 Okay, everyone, you can come back in. All right, I think everybody is joining us. Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the 7th Stream of School of Resistance, a live stream format that invites experts on change around the world to discuss valuable alternatives for our future and also to create a blueprint for politics of resistance. The project is a collaboration between Ante Gent, IRPM, Académie der Künste Berlin, Kultustiftung des Bundes, and Haarland-Steeder comments. Today's episode is called Environmental repercussions living in a compromised world. When a recent UN report noted that the 47% CO2 emission drop caused by the coronavirus would have to be replicated every year until 2030 in order to control the climate crisis, it seems like the modern world opened Pandora's box. From predictions of mass flooding and waterborne diseases to uninhabitable temperatures and irreparable destruction to biodiversity, visions of the future are bleak. Together with the co-founder of Xynxia Rebellion, Gail Bradbrook, the Canadian philosopher Alexis Shotwell, and the climate justice activist Alice Swift, we are very happy to discuss their strategies of resistance and environmental visions, looking for ways where they converge and reinforce each other. My name is Ilian Banke, and I am very happy and very honored as well to introduce our guests of tonight's conversation. Our first guest is Dr. Gail Bradbrook. She's a co-founder of the Social Movement Xynxia Rebellion, which rapidly spreads internationally since its launch in October 2018. And having been researching, planning, and training for mass civil disobedience already since 2010, and having been arrested for four times for acts of civil disobedience, Gail is a pivotal figure in the world of climate activism. Our second guest for tonight is Alexis Shotwell. She's a professor at Carleton University on unceded Algonquin territory. She's a co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project and author of Knowing Otherwise, Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, and also Against Purity, Living Ethically and Compromised Times. Our third guest for tonight is Alice Swift, and she's a British climate justice activist. She's working on a PhD at the University of Manchester on social reproduction in the European climate movement, mainly focusing on end-to-gallender and UK equivalent reclaim the power. She's interested in how autonomous left infrastructures feeds into protest camps, and how strategies, tactics, and ideology develop and travel between national boundaries. She's a co-founder of the UK fossil free divestment movement and a member of the anti-capitalist organization, Plan C. Before we start this conversation, I quickly want to remind the people of the possibility for them to engage in our conversation by asking questions. For everyone who is watching live on Facebook, for instance, you can comment just on the livestream immediately, or you can also send your questions via email, which you can send to our email address, schoolofresistance.tv, or on Twitter, you can use the hashtag schoolofresistance. Having said all this, I think we can finally maybe start with our conversation. To open up this talk, I would like to quote a talk from one of the essays of Alexis Schottwell I already referred to, namely the essay against purity, living ethically in compromise times. It's an essay in which Alexis questions to believe that in order to live authentically or ethically, one should avoid potentially reprehensible results in our actions. Because, and I quote, we are compromised and we have made compromises and this will continue to be the way we craft the worlds to come, whatever day might turn out to be, sorry. Alexis, could you maybe elaborate on this idea of what do you mean when we say that we are compromised and that our actions are always going to be compromised? And could you maybe also explain how this way of thinking manifests itself in the current climate crisis? Thank you so much for that question and for hosting this. It's a real honor to be here. So I think of being compromised in a couple of different ways. One is we can say that having porous boundaries, not being able to make firm delineations, being vulnerable to the world that we're compromised in that sense. We're not impervious, we're pervious and porous and that's just the basic condition of our life. And when we start thinking about being compromised like that, we can actually feel that that is, allows us a way in to understanding how interdependent we are with the world. So how in the world we are, how of a piece with it we are. So that everything we take in becomes part of us, we're always connected. So we're compromised like that. And actually when we look at it that way, that's a form of being compromised that we can love, that we can feel nourished by. The other way that we're compromised though is that we make compromises. We're complicit in things and really by things here I mean horrific harm, terrible grief striking pain that we would like to not be involved in. So we make compromises in the sense that we are forced to be compromised in our ethical core, our ethical and political core. We are made by this world to not be able to be not complicit. So the being embodied and alive means that if we care about the world on some level, we're already hypocrites. And this is a favorite point for people who are actively excited that the world is ending, who are profiting from the devastation of the world, who feel like they can distribute the harm and death away from them. When we who care about the world say, I care about the world, they will say, but you're such a hypocrite, you drove a car or it turns out that lamb is better for this particular bio region to eat than you can't grow soybeans in Ireland, right? So in my work, one of the things that I'm very interested in is asking, what happens if we start from the view that we're complicit and compromised and we cannot be pure? What happens if we say aiming for purity is actually the problem? And we take every place at which we're complicit and we use that as an anchor point for action and as a place to get traction. So every place that we know we want this world to be otherwise, maybe we can start there. So that's how I think about compromise. And I know we're gonna talk more about it but to give away what I think is the like how or next, the only way we can do that is by acting collectively. Like individual purity and action isn't ever going to help us or this world. So the way that it's so wonderful to be here with folks who are actively connecting with Plancy and with XR is just these are some of the models for how we're thinking about refusing individual purity and committing to collective action. Yes, I would like to pick up on this idea actually of this collective action of this envisioning how the world could be differently by going to our two climate activists to Alice and Gail looking at this idea of being compromised and our actions potentially having reprehensible results. My questions to you would be how you'd react on this thought of and if you could perhaps also illustrate how this manifests in your own methodology, what your activism in order to fight fossil capitalism what it looks like. I don't know if one of you wants to start, go ahead. Yeah, I can start. Thank you for sharing that so beautifully and I'm really enjoying the female energy in this space somehow as part of that. I've been fortunate to be coached and working alongside Mickey Cash-Tan, M-I-K-I Cash-Tan if people have come across her work and to think about patriarchy as showing up as the mentality of scarcity, of separation and of powerlessness gives me a check for where I'm at with respect to feeling compromised with respect to relating to other people because I mean, I think many of us who've been on the journey of activism well, I'm just gonna own my own side. I've certainly been in that space of feeling quite self-righteous and judgmental and all the rest of it and then feeling judged and not good enough. It's all of these things create separation between us. And I think that another way of saying what Alexis was saying is that we're all deeply traumatized by the world that we're living in. Some of us have got specific traumas but the trauma is like an ongoing thing. It's not just like childhood trauma. So how do we respond in living in such a world? I mean, again, another way Mickey put it that I found really helpful was to do purpose med trauma healing. So if we have a purpose to work with a certain group in a certain way or focus on climate justice in a certain whatever it is, what's in the way of us showing up in the best possible way what element of our trauma is showing up? Which could include white racism. It could include feeling small as a working class woman or whatever it is. So there's opportunities to work there as individuals. And I think that's another piece from Mickey's work is the both and rather than the either or. There's so much on the progressive left that comes at us as an either or. And it's immediately in separation. So either you're saying this or you're saying that what if we can have more both ends? So as an example, part of extinction rebellion comes from some of us who have a more spiritual leaning. And I know that that can really show up as like indulgence. It looks very indulgent. So where's the place where it's both ends? Where we can do our trauma work whilst keeping the focus on the activism. Did you see what I mean? So the and the other place that I lean into with Mickey is thinking that when we're working against patriarchy it involves vulnerability. It involves tenderness for each other and mourning for what we get wrong, really grieving for what we get wrong. And I think that that's part of what we've tried to build into some of the ways that we work together in extinction rebellion. And I'm not trying to pretend we get it right, but yeah, thank you. Yeah, could I come back or feedback on some of those things? So yeah, I'm really glad that you're mentioning, patriarchy and whites structures and stuff like that. Because I think, I mean, you'll be the first to know about the intense amount of criticism that extinction rebellion has received. And I guess when I, sorry, I'm very critical of extinction rebellion. And I just wanna kind of come with some clarity which is that I have a level of critical engagement with extinction rebellion. So I think kind of, you know, on the spectrum of like environmental activists or other activists relationship to extinction rebellion, you've kind of got the people that have found a new home with it and have just gone headfirst into it. You've got the people on the other side who won't touch it with a barge pole. And I'm somewhere in the middle which is like a level of critical engagement. And I guess the thing is that like, it comes from a sense of love, it comes from a sense of, you know, we're fighting the same fight, we're fighting for the same things. It seems or that's how I believe it to be the case. And I wanna recognize the incredible work that extinction rebellion has done in activating a whole layer of people that weren't previously involved with the climate struggle with ecological struggle. And I think this comes back to the notion of purity politics and kind of individualism. And one of the things that I really wanna give extinction rebellion a lot of kudos for is kind of, I think what's been so fantastic to see is in the huge mobilization effort that, you know, you and others and other people, you know, doing the kind of the talk going around the UK, you know, extinction and what to do about it. So I think it's something to that effect. What has been so fantastic about that is I think you've really positively tapped into a lot of the preexisting environmental kind of scenes or communities that exist within the UK in terms of really making that cognitive shift for a lot of people in going, okay, you know, as much as you're like gardening project or you know, you cycling lots is a really good thing. There is a limit to the extent to which an individual lifestyle change can really affect change. And I think that that cognitive shift that's been achieved with extinction rebellion is one that is incredibly valuable for the climate movement and the climate movement internationally. I'd say most particularly in the UK, but it's that shift away from like the purity politics, the individual lifestyleism to a recognition that in order to achieve change within our economy and our society and our political sphere that we need collective action. And so I really want to make that really clear that I'm really grateful for XR with that. It's essentially a game changer for the climate movement. And I think that a lot of climate activists like me that have been involved for a long time, I've been a climate activist for 10 years, we're having to like recalibrate in relation to XR because there's so much that has been achieved. But by the same token, I think, and I also, I want to give credit where credit is due. XR is being reflexive enough, or well, perhaps not enough in my opinion, but it is being reflexive in talking about other systems of oppression like, you know, patriarchal social relations or racist social relations. But I guess the problem is that when the kind of the notion that we kind of the theory of change that is based on the 3.5% rule of Stefan and Chenoweth, it really kind of has manifested in a way that valorizes just a kind of very scientific understanding of climate change and devoid from the social realities that have created it, namely fossil fuel capitalism and the way it intersects with race and gender and all of those things. And so I guess my concern is with making a lot of those mistakes where there's potential for joining up or where there's been potential for actually connecting struggles, a lot of those bridges already seem to have been burned. And I guess that's, yeah, as someone that's looking as an outsider into XR, it's deeply concerning. And I think, you know, XR, if you, then that language of XR talks about the structure, the structure of society, the structure, oh no, no, sorry, not the structure, the system, the system of society, the system. But if you go to an XR activist and you ask them, what is the system? There'll be a plethora of whole different responses. You know, what is the system that it is that you're pointing to? Some people will say it's overconsumption. Some people will say that it's, you know, the system of our democracy or government or whatever. Some people will say whatever. But for me, really the overarching thing is it's a capitalist system and a climate justice oriented approach necessarily looks at the way in which the climate crisis is a manifestation of the fossil capitalist system, that it's a fossil capitalist system that's got us here in first place. And that we can't understand the injustice of climate change unless we look at the injustice climate change distributes onto people of the global south of working class communities in the global north and the global south, the people of color, black and minority ethnic people are the worst to suffer. And when those intersections aren't deliberately played out for fear of putting people off, for fear of it's too radical, people can't understand, I think you end up doing a disservice to these people that you've really had this cognitive shift, you know? Like, it's an appreciation of how clever people can be to understand, A, the severity of the climate crisis, the urgency of it, and then B, recognize they need to be part of a social movement. And I guess where I stand is that they haven't completed that journey, they're still at the beginning of that journey and that necessarily the kind of logical conclusion of that journey is recognizing how climate change is inextricably linked to capitalism, to patriarchal social relations, to racism, and that we can't understand the climate crisis without understanding those things as well. And certainly that's the approach that Reclaim the Power takes, and the approach that Endo Glenda takes is a very much climate justice oriented mode of thinking about the crisis and a mode of operating as well. So for instance, in Reclaim the Power, oh, sorry. Well, just because I want to ask about this because my collective here in the Canadian context, when we read Plan C, and this is also something maybe for Gail, and I don't know enough about Reclaim the Power, so I wanna hear this. But here we've spent a lot of time reflecting on what is different in the Canadian context about how we think about what the system is, right? So I'm part of an anarchist collective, tiny one called Punch Up, aside from being an academic. And we said, well, you know, one of the things that is absolutely different about reading this here, if we were trying to be Plan C, if we were trying to write this here in the North American context, we would identify colonialism and border imperialism as the sort of like, or maybe colonialism, capitalism, and border imperialism as the intertwining. We could not think about it separate from indigenous resistance and indigenous sovereignty. And so one of the things that I think about a lot is how the places that we're organizing and the work that we do open the space for critique and loving critique, right? So, and so I just, I wonder if both of you actually can talk a little bit about doing this thinking and this organizing, I guess in the context of Europe, right? As a place that is, I mean, it's like central to benefits from and separate from resource extraction in a particular way, right? So if we think about flows of harm and flows of capital, I really love not being North American centric and I think about, or just American centric actually, like all of the Americas. And I think that colonialism shows up differently in how we're thinking about complicity. And so I'd love to think about that or hear you say something about that in relation to reclaim the power or in relation to XR. Sorry to jump in. Can I respond? Is that, yeah? Because it's great to just come to say just on that last point, Alexie, I mean, you know, the Financial Secrecy Index from the Tax Justice Network is a very detailed methodology for working out where corruption services are centred in the world and they're centred in the UK with the biggest providers. If you include our overseas territories and crown dependencies for the Cayman Islands at the top of the list, US a second, Switzerland third and so on, but when you add it all up, we're the biggest. So like, you know, I mean, and the reparations payments only finished in 2015, you know, for slave owners. So it's really so super current colonialism. I mean, you know, God, Alex, there's so much that I wanna respond to and I'm really like wanting to check in with my body around what I was saying about vulnerability and about separation. Cause like, obviously this part of me just wants to be in totally like defensive mode as well. Before XR got going, we started this thing called rising up that you probably know about. And I was part of reclaimed the power in terms of, you know, the anti-fracking actions and so on. And we called strategy meetings. And, you know, when you're like yet another nobody, nobody comes to these things or they're not, you know, it was like, we asked Mr. Duncan BNM and let's have us, you know, where's the strategy here? And we were very deliberate in trying to pick a different form of language. And that would not be like the kind of left bubble echo chamber language that many of us would recognize, but other people would bounce off of. And I want to mention before I go on another brilliant piece, I don't know if I'm wearing the Mickey cash down thank you today, but called convergent facilitation, which is a process by which we find the non-controversial lessons in what we're trying to do and bring it together. And I think the mistake of XR was to try and do something for strategic and tactical reasons. And that set aside the sort of moral point of owning our colonial history talking about the economic system. I've just put two things in the chat channel, by the way, I hope you really like money rebellion if you haven't come across it yet. And you'll see the other one, hella stick theories is older, but it's more detailed in terms of my thinking about the different theories of change that are going off at the same time. But yeah, I think that two things ended up have felt separated and most clearly in the US where there's been a kind of fight. And I don't particularly want to comment on it because I'm not there and I'm not over all the detail of it, but about a fourth demand and other people saying we want to really make sure the third demand is clear that it's like the third demand in XR is about citizens assembly. It's like Greek, early forms of Greek democracy. It's like completely radical, but it sounds, I mean, I'm careful what I say online because I just know somebody will grab the footage and you know, it's really radical, the third demand anyway. But it sounds reasonable because it is as well because actually radicals talk to really reasonable. And so we pick our language pretty carefully, right? And I think the thing again about the both and is and I mentioned convergent facilitation, how do we bring these parts of ourselves together and weave them back together again so that we meet clearly all the different requirements of a movement, especially frankly, a movement that built in a country that's deeply racist that hasn't done its work. It hasn't, the environmental movement hasn't done its work. And by the way, a defensive thing to say we have run about a hundred workshops in XR UK on decolonialization, anti-oppression and so on. And right from the start, we set up XR International Solidarity Network whereby something like 20% of the crowd funder and there's been about sharing across the world but it's been shared led by the stop them at Angamizie folks. You say this stuff and you think, we haven't really gone on about it before because it sort of sounds like virtue signalling. And you know, anyway, it's a tricky space to think clearly about because to take the capitalism point, right? And you'll see with money rebellion you won't hear me saying I'm anti-capitalist and the reason is, I just, I think it creates polarity because people think, okay, anti-capitalist, you're against businesses. You think markets are always a bad thing. And then another point would be there's a whole pile of people who see neoliberalism as a completely corrupted form. It's not an economic system anymore. I mean, I think it's the logical direction that capitalism is gonna go into. But for some, it's a question of corruption and well, if we would internalize the externalities of the economics, we could still have some form of market system. Anyway, the point I'm really trying to make is there's nuance in that conversation. And if there's like a line down the middle of the screen where like there's people who think they're anti-capitalist and people who think they're pro, the conversation that happens here is interesting. When it gets over here, it gets into like true polarity. And what I think is what we're calling for in extinction rebellion is a global citizens assembly and assemblies at other levels to rewire humanity. I mean, I actually got a team working on that at the minute to rewire the political economy and have like the phrase I use is the grown-up conversation about it. So it's like, how do we talk about these things in a way that brings more togetherness including operating within a racist world? And so Alice, just from what you were saying, and I don't know if you've seen money rebellion stuff but that progression's there in terms of talking about the next step. It's been our strategy from the start of the year is to talk about systemic issues. And we have to bring people with us. And then we need to pick our language carefully in my opinion. So I hope that made sense anyway. Can I come back on that? So yeah, I think it's interesting, isn't it? And I think that often extinction rebellion, it's, you know, you say about togetherness and you say about picking your language carefully and certainly, you know, I feel a sense of inauthenticity a lot of the time with regards to what the leaders of extinction rebellion or the spokespeople of extinction rebellion say and then what they think. And I think that I find that difficult because it's like, okay, I know Roger Hallam is saying this because he's hoping XYZ will come about as a result of this rather than what he actually thinks rather than what his, you know, his authentic self would actually determine. And I think that sometimes when we seek togetherness above everything else, we actually, we favor some people in society over others unintentionally. And so when you have a language which is kind of universal, okay, we can't be explicitly anti-capitalist. In fact, we're gonna be explicitly anti-the anti-capitalists as with a recent tweet. Then you're putting off a whole swathe of anti-capitalists that may be involved with extinction rebellion. And the same goes for race and justice issues. And I really appreciate the responsiveness, that reflexiveness that's happened with the extinction rebellion, but by the same token, you know, of saying, okay, we're gonna reach this kind of universality, this togetherness. Who is it inadvertently that you're putting off or you're not able to make those connections with without a recognition of, you know, what that togetherness might entail like a privileging of the white middle class environmental activist as opposed to someone that might be black or minority ethnic and can't put themselves in the firing line when it comes to police. Or, you know, when they would feel deeply uncomfortable with making the chance to the police saying that we love you, we love you, we do this for your children too. And so I think sometimes in the seeking of togetherness we can actually inadvertently put other people off. And I think that when it comes to anti-capitalism, you know, I'm a millennial, I'll be 30 in a couple of months time. And a recent survey said, and this is the same Alexis in North America that of like over 50% of millennials are anti-capitalist and socialists. And there is that appetite, there is that notion there of what, you know, the way in which they have an anti-capitalist ideology. And I think that by actively dismissing that or actively saying, no, we're not anti-capitalist. We don't support this banner that says socialism or extinction. You're actively putting off those people that might otherwise be involved and also increase the diversity and the plurality and the heterogeneity of the movement. And I think polarity isn't something that should necessarily be a negative thing. I don't think polarity needs to be a negative thing. I think that polars attract, right? That's how they operate, like polars attract. And I think in, you know, the 3.5% rule of we have to get a certain amount of people activated within the population to achieve significant change. I think it often then manifests in a way that seeks this togetherness above and beyond a kind of authenticity, a kind of a recognition of the way that climate intersects with, you know, race class, class, patriarchy and capital. And I think that, you know, it's certainly in the UK context. This argument holds a lot of saliency, right? And lots of, I hear it from lots of XR actors sort of the time, or we can't be explicit in this way because we'll put people off. And it's a numbers game. We have to have mass mobilization, right? And I think if I'd never been out of the UK environmentalist context, I'd probably believe the same. But the thing is that end of the calendar in Germany, it's become the largest mobilization of people taking direct action for climate justice in Europe, potentially the world, but we're not sure about that, but certainly within Europe. So, I mean, last year alone in June, there were 7,000 people at camp and they're not people mobilized to shut down central, you know, business districts and streets in capital cities. They're people mobilized to physically break through police lines and shut down fossil capitalist infrastructure at the source. And so I think that it's, you know, I appreciate the togetherness and I appreciate that aspect, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that we don't need to have a kind of universality or saliency to every single person on the political spectrum in order to achieve those numbers. Those numbers can be achieved in a determined, deterministically radical and intersectional way with a climate justice focus. And there's been clear examples of that. And it's not just end of the calendar as well. The Italian climate camp movement, they had their first climate camp last year and they've had their second one and over a thousand people ready to take on fossil fuel infrastructure. And it's so empowering and so inspiring to be part of these movements and do so in a way that I know that I can be my authentic self. I know that I can like have kind of, you know, go to the source of a fossil capital. And I think that with the strategy of shutting down lots of roads in capital cities, that's an interesting approach. And certainly it works to garner the media's attention initially, but I'm sure you'd appreciate as well that the media attention has gone down somewhat and that if you kind of keep replicating the same strategy, then the media, the way that the media operates, they go off it after a while, don't they? And it amounts to me, not a really true sense of the word of nonviolent direct action in that it's an elaborate petitioning of the government for the government to meet these demands. Now, when we recognize that the government goes hand in hand with fossil capital and works to service them, then we know that like, even the most elaborate of petitioning of government isn't necessarily going to achieve the change that we need to see. And so I guess that's why with reclaim the power and end the glender and lots of these climate justice movements, they take the direct side of the direct action to its logical conclusion, which is to go right to the very source. So that is fossil fuel infrastructure, the head slightly central offices of the companies doing this ecocidal destruction and acting in that way. And so I think that, yeah, kind of going back to the togetherness, like I feel a great sense of togetherness with the people that I know we can, we have an incredible sense of togetherness at end of the lender because we have this such an intense shared sense of purpose and being part of the internationals of there. I know that English might be a second language for people and they don't even understand it very well in some cases, but yet we have such a clarity and purpose, such an intense sense of togetherness that allows us to take on fossil capital right at the very source and do so in a way that is incredible and beautiful and wonderful. And I feel such a sense of empowerment and togetherness to be part of a radical explicitly anti-capitalist climate justice movement. Could I maybe quickly jump in here because I really like your talking about like all different approaches because it is of course, it's a question, how you put these thoughts and these beliefs and these practice into practice. And that's also like something that I want to pick up because another talk that I got when I was reading your essay, Alexis, against the, against purity one, you wrote, and I quote, purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing paradoxical politics of despair. I think this also connects to this idea of togetherness as well, whereas you say that this politics of purism is actually doing the complete opposite. Yet I do think that this feeling of despair is also very sincere feeling when it comes to climate change. I think we all sometimes feel grief and anger and fear as well when we see the likely societal collapse that is nearing, that is coming closer. But I was wondering how if you could suggest somehow we can create a politics that does recognize these feelings of grief, anger, despair, yet also manages to go beyond this to not create this de-mobilization and this sense of maybe helplessness. Yeah, I mean, sure, I'm happy to say something about that. And I'm thinking about it in relation to this very important conversation that's happening. So I sort of don't want to take us too far off that conversation. So I'll say something and see if it connects. Because I think a lot of the time when we're looking at what sometimes is talked about as the difference between vanguardism or volunteerism and collective organizing, some of the threads of conversation that are happening between Alice and Gail are also showing up there, right? Do we need to have just a small number of people who do the right thing and what counts as a small or a large number of people? And do we have a crew? So vanguardism as an approach from sort of Maoism, Stalinism. Like, do we have just a few people who are really educated in the issues, fully understand the complexity of everything and they lay the line for the, as Lenin said, the brick layers to make a straight wall. Or do we have an approach that is grounding itself in a kind of collective wisdom, collective possibility? I'm personally a really super anti-vanguardist thinker. I think we do best to trust that people are intelligent, although frequently misled or misguided or undereducated. So I believe in education and the possibility of transformation so much. And I also believe in starting from where people are. And I believe in identifying an enemy and not pretending that we don't have enemies. I think all of us here agree. We have enemies, they hate us. Like, and personally I can have a feeling of like, well, I actually am working for a world in which things are better. And so it doesn't matter to me that white supremacists hate me. I welcome their hatred, right? And I'm interested in it. For a lot of people, like all of us, we look and it's like everything is so awful. As soon as you start looking, it just brings tears to your eyes. And many of us can respond to that by organizing, right? By coming together. And I think for people, I started thinking about political despair and political purity as a form of despair because I had a lot of friends, comrades who had done really intense wonderful activist work for many years. So I've been organizing for 25 years. And I saw a lot of people who were like, I did all this stuff and it didn't work. And now I'm just gonna try to find a nice place to live out the collapse of civilization. I'm going off grid, I'm learning to do these various things. And when I think about that impulse as a purity move and as a thing that actually just produces more despair, the thing that I'm interested in there is how can we look at every instance where we want to take seriously and be authentic and truthful about how bad things are and use that as a point of connection and as a way to invite something, invite some kind of movement. So I'm very interested in being really honest with each other about what's different and how we organize and how we analyze. And I'm very interested in how we can do that in a way that sparks this possibility of saying we're gonna oppose anything that de-collectivizes. We're gonna oppose anything that demobilizes. We're gonna oppose anything that produces more despair. Now, I really do think like here in Ottawa some of the deepest fights that climate justice activists have had have been around the question, exactly these questions. So these are shared, you know, everywhere around the question of do we shut down the bridge downtown or do we go and shut down the places where you can turn off oil pipelines are actually pretty easy to get to. Do we shut down the bridge downtown? Do we shut down the oil pipeline? Do we shut down the rail that's shipping? So the question always for me is if we start from this approach that we don't actually know and we're not gonna pretend that we're always right. Like in fact, we're gonna start from being like probably we're getting a lot of stuff wrong but let's ask who's our shared enemy? Who can we stand in solidarity with? Where that quality of solidarity is how can we recognize reaching together across a difference and across fucking up as the ground for action? Like I actually feel like those two things together get us a long way. And I guess like I was like just here I was sort of feeling like I feel kind of uncomfortable. Like I want Gail and Alice who I literally have never met before today to like be happy together. And then I was feeling like, no, how great it is that we can have these kind of sparky interchanges that take seriously what world are we working on here? What shared world are we working for? Anyway, that rambled, I'm sorry, yeah. Fine, thank you. I appreciated what you were saying because I think it's going back to what I was trying to say about the both and rather than the either or I did start to experience that what you were saying, Alice, even there's so many threads in it. It's hard to grab, we would need a five hour conversation to go through them and talk in more detail. I think so I'm more, and I could speak to some of them but more sitting in that place where it's sort of we've been set up as this either or like it feels like a battle starts to feel like a battle and feel it in my body. It's like, you know, and I don't, you know, what Kofi speaks about who runs our XRISN work is like the broad canopy to come under the shade of a tree together and not expect us all to have the same sense of theory of change or what our particular purpose and role is or what the best strategy or tactics going to be. And I don't, well, I certainly for myself wouldn't say that I speak in inauthentic ways, by the way, I don't recognize that if anything, I'm just occasionally trying to think how it might play out if it got into, you know, like my name's been all over Breitbart, the press have been at my sister's house, my mum's house, you know, my kid's house, it's, there's a little bit of protection around how I say things, because I just know it's going to blow up. I know the media team will have a job on and so on, you know, so if you and I was having a chat, I'd talk differently to something that's being recorded. There's a bit of that going off that soil and it's just as a self-protection in it, a protection of teams and so on. But I think that I'm sort of interested in the, in this, both the chaos that we're experiencing right now, I mean, like, there's these conversations to be had and I don't want to use the word togetherness that sort of trying to smooth over some like really different senses of how to go about things or, you know, some of the things that you're raising Alice that are concerns about who feels like they can join under that canopy, you know, who feels like that's just not my place, you know, these indulgent white people just don't get it, whatever. I honestly understand I'm looking at the world and looking at, you know, the QAnon conspiracies, just how rapidly that's mobilizing people. I'm looking at the opportunity of the social dilemma on Netflix at the minute. That's, you know, finally at the end of that film, I don't know if you've seen it yet, but talks about the business model. I didn't use the C word, but they do talk about the business model, like the money that basically the social dilemma is about the weaponization of tech to destroy our democracy and the people that actually created the weapons and didn't really fully realize what they were doing and the horror of what they've done. It's a really interesting space that's been opened by that place. The QAnon conspiracy and so many of us watching our friends sharing pandemic videos or whatever, you know, my understanding is that this system that we're in is going into, descending into hell. I mean, in fact, to my mind, fascism's here already. And it's been very cleverly worked. I mean, I was not interested, I was talking to a friend today about whether Trump's actually got COVID, you know, or this is like a mechanism for, it's a trick anyway. Who knows? In these times, like what seeds are we sowing? You know, what seeds are we sowing for the changes that we want in our democratic, I mean, we don't have a function in democracy as far as I'm concerned, but this is the whole point of saying about citizens assemblies and to try and talk to that disarray and that confusion and that deliberate setting people up to not be able to make sense of the world anymore to think that, you know, somebody who's got legitimate, in my view anyway, concerns about vaccines suddenly are like on the streets with the far right, you know, this is what's happening and it's gonna come in the UK and like rapid fire, it's building really quickly. And I think we have to look at this time in terms of what we need to be saying and how to say it in a way that will bring the mass, a big body of people around a new form of democracy. Can I respond to a couple of those things? Yeah, so I think it's really interesting and I have deep concerns about the QAnon conspiracy stuff. And I guess what I've seen as well, so living in the colder valley where I live in Yorkshire near Hebden Bridge is a lot of people that would, well, have been historically involved in the environmental movement. So things like Earth First or, you know, road protests or things like that, that would have been, that were involved. And I guess, you know, kind of going back to what you were saying, Alexis, people that have found such a level of despair that it's more about creating their little corner of the world to exist in and to kind of live off the grid as much as possible and kind of take environmental lifestyleism to its logical conclusion, which is just kind of looking out for your own and being in a space that, you know, you can say is the most ecologically sustainable or whatever, you know? And I'm not saying that everyone in that area is like that at all, but there are quite a few people that I would put down as people believing things like that that have then gone on to believe the Q and on conspiracy theory stuff. And I guess that this is, I would say, part of the problem with not having a coherent ideology or a coherent set of politics, if in fact having a politics that is to say that we're beyond politics or, you know, we don't do politics or whatever, you know? I think that that can very easily the cosmic left or, you know, that kind of level of spirituality, unfortunately can be co-opted really easily by the right. And we're seeing that and it's gravely concerning because people that have been historically involved in environmental struggles, and I would put kind of as latent people amongst a counterculture attached to environmentalism are very quickly going down this route. And so I think that's kind of the danger of an incoherent ideology. That's the danger in which it can go down as if you don't have a politics. And I remember having, I had a conflict, an argument with someone who in Hebden Bridge, she wouldn't shake my, sorry, I wouldn't shake her hand. She offered me her hand. I wouldn't shake her hand because of coronavirus. And she got really upset with me for believing in coronavirus and demanding to know who I knew that had died of coronavirus and of which I said a friend, a father, unfortunately had passed away and it's deeply sad. But she, yes, when she asked me what sources I was looking at, what my media was. And when I said that Navarra Media, I left the media channel in the UK, she said, that's your problem. That's your problem is politics, is politics. And I think that there is a big crossover between the notion that XR has of being beyond politics or we don't have a politics. And it kind of gives leverage, it gives, yeah, a legitimacy to people that kind of have that persuasion anyway or perhaps are kind of going down that route in not having a thorough politics. And it's deeply concerning. And I mean, if I'm being fully charitable to XR, beyond politics, I see as a canny slogan to say this is beyond parliamentary politics, right? When we're being charitable, when I'm being charitable. But unfortunately, I think that a lot of people then take that as red to be, okay, well, that's politics per se, that's all politics. And when we kind of reinforce people's notion that politics is only about parliament and nothing else, it's just about parliamentary politics. And we don't recognize the thing that most first year politics students are taught the first day that they do politics as an undergrad, which is politics is about power. And when we think about power and we think about climate injustice and we can't look at climate injustice without looking at power and we can't look at it without looking at politics. And so, yeah, I guess, I mean, Gail, unfortunately, I, you know, it doesn't surprise me that you have friends on Facebook that are sharing conspiracy theory stuff because I think a lot of Gen X people are and I'm glad that I don't, but it is worrying because, you know, we're fighting this same struggle and we're on the same side and yet people are slipping into the right and that is of great concern. And I think that when you try and appeal across the political spectrum and actively try and cultivate appeal from the right with the notions of familyhood and the notions of like generational entitlements and things like that, I think that it can play into the right very easily. And I mean, as I was part of a survey recently, we did a survey of extinction rebellion activists. So quantitative research survey, me and some other academics and we surveyed lots of people at extinction rebellion protests and lo and behold, I mean, it's no surprise to me but most XR activists were above average involved in the Green Party and the Labour Party. And I don't think that would come as a surprise to you either, Gail. But I think it really shows or is testament to the fact that the strategy or the approach of being universal across the political spectrum and indeed not having a politics at all hasn't actually successfully mobilized people from the right or even like a great deal from the centre ground, people that were kind of a bit lefty anyway. And when we look at the demographic reality of XR, that is the case. So I don't know why there's that need to appeal to the right there, climate skeptics anyway. Like I'm not interested as Alexis was saying in appealing to those kinds of people. So yeah. Just to clarify, I mean, beyond politics is exactly about beyond party politics. And our third demand is about citizens assemblies, right? I mean, this is the whole point of a citizens assembly is it's demographically representative of the country. Global citizens assembly would have very few people with my skin colour on it. You know, that's where we're aiming for. It's absolutely political. Nobody's saying it's not political. The politics is coming from what I would say is to use one phrase is like the sort of emergence of teal thinking in these times or integral thinking. So moving beyond the sort of green, progressive left into sort of trying to look down, look at different value structures as politicians have done and to understand that that shows that, you know. So for example, you know, I might I've a working class family background. My dad was a minor, the sort of, you know, you come with a I'm getting a little bit, I'm just sitting in defensiveness. I don't really appreciate, I don't really want to do that. And I've been on XR stuff where people put climate change is a is a class issue and I've gone, oh, you know, like I give a fuck beyond I can express what's happened to my community and so on. I just don't think it works on the banner. You know, I just don't think it helps. So it's like not so much of this is is tactical. But anyway, the the the the the the the the piece around bringing in citizens assemblies as like as a it's like supreme authorities is like as bad as radical as you can get. That's why I don't understand about the critiquing of beyond politics because we want a citizen's assembly want people ordinary people to decide, you know, it's it's like and this whole left right thing is because actually in reality many people are different, but it's not a line is it's not many of it's in three dimensions. So but I'm you know, I'm I'm just not feeling that that form of conversation is it is like a lot of information and you just end up moving into sort of defensiveness really. I mean, what I really want to do is not obviously not time here, but is is talk about what's what, you know, what is the strategy around resisting what's happening, which is the descent into fascism, like you might not think XR strategy is correct. But it's what's happening at the minute, isn't it? So whatever strategies the progressive left are doing at the minute, I don't think they're working. You know, so we've tried something different. Let's get the data on that what's useful, what's not. You know, Rodgers set up a different radical flank called Burning Pink. That's what he's up to at the minute. Like, what's the, you know, what do we need to do next? I think it's like to wanting to come at that conversation, not in defense mode, but in humility mode of like, actually, you know, it's not fucking working, is it? Like, and I don't I don't think it's because we haven't done enough of one thing that we've been trying for years, which is to bang on about, you know, a particular ideology when all the money is captured or the think tanks and all the rest of it. And it's, you know, anyway, I think there's a lot of tactics to discuss here, frankly. I want to take use of this opportunity because we received the question as well from the audience. And it also connects it is politics and also the feeling of despair because the person in the audience asks us how we can connect the struggles of the refugees and their fights with environmental activism, which is, of course, something this discussion has already touched upon. But this person would like to know how we can connect it and what it would lead to. If some of you could, yeah. So I can, I could come on that because reclaimed power last year, we organized our camp Power Beyond Borders and it was explicitly organized to connect climate justice with migrant justice and the intersections between race and climate. And so, and I think this comes down to, you know, our differing theories of change, Gail, it's like, you know, my theory of change is that kind of, if you silo off the movements, then you're not connecting and you're not achieving that overall change. And when you appreciate the intersectionalities, you can actively join with other movements. And so if you join with more and more movements, then you can achieve like a great level of change in actively cultivating those, you know, working together. So that's what we did at Reclaimed the Power last year. As we said, okay, you know, we really want to be really clear in how the migrant struggle is part of the same struggle of climate injustice and that, you know, with migration, when migrants come to the UK, I can only speak about the UK context is that they're faced with a horrible hostile environment, people will be detained, people will be deported. And we set up the Power Beyond Borders camp in relation to the Stansted 15 struggle, which was to take direct action in solidarity with migrants and to stop a flight taking off that was due to deport migrants. And so in deciding that we wanted to do this and deciding, okay, we have this desire and wants to connect struggles, it wasn't a case of, okay, like, how do we get them to come to us? You know, how do we get our movement to be more like diverse or get, you know, migrant stuff within our movement and within our protest camp and our actions and stuff? It wasn't done in that way. The way that we went about it was go, okay, what is it that we can offer to migrants and migrant solidarity groups and anti-racist groups? What are our skills that we have? What is in our repertoire that we can actively offer and say, take your pick. What is it that we can help you with in recognising that, you know, it can be a very privileged position for a non-white person to be on a protest camp or to do a direct action and things like that. So when we did that really delicate and quite long-winded work of like making sure that we were completely aware of the environmental movement's history of kind of white supremacy and facting in an inadvertently racist way. And when we recognise that and when we offer something, then we can work together on this. And when we work together on this, we can build a much bigger and a much more robust movement. And so we had two days of action at Power Beyond Borders. We had an action outside the home office, which was to say that the hostile environment is racist. That this is treating people in a really inhumane way. And then the second day we did an action against fossil gas. And the whole point of the camp was linking the two together and saying, okay, what are the commonalities? Well, the commonality between fighting against ecocidal fossil fuel capitalism and the commonality with fighting against racist white supremacist capitalism is capitalism, right? That's the common denominator. That's the way that we are linked together. And when we recognise that the reason why the global south is gonna be the worst effective with climate change and why there's wars that we've created in the Middle Eastern elsewhere as like a British empire and why there's such material inequality. It's not an unhappy accident of human history. It's because of colonialism and colonial capitalism that's created this situation and will mean that people in the global south are gonna be the worst effective, not as an unhappy result of geography, but because this has been a system that has been in place for hundreds of years. And so when we recognise that and we were able to do so and reach out to those groups and actively collaborate, we had the most diverse climate camp I've ever seen and I've been in the movement for 10 years and it was incredible because you, I think too often as white activists, you bang on about, oh, you know, or like there's just too many white people or whatever. It's like, okay, well, what are you gonna do about it then? Are you gonna expect people to come to you or are you gonna go to people, hat in hand and say, okay, what is it that we can offer you? And I think that that was really good and I'm really glad that we did that. And for me, that's what my theory of change is. It's connecting those struggles and finding the common denominator, which is capitalism. I think Gail maybe also wants to address a question that that was asked because you already referred to it. You already referred to the exchange rebellion, money rebellion tactics early in the beginning of the conversation. You were so welcome to share the link in our Zoom chat. Of course, the people following the livestream might not be able to see that, but could you maybe expand a bit on that? Sure, yeah. Thanks. And I had to share joy in that way, Alice. This August at the reparations groundings in Brixton, where I feel like I've just virtue signals by saying even that really, I mean, I agree. So we're pivoting now to something called money rebellion, which is to look at the different forms of resistances that we can do and to look at economics of disobedience. I mean, Alice was talking, I think, a lot about physical counter power that we can use when we can do blockades. And obviously they tend to be not always, but sometimes symbolic, like that happened for a day or wherever we've got a lot of XR activists at HS2 sites at the minute in the UK, the anti-fracking movement in the UK, I think, and other factors, but it was successful in stopping that industry. That's physical counter power. There's the idea counter power when you do things that shift people's sense of things, watching rabbis and scientists and whatever being carted off and arrested has been part of what shifted the conversation in the world. So economic counter power is really tricky to achieve as far as I understand. Again, I'd be interested in Alexis analysis view on this, but certainly in the UK, the trade unions have had their teeth removed over many years, organizing strike actions that are really difficult. Some of us, many of us work for ourselves or work on contracts that are zero hours and so on. So the idea with money rebellion is looking at the opportunities around tax and debt and resistances therein. So I've shared a video that gives something of the background and I think Alice, you'll be mostly reassured when you, if you take the time, if you have the time to watch that, you won't be entirely, there'll be things that I'll know you, I'm sure, but I'll leave you my email, maybe we could talk some more. So the sort of, you know, the analysis of growthism, of the profit motive and so on. So then in terms of tactics, there are a few things, the sort of foundational tactic is what you'd call a conditional commitment, which is would you do this if other people would join you? So would you not pay your council tax in a specific area for the people to join you or would you not pay your mortgage debt? And then everybody's got mortgage debts if other people would join you. So like, would it be 5,000 people, 10,000, 50,000? And because of the scale of XR and we have this software called Call Hub, you can get on and phone people up and ask those questions so we can build up the threat in that way. Some of the sort of, when you talked about vanguards in Alexis, I'm not sure, I fully understood that it'd be interesting to hear more, but what I mean by vanguard actually is an action that's a demonstrator that kind of wets the appetite, if you see what I mean. So the vanguard actions that we're looking at at the minute, one is where we're taking out credit cards with certain banks. And again, it's a use of privilege point Alice, but I'm making reparations on behalf of that bank by making donations at the minutes to survival international. It could be also the Acacia School in High Wickham. I've been talking to those, it's a complimentary school focused on African diaspora communities. So making reparations and then asking the bank to write off the debts and with match funds. So coming alongside as animal rebellion because of barkers and cargill, industrial animal agriculture, and then around taxes, small businesses and all the people who do tax returns as well as another possibility. But anyways, the point of it is two levels. One is to talk about whatever the particular action is it may talk about what barkers bank are doing in the world or whichever bank it is. But also the meta point is we need to have a, the way I say it is a grown up conversation about our political economy, the destruction of democracy to the profit motive, the destruction of the environment and social good and social wellbeing to economic growth. So that's what the point of that is. And I think it's, in terms of movement, of movements of solidarity actions, it's like how to build solidarity between those that can't pay and those that are choosing not to pay. So it's talking to taxpayers against poverty recently. And there's a whole pile of, and I'm nearly finished with the rumble, but it's a whole pile of shame that's put on people around debt. That's why the banks look like temples, right? I mean, to make us feel that we have to pay and wanting to build that piece as well as part of. So that's something that we're working on at the minute. Thank you. Really great to hear both of you, how you respond to the question that arrived from the audience. Seeing it looking at the timing already past the hour, but I would love to hear Alexis once more. I'm also going to quote you again. I was very inspired by all the writing, basically I found that you wrote apparently. Some time ago, in the midst of the corona pandemic, actually you wrote an article called Survival Will Always Been Sufficient, but it's a good place to start. And in that article, you refer to the dire situations, a huge part of the global community was confronted with during the corona pandemic, and which you also emphasize that we should always start with survival and primarily that we should fight for the lives of the people targeted by the death cult of capitalism. Yet you also, in that article, state that survival alone is not enough, that people not only need bread, but that they need roses as well to paraphrase the well-known labor slogan. But today it seems there isn't a political program yet that can lay out what comes after the survival or what precisely these roses would be. So I wanted to wrap up this conversation by asking you, Alexis, if you could maybe tell us what you feel these roses could be for you. Yeah, so, I mean, I think that labor slogan, we need bread, but we need roses, is actually such a profound anti-capitalist slogan, and it speaks back to that quality of shame in poverty or shame in debt. And it also speaks to this insight that we can have many different theories of change. And as long as they're not actively opposing each other, right, or shutting each other down, they can actually, we don't know what will create the world in which lives can flourish and lives can continue. So having this commitment to ease and flourishing and joy, for me is one of the most gorgeous anti-capitalist effects that we can have and model. And it comes to this place that also returns to the very beginning of our conversation. About resisting logics of scarcity and saying, we refuse to accept the idea that there isn't enough for everyone. We know that there is enough for everyone and that it's just massively badly distributed. So coming back to the question of migrants and climate refugees, you know, in our movements, we absolutely need to say no to any logic that comes down to eco-fascism or that allows eco-fascism to exist. And I would say that in every place that I am seeing climate organizing happen, there is a right-wing tendency that is protectionist, isolationist, and that believes that the way for us to resist climate catastrophe is to shut borders and protect the people inside. So I think when we look at what it means to say, roses for everyone, one thing that allows us to do is affirm that joy is a major motivator for us to believe in this world and to work together toward a world in which many worlds can live to echo the zapatistas, right? So they said, we have many yeses. We have one no, right? But we don't know all the yeses that could exist. So in our movements, and in this conversation, I think one of the things that's interesting, useful for us to say is we can actually share this commitment to a core no, right? And that means if we don't say racism and eco-fascism is not a part of this political program, that's not a theory of change that is, right? Like, if we're doing movement work that holds up, that's not a theory of change, that's not a theory of change. That holds space for those approaches. That's not a hospitable theory of change. We can't stand shoulder to shoulder even with different movements. So we have these, like, bases of unity. And I do really feel like the approach of, yeah, finding the possibilities for unapologetic joy is useful. Like, politically, strategically, tactically useful. Yeah, there's so many, we could keep talking for hours. But yes, capitalism is a death cult and we should resist it. We should be for life. I think that's also like a very beautiful and a very strong idea, feeling to keep with us and to wrap this conversation up for today. Because as you said, we can continue having this conversation. It's important to continue having this conversation. But I'm very, I feel very privileged and honored that we managed to already address very interesting topics. And now I had this beautiful conversation tonight for which I would really like to thank you. I feel very privileged that I was able to invite you all to our School of Resistance. I hope you also enjoyed the talk. And the only thing that is now left for me to do is to announce our next episode, which will take place on Saturday this time. Saturday the 17th of October at 6pm. Our guests for that episode will be Ashil and Bambi. And together with Milo Rao, they will discuss the paranoia of the western mind. I think that's all for tonight. And I wish you all a lovely evening. And I would love to have a chat together once again.