The contradictions of Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion have been the primary actors in pushing the climate agenda recently. They’re by far the most prominent group doing this kind of work despite only having been created 11 months ago.

Their main achievement over this time has been to move climate change up the agenda as a political issue, with the main manifestation of this being the declaration of a climate emergency in May.

Their demands:

1. Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
2. Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025.
3. Government must create, and be led by the decisions of, a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice.

The structure of the organisation is highly decentralised and autonomous. Anyone who is willing to make the same demands is welcome to join or set up their own ‘branch’, with some oversight from a central body. This may explain some of the contradictions within the movement, though there does seem to be an inherent discord between its statements and its actions.

There are many people in the movement who claim not to be political end even hold up ‘beyond politics’ signs. This comes in sharp contrast with their tactics, which include spraying fake blood on the treasury, protesting in parliament square and blocking traffic in the financial district. They also have events planned to discuss a “global green new deal” which can hardly be an apolitical venture.

Meanwhile, the group has officially rejected affiliation to a planned “XR socialist subgroup” on the grounds that they wanted to be beyond politics, meanwhile approving ‘XR police’ and ‘XR landlords’.

The relationship of the group to the police has been equally contradictory. They’re going out of their way to waste police money - they’ve managed to waste £37 million of it so far - but at the time, they’ve been thanking the police for arresting them. And from a media perspective, this is working fairly well so far. Usually all protests are portrayed as violent, whatever the reality, but this hasn’t happened so far with XR. The police have been careful not to visibly be the ‘bad guys’ so far, with most of their acts being non-violent and just involving taking away props and shutting down local toilets so it’s not possible to be protesting in a place for long. We can expect police resistance to the movement to increase as they get more fed up with it and as the movement increases in militancy of course.

It’s pretty clear the movement, and others like it could benefit from a class analysis and it’s fertile ground for Marxist ideas. It seems like through their acts, these people understand where the problems lie intuitively, but haven’t quite had it expressed in the right way yet.

I don’t see much chance of this movement going away any time soon, and while it retains some of its bad ideas, it won’t be able to achieve much more than it has, it will remain an extremely good target for entryism.