? Were people working towards the long term goals? Did that really affect how organizing happened within the PGA?

Michael: No, I don’t think it really affected that gives us there was a process that was there and people did the network. There was some attempts to build a European network that you know, that was Anti Fascist in the in that sort of later periods. I don’t know if there was specifically oriented around the PGA but certainly those networks were, that did overlap. And like, you know, you know, some people had complained, oh, look, these emails are just reposts of activity that’s happened elsewhere. You know, that’s simply making activity look like it’s happening rather than doing something. So those are the, you know, I remember someone complaining about that. I remember this famous email that this guy Mark, from the London group, which was the convener. The every continent had a convener that rotated each time. And they were supposed to convene a Continental meeting. And when he was in the RTS(?), which was one of the conveners for Europe, one year, and he wrote sub kinda like if anyone sends another long email about Derrida, right, because, you know, he’s non representational politics. So you had this kind of clever, high social capital crowd with good education, kind of thinking about these ideas and writing stuff that – Meanwhile, other people were like, Look. I’m a raver. I didn’t even know what the anti globalization movement was, we were we just got together as a group to do street parties because the the law that was passed on repetitive beats, and then there’s other people in the global south who are presidents or whatever, and they only get to do email at some point, suppose the I don’t know, suppose they only have a certain amount of time, they can look at email, and then is log email and Derrida simply says, like, look, that’s not appropriate. If anyone writes another email about Derrida, I’m gonna have a hissy fit.

You know, I think it was a supposedly, an A famous or infamous, depending on your perspective of, email about what what type of things, but at some level, that’s also covered by the idea of walking while talking.

Like we’re all got come from different places, we’re all doing different things. And you give people a lot of slack, because they got this, then that’s the way they do things. And you do it this way. And then these people over here, do it this way. And when one person’s way of doing things starts to stop other people from being involved, then you have to ask questions about it. And that’s where things break up. But when you paying attention to that, maybe you go further.

And everybody is going to be wrong somewhere. I mean, I think it’s also bad to think in terms of who are the virtuous people. It’s really, it’s really, to say, here’s these people, they’re trying to do a better thing. Like college kids doing organizing, they’re, you know, oftentimes, it’s usually the more wealthy colleges. The working class colleges, they’re just trying to figure out how to do a job. They’re just trying to do stuff, they don’t get their college degree plus work 40 hours a week or something. So it’s usually they’re kind of…, in London anyway. So it’s this sort of central London, a wealthy and a lot of quite wealthy kids that, bless them, they chose, hey, the world isn’t right, let’s do something. Because they come from that political base. They don’t always make the right decisions in terms of having the experience of walking while talking with other people. And some people say, Oh, they blame them and they say, Oh, there. And what you do when you blame them is you say, oh, therefore we’re going to stop that activity. But What’s better is to kind of step outside and look at the credit structure and the choice structure in a different way such that well, it’s good that they did that. Do we need to validate or, or make ver– or make virtuous I type of decision and the type of critique that allows us to say, it would be better this way, but’we’re not going to blame these people because their activity is actually really good.

I think a lot of times politics can say, Oh, those people, t’ey’re just middle class activists and and t’at’s it blows them off. Oh, those people, t’ey’re just global peasants that have nothing to do with my trade union rights here in America, those people they are, you know, you know, transgender activists, and what does that really have to do with what’we’re doing? So you just kind of have to, like work with lots of awkward things that just ’on’t seem right to you. But like, ’ou’ll ’ou’ll find your way. If ’ou’re working. If th’re’s a strong goal, and th’re’s some real commitment behind them, ’ou’ll find a way to do it.

Leen: Definitely, I mean, what ’ou’re describing to me definitely sounds like something that a lot of contemporary current movements need to be able to interrogate and to look at, I think. At least some of the organizing tha’ I’ve been a part of, I definitely feel what ’ou’re saying. And that documentation where people kind of get lost in whatever particular thing that t’ey’re focused on that they kind of forget that’we’re all still organizing and challenging the same, the same system or the same structure. So I do think that what ’ou’re talking about in terms of the walking while talking is a really important lesson. That I think current and future movements can learn from the PGA. So thank you so much for sharing that.

I am curious now, we are kind of slowly wrapping up as well. I am mindful of the time. So I do want to check in with you about that before we kind of wrap up.

Michael: Yeah I’m alright with time.

Leen: Awesome. Awesome. Perfect. So I guess in this kind of– as’we’re talking more and more about how maybe–

Michael: one other thing I might say about you, you talked about temporalities fast and slow. Yes,

Um, one thing that is specific to this type of organizing is like, everybody would agree that in principle, ’ou’re supposed to do things way in advance and have really good planning, so it do’sn’t get last minute. But when people ’on’t have much resources, like they ’an’t, they ’on’t have a horizon to look way far in the future.’It’s only people with lots of money, who can guarantee what t’ey’re going to be doing in seven months, lots of the activists we work with, in seven months, t’ey’ll be like, Well, I ’on’t know i’ I’ll live here or have a job. So I ’an’t really promise. You know what, it was harder to do that. And lots of times with the tours. So those caravans and tours sometimes came through really on short notice, like, Oh, can you tell everybody in the next three weeks to come? In three days, I literally got a call to say, Oh, we were thinking about coming in three days and stuff could have told me earlier. But you know, at certain point, it was either going to happen or not. And, and so that temporality can be very stressed when you ’on’t have many resources can be very sudden, can look like disorganized,

Leen: right

Michael: Sometimes it is actually organized to the ability of the resources that one has. And I suppose the other thing with resources in those social movements, is, you know, when if ’ou’re in these big organization, you write a funding proposal for a nonprofit, and to a grant giver like, oh, we want to do this, this and this, and’we’re going to organize this conference and we need this. The amount of money that you need is like huge, right? And if if anybody had written a funding proposal from some of the things that the PGA and the grassroots and the anarchist movements put together, it is very similar to this, the way that temporality works different the funding worked different too

Leen: Yeah

Michael: the funder would have said, No, we refuse because it’s not a realistic proposal, you’re asking for too little. And that’s because when you engage people in the whole process, and they feel part of it, they feel that’s my movement. They contribute their resources, they give, they will go themselves, you don’t have to pay for them to come. You don’t have to say, Oh, come to our meeting, we’ve got food prepared. People come to the meeting and they’ve worked out how we together will prepare food for ourselves, right? Those types of things are different dynamics when you do kind of the non-representational and horizontal things well, when you do it poorly you just end up with badly organized things and nobody and the people who are doing work are not responsible for bad activity. So there’s many problems with the people can horizontal work. doesn’t work. And that’s often times is true. But when it works well it works very well.

Leen: Yeah, definitely sounds like it. I am curious. Also, you mentioned a little bit about maybe how different resources or kind of planning, maybe affects things when it comes to temporality and organizing within the PGA, where maybe the resources, access to resources and things like that affect it. And in some of the other interviews that I’ve looked over, some of the interviews that I’ve already done, there’s also been some conversation around how 9/11 affected organizing, at least maybe in North America and how that may be shifted certain things around. I believe there was a conference that was meant to be organized around that time or in, like, September that month. And a lot of things happened to kind of maybe shift after that. I’m wondering if you felt that there was, if you felt that there was a similar shift or shift at all in organizing with the PGA in Europe, after 9/11? Curious to know whether that was more of a North America specific thing, or if that kind of trickled across?

Michael: Yeah, and I mean, it did eventually, but it did trickle across. And I don’t I don’t know, I’m not sure back in North America right away. But it it certainly, I mean, the PGA exists in this kind of strange window between the collapse of the sort of Berlin Wall and the Cold War. And, like, the movements built and grew at the space where the organization of the American empire was around anti Soviet. And there was a huge amount of openness, because they’re huge. They’re whatever you want to call it, structure of who the enemy is. You know. thing in the 90s, the punk bands that we listened to in California was like, a New World Order. A New World Order was, you know, with George Bush played as a punk is a sound, a sound bite, you know, punk song or an industrial music, you know. And so that change was all happening are starting to move to this clash of civilizations type framework. And certainly the 9/11 thing was hugely changed America, but it also gradually started changing Europe as well.

It didn’t immediately change, the PGA, the PGA was going in 2002 really, really well. Like, our social movements were big, they kept going. I think, really, when the the Iraq War happened in Britain, that was bit of a killer, they get like that it’s a particularly crowd — of not that it is bad to fight war, but it’s a particular crowd that comes out from the peace movement, which is, ‘here’s what we do. We’ve been doing it since the 1950s.’ And it I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t, shouldn’t be bad mouthing, I work with all those people still. So but like, I mean, I think that’s a very different dynamic about how it’s organized and all that. you know, although some of them like CND are really, really clever. CND also worked with us in the (GA Gleneagles) things, and they were just a little bit more clever at being able to hold together both the regular left and anti and anti capitalism, politics, although we didn’t really call itself anti capitalism, politics, it was more like the NGO politics of stop corporate greed type thing, social justice, and all that. And the anarchist politics, they were actually quite deft at protecting us from like, being targeted and stuff.

So that 9/11 thing did gradually change the dynamics. Um, but like, there’s other things up, you know, obviously, like, you know, what’s going on in Nepal as a particular government crack– cracks down on Maoist revolutionaries, and that sort of kind of thing. So I think many of different movements have taken different shapes. One doesn’t see as much from the Zapatistas now, although they’re obviously active, but they’re very much focused on across Mexico, which is more than just Chiapas. So it is still a social movement, but I mean, they’re going to dreadful situation there in terms of the number of murders that are going on there now.

And I, I’m trying to think of different movements form in different ways, like Via Campesina has a different way of organizing, I think it’s very much part of that building global network, but it has a different style than the work. But I’ve definitely been to events with Via Campesina has very much the same v.. as the PGA. But it doesn’t have really a space for Europeans. Via Campesina, I mean, there is a Via Campesina European farmers group, and they do great stuff.

Leen: Yeah.

Michael: But it wouldn’t, they wouldn’t be punk rockers or something that are willing to, like, stand in confrontation with police. All event has been not that big ever seen and really needs that that’s not necessarily, you know, always a useful thing, but just a slightly different dynamic. And I don’t know, maybe like the I don’t know how much the global south needs Euro radicals? How useful are we? I don’t know. Yeah, I was I was kind of like, in times, I’m like, around the climate issue, kind of, please, can someone get a plan together? Because it’s not going to come out of Europe?

Leen: That’s really interesting. Yeah. So I’m curious. How, if at all, do you feel your experience with the PGA has affected your own activism and your own networks and how you’ve continued to approach maybe social movement work, just generally, on a personal level?

Michael: I was inspired by it. And I think maybe that’s one reason I was excited about the PGA oral history project. I’ve always wondered if there’s a particular stamp that thing you do exactly at the moment of your youth, which is quite powerful. Is what you then think politics is? the anti globalization movement at this particular way. But it was very much of its time in terms of designed to deal with how the [Bretton Woods agreement] from the post 95 closure of World War Two, developed an international trade system and how that was really clamping down on global south nations and within global South nations, the governments that were often corrupt around debt structures from the global north banks, were clamping down on the people. You know, and the development of that, and this multilateral agreement on investments is really basically the Death Star. You know, that was really the thing to fight at that moment.

PGA wasn’t really the thing for, the vehicle to deal with the global economic crisis in 2009. I was in this thing called meltdown. It was very much organized from a slightly PGA type style. I think we called it a carnival against capitalism, and literally the Al-Jazeera interviewer, when he talked to me said, oh, yeah, but you didn’t, it was a little bit lackluster, isn’t it? But that wasn’t really the heyday of the carnival. So he’s basically saying, Hey, man, the globalization movement and all that carnival stuff, it’s over.

And, you know, I mean, I mean, it wasn’t where we were, we did a bunch of stuff and not particularly well organized Meltdown, it melted down itself as a group before the actual event, it was Climate Camp, which was a stamp from of consensus process building organizations put together by Earth First, the Rising Tide, which was a huge, Rising Tide was a huge part of the England part of the PGA network. And I can’t remember somebody, some other people were also part of putting the other climate camps and then it became its own thing from that. And they had everything together, they built the the legal support structure and all that, that actually really helped. But like their target was the carbon trading because they deal with climate issue. And the real issue was the Bank of England, that was the target.

And so in different moments, you’re really looking at different global structures to deal with that. But I think something that the Zapatistas have to say like, walking and talking together, something that the PGA says of really organizing from the people who are most affected. And, and speaking that, which is something you can do in politics in your own city, you don’t have to be global to say who is the most affected by this issue. Right?

I mean, the PGA network isn’t was never was never designed in the structure of how you confront the, you know, policing frameworks that have been so radically violent, particularly to the black community, the poor community, you know, very differential levels of violence that they have between middle class people and working class people, all of this. And so those different structures have, different types of different structures like – Who were the people, they’re marvelous, but they were organized quite similar to in some ways to the PGA in many other ways very much not. But like when the Occupy. And it was, those occupations were set up, in some ways as a replication of what was happening in the Middle East. And they were people came from our non-hierarchical things and handed the Occupy groups facilitation process, consensus process, and that made it all very successful, right, because if you don’t use consensus process, you’ll get the traditional left in there. And the Trotskyist groups will kind of manipulate meetings and kind of ‘We are the leadership of the movement’ and it kind of sabotages things, right?

It’s not that you would consensus process, you can’t have like, silly stuff. And largely, the consensus process is just there to stop people from taking over it didn’t really accomplish much. It was, and you can’t, what happens is people get to the center of the spiral, and then they’re in charge, it just takes a lot longer to get to the center of the spiral before you have more power within a consensus process than anything. So there’s are in that entered all the hand signals and stuff.

A lot of people knew the PGA or its legacy, even if they didn’t know the PGA by the oh it’s, the hand signal people, like, that has a whole technology of using hand signals to facilitate common conversations, but most commonly the twinkly fingers, which goes directly to a feminist comment, which is like when you have that meeting, and somebody says something, and then somebody else says the same thing, because they think it’s important for them to also say it, the third person says the same thing. And you have all this repetition, it’s usually men that say the same thing, because you’re not important unless you speak, right? But the twinkly fingers was directly designed. And it’s particularly irritating when it’s a woman who says something. And then there’s a man who says something exactly the same, except he apparently doesn’t know these repeating, he somehow figured it out, realized, Oh, I’ve got this great idea without even listening, and then more men repeat it, you know, so that twinkling fingers is an example of enabling people to participate and converse, as a meeting technology that that kind of shuts down those frameworks of patriarchy and racism that are so creepy, insipid. You don’t want to blame people for wherever they come from, you know, you don’t want to say, Oh, you guys, anarchist in LA, every time you do an anarchist, meeting it’s a little bit like a punk concert. You know, those are the strengths that they bring up, let’s say the weaknesses, but it helps to have tools to work through that thing.

It can be a bad thing I’ve seen where the consensus process and all the hand signals are actually exclusionary, because there’s a group of people have worked in those movements, and they have the kind of personal interactional build up, which took a long time to get so they’re really effective. You know, the ridiculous hand signal this people started adding new hand signals with this one, which was like, I’ll talk to you about that. And after the pub afterwards, right. It’s not an official hand signal. I mean, I don’t know if there were official hand signals. But it was just one of those things that people didn’t, but like somebody, when you when you worked in, if you went to a meeting, and you were doing a meeting about violence in the black community, a bunch of people wouldn’t know that hand signal, and it would be exclusionary.

Leen: So it’s really interesting. You did mention the Occupy movement and maybe how it might have been, you know, occurring in in the legacy of the PGA, which actually brings me directly to the next question, which is, how do you think or, yeah, how do you feel other networks or other movements were inspired by the PGA? Do you feel that there is a legacy from the PGA to more to the, you know, movements now and movements afterwards I, in our conversations and other conversations I’ve had or and read over? There has been, there seems to be a particular legacy around the Occupy movement in PGA so I’m wondering if maybe you can speak to that or to any other legacies that you see from the PGA

Michael: I see. Lots of people are doing global calls for action. I do think they’re a bit kind of cheap. Wow, I’ve got an internet account and An email and I’m on a list, I will call a global day of action. Right? That’s not how the PGA did global days of action, right? There were meetings and plans. And there was a lot of people kind of consulted, it built into a process. And maybe at the end it unbuilt itself out of a process. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that the PGA kind of, like lots of anti authoritarian movements think of organization as temporary. I don’t know if that’s always good, because other people have claimed, I mean, the PGA elsewhere, not in Europe, grabbed hold of, you know, I think in Bolivia, you would claim there was loosely associated, a presidency of Bolivia that was loosely associated with the Cochabamba water movement, and the PGA. And in general, there were other countries that infrastructure did get built. Which is not, I mean, that the the horizontal and anarchist movements have not really done a very good job at that, certainly in Europe, with the exception of maybe the mutualist people, the all those people in Barcelona where the mayor was elected. Also the mutualist movement in Croatia, I forget which town I think Zagreb is it? maybe I’m gonna interview maybe we’ll be able to cut that bit of the interview if it shows obvious ignorance of geography.

But like, those people that mutualist, I don’t know if it’s Zagreb, because I don’t know them as well. But the Barcelona people when we worked with David Graeber, groups, they were very inspired by, they all knew the Zapatistas, they were part of that kind of social movements. But they’ve then gone on to do work building, building grassroots groups in a local municipal bring to the benefits of the cities. So that’s maybe another group, as part of the Lucas plan, I work with Just Space, which is very much a, a huge network of London organizations. They put out reports and at some level, they lobby the London Council, although you’d never really know it, when you just work with them, because they’re just involved in all these different putting together reports on how London could be better organized for people of London. And it’s, in some ways, part of that, at least, that mutualist thing, although that’s an example of the those people wouldn’t, wouldn’t it like Just Space, I don’t see much connection to the PGA thing. They’re a natural function of people living in the city and saying, Hey, can we make things better. That stuff that’s always going on.

When you say we’re other movements inspired by the PGA I would say definitely not as in the, in the joke that the like the people who were in the PGA only wrote, inspired by the PGA, right, because you weren’t, it was a network, not a. I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, you you had to map, who were organizers and what they were doing and how there was a process. And that was done by people were really good. And there was also some flags that said, Here’s how decisions are being made. And here’s how you contact someone. And this is what you should expect, when people sit in it, what kind of some of the issues we would definitely deal with. And then people said, Yes, I trust that I’ll get involved.

Other movements, I think, have tried to replicate that kind of stuff. And some of them do very well. Some of them do different stuff that was never successfully done. I mean, so. So one of the funny things about does it better, I mean, I wouldn’t say that the I mean, this huge bunch of weaknesses in what do you call it? The the one here on extinction rebellion, I find extinction rebellion, very charming and inspiring in the sense that, wow, there’s just people doing stuff. And I wasn’t involved in organizing it. And it’s just giant. I was like, that’s cool. Because you know, you haven’t one of those days where like, Oh, my goodness, it’s a tough day. What’s happening? Are we beaten now? Have we lost, and then all these people who weren’t involved but does something right? But one of the things they tried to do is take over the seven bridges and shut down London. And that was ostensibly a goal of the J 18 in London. I was not in London for the J 18. I was in San Francisco hanging out protecting the sound system from the police taking it away from us. It wasn’t a huge event, but it was pretty cool.

And the J 18 in London was huge. I mean, yes, it was a global event, but in London it was also A fight about the you know, the party culture was pissed that the police had decided to criminalize repetitive beats. And, and they have had this thing, hey, let’s do street party go. And they did a massive trip out. And one of the goals was to occupy all seven bridges. I think as far as I know, all seven bridges were never occupied. There’s someone coming through one of the Mayday rooms a few years ago, and they were arguing, oh, we get this thing called Extinction Rebellion. And we’re all gonna, like, come out and, and do this action. And we’re gonna see how many people can get arrested. And I looked at them and says, that’s great. I’m not involved in the thing that is trying to get arrested, right? I was like, That’s ridiculous. Right? And I just ignored it bad. I’ve got a great track record for like, betting on, you know, betting against the a really good horse. They went out and they occupied all seven bridges. So somewhere in there, there’s a link between extinction rebellion, and stuff. And they become, I mean, they have really spoke to a lot of people, they’ve been successful. But there’s something in there about how the PGA tactics had helped them, there’s something I’m still stuff that they could learn stuff that obviously they’re doing better than whatever the J 18, you know, movement was, I mean, they don’t know them very well. But extinction Rebellion has a huge set, when they were setting up of kind of criteria for how we’re gonna be together as people. And that’s very similar to what the PGA did, or what we did in LA, setting up the Food Not Bombs network is did workshops on anti racism and sexism, we were very just simple. We just figured out, well, that’s going to fuck people up if they do that. So let’s try to give them some tools not to do it. They were quite sophisticated in the way they did it. And it was, you know, it was quite so those are examples of social movements, that they might have learned something from the PGA, but I doubt many of them would have heard of it.

But quite frankly, the PGA when it was most successful, I hadn’t heard of it. And I was involved in actions that they had called. And I’d never heard of them. So that definitely says they were pretty nonrepresentational. I was in an event for Seattle, I was in an event for the J 18. Four or five years later, I met some people, I thought, hey, this is cool. Who are these people? And realize these are the people the network or what’s after that, that had called those action.

Michael: Right. Yeah, that’s really interesting. That is something that I’m personally particularly interested in, because I had personally never heard of the PGA before getting involved with this project. But I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about the PGA. And there’s probably a lot of inspiration, a lot of legacy from the organizing around the PGA networks that maybe is not attributed to the PGA just simply because of what you said in terms of them being so nonrepresentational.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, I mean, one argument is that the PGA so here’s a, here’s a question for a social theorist of social movements. Is the PGA a cause or a result of the anti globalization movement? So it’s certainly and it can be both, which is called a quasi cause. Right? And certainly, in some sense, had some actual tangible effects. But there was a movement building anyways, you don’t screw over the entire world without the entire world fighting back, right. So it was in already a movement, and it then did some stuff. But the kind of issue that a lot of people had a critique of is people saying, Come, we’re the people who did this. And taking all the credit, and then you can’t build anything, right? Credit structure, if the people who actually do something, don’t get any of the resources, but some politician becomes or some political party becomes a leader of a new thing, then then you you don’t return that. So a lot of people had that vigorous critique quite angry. And that might have been a weakness of the PGA because it disappears, right. But also, you can ask yourself, Was it really the PGA that did it? If nobody knew who the PGA was? It just happens to be things like there’s all kinds of things happen. You could probably point to something that some kind of group brought to, you know, the PGA network about, like the role of Earth First, in the Seattle, confrontation was pretty important.

I mean, Earth first shutdown the the the Multilateral Agreement on Investments? Certainly the consensus process, which was, hey, and the the spokes council style, which is quite different from how, say, a spokes counsel in a more corporate framework like Like, where you have everybody under one group in, say, the climate camps in the UK, so, so Earth First would have had in America would have had a big impact on how that went because of the way they structured the Direct Action Movement structured those events. So you could come to the spokesCouncil, and you didn’t have to agree with the other people, you could do this. But you, you could be involved, as it was, those events were. And that’s a big issue. I bet.

I bet the people in Bolivia wouldn’t have done that. I bet they would have had something else. I mean, I don’t know. Okay, I don’t know them. People that love you. And I’ll be excited to read some interviews from them. Right. But like, all these different people contribute to something in some way. So who’s the cause? Right? I mean, this is like, like, cause and effect was developed by people who play billiard balls or studies, we’re trying to figure out why the stars move around. And is there such a thing as gravity? You know, that’s a physicist thing. The rest of us all work together. And, you know, we have to walk together and we have to talk together. And as long as something gets done, and the thing that gets done really matters to the people that are walking and talking.

It doesn’t really matter whether the, you know, PGA was just a label, a convenient label for a group of people who did something. And eventually European twinkly finger people thought, Oh, that’s cool. That’s our movement.

Leen: Right. Right.

Michael: The same like, the same could be said, for the Squares movement, or the Occupy. Occupy was a convenient label for a particular time in place, that had to accomplish stuff, it had a particular set of tactics, it had a target and organizing around the way it did something in relationship to that target. And the people were first involved in that were like, wow, that’s our movement. And that’s how all movements will always go and occupy the square. Other times, it’s not going to be a useful tactic to occupy the square.

Leen: So there was one thing that you mentioned earlier in the interview that stuck out to me, and that you mentioned, when you were talking about, you know, being excited about the oral history project. You mentioned that, you know, history we normally think of as being written by the victors by the people that win. And you made a comment about the PGA having won and so it was time for the PGA to write their history. I’m curious what you can say, or what what it is, you mean, when you say that you feel that the PGA won, what is it exactly that they won?

Michael: The Doha round of trade talks in the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 99 failed and it has never been able to recuperate. The multilateral agreement on investments sank. Right? So the from a global trade perspective, which certainly one type of politics, doesn’t work for debt issues, doesn’t work for fighting policing against black, but this one type of global trade issues is how corporations relate to exploiting people all around, also people in Europe but also especially people around the global South, and those that it was a pretty much kind of a Death Star or AT&T to use an American motif from the 1980s or whenever they broke up, the phone company. And so, it and it was kind of in the making, and it stopped. So since then, there’s has been continually attempt to still build a trade regime that has all these mechanisms. So large corporations and exceedingly wealthy can extract resources from other people in probably differentially around the United States as a kind of key Empire or imperial power. That had set up the, you know, since 1945, the relations in the Bretton Woods, world global economy is set up through America. America is still the clearing currency, although the current war with Russia and the rise of China makes the clearing of the dollar as a global currency a bit harder for America. That kind of collapse looks really tough on America, means America politics is suddenly split, even in Canada, where you are, you see a lot of American politics lean over as the global empire projects its own psychosis elsewhere in the world.

And… Yeah, so I think the Doha Round won. Since then they’ve tried to build temporary… like TTIP. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Protocol is an example of trying to build a network, there was one out in China. So what they do is try to build piecemeal small trade arrangements with large, important countries. And then once they get enough of them, they’ll link them together. And all the little countries, it’s too late. If they want to be involved in global trade, they gotta jump in. So those trade treaties are still quite important. And they’re slowly getting back to that. But I mean, frankly, a lot of it is just that the global economy is in a kind of 1970s crack as the conflicts around capital accumulation generate wars and Imperial rivalries, and then split them in the capitalist economy. And the natural cycles of how nature fits into the economy are not quite overlapped, but they are overlapping more and more. And so the climate crisis is also slowing down the global economy.

So I don’t know whether global trade treaties are are the biggest issue right now. Although there’s lots of people debating currently, what’s the debate, the IRA, the Investment Reduction Act is a is an American, new version for how the new economy will be reset.

Leen: Thank you so much for sharing that. So at this point, we’ve kind of covered all the questions that we had. But before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn’t ask that you feel as important or anything that you feel we haven’t covered yet? That about the PGA about your experience with the PGA that you feel needs to be shared?

Michael: I think I’ve said a bunch of things. And many of my responses are not even in sync with what your question you asked. So I probably said things that weren’t asked already.

Leen: Fair enough.

Michael: But thanks. That’s a great question.

Leen: Awesome. Yay. That’s great. So the my final question is, is there somebody you think we should interview?

Michael: Yeah, but okay, we’ve put that off the taping.