TopCat
Putin fanboy
I would sooner eat my own leg than cross a picket line.
Extinction Rebellion
- Thread starter Jeremiah18.17
- Start date
Same thing then innit?
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
No.
Elpenor
Dancing as fast as I can
M25 protests: Activists return to Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent
Police arrest 71 people as activists disrupt motorway traffic in Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent.
www.bbc.co.uk
Go on....
Flavour
hang the bankers
I totally agree re: the disruption being a side effect. The target is to shut down infrastructure that creates lots of emissions, directly, be it airports, power stations, coal mines, car factories, whatever. The disruption is a necessary but unfortunate side effect that will certainly not enamor many people to the cause, but so what? You don't need to win everybody over. There are people on this thread who'd have been pissed with (or literally pissed on) the suffragettes for making them late for work. Fuck 'em. There's a bigger picture.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Is it really the point to directly stop emissions at the time of the action itself though? It clearly isn't the point of the M25 stuff, nor for most of XR stuff so far from what I can see. Even power station stuff isn't likely to lower emissions at the time of the action, even if (and it's a big if) the power station is operationally impacted the grid adapts and supply continues from elsewhere - emissions aren't stopped, they might even be increased tbh. The point would be to lower or halt emissions longer term through forcing social and political change surely? I think the big weak point now (for them) is stopping any new emissions from starting, so not allowing any new fossil fuel developments.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
The amount of hot air they have prompted is likely to be their longest lasting legacy
Think there was more emanating from the park bench you were standing around on Saturday
That is the strategy, albeit with a pretty bonkers way of getting there
Athos
Well-Known Member
It's just not a picket line i.e. striking workers encouraging other workers (and customers etc.) to show solidarity in a labour dispute.
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
You know yes? Well imagine the opposite of that.
Or feel free to explain how workers pushed so far that they're forced to down tools, strike and picket for better conditions and/or pay is even remotely similar to a bunch of middle-class wankers blocking a road because they want better loft insulation?
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
I was thinking of all the pontificating in newspapers and other media, vastly exceeding everything emitted by the bookfair
hitmouse
so defeated, thinks it's funny
Suppose the old J18/Give Up Activism debates may have some relevance on this point?
Serge Forward
Just enjoyin' my coffee.
The Ulster workers' strike, maybe?
Or Powellite dockers?
Otherwise, I too would sooner eat my own leg than cross a picket line.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
I don't think you can liken a protest/demo to a picket line, different things entirely, one is about workers withdrawing their labour and the other isn't. Although maybe you could argue labour isn't solely confined to workplaces and people on demos/actions like this are withdrawing their consent/unpaid labour that reproduces society as it is somehow with these demos/actions?
The logical result of saying crossing/ignoring a demo/action is the same as crossing a picket line gets into issues with demos like outside abortion clinics or right wing demos or like those outside school ones recently, is passing/ignoring those like crossing a picket line as well?
Just thinking on this as totally avoiding jobs I have to do...
The logical result of saying crossing/ignoring a demo/action is the same as crossing a picket line gets into issues with demos like outside abortion clinics or right wing demos or like those outside school ones recently, is passing/ignoring those like crossing a picket line as well?
Just thinking on this as totally avoiding jobs I have to do...
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lazythursday
Averagely-Known Member
Where I think road blocking makes absolute sense as an XR protest tactic, is in particular targeted locations where there are extremely high levels of air pollution that are endangering people's health. It's not hard to find out where these are - there are air quality management areas all over the place, with fuck all being done to mitigate against localised pollution and often even poor monitoring. Generally affecting poorer communities too.
And let's not forget this
.
Extinction Rebellion protesters dragged from Tube train roof
Extinction Rebellion says it will "take stock" of the reaction to the action for future protests.
www.bbc.co.uk
andysays
Love and solidarity
And ideally really involving the local communities affected as well.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
I'm not sure that direction has much to offer a climate movement at the moment. It's important for sure more widely, but I think people might be getting a bit reactionary localist on this. It's an issue that doesn't automatically scale up to (or even being about) reducing carbon emissions, and I suspect would very quickly lead just to traffic re-direction away from certain areas or a call for electric cars or something. It also fixes on car drivers as a problem and would involve local councils and similar, which I think aren't that important at the moment with this issue.
Small local campaigns involving local people and 'communities' are often what people say is the direction to go in, and it's partly true (although they are usually full of a whole load of other problems) but we also need large confrontational non-geographically based mass movements. If XR had just done traffic stuff in small towns they'd hardly have been heard of now. And yeah, for sure they can feed off and into one another, but a good argument for climate stuff is the time that it takes to build strong and active local groups is past now. And also XR does have quite good 'local' groups in towns and cities I think, maybe that's the stuff they're doing....?
hitmouse
so defeated, thinks it's funny
I think I'd disagree with you here, or at least question it a bit. For one thing, looked at from capital's perspective or whatever, I dunno if there's that much of a difference between no-one turning up to work because there's a strike on, and no-one turning up to work because XR are blocking the road outside your building, it's going to piss on your chips either way.
Also like, I think at the moment it's relatively easy to draw a neat line between protests/demos and pickets, but that's because both workplace class struggle and non-workplace political/social movements are piss weak at the moment. When they're stronger, I think you tend to find protest political movements having some expression in the workplace (so like green bans, Scottish engineers v Pinochet, Irish shopworkers against apartheid), and also strikes going beyond just pickets and taking on forms that you'd associate with other movements, like the Molly Maguires, hunting Murdoch vans during Wapping, and perhaps most relevantly Blacklist Support Group blocking the road during disputes at Crossrail.
The port of Oakland's interesting to think about here, like they're still well-organised enough that they have a rule about not crossing any pickets so it seems to be a fairly regular thing that protesters will picket them out against the Iraq War or Donald Trump or for Black Lives Matter or whatever. Dunno where I'm going with that other than that we should all move to Oakland and get jobs as dockers, I suppose?
Anyway, I don't think that random commuters in London are responsible for management practices on Crossrail any more than they are for climate change, even less so in fact. But I still think that BSG blocking that road was A Good Thing. And I suppose it'd be a bit weird to say "well, I'm prepared to put up with a bit of disruption if it's for something important like getting one bloke on Crossrail his job back, but not for some trifling bullshit like the total collapse of the ecological conditions that've sustained human life up to this point"?
In that case roads would need to be blocked nearby, but outside, the targeted area. Otherwise they'd just achieve a long line of stationary, polluting, vehicles which would not help.
Yes that would be crucial.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
What bit was the disagreement specifically? I'm not sure anyway, just thinking thing though.
I guess the difference would be in the 'what happens next'? Like you can drag people out of the street and get the traffic flowing, but it's harder to drag people into work. But yeah I think the critical thing is the link up between work stuff and social movements, that's where I think climate stuff (and everything else) will be won or lost.
lazythursday
Averagely-Known Member
While it's not the CO2 causing the localised health problems, I'd thought of this as more a way of connecting people with broader issues - our transport system has all sorts of negative impacts, locally and globally. And it's not just small towns - AQMAs are all over the place, one day of effective action at dozens of AQMAs could really fuck up the road network much worse than a few actions on the M25. And I don't think we can get away from the fact that car drivers are a problem. It's not their individualised fault, but the lack of policies to get people out of cars is a big part of the problem.
It is all a real conundrum. I do think that while people are waking up to the climate issue the broad mass of people still don't get the urgency. Ed Miliband was on Newsnight the other day being really angry and passionate - the best I've seen him on this issue tbh (and cleverly trying to paint Starmer into a bit of a corner quoting his ten pledges) and most of the responses on Twitter were people thinking he had lost the plot / taken cocaine / having a mid life crisis. I'm not sure what it takes to show people that this is a catastrophic issue within lifetimes. I think there's a bit of a paradox that the more people try to raise the alarm, the more desperate they appear - whether through protest or other means - the more they look outside of convention and the more many people are prepared to dismiss them as no more worth listening to than, say, the covid deniers. (I think the fact that the covid protests look kinda similar to XR in terms of the demographic make up isn't at all helpful either).
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Yeah for sure there's similarities between the pandemic and climate stuff, something about it being a problem that's too large/too complex/too challenging to grasp and that leads some into denial very easily. And like has been mentioned a few times the changes needed to people's habits and lives will be difficult to deal with for us.
lazythursday
Averagely-Known Member
But in terms of high profile actions, I would focus completely on a) the finance sector, cos they fund all the bad shit b) new fossil fuel infrastructure, whether that is roads, airports or whatever and c) any new developments that are catastrophic for nature (eg that new theme park in the Thames estuary). Anything else just doesn't help the overall narrative that business as usual has to stop.
hitmouse
so defeated, thinks it's funny
Oh yeah, I'm pretty much thinking things through as well. Mostly just disagreeing that it's easy to draw a line where protests end and pickets begin. I think unofficial/rank-and-file stuff might make that trickier as well, like going back to the electricians' dispute earlier this year the majority of that consisted of protests at building sites that definitely weren't pickets, more like threats that pickets could take place at some point, but then at some places people refused to cross and so I suppose it became a proper picket at that point? Obviously the culture around secondary/sympathy strikes is very weak at the moment, but when and where those happen I suppose they involve people standing around other people's workplaces, in a very "activist-type" way.
Denial and the tendency to try and find a way to personalise/anthropomorphise (is that how you spell it? looks wrong) it. Obviously it's more immediately obviously harmful with blaming Bill Gates or whoever, but I've also seen a fair bit of back-and-forth in lefty climate spaces around how useful "X amount of companies/billionaires are responsible for Y amount of the earth's carbon emissions" rhetoric is.
