The “rebellion”?

Recently a number of Extinction Rebellion protesters were found guilty (mostly in absentia) for their actions in a series of demonstrations in London in October 2019. The actions mostly involved obstructing the street, and this has come to be indicative of what mainstream activists and the general public now understand as “rebellion,” along with digging up lawns and what look like acts of performance art in public spaces.

Given that serious acts of rebellion tend to be seriously punished by the state, we can learn something about how seriously the state takes these XR actions by looking at the severity of the punishments handed down. XR protesters were handed a six- or nine-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £85 costs. This is a nominal punishment for a nominal rebellion.

By describing its actions as “rebellion,” XR does a great disservice to true rebellion by casting it as something that looks like a pantomime (this has been happening at least since the Occupy movement), which in turn has the net effect of erasing what genuine rebellion might even look like in the imagination of the general public.

The same can be said for the manufactured dissent of Greta Thunberg. Is it credible that a person who was a genuine threat to the status quo would be allowed to speak at Davos and numerous other international fora, and to hang out with senior politicians, celebrities and business people? Of course not: the only reason that the global elite would consider sharing the same stage as Thunberg is if it suited its purposes to do so. Any “threat” which is permitted by the elite — whether XR or Thunberg — has essentially been co-opted by the elite.

More troubling is that XR and Thunberg — given their actual presence in the street — are relatively edgy compared to the masses sat at home engaged in “online activism” in the belief that this has genuine impact for the environment. Of course, the supporting argument for online activism is that it “raises awareness,” with the consequent assumption that this translates into real life action. This assumption is highly contestable: one study of “slacktivism” concluded that, “slacktivist actions, unlike those by dedicated activists, do not encourage others, and if anything, discourage them”; another study concludes with reference to “an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing.”

Certainly, raising awareness is important, but such low-engagement activism is a double-edged sword, and could potentially be worse than doing nothing. How so? If a person accepts that there is indeed an environmental crisis but is doing nothing about it, then s/he may feel guilt, which at least has the potential to catalyze some genuinely useful action. However, if a person is sat at home liking social media posts, or even sitting in a street with a sign, s/he might be inclined to think s/he is already doing their bit and there may be no such further catalyst to genuinely useful action. Indeed, if you were a world-destroying mega-corporation or its government minion, this is exactly the type of “protest” you might be inclined to enable, because it can be so easily managed and contained. In other words, not so much Extinction Rebellion, rather the Extinction of Rebellion.

Remember, any environmental protest that is remotely dangerous to the political and corporate establishment is hit with a ton of bricks. If you want an example of this you should go and read The Intercept article, The Green Scare: How a Movement that Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s №1 Domestic Terrorism Threat. We should also remember here that even the activists responsible for the green scare operated on a modest level compared to the size of the problem they had identified. This is why it is so important to genuinely think about what a proportionate response to the environmental crisis actually looks like.

In the end, we are faced with an uncomfortable truth: rebellion is not defined by protest pantomimes and retweets; it is defined by blood and sacrifice.