Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome back to the Working Class History Podcast.
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Speaker 1: History link in the show notes.
Speaker 2: You also have a bunch of international wings of the project. Ada.
Speaker 2: You're part of the Persian language wing. Maybe you could
Speaker 2: talk about the work that you all do and also
Speaker 2: what other languages is the project available in and how
Speaker 2: are you organized? You know, how is the project organized
Speaker 2: across the world.
Speaker 3: Well, for the part of the we do the Persian language,
Speaker 3: we provided in tweeter Instagram and telegram Telegram tweeter both
Speaker 3: are censored in Iran and so people usually use proxy.
Speaker 3: But most of the people have the proxy, so they
Speaker 3: can have access to it. When we wanted to start it,
Speaker 3: we were actually thinking about how we can work in group,
Speaker 3: so they were first of all, I have to say
Speaker 3: that our group consists of usually around seven people, but
Speaker 3: it sometimes varies from ten to four. Some of us
Speaker 3: will mostly inspired by worker cooperatives of Richard Wolf, and
Speaker 3: some of us also were inspired and influenced by work
Speaker 3: of atomist Antonio Negri and Michael Hart works of assembly.
Speaker 3: Their concept which they're saying that basically this network, any
Speaker 3: sort of network, would also in the twenty first century
Speaker 3: in the now liberties era, need to carry the material
Speaker 3: reproduction of themselves as well. So that was the aim.
Speaker 3: The form the form. It was basically our first priority,
Speaker 3: and one of our friends introduced us. We thought that
Speaker 3: it would be a great idea to adopt it because
Speaker 3: it has some sort of continuity, and we thought that
Speaker 3: it would be equally spread the division of labor that
Speaker 3: they live. We have to do it one of us,
Speaker 3: and so it would be a good practice for us
Speaker 3: to work on it and to do the thing spontaneously
Speaker 3: without any middleman in between. Our coordinator and we also
Speaker 3: developed a bots that would just call us out and
Speaker 3: do the coordination a bit. Yeah, well this is something
Speaker 3: which is always is still in progress, and there is
Speaker 3: always these ups and downs in it. But I personally,
Speaker 3: I am actually proud of it. And in our group
Speaker 3: we so one of the very important thing about posting
Speaker 3: or publishing a post is that you need to you
Speaker 3: need to think about the narrative. We do it in
Speaker 3: a way that so it doesn't really matter, like I
Speaker 3: really don't know exactly about the stands of my fellow members.
Speaker 3: We put something in our group and then we send
Speaker 3: it out, we publish it if we all agree on it.
Speaker 3: So and this is something that I'm really like, I
Speaker 3: really glad about this, but we haven't really reached our
Speaker 3: aims yet. But yeah, this is this is the idea
Speaker 3: that how we come about about working class history?
Speaker 2: John, How did you go from you know, as the
Speaker 2: host of a relatively unpopular but in my opinion, quite
Speaker 2: good podcast. It's not easy to build a base of
Speaker 2: listeners online or a base of followers around, especially serious
Speaker 2: political history. That's global, right. A lot of people want cynicism,
Speaker 2: they want sarcasm, They want to be reminded that the
Speaker 2: world is shit and everything's fucked. They don't want. Usually,
Speaker 2: you know, there's not a lot of young lefties out
Speaker 2: there who are trying to get inspired when I was
Speaker 2: when I was younger. At least, maybe that's changed as
Speaker 2: the world has shifted in recent years. But how did
Speaker 2: you go from taking this idea? I don't know if
Speaker 2: it started with the idea of posting a daily you know,
Speaker 2: this day and history for the radical left, but how
Speaker 2: did you scale that to where you now have half
Speaker 2: a million followers and people. You know, there's little collectives
Speaker 2: around the world who are trying to participate.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting for me to hear as well and
Speaker 1: to learn more about how they organize. The English language
Speaker 1: pages are a collective effort. So I can't take credit
Speaker 1: for all that. But essentially, a while ago, some of
Speaker 1: us had the idea of posting anniversaries would be a
Speaker 1: thing that might go viral on social media and might
Speaker 1: prove quite popular, and then that might be quite a
Speaker 1: good way of essentially propagating radical ideas and trying to
Speaker 1: encourage people to organize and get active and stuff and
Speaker 1: learn from past struggles and things like that. And that
Speaker 1: basically was just more successful than we anticipated, and so
Speaker 1: as more and more people started kind of following we
Speaker 1: started and thinking about what more could we do with it,
Speaker 1: and so we started a Patreon where some people started
Speaker 1: to essentially support us financially, and this enabled some of
Speaker 1: us to start taking time off from our day jobs
Speaker 1: to do more in debt work, which is how we
Speaker 1: were able to start a podcast and cover the costs
Speaker 1: associated with various online platforms which kind of mount up,
Speaker 1: you know, social media tools and things like that. So
Speaker 1: essentially it was support from a readers on Patreon that
Speaker 1: enabled us to take that to take that step. And
Speaker 1: because we did think that a podcast talking to people
Speaker 1: who were involved in struggles in the past are primarily
Speaker 1: and some historians as well, to try and tell those
Speaker 1: stories and learn from those experiences was something which wasn't
Speaker 1: being We thought there was a bit of a gap
Speaker 1: for that, at least in terms of the international scope
Speaker 1: the wh has and the perspective that WCH has focused
Speaker 1: on ordinary people and not like political parties or governments.
Speaker 2: Can I ask another question about that perspective because one
Speaker 2: of the you know, as a songwriter, I've always been
Speaker 2: a huge fan of the two to three minute history
Speaker 2: of some thing, you know, the ballad maybe six minutes
Speaker 2: is more accurate. But you know, you guys do a
Speaker 2: really really good job of compressing really big stories into
Speaker 2: a couple of paragraphs that people are actually going to read. So,
Speaker 2: you know, one of my goals as a songwriter is
Speaker 2: can I tell you enough about a subject that makes
Speaker 2: you want to learn more about it without giving you,
Speaker 2: you know, a fifteen minute long song that just goes
Speaker 2: on and on and on. That's an art. It's very
Speaker 2: very hard. I don't always do it correctly, you know,
Speaker 2: but you guys do a really really good job of that.
Speaker 2: And I'm interested to know if that was something you
Speaker 2: know from the get go that you all decided would
Speaker 2: be a more digestible way to propagate these stories. Was
Speaker 2: their conversations about the length of posts, you know, because
Speaker 2: because another thing you do that ties into that is
Speaker 2: you don't necessarily propagate the way you know, like think
Speaker 2: of a kind of classical left party sort of narrative
Speaker 2: where you're telling people at the end what to think
Speaker 2: about it. You kind of leave it open to the
Speaker 2: reader to interpret what the story means, but you tell
Speaker 2: it in a way that makes it hard to not
Speaker 2: sympathize with the subjects of the story.
Speaker 1: Oh well, well thanks, I mean with the English language stuff, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we did decide that in terms of stuff,
Speaker 1: we wanted to be succinct, and we wanted to speak
Speaker 1: clearly without using specialist terminology where we can avoid it,
Speaker 1: or explaining any specialist terms that we use. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and we really we just had a genuine dislike for
Speaker 1: so much lefty history telling, which you get trock groups
Speaker 1: or whatever, and they have history articles in their papers
Speaker 1: or whatever, and they typically end and that's why and
Speaker 1: this failed because they failed to have the correct revolutionary leadership.
Speaker 1: And so we are that correct revolutionary leadership, so if
Speaker 1: you join us, it will all be good next time.
Speaker 1: And then on the other side of that, you've got
Speaker 1: like anarchists or an archo syndicalists who do the same
Speaker 1: thing and they end it with and this is why
Speaker 1: you should be in an arca syndicalist, you know, and
Speaker 1: which you know, if people want to do that, that's fine,
Speaker 1: but that's not really how we wanted to go about things.
Speaker 1: And with the length, we don't actually when we started,
Speaker 1: the posts were a lot shorter for the most part,
Speaker 1: but we kind of discovered that to our surprise because
Speaker 1: especially so much. Social media, especially Instagram, is such a
Speaker 1: visual medium that people seem to really prefer once where
Speaker 1: we go into more detail. So over the past couple
Speaker 1: of years we've been rewriting a lot of stuff to
Speaker 1: give more detail and to give more background because the
Speaker 1: posts where we give more context and do things like
Speaker 1: you know, try and include quotes from participants and things
Speaker 1: do prove more popular. So we are trying to add
Speaker 1: more depth there. But you're restricted by the character limits,
Speaker 1: so you can't go over two thousand characters and including spaces.
Speaker 1: So that's the limit set by the format.
Speaker 2: Don't they know that history has no character limit oday?
Speaker 2: What about in the in the Farsi language version of
Speaker 2: working class history? What are the main projects that you do?
Speaker 2: Do you have an Instagram as well? Do you focus
Speaker 2: on you said earlier, a few of the things, including telegram.
Speaker 3: Basically, as John also mentioned, there's a character limit, especially
Speaker 3: in Twitter, and I think we are most emphasizing is
Speaker 3: in telegram because it's very popular in Iran. Telegram is
Speaker 3: basically kind of do the job of like WhatsUp as well,
Speaker 3: so people really use it for their daily and there
Speaker 3: they really have interaction with it at the beginning it
Speaker 3: was it was little, but it slowly grow to be more.
Speaker 3: There is also this limit, but if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 3: the limit of telegram is less than the other platforms,
Speaker 3: especially our domestic local stories are longer than the than
Speaker 3: the more international.
Speaker 2: And you focus on the same kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Though well, so our principle that like how we're gonna choose,
Speaker 3: we prefer those who are about movements than like birthday
Speaker 3: or the death date of a scholar or activist. And
Speaker 3: if it is about movement, those who are more about
Speaker 3: the victory, who were successful than those who failed. We
Speaker 3: wanted to have this theme as like an honorable or pride,
Speaker 3: a sort of sort of theme, not to make audience
Speaker 3: feel pity, but to encourage them and gave them responsibility
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that brings us to the end of this episode preview.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed it. To listen to the full thing
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Speaker 1: class history. That's p A t R e o n
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Speaker 1: Catch you next time.