Despite its gently patronizing and humorous tone, the documentary is prescient as it pursues Roger for arrest on Lambeth Bridge. Hallam was notorious for complaining to police liaison officers that ‘arrests were not being made fast enough’. Other bridges merged into Parliament Square to end the day, preventing further arrests.
Because XR’s media profile and messaging system was embryonic at best, its goals and reasoning for the day, for better or worse, were not detailed. Roger’s main goal was to put pressure on the elite, in part by disrupting the functioning of London and, in particular, by populating police stations in a conscious imitation of XR’s precedent of official civil resistance.
But other inferences also existed. Jacout, for example, was more representative of the Reclaim the Streets tradition, interested in reusing public space to model more enjoyable social possibilities. Related but distinct was the interest in the crowd itself. That is, the prospect of unifying the crowd through narrative, materiality, and tactics from a group of individuals to a collective actor. The most recent lineage of this family can be seen as Occupy (veterans of a significant portion of XR’s core players).
These different impulses do not necessarily contradict each other, and indeed this trilemma will soon take formal form. All actions take place through a strategic forum that declares that all actions should work towards at least one goal: a vision (a better world), movement building, or destruction. In some ways, this was seen as a space of constructive strategic ambiguity. But the flip side is that differences between XR’s founders have proven impossible to resolve.
portrait
document of guardian It demonstrated more than just a strategic contradiction. It is helpful to recognize how radically some things have changed, especially from the perspective of November 2024.
Perhaps the most striking detail is XR’s relationship with the police. The development of this relationship towards studied mutual criminality was perhaps inevitable and had as much to do with the tabloid frenzy (culminating in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022) as with the left-influenced reassessment within XR.
But as someone who has experienced pain compliance alongside the UK’s widespread crackdown since then, I can’t help but note that this ‘Kill ’em with kindness’ era had some real advantages, including, ironically, some forms of accessibility. It is also worth noting that this era was largely driven by outrage over the policing of the Camp for Climate Action and the murder of Ian Tomlinson in 2009.
This levity towards the officers was, in retrospect, part of a wider feeling that could be called innocence or innocence, or perhaps more usefully, simply lack of guilt. This seemingly impossible thing is XR before Media piles up and is swallowed up by culture wars.
The activists on screen appear almost painfully serious, fundamentally unhindered by optics or neuroses about movement politics, and much more genuine. This is obvious to individuals, even Roger himself, but especially true to groups. It’s disturbingly difficult to imagine today’s XR crowd singing ‘never doubt that a small group of people can change the world’, especially as part of the Obstacles.
This emotional dimension is especially beneficial in 2024, when we are caught up in terrible official positivity. Amy Westervelt said this about the recent UN-linked New York Climate Week: “The claim that everything is normal and fine, which is clearly not the case, is, in my experience, one of the hallmarks of the climate movement, especially among those with power and money.” . Today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to have an alternative ’emotional framework’ for that prospect. But for a while, XR really made it happen.
We can say that those were more positive times. America just four days ago sunrise exercise Another example of the momentum model is the groundbreaking action taken by Nancy Pelosi’s office. The Gilet Jaunes (yellow vests) were on the march. But whatever the context, it’s hard to overstate how this emotional quality has been one of XR’s greatest and most elusive strengths.
continue
As the ‘Day of Rebellion’ ended, the new movement continued to faithfully follow the momentum contours. This was most evident in the flow. Momentum charts a very clear cycle from action to absorption, the sentiment of which is encoded in the fifth principle of XR. “We value reflection and learning. We follow a cycle of action, reflection, learning and planning. We learn not only from our own experiences, but also from other movements and contexts in order to take further action.”
Even now, there is debate about exactly when and how to end the action cycle. Roger advocated attempts at post-bridge enlargement through ‘swarms’ (a sacred concept at the time). This experiment didn’t work. Driver hostility diminished, coverage became minimal, and the episode was quickly and amicably forgotten. Early evidence suggests that XR was never comfortable with destruction for its own sake. But relatedly, that effort deserves to be remembered as the seed that would eventually grow into JSO and the whole. A22 Network.
The cycle ended emphatically with a funeral procession to Parliament Square that saw around 1,000 black-clad mourners block the roads and try to bury a coffin marked ‘Our Future’.
A more obliquely related tenet of Momentum was its consideration of competing theories of change, that is, of the mosaic of existing movement traditions, with Momentum distinguishing itself as ‘structure-based’ or ‘mass protest’, as well as the ‘pillars of power’ of the status quo.
Unlike other momentum lessons, this sophisticated explanation of movement ecology was essentially absent from XR. Therefore, many new members of XR Early rejection by Chis Saltmarsh Novara MediaBring back a national forum of power that refuses any recognition and only vague support from NGOs. This dynamic would dominate XR in the following years, but the reality for now was simple. XR was reaping the rewards of being different from the incumbents.
hibernation
One of the many tensions animating XR was the tension between mandatory after-action ‘reflection and learning’ and the vaguely defined but very necessary movement-building work. The agreed-upon schedule for Insurrection Day was for a complete lull in December. Perhaps two or three administrative heroes turned on the lights in their offices and the wider movement became mostly quiet in anticipation of a remobilization. In spring.
The reality turned out to be very different. Although the action has stopped, the action continues to swirl. Many of those who took part in London have now returned home, energized to satisfy the widespread need for local groups that have begun to pop up across the country and beyond. Meanwhile, the central office gained new space and an entirely new location, coming alive with efforts to channel the flow of energy and attention.
This enthusiastic cooperation was made possible thanks to a predetermined and clearly stated short-term plan, with the next pre-determined day of insurrection as Monday 15 April 2019 as its core. It cannot be overemphasized how much internal collaboration was made possible by eliminating the need for strategic deliberation.
but Paul Engler he himself mentioned Ecologist: ““Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Just a few weeks ago it was essentially a group of friends with some plans and filling out forms, but now it has suddenly become a movement, with a vision and a decidedly under-theorized intent for culture. Now This is a rapidly evolving reality.
Like any other early organism or colony, the three-week-old XR has now gone through a ‘critical period’. This development process prior to XR’s April breakthrough, which is underdocumented and understudied, was critical in shaping XR today. By highlighting this process in the next part of this series, I hope to help inform the growing pains of the future mass movements we need to build.
This author
Douglas Rogers is a writer, activist, and editor. labeler magazine. This article was published through the Ecologist Writers’ Fund. We’re asking our readers to donate so we can pay some writers £200 for their work. please Donate Now. More information about the fund and application can be found on our website.
