This is an interview with a former member of Extinction Rebellion by East Anglia Anarchist Federation.
D: The first question I have for you is what made you want join XR (Extinction Rebellion)?
L: Climate change is a thing, and I was pretty worried about it. XR were the only people I saw doing something about it. For example, I don’t know if you remember the 2018 thing where they shut down London and the result of that was that the government declared a climate emergency. That demand was met. Even though…
D: …the government haven’t acted on it lol.
L: Easy to say, ‘there’s an emergency’. Still, that felt like it was doing more than anyone else I’d seen at the time.
D: Upon joining what was your initial impression about their politics and stuff?
L: The first meeting I went to was in this little meeting space, everyone sat in a circle, and we talked about why we were here. When I say it like that it sounds kind of religious lol.
D: Cult!
L: So, they went round the circle, and everyone said their own reasons. I distinctly remember my response to that question which is quite indicative… of the XR ‘rebel’ (that’s what everyone’s called, a rebel) mindset which was basically, climate change is a big problem and the way that change has been achieved in the past, that’s proven to work, is people like the suffragettes, MLK and Gandhi. So, I felt like XR was part of a lineage, almost, of positive social change. Everyone was pretty nice, obviously, as you might not be surprised to hear, it was quite white middle class. I was the youngest there by quite a way.
D: I’m surprised. A lot of people involved in XR are quite young and stuff.
L: Well, it depends on where you are I suppose. There was a couple of people who were not too old, but I was definitely the youngest. So, the way we did meetings was by having a facilitator of the meeting, but anyone was allowed to speak. If you wanted to make a point, you’d put up one finger and the facilitators job is remembering the order of fingers going up because people might want to talk about something next. Then you can put up two fingers if you have a direct point about something and the facilitator lets you makes the point and then the first person carries on. I did like and still like that way of doing things. It gave me more confidence to speak and not feel like I was going to get cut off and also not feel like I was going to cut someone else off.
D: Yeah, a lot of ‘radical’ spaces use a similar sort of thing. But I’m glad where you went had that as well, but of course you’ve had other experiences.
D: What kind of experiences did you have whilst in XR?
L: It’s not like it was overtly horrible, although it could have been! I came very close to being arrested on an action and I’m now very grateful that I didn’t. At the time I was mildly disappointed!
D: Really?! You were like, ‘damn, [I’m] upset I’m not in handcuffs right now?’ I’ve never said that in my whole life lol.
L: I know and obviously it’s a heavily white privileged kind of thinking and I was aware of my privilege and felt like I wanted to weaponise it, but yeah.
D: Yeah… it’s a valid thing to do [weaponise your privilege], lots of white allies will put themselves at risk because they know that they can get away with slightly more than a non-white person, there’s tonnes of footage of that. Especially at the Black Lives Matter rallies where they’d have a row of white guys at the front so they wouldn’t get shot by rubber bullets.
L: I love that, but that’s in the aim of people not being arrested, which is the good thing.
D: No, you’re right, they linked arms to make sure no-one could get knocked out of the crowd [try and find a picture of this from Portland?] and they had this white guy group blocking this massive block of black and brown people from being hit with rubber bullets, yeah nasty fuck the police.
L: Yeah, with nonviolent direct-action training…
D: Wow!
L: There’s training in XR, you train. Lol. You pretend to be arrested.
D: Oh my God
L: Yeah, basically so the strategy is that you go limp, which makes it harder to remove you, you just make your limbs really heavy so that it takes 4 or 5 officers to remove you. And of course, while you’re being removed everyone starts clapping and hollering for your sacrifice because it’s the best thing that you can possibly do is be arrested.
D: That’s crazy, I hate to use that word but that is literally crazy, “they’ve done it they’ve been arrested YEAH” like what?!
L: So much time is spent focussing on and it’s good in a way, it displays less naivety than it could, there’s a lot of preparation that goes into people who feel like they want to put their body on the line as it were and be arrested. These bust cards are a part of that, and they’re written with the assumption that you will be arrested, so it’s what to do when you are, less if.
D: That’s valid, I respect the fact that they are noticing that bit, that they are preparing people for that, but then again that’s the bare minimum.
D: This might be a good point to ask the next question; what made you want to leave XR?
L: What made me want to leave was basically the realisation of how white and middle class it was and the fact that the strategy for protests was to be arrested. Which at the time was something I was personally willing to do, but subsequently felt like no this is a terrible idea because at the time I didn’t have this ACAB perception of the police.
D: Fair enough. I think their tactics including getting arrested at many of the demos they have planned, not only puts individuals at risk of being abused by the police or facing further legal issues but also provides just a bunch of trauma for a very symbolic action and that’s the outcome.
L: Yeah
D: I get many times there’s plenty of valid reasons to get arrested, but that as the crutch of the protest is pretty inhibiting to actually doing anything of value or note.
L: Which was a big part of the reason I left. Basically, I went to a big London XR protest, and it didn’t really achieve anything. I thought maybe this is as far as these tactics for XR can go and I wasn’t really hearing that from others. There was a general feeling of disappointment that we hadn’t achieved as much as we wanted but no real discussion about whether the demands we had made sense or whether the tactics we used made sense and I started to question a few more things like, where did these demands come from? Why did we all implicitly accept this list of specifically three demands that are seemingly unquestionable.
D: XR leadership is another barrier to them being a progressive force. Often, we see XR styled as a grassroots organisation but as we both know, they are run by a handful of people. The groups themselves have a reasonable amount of autonomy but as you say the demands they have are set by somebody else. I think there’s also a distinct lack of accountability they have to the wider membership. They can just tell you to go somewhere and SWP-style you’ll just rock up. It isn’t of your own will.
D: OK, the next question I had in mind is, what is lacking in the climate justice movement?
L: It’s a fair question. I think the answer is that what is lacking is an understanding and an education from people in XR about how social change is actually affected. As I said earlier in my first meeting of why I was there and those example that I gave, they obviously come from a specifically British education, English schools’ idea of how social change occurs. Obviously, those schools don’t talk about riots, they don’t talk about Malcolm X, for example, they don’t talk about other liberatory movements that were arguably more successful, but definitely more radical in their methods and their goals. What’s missing is that understanding… XR doesn’t really see the world any differently from your ordinary person without any political education or personal experience of oppression.
There’s also the concept of ‘saving the world’, a lot of the problems with XR come from there, it’s why a lot of people, including me in the past, were willing to be arrested because there is a genuine feeling that what XR are doing (this sounds ridiculous to me now) is the way to literally save the world from climate change, so being arrested sounds like a minor sacrifice towards that end.
D: Yeah, it’s like block a road, be arrested, go to court, dropped charges, world saved! I can see why people who are concerned, worried or anxious will be like, ‘this is the only option’ because they’re saying ‘we’re going to save the world’ but I don’t know, maybe we won’t. Read Desert.org.
D: Do you think an organisation like XR is redeemable? There are some groups who have clearly more radical politics than other parts, like we’ve all seen groups like XR Youth Cambridge being a lot more radical and some XR groups are targeting, rather than slip-on roads, they’re targeting oil companies and that’s really good. But we’ve seen XR doing stuff like gluing themselves to trains and stuff like that! Is it redeemable? Could the NVDA (Non-violent Direct Action) movement be useful? Or would it have to be paired with an equally radical but explicitly non-non-violent alternative?
L: I think with those individual groups, genuinely there is the potential for quite a lot of autonomy. For example, I tried to set my own group at university and there was no-one calling the shots from above, it was just me and some friends deciding to get together using the XR label. I specifically used it because I knew it would get Society status and all the benefits that come with that. In terms of how it literally functions, it’s more anarchist than maybe a lot of anarchists would expect. However, that doesn’t stop the problems that I was talking about earlier where it’s really the people within the group, together and individually, thinking about things in a way that isn’t entirely matched with reality (Class struggle, anti-state, etc.) And of course, because it has that perception from the outside it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because only people with a certain mindset will want to join.
D: What are some things that might surprise me about XR?
L: When I went to a communist anarchist society at my university, I heard all these surprising things they thought about XR, which was interesting to me as someone who was kind of in it at the time. The things they were saying about it didn’t match what I’d experienced. One of them was convinced that XR were all cops, another was convinced it was a cult. Did you have any of those perceptions, do any people you know have those perceptions?
D: I have heard people who have said to me, oh they must be police officers because it’s completely deranged, I’ve heard that more about Insulate Britain, because Insulate Britain came out of nowhere, like immediately the day they were founded they’re laying in the fucking road (lol).
L: I’ll admit I had the exact same thought
D: To stay on topic and talk about XR I think you’re right that a lot of people on the ‘radical left’ suffer greatly from this belief that it is this death cult, but it is more like a slightly hierarchical organisation that has some politics issues rather than it being overtly evil, like Exxon Mobil funded climate group or something, special ops lol. It isn’t that bad, I’m sure.
L: No, it’s more simply about the tactics. From the perspective I have now as an anarchist I can understand why they might think that, but obviously having had my life go in this specific trajectory from XR to anarchist I can tell you that it’s just kind of what happens, it would seem, when you combine a climate emergency occurring and people are panicking about it for various reasons, but don’t have the analysis of things like class, race, etc. It’s not there.
D: That’s a very valid point. It is environmentalism without class struggle. AKA just gardening.
L: Also, what might surprise you is XR’s attitudes towards the police which I think of people on the ‘radical left’ perceive from the outside as being different than it is actually thought about within the organisation. So, for example, I have a bust card here from my XR days and here’s what it says.
D: That’s pretty radical yeah! That’s quite standard for any other protest! I quite like that actually. At least it doesn’t say ‘give them a hug upon approaching’ it’s pretty valid as far as things to do and not do in front of the police. I’m sure you’d see the same sort of bust card at any other demo.
L: I think part of the problem is that some people from XR don’t actually take this advice. Because they believe so strongly in what they’re doing and also because they don’t have an anti-police perspective, they genuinely believe that they could convince the police hired to arrest them that arresting them is the morally wrong thing to do and, therefore, they shouldn’t do it.
D: So, like Speech 100? Fair enough. That’s a pretty hard flex! I have a hard time telling the police that I don’t want to talk to them in general so it’s very brazen that they think they can just say ‘hey I know we’re blocking an entire motorway but hear me out…’ it’s a serious flex! I think it puts a lot of pressure on the individual activist to somehow be the public face of the group every time they go outside. Of course, none of them wear black bloc, that’s another critique I have that they’re always posting their members faces on the internet which is a bad thing to do…
L: Oh, yeah
D: …it’s bad OP-SEC, always at least partially bloc up if you do anything remotely illegal it’s bad form in my opinion, but then I’m of a different background to Hallam.
L: A point on Roger Hallam himself, the strategy I’m describing as a misguided strategy that XR has comes from, I don’t want to get it too wrong, but it’s a Masters or PHD he did and he basically decided that, in this essay, this is how social change happens [specifically that 3.5% of the population mobilising behind something makes it happen] but it’s not like any of us have read it! He’s narrowed it down to a specific percentage.
D: That’s pretty brave that he’s just like, ‘so I wrote this theory you all have to believe it and we’ll save the world!’ Imagine just being like ‘we’re one day short, one person short of solving climate change, but one guy’s just saying, “nope I will not recycle”.
L: Just like 50 activists turn up to convince this one guy and convince him and just start cheering “WE DID IT” [Laughter]
L: So maybe I should turn the tables on you and ask you what you think about XR?
D: I think what the members of these groups are doing and a lot of the local groups are doing very cool stuff and a lot of them combine these politics of saving the environment with queer rights, disability justice, anti-racism and that’s great, I just always shiver in discontent when I see it being a liberal “all we have to do to stop climate change is do more activism”. I always find it is a wormhole for young activists and I wish they had the ability to see there is alternatives and that is because a lot of the alternatives that I prefer *cough anarchist ones cough* would be harder to see because of OP-SEC, they don’t have parades, unfortunately. As cool as it would be there’s no black bloc parade every day, there’s XR fly posts everywhere there’s an XR group in every city. I’ll give them credit they’re out there but it’s just a shame that these people aren’t seeing the benefit of an anarchist analysis, but that’s because they aren’t seeing any anarchist analysis or action. There’s a distinct lack of anarchists doing stuff and coverage when anarchists do do stuff. Anarchist coverage is very low sadly we’re not like Chile we don’t have anarchists constantly setting things on fire so… it’s a shame. I would have to show them how it’s done, show them the value of anarchist organising methods through doing things as an anarchist that are bad to the people destroying the planet. My opinion is it’s a wormhole and hopefully can drag people out of said wormhole, tell them they don’t have to be in a wormhole.
L: I definitely agree with you on all those points.
D: It’s a shame because in some places anarchists are the ones on the forefront; Chile, Greece, Latin America and Indigenous people, but there’s so little visible stuff anarchists are doing and hopefully anarchists can change that shit, or we’re all fucked. I’m not saying anarchists can save the world, I don’t think the world is saveable in the sense that we can stop climate change from killing millions of people, but I think anarchists have opportunities to further their ideas and their expression and their autonomy through acting during this particular crisis that we’re facing.
L: Yeah, the XR pathology is an interesting one because there’s just an acceptance of the violence of the state, basically.
D: Oh yeah, you’re right, there’s a brilliant book by Peter Gelderloos called ‘How nonviolence protects the State’ and he goes into the details of how nonviolent groups accept state violence as the only valid form of violence, while rejecting the violence of individuals and of the oppressed which is obviously totally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and colonialist and also disempowering, ineffective, and delusional, so it’s bad nonviolence bad, violence good. lol. I want to print out a hundred copies of that book and just hand them out to XR, read the book, read the book violence is okay sometimes!
L: The funny thing is that you might have a somewhat violent response from the ‘nonviolent’ activists towards you saying that!
D: Like you said this pathology based on MLK and stuff, it is just a lie. People who supported MLK were rioting, they were setting things on fire, they were armed to the fucking teeth. There’s another good book called ‘how nonviolence will get you killed’ and the subtitle is ‘how guns made the civil rights movement effective’ because you couldn’t just harass people who were black if they had assault rifles, you just couldn’t do it. You can’t follow them home if they’ve got a Glock, like what are you going to do? Lol.
L: There’s actually a book you can get, ‘This Is Not a Drill’ which is an XR book.
D: Is it their theory?
L: Yeah, it’s their whole theory in this one tiny book. I can give it to you if you want lol
D: I’ll do a dramatic reading: “Step 1 lay down; Step 2 government gives up!” The Vietnamese should have just laid down in front of the American tanks and they would have stopped attacking!
D: Ah yes but neoliberal capitalism is the most nonviolent ideology in human history. Scary as fuck. It is funny that they’ve got this bible. I think a lot of people could benefit from learning about the Indigenous environmental land protection strategies and their allies, who aren’t indigenous, supporting them. For example, Canadian anarchists who attack train lines, that’s the combination – supporting existing struggles and adding anarchist methodology to them and through that shit gets done. It’s a shame there isn’t more of it going on.
L: Isn’t it like 25% of US emissions get stopped by those land protectors?
D: Yeah, they’re really doing it, putting their lives on the line fighting the police, private military. The army, National Guard, oil company goons. It’s a proper social war to fight against the expansion of these pipelines and fight for the defence of land, it’s a shame that XR would decry it as too violent. It’s so strange it gets on my nerves.
L: I suppose it is the difference between when you are directly at risk and when you aren’t. Because you’ll hear a lot of XR people say, “I’m doing this for my grandchildren”.
D: Not for themselves, they don’t see themselves in any immediate danger, they see it as we do the laying down now and my kids will have a slightly cooler walk to work. It’s a shame because they’re going to be underwater swimming to work, swimming to Asda.
