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Their portrayal and constant vilification by the British media is disgraceful but entirely expected from an industry that the private side of is beholden to fossil fuel companies, the public side of is beholden to a right-wing one-party state, and is made up of people who think that their drive-thru morning coffee being inconvenienced is fascism but banning protest and sending refugees to off shore concentration camps isn’t.
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Plenty of people in Just Stop Oil are earnest, good-hearted, and occasionally brave people who see a untold climate misery coming and feel compelled to do something, sometimes even going as far as realising electoralism is mostly a waste of time in a country that lacks genuinely democratic institutions. That they face frequent assault not just from police, but by vigilantes and public mobs, with no protection from authorities, as well as absurdly harsh prison sentences for minor disturbances is a damning indictment of the system and society.
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Just Stop Oil itself is effectively a lobbying group, pitched as a grass roots activist organisation, that is wielded almost exclusively by green capitalist hedge funds whose fundamental goal is profit. Its part of a new model of so called ‘activist funds’ which seek to make a greater return by either forcing legislation they’re already prepared to take advantage of, or breaking the old money stranglehold to short their positions and carve out space for themselves. Either way this is the capital class wrestling with itself over market share, not a genuinely proletarian or radical movement for climate justice.
It’s like 4am here so I hope that isn’t too garbled.
I haven’t looked closely at JSO but in my mind it’s closely associated with Extinction Rebellion and similar movements and I’m going to speak about them generally although if I’m inaccurate in my criticisms of JSO specifically then that’s on me.
These organisations are critically flawed because they lack materialist analysis. They base their movements on Momentum and really idealistic electoralism (see: advocating for Citizens Assemblies, positioning themselves as “beyond politics”) and other nonsense.
They have a tendency to engage in Alinsky-style performative protests against the powerbrokers while they actively disrupt the lives of average people, and this has caused significant backlash and negative sentiment towards XR and JSO from society at large rather than doing anything that resembles mass line work.
They base their protest movements on dogmatic non-violence and they make the assumption that peaceful protests lead by people like Gandhi and MLK achieved their goals independent of the more militant threats that existed contemporaneously such as those led by Bhagat Singh, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers.
They intend to “clog up” the judicial system by having their protesters be brought up on charges regularly, ignorant of the fact that the government can crack down harder on activists, it can expand the capacity of its judicial apparatus, and it can pass more severe legislation to allow for legal proceedings to be much more summary than they currently are.
They had a come-to-jesus moment, at least in the UK, around the start of the pandemic and the lead thinker for Extinction Rebellion brought up critical issues with the movement, not least of all their sudden loss of organisational momentum and the mounting public backlash they were facing, and yet I see no change in their MO from this point (although I haven’t been looking closely so take that for what it’s worth.) I believe that it’s in this video, if you can bear an hour and a half of the speaker being completely ideologically blinkered and basically for using the entire speaking opportunity to shill his book.
If I were running a COINTELPRO operation to surveil and subvert the nascent climate change activist movement what I would do is I would create an organisation which more often than not targets the average person in order to alienate them to create a general consensus that is hostile to climate change activism and thus is opposed to anything associated with the movement, including legislation to mitigate climate change. I would get the most committed activists and funnel their opportunities for developing class consciousness and revolutionary spirit into dead-end crypto-liberalism. I would encourage that activists spend vast sums of money paying fines and legal fees so that cash which could create thriving organisations that threaten the system get diverted and soaked up by the state. I would create a culture of activism which, by design, means that the most committed activists accrue extensive criminal records that will prevent them from getting jobs that pay well or which have significant political influence in the future while also providing a pretext for closer surveillance, harsher penalties, and to create thorough documentation of each individual via the collection of biometric data etc.
There was a tweet that went up on an official Extinction Rebellion twitter account which, if I’m remembering correctly, encouraged people to literally post their fingerprints publicly. I can’t pull it up because the search results are clogged with shitty journalism but this was something that came up years ago and when I saw it I was like: “Fuck me, that’s exactly what I’d be doing if I was running an op.”
They intend to “clog up” the judicial system by having their protesters be brought up on charges regularly, ignorant of the fact that the government can crack down harder on activists, it can expand the capacity of its judicial apparatus, and it can pass more severe legislation to allow for legal proceedings to be much more summary than they currently are.
“they can’t arrest us all” hasn’t been true for probably 40 years outside of some specific small town situations.
💯 if XR isn’t an OP they’re sure doing lots of stuff that would be really smart for an op to do
They intend to “clog up” the judicial system by having their protesters be brought up on charges regularly, ignorant of the fact that the government can crack down harder on activists, it can expand the capacity of its judicial apparatus, and it can pass more severe legislation to allow for legal proceedings to be much more summary than they currently are.
Wait this reminds me of this quote:
“We should also wonder how our appreciation of the sophistication and totality of the propaganda apparatus and its ongoing repression squares with the peculiar kind of “critical” media that does make it to wide circulation, usually to universal praise from both the mainstream and the counter-cultural “left.” Women getting constantly raped and murdered in film is deemed a protest against the patriarchy. Black people getting mauled by dogs, the most horrific traumas in their history ritualistically re-enacted in high-definition — this is an assault on white supremacy. Disaster movies insist that the end of the world is inevitable, that we are all complicit in ecological devastation for not doing our part recycling cans — this is environmental critique. Triumphant, handsome, charismatic, “alpha” men climb to the top of their respective empires of crime in highest-budget four-season shows and are awarded the highest accolades in their profession — this passes for an indictment of capitalism.”
On second thoughts, this is a good note for myself…
I think that if you do anything good, the capitalist media will hate you.
Who ever did the climate protest at Burning Man blocking the road in, that was based.
i think they’re not clever or adventurist enough.
all hat no cattle.
To be fair, I think that they’re the perfect example of the failures of adventurism; it’s very often characterised by action for action’s sake without carefully considering the context and the potential effects of their activism, it’s divorced from the masses, it’s intended to be essentially a form of propaganda of the deed with the intent that it will inspire others to come around to their way of thinking spontaneously and that they too will simply join the movement, and it funnels precious resources (energy, time, money, the reputation and criminal history of individual activists, overall zeal) into a burnout culture that achieves nothing because their goals are wishy-washy and their activism is on the whole disconnected from their goals, and it’s basically one big exercise in pissing revolutionary potential up the wall.
That’s the epitome of all things adventurist.
But I suspect that you already know this and that what you’re really saying is that their activism lacks any John Brown-style edge.
no, that’s a good point. they’re throwing stuff to the wall and seeing what sticks (sometimes literally) and don’t do much of anything to connect their actions to the actual problems.
maybe i haven’t ever seen it because it doesn’t work, but as an armchair jackass I’d think doing spectacle vandalism in undeniable connection with some actual sabotage to bait the media into giving more time to “hey this extractive industry is vulnerable and can be damaged” could actually accomplish something instead of just being the soup jackasses. It is of course, very easy for me to say that from here with my no ability to organize and no logistical support to do more than throw soup.
