In 2019, climate change went from being an issue that many people were concerned about to one which many are alarmed by and demand swifter government action on. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic started to talk about a Green New Deal and a multitude of institutions at different levels declared climate emergencies. There are several reasons for that increased salience of climate change in public debate. The hot summers of 2018 and 2019 along with other extreme weather patterns may have made it feel more real and immediate. The school strikes that have grown and grown from a one-girl protest by Greta Thunberg in August 2018 to 1.8 million students striking in 120 countries in June 2019 have been both a cause and an effect of this heightened interest in the climate. Another cause/effect has undoubtedly been the growth of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and not least their large-scale civil disobedience protest in London in April 2019 where over 1000 people were voluntarily arrested. It was in the aftermath of this protest that the UK Parliament declared a climate emergency (Reuters 2019); a largely symbolic act since it was not linked to specific policies.
XR and their April protest took many commentators by surprise and was remarkable in many ways. For two weeks, XR and climate change were headline news as they occupied Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Parliament Square and Waterloo Bridge. The authorities seemed confused in how to deal with this unusual kind of protest that was disruptive, organised, nonviolent and welcoming of arrests. The protest was disruptive in that it closed off important parts of central London for traffic. It was organised in that it did so with thousands of people who seemingly knew where they had to be and what they had to do. Most importantly perhaps, it was evidently nonviolent and peaceful, which made the policing of it all the more difficult. The most unusual aspect of the protests was the willingness of the protestors to be arrested. That is, arrests were not just an inevitable result of disruption, but an end in itself. The demands of this new social movement were in their own words to âtell the truthâ, âact nowâ and go âbeyond politicsâ (XR 2019a). Telling the truth means that the government and the media should be honest about the severity of climate change and take responsibility for informing people about what it may mean for society and individual citizens. Acting now means that radical action has to be taken sooner and more drastically than anything that had been seriously discussed by policymakers. Lastly, by going beyond politics, XR claimed that climate change is best addressed by reinventing democracy and establishing a Citizenâs Assembly. This body would be selected through sortition and tasked with coming up with solutions to climate change after a process of consulting experts in all relevant fields. Along with the radical and seemingly efficient tactics and the broad demands came a discourse about strategy; a vision for how this form of disruptive nonviolent protest could lead to real change where others before had failed (XR 2019b).
In this book we engage with the tactics and strategy
of Extinction Rebellion. We ask what XR are and what lessons can be drawn from them. We do so through exploring a number of tensions, contradictions or
issues regarding XR as political actors. These tensions are woven through the chapters that follow and concern what XR do, how they present themselves, what their demands are, how they are portrayed by the
media and how they see themselves as political actors. We explore different sets of academic literature that address these tensions in different ways. Some of these literatures have been essential
to develop XRâs strategy and discourses. Others are implicitly drawn upon whilst others still are wilfully
ignored by XR and the academic literature that directly informs them. The book is based on research carried out in 2019 and early 2020. We have
participated in XR in Bristol and interviewed both local and national level activists. The tensions that we have identified within
and around XR are
necessary for XR activists and other climate activists and potential activists to reflect upon. Indeed, many already do so and we hope that this analysis will aid those reflections.
- 1.
Are XR a reformist or a revolutionary movement? That is, are XR activists campaigning to put pressure on the government to address climate change OR are they campaigning to replace the state as we know it with something different. The answer to this question is not obvious and different aspects of XRâs discourse offer contradicting answers to this question. This tension runs through their lawbreaking protests, their demands and their broader political strategy. We also get different answers to this question depending on who we ask within XR.
- 2.
Is it tenable for XR to be solution agnostic? XR do currently not offer answers to how to address climate change. Instead they leave these solutions to a future Citizenâs Assembly. At the same time, XR claim to be committed to climate justice. As climate change politics develop, ecofascism and neo-Malthusian thought are also gathering strength. Such perspectives promote solutions to climate change that involve deeply unequal adaptation rather than mitigation and tend to focus on controlling populations rather than controlling production and consumption. This tests XRâs solution agnostic stance. It may push XR to become more explicit advocates for climate justice and more directly political than they would like to be perceived. The other risk is that the movement ends up justifying neo-Malthusian or ecofascist ideas on the basis that it would all be up to the Citizenâs Assembly to decide, thereby making each solution equally valid.
- 3.
Can XR continue to have a model of change that they claim is based on social science? XR make bold claims about how radical political change happens and claim to have a model based on evidence. We and others show that the evidence that they draw upon does not relate to the struggle for equitable climate action. At the same time, having a model, even if flawed, has seemingly helped XR to gain support and pull in new activists. The model will also be tested by how events pan out. Will increased state repression be followed by increased support from a growing number of activists as the model predicts? Unlike XR, we argue that the history of struggles for social justice does not provide the answer to this question. In fact, the fall of actually existing socialism 30 years ago effectively ended the search for silver bullets on behalf of left-wing activists after that search had already been declining for some decades. Blueprints for change and revolution became unfashionable. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and the movement of the squares which included Occupy, this has changed somewhat, and more activists are asking the question that Lenin once posed: âWhat is to be done?â. In XR, this has been driven by Roger Hallam, one of XRâs co-founders.
- 4.
Can climate change activists afford to wilfully ignore the political economy? XRâs model of change is based on research that is focused on state power as devoid from the political economy and global capitalism. Moreover, XR shun discussions about capitalism as âlefty languageâ. Whilst fully appreciating the necessity of this in order to appeal to a broader public, we ask if it removes too much capacity of XR to effectively engage with climate politics. We argue that in practice, the struggle for climate action and climate justice is a struggle against capital (fossil fuels; finance; agroindustry) and against fundamental aspects of capitalism (the profit motive of capital; economic growth on a finite planet; the right of one small group of people to own the land and what is beneath and above it). These anti-capitalist aspects of the climate change movement, although highly inconsistently expressed, are discernible in the discourses of many activists and groups including both XR and the Youth Climate Strikers. That does not mean that social movements should declare themselves anti-capitalist. Indeed, that would be unwise. It does mean that climate change activists should study, explore and understand that which they are struggling against. Based on that understanding, they can device political tactics an...
