Roger Hallam on violence and non-violence

Welcome, Roger Hallam! This is a special edition of our podcast Basta! We produce that almost every week from a special location in Amsterdam. We are basically discussing all kinds of current affairs that are going on in Amsterdam, but also in the wider world. One of the most pressing issues these days is of course the fight against climate change and everything that’s connected to that. One of the people that is very important in that fight are you, Roger Hallam. You were one of the original founders of Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. I’m not entirely sure if you are still part of that movement, but you can elaborate on that a little bit later.

But first of all, the reason that we asked you to do this interview is that you were about to come to the Netherlands last weekend, to give a lecture in the Sering in Amsterdam, but at the last moment you were prohibited from leaving the country, so the lecture had to be delivered on video. What exactly was the reason that you could not come to the Netherlands, can you explain that a little bit?

Well, the story starts last November, when I gave a twenty minute speech for Just Stop Oil during an online call. The speech was a sort of standard speech I give, which is to talk about the climate crisis, the need for civil disobedience and to support existing civil disobedience projects. The newspaper The Sun, a rightwing Murdoch newspaper in the U.K., recorded the call and gave it to the police. And the upshot of this is that they sort of raided my house, my flat. I was not there, they told me to come around to the police station. They thought they could keep me overnight because I had been involved in organizing something, but I said I had simply been asked to give a speech. They did not want to listen to that and they put me in prison for four months under a charge of conspiracy to commit public nuisance. I have not been taken to trial, that will only happen in a year or two. When they finally granted me bail my bail conditions were to stay at one address and always to be inside that address between ten in the evening and seven in the morning. I’ve been trying to get that bail condition changed, so I could go to the Netherlands and various other places, but it did not come through in time and so I was not legally able to travel to the Netherlands.

Does this mean that for the foreseeable future you cannot go anywhere, or will that change?

I’m not entirely sure what the status is, but the bail conditions have now been changed, so I can stay at other addresses, but I have to tell the police where I am going, so I think I have to go back to the judge in a week or two to clarify the situation.

Would you say that your detainment and the accusations against you are part of a larger crackdown nowadays on climate struggle activists? Half a year ago or so a French publisher was detained on Heathrow or one of the other British airports, because he is the publisher of the French translation of the book of Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up a Pipeline. Actually recently a whole movement in France – Les Soulèvements de la Terre – was kind of prohibited by the ministry of Internal Affairs, also with a direct reference to the book of Andreas Malm, which was kind of taken as an incitement to use violence in the climate struggle. Do you see a pattern here or is that a bit of conspiracy thinking? What do you think?

There is no question at all that the legal regime in the U.K. has become more repressive. There’s no sort of argument about that. Various acts have been passed in Parliament in order to prevent people from engaging in civil disobedience, with potential jail sentences of up to ten years and civil action that could result in tens of thousands of pounds of costs, meaning that people’s houses could be taken off them. The reason for that is fairly clear. There has been a major movement of civil disobedience in the U.K. since April 2019, when ten thousand people went to London to change the conversation on the climate and to get the British government to declare a climate emergency. That has led to thousands of arrests, particularly in the last year, and around a hundred and fifty people have been imprisoned. There has not been such a repressive response to a social movement arguably since the suffragettes in the U.K. In my view there is no mystery why this is happening, because western democratic states have been taken over by the carbon lobby and they will fight as much as they can to prevent any material challenge to that political regime. We’re not talking here about simply changing a few climate policies, what we want to change is a fundamental economic and political paradigm. That’s because the carbon situation is completely embedded in our way of life, and the power of the carbon lobby is prevailing in all western regimes. So I think you all know it will no doubt get worse before we will actually win, which no doubt we will...

Roger, in what way would you think it gets even worse? What do you expect?

Well, eh, states have a certain law of operation when they are challenged, or rather regimes, when that fundamental ideology or material power is challenged. That is how we should construct the challenge to the state. Then they will engage in mass arrests, pre-arrests, imprisonments, and finally in violence and killings. We shouldn’t be surprised if western states will do that in the coming years, until they collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. What I am trying to say is that the demand for decarbonisation can be placed within a liberal paradigm, but the idea that the state, the society and the regime are fundamentally good and stable is simply unsustainable when we are moving into a situation of 1,5 degree of temperature swell or more. The massive contradiction of western states is that in order to maintain themselves, they have to continue to maintain this carbon regime, but the carbon regime of course is going to lead us to social breakdown due to the extreme events of the climate crisis.

Roger, how do you think activists should respond to that kind of repression governments if it gets even worse and if there would be mass arrests and killings? How can we respond to that as activists?

Well, what we need to understand are the two or three thousand years of human experience of oppression, and arguably longer. From a political-sociological point of view, which is the point of view I come from, the pattern of repression and revolt throughout history is fairly clear. If a state engages in extreme oppression, then it is checking the dice how to maintain itself. There is no deterministic outcome to a confrontation that leads to a high level of social conflict. What I mean to say is that often the regime will win, but often it will fail as well, for quite complex and indeterminate reasons. However, the climate crisis, which is ontologically completely different than any other form of crisis, because it’s global and fundamentally beyond awful in its level of injustice and suffering, is getting exponentially worse and will effectively go on forever, for thousands of years. It’s a completely different ballgame than previous social struggles, in the sense that western regimes and regimes generally will collapse in the next ten years, because they simply can’t maintain the logic of their existence. In other words, they’ll be forced to make the climate crisis many times worse, by ignoring rational reasons for decarbonisation, but if they resist decarbonisation, then they’ll collapse in climatic chaos. On the other hand, if they try to decarbonize, then they’ll provoke fascistic responses. So either way we’re in for an extremely turbulent future. And the proposition I made in my lecture, as you know, is that if people from the social and liberal democratic traditions provide an updated version of democracy to replace the carbon regimes, then they’ll simply fail in the battle against emerging fascism.

Now, one of the issues at stake, both inside and outside the climate movement, is the question whether or not to use violence, not so much against other human beings of course, but for example – as Andreas Malm states in his book How To Blow Up a Pipeline – violence against machinery or pipelines or infrastructure, because the catastrophe that is threatening us is so big that we really have to do something. What is your view on that?

Well, I think the book is indicative of an outdated reductive materialism, that has been proved to be an inappropriate form of analysis by modern psychology, and to a certain extent by modern sociology as well. What I mean by that is that the dynamics of human history are determined more specifically by psychological factors like meaning systems than they are by the simple force of material power. More fundamentally what I’m saying is that people are motivated by a sense of engagement, connection and ultimately love. If they’re denied that, then they’ll turn to destructive alternatives – either destruction towards themselves or destruction towards the other. So that’s the philosophical, existential basis of my rejection of what he says in the book. What that practically means is that when you’re engaging in social struggle, obviously there is a material element, inasmuch as you want to prevent a certain kind of economy from functioning. So there’s no question about that, whether it is by strikes, or by closing down a city, or ultimately by removing pipelines. The point isn’t the materiality itself. The point is the meaning system within which the material action takes place. And the fundamental division is the division between closed communications and open communications. In closed communications actions happen in secrecy. In other words: you don’t know who has blown up a pipeline. You don’t know before and you don’t know afterwards. What that creates is overpolarisation in the social field, because people can’t empathize with you when they can’t see you, or more especially, when they can’t see your eyes. Because eye contact is the most basic human connection. All research about non-violent political action shows that people only form a connection when they can actually see other people and talk to them. If you can’t see them and talk to them, then you’ll view them as an enemy, and eventually people will turn to a fascistic orientation if they can’t see their radical opponents.
As I said in my lecture, there is a good case study of Harvey Milk, who was the first gay mayor of San Francisco. There was legislation preventing gay people from working in schools. And the gay community had a materialistic orientation, which was to protect themselves materially from harm and close in on themselves, and not communicating, not entering into dialogical spaces. Harvey Milk was intelligent enough to say: the most effective way to strengthen your position is to make yourself vulnerable. That creates an inverse effect. This was capitalized on by going to the big churches of the christian fundamentalists, openly presenting themselves fearlessly and willing to engage in dialogue. Your adversary would see your eyes and see that you were of good character, and the middle ground would move towards the gay position, so that the fundamentalists failed to win the debate. In other words: openness is inseparable from the democratic project, and closedness is fundamentally opposed to the democratic project. This is the tragedy of the left in the twentieth century: believing that imposing an ideology through materialistic power is the way to create a more moral society, which it has categorically failed to do. So we really need to leave behind the failed methodology of 20th-century materialism and have a more sophisticated, multifaceted orientation towards social change. In other words: to fuse the material logic with the psychological logic. What that concretely means is that the issue of causing damage to a building or to a pipeline is not in and of itself the issue. The issue is the context, the motivation and the open design of the action. So for instance ten, twenty years ago it was perfectly legitimate for women in the U.K. to destroy the planes that were going to bomb people in Yemen. They destroyed the jets, so you might say they caused criminal damage. But they stood there and said: this is where we stand. They were put on trial, and the jury found them not guilty, because they were known to be acting on behalf of the common good. That helps to undermine the whole logic. So if you want to blow up a pipeline and disable it, that’s perfectly legitimate, as long as you are open and engage in democratic debate. But if you’re doing it secretly, then you are going to facilitate overpolarization and foster fascistic tendencies in society. It is no surprise of course that what has happened in France has created an overpolarization and a violent response from the French state. Which of course is what violent strategies always do; they provoke the state, and historically three times out of four the state wins, because you’re fighting the state on the terrain of the state, which is violence. If you fight on the enemy’s terrain, you will always lose. But you can overcome an oppressive state by fighting that state on your own terrain, the terrain of democratic non-violence, and you will succeed in fifty to sixty percent of the time. This debate has been settled, I believe, in academia for a good quarter of a century, and it is very sad to see this regressive retreat into the irrationality of 20th-century left materialism.

(an interview for the podcast Basta! by Stephanie and Menno)
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