The Rebellion Hypothesis: Crisis, Inaction, and the Question of Civil Disobedience
Many of you will have read about the Extinction Rebellion that has been hitting the streets around the world in recent months. I’ve participated in these non-violent demonstrations, not because I agree with every framing, demand, or detail of this movement, but because I worry that ordinary politics is functioning to sleepwalk us all toward catastrophe. Therefore, I feel we need to experiment with different and creative political strategies given the complete failure in recent decades to stem carbon emissions or the decimation of wildlife populations. Love it or hate it, the Extinction Rebellion is raising issues that cannot be avoided.
This movement raises all sorts of important, complex and often unsettling issues that I am still trying to get my head around. I often feel that I do not understand an issue until I try to write my thoughts down in the hope of clarifying them. I’ve just finished an independent discussion paper that I’ve made available here. It barely scratches the surface of the issues that need to be critically analysed, and I reserve the right to update my position as more evidence and insight emerges, but here is my first attempt to understand the Extinction Rebellion.
The Rebellion Hypothesis: Crisis, Inaction, and the Question of Civil Disobedience.
Excellent article Sam,
Yet I find the notion that “we live in a democracy because we get to vote for a representative” very challenging. Essentially, voting is the mechanism through which we forfeit our right to directly participate in the decision-making.
Accordingly, the XR demands all very interestingly start with ‘Governments must…’
Yet in their declaration (https://rebellion.earth/declaration/), XR have explicitly declared “the bonds of the social contract to be null and void”.
You can’t have it both ways. Do we believe in the current social contract or not? Do we trust that governments will act in our collective interests and those of earth systems or not?
Civil disobedience is an empty threat if it’s just a way of applying pressure on governments to act. Without an alternative social contract that makes the existing one obsolete, disobedience can only be temporary.
In its broadest interpretation, the social contract is the set of agreements we accept as a way of living together. They include both political and economic structures, which are intimately intertwined, in fact two sides of the same coin. There is no new economy possible within the same political structure. We need a new political economy…a new notion of participatory democracy, that allows us all to satisfy our economic needs, while also giving us and all life the opportunity to thrive.