About Rev21
Vision
EDUCATE: Building on the success of Roger and Robin’s talks, podcasts, and articles over recent years, we hope to expand this work into books, regular community gatherings, and online talks to learn and support each other.
INSPIRE: With global thought and action leaders, we aim to inspire a mass movement into resistance and train a vanguard of leaders worldwide.
CONNECT: With this new energy and knowledge, Rev21 will direct people to organise in our sister organisations in the A22 Network, Umbrella and Global Assemble networks.
All of these will be guided by values of service, respect, and trust.
Mission
1. Revolution - Building social formations to create revolution and guide moments of social disruption.
2. Balanced Society - Building a new civilisation based on a new balance of deliberative democracy, compassion, and limited consumption.
Statement in Intent
Rev21 is building a global revolution to replace the collapsing world order with a thriving society. This transformation is both visionary and strategic, guiding individuals through increasing levels of commitment and action.
The centre will not hold. It is now obvious to any serious observer that world society is entering into crisis. In 2024, Trump won the US elections, and temperatures rose above 1.5°C for the first time. The elites are incapable of responding to the threat to democracy for the same reason they cannot respond effectively to the climate crisis.
This is nothing unusual. Modern history is a story of those in power continually failing to act responsibly and thus undermining social stability. The difference this time is that the disruption we face is now existential. We need a new global movement that will create the people power needed to renew democracy, enact the common interest over the private interest, respond effectively to existential threats, and that is guided by love and care for life.
Non-linear take-off political projects happen, and the assembly mobilisation method provides a systematic and replicable way of creating people power, involving hundreds of thousands of participants in a matter of months. It now needs to work in an organised and coordinated way on a global scale.
The outsider strategy requires the second classic mechanism of democratic upheaval: daily mass demonstrations in the capital and major cities. On this matter, we have ongoing experience within existing movements on how to organise such events. For instance, in 2019, Extinction Rebellion organised thousands of people to occupy central London for 10 days, which led to negotiations with the government and created a new international movement. Mobilisation, via the organising of thousands of local meetings, was replicated across many Western countries, supported by several million pounds of funding, and resulted in similar campaigns with national name recognition. Mass mobilisation in the Netherlands in 2023 led to thousands of arrests and significant concessions. There are many examples of these people power moments from around the world.
We have the know-how to create both strategies. What is needed is a concrete and integrated strategy. There has to be a vision, a programme, and a demand.
The vision is a new political system for our countries that makes a structural change from elections to sortition. Elections are the key bottleneck mechanism through which the present dysfunctional system replicates itself. Elites dominate the process, controlling both who stands for election and who gets elected, and also what is "possible" once elected (meaning conformity to the corporate agenda and short-term policies). This cycle is broken by sortition—people selected randomly by chance, which by definition cannot be corrupted by elite power.
This new political system can be introduced through several stages:
Initial Citizens’ Assemblies: One-off assemblies deciding government policy (such as Ireland’s assembly on abortion).
Permanent Sortition-Selected Chamber: Establishing a standing assembly chosen by sortition.
Sovereign Sortition-Based Assemblies: Transitioning to a final system where sortition-based assemblies hold sovereign power.
Just as the demand for "one person, one vote" was the key popular political demand of the last century, this century the demand has to be for "the people to rule" through citizens' assemblies. Sortition, leading to free deliberation and the rotation of people in these assemblies, will promote the common interest as they break out of the "herding" dynamics of the present system. They can and will decide on policies to prevent human extinction. That is the bottom line. It is our best bet.
With this broad agenda of systematic change in mind, it is then a matter of creating a series of iterations of people power growth. The standard way to create this is through a regular series of mass demonstrations and marches, which build momentum and are coordinated with election campaigns.
Context
Roger and Robin, who co-founded Extinction Rebellion and have teamed up to work on a program to educate, inspire and connect around a 21st century revolution.
Together with a small team they have set up individual blogs, social media sites and a website - https://www.rev21.earth/
With Roger now in prison from the “Whole Truth Five” trial, he has written 2 books and recorded a new podcast for this project, ‘The Spirit of the Revolution’. Robin is writing a book, organising workshops and speaking publicly about the need for a nonviolent revolution against climate collapse.
They both want to use their personal platforms to grow Rev21 into an organisation providing training, education and strategic advice, that will support groups running direct action and assembly based campaigns, in order to help spark nonviolent revolution across the Western World - particularly focusing on supporting young, PoC and rural leaders.
We are organising another international online convention at the end of May. The goal of which is to inspire people and connect them with the existing revolutionary networks like A22 (Just Stop Oil, Last Generation etc) and assembly focused movements (Assemble).
Why set up a new network when we have one?
Rev21 is specifically for educating, inspiring, and connecting people. In this way, we believe it's better to have a standalone organisation that can guide people to such revolutionary activities whilst being safer from state repression by focusing on education. Therefore, it is not in conflict or trying to supersede any existing network but to harmonise and bolster those currently focused on the groundwork. We will run some projects to experiment with best practices and prototype tactics for groups in our movement.
What’s it supporting, and what’s the money for?
It is to support the production of talks, books and an online community based on the concept of democratic revolution. It also connects those people with on-the-ground organisations in the A22 Network and Umbrella Network. The money supports this with a small volunteer team. We will shortly set up a Register of Interests and Financial Transparency on our websites. For now, we raise approx £3,000 a month, which largely goes towards Roger and Robin, other members of the Rev21 team, as well as the upfront costs of Zoom hosting, video editing, and publishing upcoming books.