A group with an agenda of organizing mass, peaceful, civil-disobedience to pressure government into radical change necessary to protect our environment from imminent disaster is, ostensibly, an extremely good thing and as such, is bound to attract many conscientious and caring people who are willing to push for change. During my time with Extinction Rebellion West Cornwall I met many such good people, intelligent people who could see which way the world is going and are not prepared to idly watch the mindless destruction of nature itself. There was generally a good sense of empathy and solidarity between people which I remember fondly.
I’m aware that there are various ‘conspiracy
theories’ about Extinction Rebellion circulating around but have not heard anything
more than the usual ‘everything is fake – all flags are false’ rhetoric of
manipulation and infiltration by ‘shadowy forces.’ These tales usually include extravagant
claims of the organization being funded by ‘big business’ for some sinister
reason or other. All I can say is,
having seen the meagre funds stumped up by the rank and file members at
meetings, and the difficulty in paying for even small amounts of printing etc.,
the idea of corporate cash washing around XR is a deeply ironic joke. Anyone is free to look into the story of this
organization and draw their own conclusions.
In this article I will restrict myself to a critique of XR West
Cornwall, based solely on personal experience.
I would also like to stress that until very recently I had nothing but
the most profound respect for XR and its approach. However, after engaging in direct action, I started
encountering what I consider to be serious breaches of democratic process from
certain influential members of the group, who held administrative
positions. It is these difficulties that
I will describe and review.
As a ‘core-principal’, XR places strong emphasis
on the concept of inclusivity and the organization claims to be
non-heirarchical in structure – “Everyone Is Crew” is the slogan that expresses
this idea. People who chair the
Extinction Rebellion (XR) meetings are known as ‘Facilitators’ and these
facilitators talk about ‘mitigating for power’ and circulating organizational
roles to ‘share’ power equally. All sounds good. Within the proposed Citizen’s
Assembly, a policy of sortition is proposed, also as a means of keeping the
power circulating rather than letting it concentrate in a few hands. Ostensibly
these are excellent principles that seemed to win the respect of the group.
During a meeting in April, Facilitator Paul
Antonelli was highly critical of the direct action undertaken by Verity and I
and filmed by Diane. The discussion was unresolved when the meeting closed. The
following week, with Paul absent, a further discussion of the direct action
ensued. It was agreed that discussion of the action would be put on the following week’s agenda for a half-hour
discussion. There was obvious reluctance from Facilitator Manda to do this but
another lady was quite insistent about it and so it went on the agenda. This
was the result of a show of hands, which is how democracy functions at its most
basic and perhaps its most important level.
I had been attending meetings for several months
by this point and they had always had the same structure; however, when the
meeting came round the following week, everything had mysteriously changed.
Instead of the normal format (and the democratically agreed discussion of the
action) we were presented with a ‘talking-circle’ at which people pass an
object to their neighbour, who is then ‘allowed to talk’. This move was
unprecedented and seemed a transparent ruse to avoid discussion of the action,
as agreed. The following week the item was still not put on the agenda and also
the Facilitators who had discussed it stopped attending meetings in Penzance. Although
slightly caught off-guard by this dubious change of the agreed meeting format,
it was only afterwards that I started to realize the significance of it. It
became obvious that the Facilitators were totally unwilling to debate the
action with me.
There was also some trouble on the internet
(surprise surprise.) It started when I posted my account of the direct action
on the Extinction Rebellion West Cornwall f/b page. The article was titled –
ironically – ‘How Not To Hold Up A Gas-Station’ and is on the Save The Holy
Headland blogspot. It was written the day after the direct action, and had some
catharsis for me as I was still in shock. It’s a spontaneous and unedited
account of what happened.
When this article was removed from the XRWC f/b
page I saw it as a totally unacceptable violation of basic free speech which I
found most disturbing. Apart from the fact that the three of us went through
real hell during that action and seeing people desperately trying to supress
the story of that event was a gross betrayal of solidarity.
There were several incidences of my posts being
removed from the internet and when challenged, the f/b page Administrator of
the West Cornwall group refused to identify themself, which I found pathetic
and also a thwart to communication and resolution. On another occasion, someone
was advertising a ‘communication workshop’ starting at around £80 a day, with a
sliding scale of pricing going up to something like £140! This is private,
capitalist business; ostensibly in the service of saving the planet. When I put
up a quote on the site saying “turning rebellion into money…” I was accused of
‘sniping’ and banned from the site for several days by an anonymous
Administrator. After working over ten years as an unpaid activist, deeply
connected with free-speech cases at home and abroad, and particularly after
working with ‘Caged Crusader’ Harold Hempstead who was so nearly murdered for
his fearless speaking-out against evil and injustice, that just seemed like
what is known in the business as ‘bullshit.’ Previous to this, I had raised the
issues of Administrative-anonymity and also suggested that the perimeters of
subject-matter should be clearly defined on the website. A promised ‘protocol’
was not forthcoming. Early on I’d had a problem with the web-Admin when they
took down a petition I posted about 5G. I pointed out that it was only reasonable
to clearly delineate which issues were supposedly fit for discussion and which
were not. Personally I found the attempt to micro-manage dialogue to fit the
‘image’ of the organization was very stultifying to open discussion, but it
seems the British are not overly outspoken on the net so there was not much
debate to control anyway! My own attitude is to let free speech ring out
loudly. I believe it is a self-balancing mechanism and have faith that, short
of abuse, grown-up people don’t need policing on an environmental website!
I understand that my own experience with XR was
unique and that other people may not have encountered the democracy-problems
that I ran into but I set down my own story for the record.
Despite the claims of equality, inclusivity and
‘Holocracy’ (which is a ‘safe’ euphemism for Anarchism – the opposite of Hierarchism,)
the reality (at least in Cornwall’s notoriously incestuous Far West) is that
the Facilitators of meetings and the Administrators of the web-page constitute
an oligarchical inner-circle, who change the agenda at will, over-ride the
democratic wishes of the ‘rank and file’ members and capriciously delete their
comrade’s words whilst hiding behind the mask of secrecy.
And how does one join this inner-circle? How do
you become a Facilitator/Administrator? By election, you might assume, in a
so-called democratic organization… You
would be wrong in that assumption.
Acceptance into the inner-circle is not
decided by the votes of the members, but rather by the approval of those
who are already in the
inner-circle. So seemingly ‘everyone is
crew’, but just like on a real ship, certain crew-members actually steer the
ship, whilst others do not. This is
particularly evident when the Facilitators ignore
and override the democratic will of the group and impose their own,
oligarchical and private agenda on them.
Once again, the wise old proverb returns to my
mind: A nation of sheep shall beget a government of wolves.
XR has a hand-signal for agreement but not one
for dissent. This may prove its Achilles’ Heel.
In a healthily functioning democracy, you don’t
expect people to supress open expression, hide behind aliases or a fog of
anonymity and run in horror from the idea of open debate.
I reached out to various members of the group
with appeals to communicate over these difficulties, but these were not
responded to. I also approached the
national organization, but again, no response was forthcoming.
As I said before, XR is a magnet for
conscientious people and they come from many walks of life. However, once
people are in a collective situation, whether religious, educational, political
or even artistic, there is often a shared unwillingness to criticize the group,
or indeed even view it critically and objectively at all. Once we fall into (or continue familiarly
with) group-conformity, we abdicate
our own sovereign judgement and autonomous power. It is a fundamental mistake to give your
power to another. If nothing else, it
inflates that person’s ego; at worst it can do infinitely more damage. The highest authority can only be found
within yourself and that which is not in conformity with it must go. If we seek
or accept an authority that’s outside of ourselves, we invite tyranny and throw
away the essence of our humanity.
An activist with many years of experience behind
them can sometimes notice little things that are not always obvious to people
from other walks of life. XR came on
talking about Mahatma Gandhi and Dr King and mass-mobilizations of the people. There
was talk of a campaign of ongoing civil disobedience. As the months went by and the meetings added
up, this campaign of action to save the planet did not materialize (I’m talking
about our local area.) In roughly half a
year, the only direct action conducted locally was the aforementioned, the one
that inspired a friend to refrain from buying a new car; the traumatic,
dramatic and gruelling action at the garage that caused so much fuss from the
‘rebels’ of XR. I fear there is a very real danger of XRWC becoming a mere
talking-club, a bourgeois social-institution that substitutes
for a movement of genuine revolutionary action, but is too hobbled by
timidity to fulfil its own raison d’etre.
One thing I know for
sure: The cure for the disturbing feelings people commonly experience when they
learn the grave reality of the planetary situation is action – not talking in cafes and pubs, but taking regular, focused
political action of one form or another.
Only by deep and real engagement with the issues at stake do people find
relief, by growing strong through action, this is the remedy for eco-shock.
People like Greta Thunberg do not wait for the go-ahead from others, they
follow their conscience and take it on themselves. To call yourself a ‘rebel’
without defying authority is to devalue the term to the point of absurdity. So,
my other criticism of XR is that it is not doing what it set out to do, in
seeding a mass-rebellion, but seems to have spawned a bourgeois social-club that
passes for a pressure-group. Where are
the marches? Where are the posters? The
leaflets? Where is the presence? The
buzz on the street? The speeches, songs and chants? Where is the direct action
and what has it achieved? If this be rebellion, it looks suspiciously like
nothing’s happ’nin’.
