Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation
My name is Roger Hallam. I am a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain. I wrote this over a year ago in prison. I was in prison because I was accused of planning to fly drones, safely, at Heathrow Airport. I was there for six weeks, and during that time I wrote this article. It has remained unpublished for over a year, because I've been trying to find a group of people who it might apply to. I've recently helped to facilitate the setting up ‘Last Generation’, a group for young people that want to engage in civil disobedience. I recently did a video with this title which has been watched on YouTube over 100,000 times: Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation | Roger Hallam | 2021
Introduction
I am sitting on a solid plastic chair in the early morning, as the dawning light streams through the barred windows of my cell. I'll be in prison for a few weeks, maybe a few months. I'm not sure which. The reason for my imprisonment is that I am accused of conspiring, along with others, to close Heathrow Airport, until such time as the proposed third runway is canceled.
I've made a list of writing projects, the first of which was to write to the world's youth about what to do about their approaching annihilation, due to the climate and ecological catastrophe, which is now upon us. This is because I'm very concerned, but not surprised, by the inability of young people to organise effectively. This inability, I want to argue, is going to take you to your deaths. Nothing, then, can be more serious than this. I therefore intend to be blunt and honest with you. I don't think this is the time for pretence or false reassurance; time is short. Indeed, the point of no return may well have already been passed. My proposal to you is that all that has been done over the last 30 years has been a failure: carbon emissions have continued to rise. What many of you are doing to try and stop this catastrophe is bound to end in failure, because you are copying the same failed methods. This is to be expected: nobody has shown you how to do this. In this text I want to give you advice on how to be successful. Please note, it is only advice, which means it's up to you whether you accept it or not. But by the same token, as an adult you're also responsible for your decisions. No one will save you if you make the wrong call, and here the consequences of error could not be greater. So I do not intend to patronise you, I assume you are my equals and as such, I will give it to you straight. Nor do I intend to fetishize you; you have no special advantage because of your youth. Everything depends upon what you decide.
So it is important to consider very seriously any advice you're given. The fact is, you're on your own. So take what you want from what I say and leave the rest. You are free now, for better or for worse.
But I think you should take my advice, because I've been thinking about the question of political effectiveness obsessively since I was 13, and now I am 53. How to make the world a better place is without doubt the purpose of my life. I quickly came to the conclusion that peace and justice could best be promoted through nonviolent direct action; calmly and peacefully breaking laws, showing respect to ourselves, to the public, and to the authorities. During my youth, I was arrested many times and sent to prison on several occasions before I was 21. This was in the 1980s peace movement, where I cut my teeth on the practicalities of civil disobedience. I decided to leave University after just one year, to study Gandhi and his methods, and spent 10 years developing ways of creating participatory organisations where people could make decisions together and feel empowered. By the late 1990s, I decided there was little chance of bringing about radical political change, as most people, including supposedly radical people, had bought into the idea that the most important thing in life was looking after themselves, rather than considering the general good. I became an organic farmer for 20 years, mistakenly thinking I could escape from the world. But no one can escape from the climate crisis. We all live under the same sky. Extreme weather destroyed my business, and so I decided to go back to university to study politics. I was able to enter King's College in London to research effective radical political campaigning. My supervisor told me I was the best PhD student he'd ever supervised, but we disagreed on how to study my subject area. I wanted to research the whole field of mobilisation: how to get the maximum number of people to take the most effective action. This is the most important question in the world at this time of crisis. I didn’t spend my time reading books on why the crisis existed, but with campaigns instead; developing practical ways of effectively responding to the crisis. I learnt through doing, not speculating. I was arrested over 10 times in two years, and went to prison twice. I developed principles of effective action design, which I want to share with you in this essay.
What I'm laying out below is what I know. Of course, I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. It is based upon 35 years of thinking and practice. However, I do not make any great claims to originality. I am simply updating the principles of action discovered by Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the 20th century. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just simply laying out what I think.
I'm going to give you a summary of what I'm going to say in this text. I do not intend to go in great detail through all the points, but to give you an overview of the subject - that is, the key arguments and some evidence, so you can see it as a whole, and understand some basic principles. I will start with the crisis itself because, and this is very important: unless you fully understand the extent and the absolute severity of what is happening, you will surely fail. To solve a problem you first of all have to know precisely and concretely what you are dealing with. Knowing that you are potentially heading for awful suffering and an early death will provide the rage without which you will not gain the courage to do what is most effective.
So, I will go through what is going wrong. There are two ways of bringing about change on climate activism, at least traditionally. Both are based upon failed ways of doing things. The first way is the way of charities, NGOs (that's Non Governmental Organisations) and political parties, including Green Parties. They are what I call the liberal left. They have failed because they believe in gradual change through negotiation with the powers that be, which is called reformism. You might say that their principle is ‘don't rock the boat’. The second group, and the second way of doing things, I'm going to call the radical left, which believes in radical change, but has no idea for, or maybe no intention of, bringing it about. It cannot mobilise effectively because it is obsessed with ideological purity issues, and you can't build a mass movement on the basis of criticising anything that exists as immoral and wrong. I will then move on to talking about the central solution to the problem of mobilisation, that is effective organisation.
All social movements of the last 30 years, which claim to be bottom up, have failed to become sustainable, because they provide neither leadership nor clear ways to make decisions which affect the whole movement. Effectiveness requires clear decision-making structures; that is: who makes what decisions. This requires open and transparent hierarchies. Success requires sustained levels of civil disobedience by large numbers of young people, and it requires organisation. Let me be concrete about what that means: thousands of arrests, and hundreds of people in prison. This, in a nutshell, is how change happens. It requires a vanguard of those who show the way by example, and thereby inspire many others to follow. This is completely different to the main idea that informs present day protest. You will only be successful when you break the rules and break the laws. Lastly, you will start to be successful when you throw off the outlook of older people. Most older people, adults, are concerned with your welfare here and now. They don't want you to come to harm because harm for them is a bad thing. You need to realise that you are going to get harmed anyway. Putting yourself in harm's way is in fact the only way you can reduce the far greater harm coming down the line. When you act, your despair will lift in resistance to the death which otherwise lays in wait for you, and you will find the happiness which presently feels impossible. In short, one of the main things we need to learn is that everything in life has a potential for positivity.
In conclusion then, everything has to change, and that means everything. Yes, everything has to change. Even your desire to be effective. You have to march into battle with no thought of the outcome. That way you will lose your fear, and only when the fear goes, will the world be transformed. So let's get on with it.
The Real World
First of all, the crisis. Let's be clear, the world is a gas chamber. The gas which will kill you has been sent down the pipes in vast quantities for 30 years now, in the full knowledge of what it will do. In the next 30 years, it will destroy the weather, and thus our ability to grow food. This means starvation and the collapse of our society. This means war and violence, the slaughter of young men and the rape of young women on a global scale. As a London lawyer has said, “there is no greater crime”. This is what you're up against, what you have to try to overcome. There are three clear reasons why this is going to happen.
First, then, let's look at the Arctic ice in the summer. This has now melted by 70%, compared to 30 or 40 years ago. According to Professor James Anderson at Harvard University, the permanent ice will be melted by the end of 2022. It will be totally melted in the summer within 15 or even 5-10 years. It’s not complicated: it's warm, and when it's warm, ice melts. Once the ice is gone, the dark water, which will then not be covered by ice, will absorb the heat of the sun rather than reflect it, which is what happens with ice since it is white. This will then rapidly heat up the Arctic region. The difference in temperature in relation to the hot equator regions, the tropical regions, will lessen. So the difference in temperature, which drives the winds across America, Europe and Russia, will be lessened, and without that strong wind direction, the weather changes. What we get as a result is long periods of extreme hot weather and long periods of extreme cold weather, which will last weeks and months rather than days. It's the same with wet and dry weather. It's important to understand that crops die in such extremes, and with crop failures all around the northern hemisphere, all at the same time, we will have chronic food shortages. What that means is starvation, and what that means is mass violence, as people and governments fight over scarce food and resources.
At the same time temperatures will soar ever higher, we are currently at 1.2°C average global temperature over the pre-industrial period. Further temperature increases are now locked in. The carbon that has been put into the air over the last 30 years has still yet to translate into hotter weather. Another 0.7°C increase has yet to come through. Let me say at this point, this is uncertain; it could be less, it could be more. At the same time, using fossil fuels has put vast amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere. When the burning of fossil fuels stops, as it has to stop, then the pollution will go. At present the pollution blocks the sun's rays. When the pollution goes, the temperatures will increase further by around 0.7°C. Again, that's uncertain; it could be 0.2°C or it could be 1°C depending upon which scientific paper you read. The fact is though, that both these things, the ‘carbon lag’ and ‘global dimming’, have locked in significantly higher temperatures.
Then, we have to consider the earth’s soil. As the world heats up, the soil heats up, and this leads to carbon escaping from the soil. One estimate is that this will increase temperatures by 1°C by 2050. Again, this is uncertain: it could be less, it could be more, but it's there. So by the time you, as young people, reach middle age, temperatures will have risen over 3°C. That will be the norm, and that's the average prediction. It could be a little bit less, it could be significantly more, and this is before we consider the impact of the melting permafrost in the Arctic. As temperatures soar in this region, we know that methane will escape. We also, of course, have to consider the burning down of the world's forests in the Amazon, in Africa, around the Arctic and in Australia. The fact of the matter is, there is no chance of staying within 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. Don't allow anyone to convince you that this isn't the case. So again, let's face facts; this means mass starvation, and social chaos. The temperature in the central continents is double or three times the global average. At 2°C, average temperatures are 4°C or 5°C in these regions, and at that level of heat, it is no longer possible to grow grains and corn reliably. These are the crops which sustain civilization, and without them, everything collapses. Everything is based upon storable food. Think about it.
Finally, we have to consider the basic facts of the relationship between carbon in the atmosphere and global temperature increases. At present we are at approximately 415 parts per million of CO2, up from 280 parts per million in pre industrial times. The increases by which this goes up each year have been rising over the last 50 years. First of all, it was 1 part per million a year, then 2, and now we're approaching 3. So, it's a good prediction that we'll be reaching 450 parts per million by around 2030, and at that level we will have locked in 2°C, and 2°C is the pathway to endless hell. Recent estimates from independent research institutes predict that at 560 parts per million we will have locked in an average temperature increase of around 5°C. Remember, this is an average and it may, and probably will, take some time to come through. But 5°C average is 10°C to 15°C in inland areas. So we can expect to hit 560 parts per million around the time that young people today reach middle age or later middle age. In other words, by the time you're in your 40s and 50s, large parts of the hottest areas of the world will be uninhabitable because it will be too hot to grow food and too hot to work outside. There are estimates that suggest that only 1 billion people will be left alive, crowded around the north and south poles. Six or more billion people will have been killed through illness, starvation, or slaughtered in wars for resources. We will then have to experience the reality that all the ice at both poles will melt. Without the ice, temperatures will slide up to a new stable temperature of around 23°C, around 10°C above the temperature today. This has happened before in the history of the planet, leading to mass extinction events, when up to 95% of life on Earth was destroyed.
What this involves is the death of phytoplankton in the oceans. Phytoplankton produces oxygen, and at around 6°C, above pre industrial temperatures, the phytoplankton will die, and oxygen levels will fall. So mammals, including humans will not be able to breathe and will die. Secondly, as the polar ice disappears, the pole temperatures will increase and they will effectively be the same as the temperatures in the hottest areas of the world around the equator. According to the historical record, it can take up to 50 million years for the earth to recover, and reproduce the amount of life we have today.
Previous mass extinction events were created by the pouring out of CO2 into the atmosphere. Which sounds sort of familiar doesn't it? In the past, it came from volcanoes. So what we're looking at is the setting off of a global landmine. We've had our foot on the mine for years, and we're pressing harder each year, and now it's going off. It threatens to destroy most of the life on Earth, including your generation, the last generation. However, long before sea levels rise over cities, and all the forests burn, and all the ice melts, you will face social collapse. This is the front line reality of the climate crisis. This is what David Attenborough calls the end of civilization. It is important to know what this means in terms of everyday experience; what will happen to you in the next 20 to 30 years. It is likely that mass disruption will come all at once. This is because everything in the world today is highly connected. If something happens in one place, then you can get help from other places. However, there's a catch. When the pressure increases on everything all at the same time, then all of a sudden, the whole thing collapses, because everything's being affected. There is no help because everything is experiencing the same situation. In other words, what's called a complex system is very resilient, but also highly likely to completely collapse when the pressure upon it becomes extreme. This is particularly the case with the world's economic situation, which as we all know is highly connected. An example of what happens was shown by the 2008 financial crisis, when catastrophic collapse was only a few days or so away. Such collapses are set up by trigger events; small events. There are two possibilities here. At some point the stock market price of fossil fuels will collapse as it becomes obvious that the digging up of further coal and oil will lead to global suicide. Alternatively, it is now inevitable that the global coastal property price bubble will burst. These properties are now worthless in areas where there is going to be inevitable sea level rise, and permanent flooding. Combine these two crises with the approaching global food crisis, and we can expect to get an exponentially worse situation in the near future. From now on, we will face continued economic crises. Note, I wrote this before COVID. That's the sort of thing I was predicting when I wrote this.
The effect then is obvious. Less money to go around, welfare payments will stop, house prices will collapse, universities and schools will close, hospitals will be shut. Those who have been in denial will experience massive social and mental distress, suicides will soar and mental breakdown will become the norm. It is at this point that people will take matters into their own hands as the food runs out. Again, this is likely to happen suddenly; one week Tescos will be short of a few items; the next week, there'll be no bread, unless you want to pay £50 for a loaf in the carpark. Public order will break down, and it will happen quickly; because people will get hungry. People will break into stores and into houses and take what they can and kill those who stand in their way. The endpoint of social collapse then is war played out in every city, every neighbourhood, every street. This is what's going to happen to your generation, and this appalling situation is liable to become commonplace. This is the reality of climate change. Because this is the reality of social collapse, what it actually means for you and your generation. They're not going to tell you this at school. You're not going to get to read about it on the Greenpeace website. People won't tell you about it at a climate change demonstration. This is because the people who control our society, who run our schools, who run the NGOs, don't like to think about things that they don't like. But you need to be aware of them; you deserve to be told the truth in simple everyday language. Only when you know viscerally in your body what exactly is coming down the track are you likely to gain the courage to engage in the very real sacrifices which will minimise the probability of the worst.
In other words, and this is important, in denying the truth, the middle class people who run the climate change world are ensuring the worst will happen. They are not trying to protect you. They are trying to protect themselves. They are unable to act responsibly because they are in denial, and because they feel guilt. These people, as I’ll outline below, are not there to help you. They will lead you to failure. Climate change, then, is not about polar bears, ice melting, sea level rise and saving the planet. It's not about that at all. What it's about is mental collapse, the loss of all your dreams, and being dragged off to be slaughtered in war. It is about being brutalised, it's about rape, and slow starvation, ending in early death for the thousands of millions of young people around the world today. If you don't feel the terror and horror of what is to come now, then you soon will, and then you will feel the rage, the hatred, and then despair.
So take some time off now from reading this text. So you can feel and express all these awful emotions. Speak to others about it, go to your room, whatever feels right. But this is my advice: hold on to them. Hold on to your emotions, keep them close to yourself, because they are your friends. Because only those emotions will give you the power to do what you and others in your generation need to do in order to respond to whatever is now going to happen. So take that break now.
*Break*
Okay, let's carry on.
The truth is that the situation I've described above, has in fact been the normal situation for most human beings over the long course of history. Most people used not to live much beyond their 20s. War and rape were a constant threat, and people with power would kill and abuse with impunity. Crop failures and starvation were a regular occurrence. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Over the past thousands of years, millions of people have dedicated their lives to human improvement. And millions have died to create your freedoms and your prosperity. There was nothing inevitable about this. It took dedication, courage, and a willingness to sacrifice to a higher purpose, for a common good. In the next 10 years, the people in charge of our societies are planning to throw away the fruits of the lives of these millions of people. A bit like how they are throwing away everything else they don't care for. These people that run society, in other words, have no sense of honour, no sense of duty, no sense of responsibility, no sense of respect. They are the most immoral and depraved generation in the history of humanity. What they are doing, knowingly, willingly, in full knowledge of the science, is the greatest crime in the history of the human race. Their plan is to do nothing less than to kill you. That is the reality you face and, of course, it's worse than that, because these people are clueless as to how to effectively respond to the situation even if they wanted to. What supposedly well-meaning people propose to you will make you fail. Because these are the same ways of acting which have failed for 30 years. These people are part of a culture which is going to have you die. They have neither the courage, nor the knowledge, to do what has to be done.
That is, in short, why you need to rebel.
This is what needs to happen now: you need to bring down the world's governments in the next 10 years. Take them over, and enact emergency measures to massively reduce carbon emissions, to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and to undertake geoengineering measures to stop the melting of the ice in the Arctic. Only these actions have a chance of halting the slide towards extinction. These objectives, therefore, need to be pursued ruthlessly, with total focus and dedication to the goals. Otherwise, all will be lost for good and indescribable suffering will be the inevitable fate for you and future generations. There is no guarantee of success. The situation is very probably too late, but there is no third option. Physics is brutal, it is not open to pleading or persuasion.
So here's the situation. The more you deny this reality, the more time you waste, the more likely it's going to happen. In other words, this is absolutely a race against time. There is literally not a minute to waste. You are part of a long tradition, as old as the human race itself, who against all the odds rose up against evil. It is both terrible and glorious at the same time. But however you choose to experience it, one thing is beyond doubt. Rising up now is absolutely necessary. So in the rest of this text, I will deal with the practicalities; why what is failing, fails. That is the present course, and how you can succeed, in so much as you can succeed.
So first of all, the ways of failure. There are many, but they all have one thing in common: a lack of courage to look at reality. It has been said that courage is the first virtue. As without it, none of the others will exist. This is certainly the case today as it was in the past.
I will separate these failed approaches into the two main ways of doing things which dominate the climate change movements at the present time. What I will call the liberal left and the radical left.
The liberal left
By this term, I mean the charities, the NGOs, the campaign groups and the conventional political parties, including the Green Parties. All these groups have controlled the way people have tried to reduce carbon emissions for the last three decades. They have catastrophically failed, and will continue to fail if you copy their approach. There are a number of connected and disastrous problems here. First of all, they deny the reality of physics, what I have laid out in this text, and they are in even greater denial about the social realities; hunger, rape and slaughter. They do not talk about the actual situation, the actual data. Instead, they choose, and this is important, to talk about the ways of looking at the climate crisis which have been set by those in power. The governments, the scientists, the economists, the politicians and business leaders, all these people do not go through the data in a detailed way. Neither do they bring the data together, so that they can see it as a whole interconnected picture, and critically they do not deal with the social and psychological implications. They assume that physics happens in a separate sphere, without any breakdown of societies. In other words, they underplay and avoid the reality. To put it bluntly, they are lying to you.
And, they never get emotional. They never cry, they never scream, they never shout. They never rip off their ties, take off their clothes, and point out we are just flesh and blood and bone, and when we die, we will return to dust. In other words, they never talk about birth or death. They never talk about what it means to live. They never talk about what it means to die. They are walking ghosts, caught up in a cult which plans your death.
What are the main elements of this cult? First, they cannot get emotional because they are ‘well educated’. Because they have been taught that showing emotions is a weakness, it's a shameful thing, it would be irrational. But what is more shameful, or more irrational, than a plan to kill our kids? But this is how they've been brought up, and they can't change themselves now. There's no point arguing with them on this, they are done, they are lost. Another key element of this is the ideology of hope. These people literally cannot abide the notion of no hope. It is an intolerable horror to them. It is inconceivable to them that it is possible to live life without a prospect of success, without advancement, without a plan for personal and social gain. Regardless of the fact most people, in most of history, and in most cultures, have no notion of hope. Life for these people, for most people, is a process of encountering and experiencing one's fate, whether in this world or in the next. In other words, for most human beings, for most of history, the aim of life is simply to be good as defined by their own culture and tradition. But for the modern middle class professional people in the global north, this idea disgusts them. They abhor it, they hate it because they think it leads to nowhere. Of course, the situation could not be more opposite. It's their approach to life that is leading to nowhere. Or, as you might say, into endless hell. So the people that teach you, the people that advise you, these people cannot understand any approach that does not proceed gradually, one issue, one step at a time, towards a better world. This is how they think things work. This is the way they've always done things, and they are never going to change. Even as everything screams the need for revolution, they live in a bygone age, when there were ‘issues’, and ‘solutions’ to them. When talking and conversation ‘got results’. They don't get results, and they never will now, because this crisis is not an ‘issue’. It's not a thing. It's everything forever, and to deal with everything, everything has to change. Now.
When you say this to them, their eyes glaze over. They don't understand what you mean. Because they have no life experience of revolution. They have spent their comfortable lives in offices in front of computers, on social media; they can't conceive of any time that will be different than this. In practical terms, it means that they will never support anything which upsets those in power. The only thing they wish for is dialogue. But dialogue is only possible when two parties meet as equals. So, first of all, you need to create outrage, and only then will they understand you're serious, and dialogue can begin. Instead of real communication, which brings about concrete changes in government policy, they prefer vanity goals, symbolic wins, fancy words, which have no effect on anything; meeting important people, shaking hands with people in the UN, making speeches in the Houses of Parliament. All that generally means is being patted on the head by the people who are taking you to your death. You don't want to be worthy. You need to be outrageous. You don't want to be engaging in conversation. You want to be shutting down conversations, because only then will you get a real conversation. These organisations have only one response to the catastrophic situation which is taking over the world. That response is an old fashioned word, but it's appropriate here, which is appeasement. Whatever the outrage of lies, delays, betrayals, for generations and generations, they only have one response; more talking, continuing to sell hope and t-shirts with ‘resist’ on it.
T-shirts with ‘resist’ on them have nothing to do with resistance - it’s a pretence. What is desperately needed is wholesale mass resistance immediately, in actuality, the day after you've heard what I've got to say in this essay. At the core of appeasement is cowardice, a fear of any real harm to themselves and their position of power in society. This fear then, is projected onto you. Nothing of harm must come to you. Not because it would be a bad thing for you, it could do a lot of good in fact. Their concern is with themselves. Harm to you means that they will get upset. It will expose their cowardice and their complicity in the death project which you face. They do not understand that the harm you expose yourself to now, will be nothing compared with the harm coming down the tracks when society collapses. They will use meaningless phrases such as ‘duty of care’, to create ridiculous bureaucratic delays. They do not understand that in any rebellion worth its name, people get hurt, traumatised, and ultimately perhaps killed. It's part of the deal. It's what history means. It’s what makes it exciting, to go into battle against evil, whatever the consequences. This is what our ancestors did on a regular basis. It's part of the deal of being a decent, responsible person who understands they are part of society, and not a helpless, frightened individual. As the quote goes, “evil flourishes when good people do nothing”.
Every conflict in history, and it’s good advice to read history, involves people standing up against injustice and stupidity, and in every conflict, people get hurt. When 1000s of children went to prison during ‘The Children's March’ (You can see the film on YouTube) to get their rights during the American 1960s civil rights movement, many of them ended up in hospital. They were bitten by dogs and thrown against walls by high powered hose pipes. And the campaign was a great success. Because, and this is important, the children had lost their fear of the harm which might come their way. Similarly, when 25 black and white students started the Freedom Ride in the American deep south to challenge the racist segregation on transport systems, they were massively criticised for their recklessness. They were told they would come in harm's way. This sounds familiar right? But they did it anyway! They chose to put themselves in harm's way to be beaten up by racists, and by the end of the ‘summer of the Freedom Ride’, 500 people had ended up in prison. Then, and only then did the government crack. In other words, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Without upsetting ‘the movement’, as well as the opposition, nothing gets changed. You know that school strikes will get you nowhere, and the reason for this is because the people in power think it is a worthy thing to do. Their support for your actions means you're being unsuccessful. When they are screaming with horror, you will know you're getting on the road to victory. To do this, some of you will need to strike for more than three days a week. Only when you are being dragged out of your home to be taken to school, only when your parents are getting prosecuted for not sending you to school; only then will politicians actually act. This is because we are facing a juggernaut, which is taking us over the cliff. We are facing everything and everybody in a position of power who oppose you. Those from the liberal classes and from the liberal left who seek to organise you, can only take you to bitter disappointment. They just want you to call for reforms and policy changes. What you need to call for is an end to the whole damn system. Only when you call for the impossible, will the possible start to happen. Conventional campaigns only work within the system. Their day has passed. They have utterly failed. You need to take the driving seat now. So let's move on to the radical left.
The radical left
The radical left are those people who say great stuff, but are totally hopeless at doing anything about it. They call for climate justice, they are into ‘intersectionality’, they are pro identity politics. But the main thing is not what they say they want. The main thing is they have no idea about how to make it happen. In fact, everything they actually do stops change from happening. They are not radical at all. They are reactionary. They stop everything you want to happen from happening.
At the present moment, those nice liberal left people are the biggest threat to your effectiveness. They seem organised and professional with all their big conferences and paid positions. But very quickly, you will realise that they are leading nowhere, their day has passed. That will become clear for all of you to see. At that point, a far greater danger will then come from the radical left. Partially because they come across as the real deal. They speak all the right words and have all the right attitudes. But they will stop you doing anything that is actually real, actually effective. If you do finally get to do something, then it will be more of the same. More marches, more days of action, all the same old shit. Except this time, the slogans will be more impressive. The radical left then, in the longer term, are the biggest threat, because they will stop the actions which are needed to stop your annihilation. In other words, the radical left are nothing short of a disaster.
The first problem is they see everything as a problem of politics. But the fact of the matter is that this crisis is beyond politics. Everybody is going to die unless we act. It's a universal situation. By thinking about it as all about oppression, it sets one group against another when we all need to come together, whatever our politics. Yes, of course, there is unfairness between groups, massive unfairness, and of course there is racism and sexism and all the rest of it. But we need to have a sense of balance here. The main show now is the universal threat of extinction, whatever your background or culture. Yes, absolutely, there need to be rules about bad behaviour and bad attitudes. But first things first. If the positions of the radical left were put forward in a respectful way, then they wouldn't be so problematic. But as many of us have experienced, they are put across in a violent and inhuman way. In other words, if you don't agree with their way of looking at things, then you are insulted and often forced out of groups. They will force you out of the movement as I have experienced myself. We need to be clear that this is an old, highly reactionary and conservative way of doing politics. It is what led to millions of people being shot and killed in the last century, because they had “the wrong opinions”. It turns societies into prisons, where everyone is afraid all the time. You will notice that they tear movements apart, through creating movement spaces full of fear. These ideas are based upon a deeply reactionary philosophy, where the world is split into the good and bad. Those who are bad have to be made to suffer. But there is nothing radical about forcing people into such a situation. It is a total disaster in terms of building a movement; because no one wants to be abused and insulted. No one wants to be in a place where they're being judged and discriminated against. They will vote with their feet, and they will not come back. And you'll be left with a small group of purists, with everyone on the lookout for any sign of deviance. Radical left groups always end up eating each other up!
It is worth remembering what Jesus said, “‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” I'm not a practising Christian, but I sense that everyone reading this knows what I mean. We cannot build a movement without compassion for each other. Without this, a movement will create no change, and there is nothing more immoral than to refuse to do what is now needed in order to save the world from destruction. This is not just about naming and shaming, which destroys movements; it is also about the radical left's obsession with victimisation. They make the terrible error that those who have been, or declare they have been traumatised by the system, have the best ideas about how to change society. They don't. The best strategies and tactics come from studying data in a cool and calm way, weighing up the evidence, not just the views of those who have directly suffered. Often dogmatic voices are not from those who have suffered, but from the middle class radical left people who claim to know what is in the best interests of those who have been traumatised and victimised. They offer no evidence of this; it is a matter of ideology for them. The upshot of this is that nothing gets done until we have all submitted to the ideology; until we are ‘in solidarity’ with the victimised. But there is no practical meaning behind the slogan of ‘in solidarity’. What usually happens is endless discussion on how bad the world is, and making lists of all the people who have done bad things to us and to them. At worst, you then have arguments over who is more victimised, and then all hell breaks loose, particularly if you get them in what some people believe are the wrong order. All this would be hilarious, if it wasn't such a disaster for building a coherent revolutionary movement. Let's be clear, no change ever comes through people sitting in a room, discussing effective action and calling each other out. The fact of the matter is effective mobilisation involves excluding people as much as including people. Many people who have been, or claimed to have been victimised cannot participate because they're not strong enough. Those in genuine pain need caring for, and need therapy. We cannot do that for them, and waiting for them will do no good. What will do them good is seeing successful rebellious action on the streets. They will then be empowered by our example of being strong and fearless in the face of those in power; those who shout out “bring it on” when those in power threaten us with arrest and imprisonment. Go into battle with a smile on your face and gladness in your heart, knowing you're finally doing what has to be done.
The radical left simply does not understand this, and does not want to because it would shatter their desire to make everybody miserable, humourless and ‘pure’. They will criticise it as being ‘insensitive’. They claim nothing can happen before you are sufficiently radical enough. The great phrase, “there are not enough black people in the room” comes to mind. Then when it comes to action, it is endlessly deferred because it excludes people. Let's be clear, radical action will always exclude people. That's the way it is. It's only through radical action that you can create the change that then will include people, it works that way around.
This disaster then has to be exposed for what it is. The radical left loves to argue, but it will never be defeated by argument. It can only be done by action, by showing the oppressed ways of empowerment through example. Those in the global south will only cheer when we bring down our governments. Not when we declare our ‘solidarity’ with them, and other meaningless nonsense. The plan has to be, then, to be polite and exit the room, literally. What needs to happen is to create a rule of no naming and shaming in meetings. There needs to be a rule to ask people to leave if they break these rules. They can always be asked to set up their own group. Why not? If they do this, they can leave you alone, and be left to their own devices.
Of course, this is a generalised criticism. Let's be clear, many people from the liberal and radical left are decent, caring people. Once you are successful at action, organisation and mobilisation, they will accept their mistakes and come and join you. In which case it is vital that you don't give them a hard time. What is past is past. It is important to warmly welcome them. We have all made mistakes, and we will continue to do so. The problem is not about being human, the problem is being judged for being human. We all need to join together. But this will only happen on the basis of what works. This requires vigorous but respectful open debate. What I have written here is not personal. I'm criticising ideas and actions, not people in themselves. You must never be afraid of debate, you cannot afford to be sentimental. We need to upset people, even on our own side, as much as people on the other side in order to be successful. This was always the case in radical history, take some time out to read about it. It is the same today. What we need is radical revolutionary action, not obsessing about perfection. So let's look at a positive plan of action, how you are going to get yourselves out of this mess. Hold on to your seats, and get ready for the ride. It's going to be quite something.
END OF PART 1
Action
My 35 years of organising people have taught me one thing, which is more important than anything else; action comes first. As soon as there are two of you, go and do something. Once you have enough people to block a road, go and do it. Don't ever wait around, or you'll be waiting forever, and all will be lost. What brings people into your group is action. What brings in money is action. In other words, this is the one line outcome from my research. Wait for it: action creates mobilisation.
This is the fundamental rule. So the question is not whether or not to act, but what action to take, and the answer to that is action which breaks the law. Let me say that again; action, which breaks the law. Action that does not break the law produces nothing. It does not bother the authorities, and it does not attract the attention of other young people. They stay distracted by the 101 other things going on in their lives. Action then needs to be dramatic, epic, outrageous, fearless... and illegal. Think of your most ambitious idea, and times it by 10. Feel the fear, put it to one side, and do it anyway. It will be glorious. It will make you a hero, and most importantly, it might just save your generation from hell. Remember, everyone around you will think it's a terrible idea. Those liberals will say “you will upset people”, those radicals say “it excludes people.” But we know there are no other answers at this point in history on how to create effective change. It is then a matter of honour and duty to transgress normality, and it's your privilege to be able to do so. So smile as much as you can, as you march out into the field of battle.
To be effective in this battle you need to know about tactics. First and foremost, you need to learn that to win this battle you have to be non-violent. With violence you only end up poisoning hearts with hatred, any success will be a false dawn. This involves being more than just physically non-violent. You need to have ‘love’ in your hearts, ‘love’ in the old fashioned sense of the word. Not a sentimental mushy internet thing, but a militant desire to seek the well being of others, including your opponent. This is what can be called ‘tough love’. You are respectful in your words to the authorities. In other words, ‘maximum love: maximum disruption’, is the key slogan here. You do not avoid arrest and imprisonment. You are fearless in your righteousness. The slogan here is ‘stay calm and do your worst’. You will not bring down the opposition to negotiate with you through dialogue, but through being fearless in your disruption. Only then will they sit down and enter real dialogue with you. Their power is not based upon their laws, their police, or their money, let's be really clear about this. Their power is based upon their ability to create fear in your minds. Once the fear goes, their power collapses, the empire is gone.
This is because people love to see an underdog speak truth to power. It is the first story of all the dramas in human history. We watch this story every night in films, and read about it in books. We always have respect for the person who stands up for her beliefs, and suffers for them. We cannot even help ourselves with this. It's not about the issue, it's about the emotion. What we fear most in ourselves, is what we love most and admire. And what we fear most in ourselves is our own fear. What we admire most in others is their lack of fear.
Disruption, respect, and fearlessness. This is the Holy Trinity which will save the world. The basics that are not complicated. Of course, it's not going to happen every time, and sometimes other tactics and arrangements will work. But over the long term, this is the golden formula; these core elements of radical political change. Now the devil, of course, is in the detail. This is not the place to go into the nuts and bolts, you can find out about them elsewhere, such as in Extinction Rebellion trainings, and in historical accounts of campaigns. But this is the direction of travel. I will, however, give you a few specific examples.
First in combination with your action, you need to talk to other people offline face to face. In schools, in cafes, and in your homes and bedrooms, wherever you can find a place to meet. You tell them three things. Number one, we are well and truly fucked. Don't mince your words, show them the evidence, not abstract words. Tell them precisely how they will die. They need to know. Second, tell them the best way to take action is together with others. To break the law with respect, without fear, with a smile on your face, knowing you're doing what has to be done. Finally, third, and vitally, give them a pathway to action, concrete details of an upcoming action, when and where to meet.
So what actions should you take? Don't think about this too much, just go and do it. You will learn by doing, not by agonising beforehand. Go on strike in your school or college. Superglue yourself to the doors or the desks of those in authority. Spray paint the walls and halls. Go on hunger strike. Have a specific and winnable demand. Ask it with a smile. You are right and they are wrong, and they know it. Don't do things by half. If it's not working, up the pressure. Strike harder. Go on strike for 3 days rather than 1. Go on hunger strike for 21 days rather than 7. At some point the opposition will crack. Most importantly, don't ever wait for consensus, for others to follow you, they never will. As soon as you have enough people to make a decent impression, go for it. This will bring others forward to act. They will say, “I've been waiting for this for ages, you're my hero, I want to do the next action with you.” Action creates mobilisation, every time. If a group or a network stops you, then politely leave, and set up a new network, a new group. You can do this in a week on social media. Don't waste time arguing. Remember, people are persuaded by action, not words. Focus on the job. Once things are going nationally and internationally, don't get stuck on finding coordination, or finding consensus. If you are effective, you're most likely to get thrown out. Liberals and radicals will hate you for your daring, it will show up their own failure. This will not be about politics. It’s hardly ever about politics, it's about jealousy. So be polite, smile sweetly, and move on.
Remember where power lies. Power does not lie in international bodies. They are a total distraction. They only make declarations. Declarations mean nothing. Not one molecule of CO2 was prevented from being emitted by warm words at the UN. Their time has passed. Focus on rebellion. Your focus on rebelling should be where power actually lies. Power lies in the nation state, in the state government, this is where the rules are actually made. This is where people facilitate the genocide that's coming. Close down the state, and the power will come to the table. Find the physical choke points of the system, the times and places where evil resides and does its bidding, and choke them. Block the roads and the motorways. Glue yourself to government ministry doors. Let down the tyres of their cars. Block the tube stations, the railway stations and the airports. Keep going day after day. Most importantly, don't stop. When you're exhausted, take a day off, not a month, and then start again. Keep that smile on your face. The more they fight you, the closer you are to winning. Always remember that, and don't ever let them con you. Your place is on the street. As soon as you are old enough, stand in elections. The Green Party and the left will hate you. But they have catastrophically failed for 30 years. Your time has now come, it's time for them to roll over. The state, remember, belongs to you. We live in democracies. You are here to change the rules because they're your rules. This applies whether you live in democracies or not, the world is your world, make of it what you will. Make clear that you will not be stopped. You are in charge now, and yes, you will suffer. Both liberals and radicals will hate your suffering, because it exposes the cowardice that is the real reason for their lack of action. They are full of fears about suffering, fears about failure, fears about everything. Their fears can only fall away when they can see the success of your action, your demonstration of what real resistance looks like. You're in a great tradition, remember that always. Your tradition stretches back far into the past. Their defeatism, their lack of imagination, their failure to take up courage, all that leads to, is your death. So action then puts the smile back on your face. At last, at last you're doing something, at last you are on your way, come what may.
Organisation
The biggest disaster of the last 30 years has been the adoption of horizontalist dogma. The notion that you should not have leaders, hierarchies or clear structures. Indeed, for many years, I believed much of this ideology. But practical experience shows it to be nonsense. This is because it imposes moral ideas on timeless truths about how people make decisions together. As such, it prevents movements from reaching a fraction of their political potential. That is, they fail to take power, and things only change when you have power, meaning your ability to change the rules and the laws of society. This then is a self inflicted failure, it is a luxury of privilege that you can no longer afford. If you're going to respond effectively to the prospect of starvation and death, you need to focus on what will enable you to succeed.
There are two universal problems of trying to organise without a central decision making body.
First, no one knows what to do for the best, because they don't know what everyone else is doing. Someone has to decide the best thing to do first, and then everyone else can work to make it happen. No collective projects can be undertaken, unless a project is decided upon. Without this, we have a disaster of no collective action. Let's be clear: no collective action means failure. Taking power essentially requires collective action. Only when there is safety in numbers will people take the risk of collective struggle. There has to be a way of deciding on the best action to take, and horizontalism assumes this can be produced spontaneously. It cannot. Horizontalism simply creates confusion, inefficiency, and thus disillusionment, and it therefore enables those in power to maintain their power, despite whatever those fine slogans say to the contrary. Secondly, if you don't decide explicitly on who decides on collective rules and projects, then what always happens is a farce. No one can decide on who decides on who decides. If a group assumes this role, then the accusation arises, “who gives you the right to decide who decides?” and on it goes. No one can decide who decides, who decides, who decides... and so on forever. In the meantime, the world burns.
There is a simple time honoured way of stopping this disastrous time wasting. A group decides it will create a hierarchy, but one which is clear, accountable, limited and open. The fact is, there are always hierarchies in groups, let no one try to convince you otherwise. This is because collective decisions are always being made. The name of the group for instance, the rules of behaviour, its collective aims. If there is no clear way to make these decisions, they get made anyway, by hidden hierarchies, informal groups of friends for instance. This is what's been called a ‘tyranny of structurelessness’. Needless to say, it's always those with privilege who take these secret decisions, because they have more confidence and they have more networks. Even when you create a clear and open hierarchy, then you will be attacked by those who do not want their horizontalist ideology to be questioned. They don't want effective organisation. Again, it is important to be polite, and ask them to set up their own organisation where they can prove how moral and virtuous they can be. Or if this is not possible, you set up your own organisation, with clear decision making structure. Please do not spend time arguing. Again, you will be proved right by your success and by their failure. Once you have made a fundamental shift to a clear decision making process, you are in a position to take on the power of the government.
The next task is to make the best hierarchy you can. The horizontalists of course are right; closed, arrogant and dominating hierarchies are terrible, destructive things. So, how do you make it work? First, you have to have explicit rules; who makes the decisions, how they make them, how you join the decision making group, how you leave, and of course, how you get asked to leave. There are a number of competing ways of answering these questions, but what is vital is that you have clear answers. These answers are written down and everyone can see them. They're communicated to everyone in your organisation. The hierarchy then is open, people can rise into it, and there are clear rules about how you go about doing this. Of course, there are always going to be inequalities between people, and these do not go away by declaring that they don't exist, or saying how bad they are. The question is how to lessen them. People without confidence are empowered to the extent that they have a pathway to taking on decision making roles. This only happens if there is an extensive training programme to give people from disadvantaged groups the skills to step forward; it's not created through fine words. An organisation serious about increasing equality, inclusivity, and fairness, will have a clear open hierarchy and a compulsory training programme to give people the basic skills, knowledge, and competence to participate.
Another key development is to decentralise decision making as much as possible. The principle here is that decisions have to be made at the most decentralised level at which they can be made. This is not just because it's a moral idea, but because it's good to involve as many people in decision making as possible. But also, the closer people are to the consequences of a decision, the better the decision is likely to be. So, this then is not the demonising, dominating hierarchy that the horizontalist fears. It's about combining effective hierarchy with effective decentralisation. Each group then has autonomy to set clear roles and mandates, the decisions for which they are responsible. A central group decides on these mandates and sorts where there are gaps in decision making, and resolves the conflicts where there are overlapping decision making processes. Systems are never perfect. All organisations are challenging spaces. But there is a difference between a good enough system and a complete mess. You soon learn to know the difference between the two, and here's the important point. In a fast moving massively challenging confrontation with the powers that be, more than ever you need to have clarity in structure so that you can focus on the fight, not on process politics. Major strategic decisions have to be made by only a few people, because they have to be made fast. You need to have generals in order to succeed. This is fine as long as you know how to get rid of them if they're no good. This is the difference between open and closed hierarchy.
Organisations are not just formal structures, vital as they are. They also involve cultures; how people behave towards each other. The tragedy of many radical organisations is that they claim to stand up for people, but the reality is people are treated badly. This goes back to the radical left point, that if people don't live up to certain ethical standards, they are made to feel bad. People are aggressive and sarcastic towards them. This not only creates fear and anxiety, but also people leave, and nothing gets done. People spending all their time attacking each other for being imperfect is just beyond useless. Instead, it is vital to create a respectful culture, where everybody is accepted for who they are. Practically, this means a statement needs to be read out at the beginning of meetings to say this is the case, and to ask people not to engage in aggressive speech. Of course, sometimes people have had a bad day and they take it out on people, which is fine, as long as they apologise afterwards. No one's perfect. However, if someone is continually abusive, then they have to be given a warning and offered support. If they continue to be abusive, they have to be asked to leave. Let me emphasise that; they have to be asked to leave. This process has to be organised and clear. It is vital that there exists a clear way of doing so. Being able to ask annoying people to exit an organisation is a vital part of an organisation’s success. A respectful culture then supports unconfident people, along with training and an open hierarchy of roles and responsibilities.
It is a beautiful process to see when it is working well, and this is the essence of what a civilised society is all about, where people can expand their capacities and creativity and flourish. All of this creates the foundation of a regenerative culture. This is one in which individual involvement is nourished within collective effort. It is not about feeding a sense of self, but of finding oneself through working with others towards a collective goal. It is always painful working with other people, and it is challenging at the best of times. But it gives us a grounding, and a maturity. These things are much needed if you're going to be resilient in your struggle with the authorities and the government.
Balance and wisdom
My final advice, then, is finding balance and wisdom. Facing death is a challenge, particularly if you're a young person about to embark on life. It is even more challenging to find out that your death is being planned, knowingly, in full sight of the science. It is only human to feel an overwhelming rage, knowing that you're going to be murdered, because that is the truth of the matter. What this provokes is a toxic mix of emotions. Contempt, self pity and desire. However, if you allow these feelings to overwhelm you, then they will destroy you. Instead, you need to use them to give you the courage to serve others and the common good. When I was young, between the age of 15 and 21, I was consumed with hatred and resentment. I could not abide the injustice and stupidity of the world. My generation also faced annihilation through a nuclear holocaust. We thought we only had a few years to live before we would be blown up. Although I spent every spare moment I had in peace movements, getting arrested and going to prison, I was also consumed with judgement. Not just with the government planning to take me to my death, but with other activists who weren't doing enough, and other young people who were doing nothing. It ate me up, and I lived in an emotional hell.
Then, when I was 21, I decided something was very wrong. I decided that I had to make a fundamental choice. Whether to love life for what it was, or to hate it. To live in judgement, or move into a life of service. For entirely selfish reasons, I opted to live a life of service. I decided I will do my best. Whatever anyone else did, or whatever happened, I could never do more than that. So when I felt angry that I had been let down again, I just accepted it. I no longer wasted my energy with self pity or resentment, but accepted the world as it was, and focused on my objectives. I accepted it as a given, something to be worked with, to be factored in. What I decided was to get up each morning and dedicate myself to making the world a better place. Of course, this did not work perfectly. Whatever does? Even today, I get overwhelming feelings of anger and bitterness. But as soon as I'm able to do so, I do not entertain them. I do not allow myself to think they are me. I can choose, and as soon as I'm able to choose, I choose to move on. What is done is done, each day is a new day.
This is not to say that I think negative emotions are a bad thing. The experience of suffering is vital in order to mature into a person who can understand the sufferings of others. It gives us an opportunity to become stronger. I can handle many things now, because I've handled them in the past. As such then, the experience of suffering provides the basis of fearlessness, which as I have argued, is the key quality of creating political success against the authorities.
Of course, what has worked with me will not work for everyone. Many people will not be able to make the transition to service, either because they get so consumed with hatred, or because they choose another path. But it is fashionable among many young people I see to glorify resentment and find solace in it. I want to challenge whether there is anything good in this. The truth is just because you are reading this you are no better person than those who are planning your deaths. It is just fate that you're in the position you are in. If you were an ‘adult’, most likely you would be acting in the same way as ‘adults’ are now. You're not right just because you're young. You are only right in as much as you act well in life; to the extent that you choose wisely and learn to distinguish between good and bad advice. A good way to discern this is to sense whether someone offering advice is authentic. Do they have a record of effective action? Do they walk their talk?
In what I've spoken about here, I have tried to speak in my own voice. I have not tried to impress you, or be your mate. I am communicating what I know to be the truth. I don't know many things, but I know about effective mobilisation, and how to bring about radical change. It has been my life's work. It's what gets me up in the morning, it's what I think about when I go to bed. I know I'm a bit of a freak in this respect, but I am what I am. Of course, what I have said here is simplified. You will need to read many other materials in order to learn the nuts and bolts. My bluntness is aimed at waking you up to new ways of acting, new ways of being, and how to effectively organise. I do not intend to be rude or disrespectful to anyone in what I am saying. I am not concerned with judging souls, I am concerned with right action. That requires criticism of action which has failed and continues to fail. This is not the time to be sentimental; you must be ruthless, and rapidly adapt what works. The situation you face demands nothing less.
Every day I wake up wishing the situation is not as it is. Nothing would please me more than to be shown I am a fool, that the climate is just an issue, just another thing, just another news item on TV. In fact it is everything, the thing which will kill all our young people. I wish there was lots of time and that we could take it easy, we cannot. It is probably already too late. But there is no point in being self pitying, it does you no good. We know most people can't cope with the truth, we know most people are in denial. In fact, denial is needed to get us up in the morning. But if you get to this point in reading what I have to say, I expect that you are a very special sort of person. Most people bury their heads in the sand ever deeper. They say, “just live for today”. Others will collapse into fatalism, “nothing can be done, all is lost.” You are a very special person for standing between, and above, these mirror images of immorality. On your head, literally on your head, and those like you, falls the task of saving the world. There is no point asking, “Why me? Why us?” We are thrown into this life, and no one has a good answer as to why this has happened. We all know that life is a miracle. No one knows what life is, no one knows how it began. All we know is that it is an exquisite gift that has been given to us. It will take a miracle to save us now, but we know miracles happen. What else is this moment? As you read this, I wish you all the best.
I finish this as the sun is going down and the light is fading through the bars of my cell window. I found out today I'm the only activist in prison. I'm feeling alone and foolish, but I'll go to bed soon, and tomorrow I will carry on. What else is there to do? I will put a smile on my face.
Thank you
Roger Hallam,
October 2019
HMP Wormwood Scrubs