ACFM - ACFM Trip 39: Protest

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

Millions have protested against the bombing of Gaza by taking part in marches, boycotts, sit-ins and other demonstrations. But what difference does it make, either to the world or to ourselves? The gang confront a contentious topic in this Trip. Do “A to B” marches ever achieve anything? What about joining hands around an RAF […]

Welcome to Welcome to ACFM, the home of the world. I'm Nadia Idol, and I'm joined as usual by my friends Kear Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we are talking about protest. So, guys, why are we talking about protest at this moment? Kia?

Well, I mean, the obvious reason the principal spur to us talking about protest at the moment. It's a perennial topic, but why are we talking about it now? It's, I think, the huge protests that have been taking place around the world, but particularly in the UK, against the Israeli war on Gaza. pro-cease-fire protests, you put it that way, perhaps. You know, they've been of a size which is surprised lots and lots of people. Well, it surprised me, let's put it that way. 700,000, perhaps, on the largest march in London.

A few weeks ago, as we record now, like simply huge numbers. Definitely the biggest protests since the February 15th, 2020, 2003 anti-Iraq war protests. That's something we need to think about. basically. That's the principal spur for me. I'd also say there's a huge wave of anti-protest laws and anti-protest rhetoric spreading right across, probably across the world, but particularly prevalent in Europe and the UK at the moment. And that needs getting into, like, why is that happening now? Why is that the thing of the moment? I think I'm interested in a more general sense as well as thinking about protest as a concept, rather than, I mean, sometimes when you say

protest, people use the word protest and what they mean is like demonstrations in the street. And obviously, that's only one kind of protest. It's only one physical form of protest. And there's a whole set of ideas implied by the idea of protests, which might want to be unpat, like that question of, well, who are you protesting to? What does it mean to protest or rather than to rebel or revolt or ignore or withdraw. And I think all that stuff is particularly put into relief by a situation like this one, which, like the Iraq War demonstration 20 years ago, is an example of people feeling very, very strongly, very intensely about an issue,

which obviously has a real moral dimension to it. And yet, really, it's an issue, the nature of which makes it very different. for ordinary citizens to exercise any real agency around. I mean, notoriously, foreign policy, security policies, very resistant to influence by the general public, as we saw 20 years ago in Iraq, which is why that's still remembered as such a pivotal moment, at least in British politics. I still think it was a moment when a lot of people realised that liberal democracy was completely broken. So I think those are all reasons for thinking about this idea of protest and its practical implications.

That's all really interesting stuff that I also would like us to discuss. I instantly was not surprised by the amount of people who came out in solidarity with the Palestinian people, but some other things or some other aspects of why I would like to talk about protest is I'm interested in the role of protests and protesting in the collective psyche, I guess, and what it does to us and what it says about us to protest. And that's partly because protesting requires, I think, sometimes, at least some forms of protest, requires an exposure of yourself in a way because you are, in effect, quote, unquote, standing up for something. So it's like the opposite of trying to have an easy life when you actually like stand up and take part in a form of protest.

It's a very active thing to do. It utilizes energy from human beings, but it can also be energizing. I mean, even something like signing a petition and feeling like you're part of a big group, and we'll talk about these different forms later. And there's also this thing, I think, in British culture, which I find really interesting, which is like what I call done our bitism, as the amount of people who say, oh, yeah, I've gone on this protest or I've gone to this event or I've signed this petition because I've done my bit, which is also something that I find interesting,

juxtaposing against sort of a long-time, lifelong activism, I suppose. However, that can be conceived as an idea. And I guess I'm also interested in the anatomy of protest and its taxonomy and kind of what shapes a protest can take and how those forms developed over history. And I think, like we mentioned, what a protest is not and when it's a revolution or a revolt or some kind of other behaviour. so it would be nice to unpack that. But before we get into this episode,

we should mention that you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter, which we'll now be sending out with every new trip. So no more than once a month with bonus content and updates from us, the ACFM crew. To sign up, go to norvara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. For more music and less chat, Follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify, just search for ACFM.

And also, please leave us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on if you are enjoying this podcast. And to support us to be able to bring you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, please support our hosts Navarra Media for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. Right, with that over, guys, let's see. get into it. Well, let's return to the protests of the moment, which are these, you know, pro-seas-fire, pro-Palestinian anti-war on Gaza protests. There's a couple of things I want to talk about on that. One of them is, like, why were they so huge? So I was surprised you weren't Nadia, we should get into that. Also, what does it signify that the fact that there were such huge protests around it, or they have been, there probably will be? And we also have to examine

in the statement gem made just before we did our parish notices, which is that, you know, foreign policy is a notoriously difficult thing to influence. I think as we stand now, so this is the end, very end, we're recording at the very end of November, 2023, it looks like those protests have been absolutely phenomenally successful, I would say. I should get into that as well. And let's start at the beginning of that. So I just think I was really surprised.

is that just how big they were, partly because they were of a side, which is getting up to the anti-Iraq war protest, that really, really famous February the 15th, anti-Iraq war protest of 2003. And the thing to remember for that was that that had a very big build-up, like almost a year build-up of outrage, that this war of choice was being undertaken, etc.

And it also had significant support from the media, you know, the Daily Mirror was, was promoting the march and producing maps of the march and these sorts of things. This is not what happened, you know, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack and then the attacks on Gaza that followed. The protests against the Israeli reaction, they generated very, very quickly after huge numbers and the protests were, you know, the government ministers were calling them hate marches. there was virtually no representation

or no representation of those marches or of the opinions those marches were representing there was virtually none of that represented by either politicians or in the sort of media the vast majority of it was that even to think this the thing that there should be a ceasefire was like beyond the realms of acceptable conversation so what made those marches so significant

and perhaps so effective is that they, you know, just by the sheer numbers of people coming out, plus the fact that there were opinion polling, which said that they represented something like 75% of the population, the UK population who wanted a ceasefire, and like 3% said there should be no ceasefire. And the absolute consensus on the media and across all politicians, not all politicians,

but, you know, something like 97% of MPs, etc., is that there should be no ceasefire, and in fact Israel should just continue, slaughtering until it had wiped out Hamas. And that was the position of Kiyah Stama, that was a position of Rishi Sunak, and that was the position of Joe Biden. And when we recognize that have these protests been affected,

we can say this. Joe Biden position was that there should be no ceasefire until Hamas is destroyed. And he's 100, 100 degrees reversed that now. He says that there should be no continuation, there should be no breaking of the temporary ceasefire that's in place. and if there is, it's got to be really, really limited. He's trying to put real limitations on what Israel can do.

He's been forced into that position, and he's been forced into it by a number of things, but one of those is protests. And of course, like the UK doesn't really have an independent foreign policy. It follows whatever the US is going to do. You know, that's the Labour Party will, you know, Stama has now sort of, he's not quite gone as far as Biden, but he's reversed his position or put his position closer to Biden's

and, you know, he wants an extension of the temporary cease fights, etc. But there's a load of stuff to look in there, basically. Why is this huge reaction happened around this issue, much bigger than like previous massacres, you know, Operation Caste, led, etc. And why has it been so effective this time, I think? It's things to get into. Kia, can I ask you just a clarifying question, just so we understand what, we understand that we're talking about the same thing.

When you say the protests have been successful, are you talking about a change in policy or are you talking about facts on the ground? Yeah, this is all tentative because that's what it looks like today, November 30th, but like this is like a war situation. There's been 52 UN resolutions telling Israel not to do things over the year. Yeah. I think it's 52 the number. And they've not succeeded in stopping Israeli government from doing whatever it likes. So the question is, what's the chain of causality that leads to the current? ceasefire? Like, would it have just happened anyway without the protests? Let's be honest,

it would have happened anyway without one single person protesting in London. Would it have happened anyway without significant dissatisfaction being expressed in the States? No, probably wouldn't. So there's no question that, there's no question that it's encouraging and helpful to the movement in the States to know that there are these mass demonstrations happening in London and it adds to the pressure. So I think we can fairly say that the protest in London have contributed to the sort of ambient global climate within which Netanyahu has been under some pressure to concede to a ceasefire. But the key factor is the fact that is the polls in America showing that this has turned out to be a much bigger issue for young democratic voters

than anybody was planning for it being. You can't know. know, what would it mean to live in a world in which that was true? The polls were all showing this, but there weren't mass protest happening, both in the States and in London. We don't know, really. So it's a sort of non-question in that sense. No, I don't think it is a non-question. You can't know, but you can think about how things work out, basically.

So, like, one of the other thing that's really happened has been, like, this is a huge, huge defeat for Kea Starmer. Part of why I think that the protests were so big, and we're basically affect, we're really effective. So the protests in the UK are going to have minor influence on the movement in the US

and the movement in the US is the thing that basically can affect Biden. And like, it's the US, the UN is irrelevant. It's the US that basically is like the key deciding point outside of Israel. It's the key thing that decides what happens in Israel, Palestine because of the huge phenomenal support

that it gives up to Israel, even though Israel has tried to domesticate arms production and these sorts of things and try to make themselves a little bit more independent. It's basically, it's almost like a, you know, it's almost like a proxy state of the US in terms of like military might, etc. But the protests in the UK, you know, in lots of ways, they were protests against this consensus in the political media elite. Do you know what I mean? It's one of those rare moments where you can, you can just pin down the fact that there is a ruling class in this country. And that ruling class is,

a political media elite, which acts, which is, acts and has, like, basically pretty freakish, pretty freakish positions and policy positions. And most of the time, they can present those policy positions, like this huge unanimity, the Labour right, you know, they are a bunch of freaks, basically, and they have freakish views, and whenever their views are exposed to public scrutiny, they are looked at with horror, right? And so those views and the views which cross over to the centre, right, and then get worse and worse you go to the far right, you know, they are basically presented as just, you know, not political choices, but inevitabilities.

Or this has to have, this has to be this way and we don't get to choose this and we'd love to choose something else. In fact, no, that's their firm political position built up over years of it, battling inside the Labour Party. Do you know what I mean? And every now and then, you get to pin them. You get to pin them and say, no, this is your belief and this is the thing you have chosen over other possible choices, basically.

And that's what happened with their protests. Because what I think happens is that you can have public opinion in the UK around Israel. Nobody likes to see probably something like 20,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 10,000 children killed in Gaza. Nobody wants to see that. But, of course, there's no guarantee you're going to see that. You know what I mean? And political opinion is moldable. Do you know what I mean?

Without these huge expressions, which says no other people believe what you believe. I know you're not seeing it on the news I know you're not seeing your views reflected back at you through the media but there's 700,000 other people who believe this thing and that's not ignorable I think that's the way it works basically and this is one of those moments where the Labour Party

have been like to Stama this Stama was one of the targets of this and Sunak but like who cares about Sunak he's out of power you know either next March or next November nobody cares about him you know I think it's a really valuable lesson of like every now and then you can pin your opponents

to expose their views And that's how you defeat Starmer. That's how you defeat Rachel Reeves, basically. And that is the task of the second half of the 2020s, which is why I think they are significant in these protests. They show something big. Yes, I think that's all right. But coming back to just answering your question,

I can give you three other reasons why the demonstrations were so big. So I think, yes, it's feeding the anger against this political elite. That's one thing that you've mentioned, Keir. I think related to that, It's also people's anger over the last 15 years of austerity and cost of living crisis being fed through another issue. So I think on a kind of libidinal and subconscious level, and maybe conscious level, that's also what's happening. It's an opportunity to come out and say no. That's just consistent with what Keir said, I think.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is all me agreeing with Keir. I'm just adding. Oh, yes, this is the sort of podcasting I like. So the other three reasons, I think, why the demonstrations were so big are, One, it's really important to remember. You know, I worked on Palestinian Solidarity for about 15 years. We've got a really well-organized Palestine Solidarity Network on the ground here in the UK. And I can tell you that those groups are really well organized and people are very passionate on the ground in cities and towns and villages all around the UK. And so there is a group of people, constituency that is available to mobilize, to mobilize other people when things like this, when is needed for a mass demonstration in London's, that's a reason. But also, I think the imagery on the news of children being killed just didn't match up to the rhetoric about what you were talking about

earlier, Keir, all these hate marches and whatever. Like, it's so stark the bombing of Gaza. Like, it was so intense. And it just didn't match up to that rhetoric that we're talking about. But I think also, minoritized or minority groups in the UK, the sort of groups from various different heritages that would potentially support the Palestinian cause have access to alternative media. They're not just watching the BBC. They're watching, I mean, if it's Arabic, you know, El Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and then other media outlets, not just, let alone all the stuff that's going around WhatsApp, which are providing the alternative stories. So I think all of those are reasons why in a very, in a very short period of time, it was very, you know,

it wasn't surprising to me at all that they were going to be able to mobilize that number of people. I mean, people were just really angry about it. Like, there was no way I wasn't going on that demo. Yeah, I think that's all true as well. If we're talking about the specific UK case as well, you can't downplay the significance of the way in which the right of the Labour Party and the political establishment generally weaponised support for Israel.

I mean, they weapon, that's the wrong phrase, really. They made unequivocal support for Israeli state policy the litmus test of just whether you were, a legitimate political actor or not, like doing the process of defeating Corbinism. That was the key method by which they did it. And there's a huge amount of resentment about that. In terms of their longer term legitimacy, the behaviour of Israel is a total disaster for that project. So this is partly that is those chickens coming home to roost. But that's less the case in the state. I mean, it is the case in the states that uncritical support for Israeli state policies,

is also a political fault line between the left and right of the Democrats as well. But it's been less of a hot issue there and it still has been like huge anger. So I think you do have to partly see it in terms of the further. Really since Iraq, I mean, since it became widespread consensus that the invasion of Iraq was a total disaster, which was really the basis on which Obama got elected in 2008,

the consent for US-led policy in the Middle East as military policy has just been in long-term decline and it has passed some sort of a threshold

where by people just won't tolerate it I'm also, I am quite conscious as well that as Nadia was saying I do think general consciousness around the issue of Palestine has really been rising

over the past few years and I'm really conscious that just sort of casually amongst people who I know who are not even very political. People who just wouldn't have known anything about it 10 years ago have a pretty clear sense of what's going on now. And that is partly because of the persistence of anti, you know, of Palestinian solidarity organising and propaganda and what have you.

So that's all part, it's all part of it. If we're going to play some protest music, then we should probably play some of the early Bob Dylan. He's the one person ever to have really become a global star on the basis of playing something that was referred to explicitly as Bratest Music. I think probably the most affecting song from that period of his work is Masters of War. Come, your Masters of War. Here that build the big guns. Yeah, that build the death planes

Yeah, that build all the bombs Is it hide behind walls Yeah, that hide behind desks I just don't want you to know I can see through your masks So should we start talking about other forms of protest Of course, a demonstration is only one, an A to B demonstration, is what we call them A to B marches in the left. Should we talk about other forms of protest?

Should we talk about when we first got into protesting? When did you first go in a protest here? I mean, I'm not sure. I can't quite remember. But the first one I remember is that my mum took me up to Greenham Common in 1982 for a hands-around-the-base march. So basically, Greenham Common was a base where nuclear missiles were held by the US Army, cruise missiles. And it was part during the big explosion of the peace movement in the early 1980s.

And there were peace. So, oh, here's a form of protest. There were protest camps. Women only, well, mainly women only protest camps around Greenham Common, basically, for years and years and years. And, you know, people would go from those camps and try to break through the fences of Greenham Common and try to sabotage the missiles if you ever got that far, et cetera. As part of a sort of a big explosion in CND, the campaign for nuclear disarmament,

there was a, in 1982, there was this, people came from all around the country. I remember going on a coach up from South Wales. And the aim was to just link hands all away for women and young children, young boys apparently, because I was there, to link arms all the way around the base. And something like 30,000 people, I think, on that. Like, I might have been on protest before that, but that's the first one I can sort of remember that stuck with me.

Embrace the base. So that's a kind of demo, but it's not a, it's not an A to B march. No, I think it was a march. Because I remember marching. But, like, the protest form was to be, that there was going to be a huge chain all the way around 30,000 people holding hands, around this very large protest base, basically, to encircle it. It was called Embrace the Base. I don't know quite why.

No, I went back for like the 20 year anniversary of that something on a really cold March day and we did embracing the base as well. Jeremy, what about you? I mean, I was taking on demonstrations in the 70s as a baby. The first one I remember was an anti-austerity demonstration against the IMF mandated cuts being implemented by the Labor government in the late 70s. It would have been in 77 or 78. It was a public sector pay demonstration in Liverpool, I guess. I'm amazed you can remember that. How old are you, like six or something?

Yeah, yeah. My earliest verifiable memories when it was two. Jesus. I need to get into this Zen stuff. Yeah, you do. Yeah, and I was on, I was, I guess I was, I had enough of experience of it to have become really disillusioned with CNDs, like political strategy. and, you know, it's a focus on marches and peace camps by the time I was 13, 14.

I remember not renewing, deciding not to bother renewing my membership of UCND because I had become convinced that really the people involved weren't actually interested in achieving the achievable political objective of a significant reduction in spending on nuclear weapons. They just, they said that what they were after was complete unilateral disarmament was obviously politically unachievable, whereas they could have, I thought they could have got a consensus for really significant reduction. They didn't bother with that, and I felt that a lot of it was just about expressing a certain sort of countercultural identity rather than actually

winning a political argument. So that was the moment I became a Gramscian, like years before I had ever heard of Antonio Gramsci. I was just about to take the piss out of you then for being such a nerdy 12-year-old, and I remembered about that age, I drew up a manifesto and took it around my aunties. The different aunties and say, would you sign up to this? Well, I remember it was because... I was a nerdy 12 year old as well.

But it's not nerdiness. I don't think... Is it nerdiness? I don't think it is. Well, it's just quite, quite advanced for 12-year-olds. It's precocious, yeah. Precocious, yeah.

I remember being on a big demonstration up in... It would have been up, a big CND demonstration. It would have been up around Barrow, the big uh one of the big bases up there seeing you know lots of people you know there's a very festive atmosphere there was a guy in a gorilla suit and i just remember thinking this is just shaking my head thinking this is just a joke you know so people are having a fun carnival it's collective joy but it's not politics so and i've since that moment i have to say it's with so it's always with some reluctance i go on on big marches like i do it and it's important sometimes

I remember also actually, not long after that, having a conversation with someone, we had this American, like this student teacher staying with us for a bit, like on some sort of exchange scheme. And he was like a typical American liberal. And I was telling him, oh, yeah, I've become really disillusioned. All this is pointless. These people are just wasting their time. And he said, yeah, you might be right in terms of they're not going to achieve their objectives,

but what else can they do? Like, is it better that they just do nothing? And that was also really persuasive to me. I was really struck. And ever since that moment, I've always said to people, you know, you've got to ask yourself that what is the actual function of the action? Whether you're talking about a mass demonstration or a little bit of street theater or whatever kind of political action or protest you're talking about,

what is its political function? And it will almost always will have multiple functions. And if part of the function is just to enable, a bunch of people to be in the street together and remind each other that they exist and they're not alone, and to have a good time. Well, that is a legitimate function in itself. You shouldn't be confused

with the function of actually achieving a political objective if it's not contributing anything to that. But that's not necessarily a reason just to condemn it as an activity. And so I think that does raise a whole interesting set of questions. But we've heard enough about you. I'm just pointing out, I've talked a lot because you guys have been pressing, impressing me to keep talking.

So let's let's add, Nadia, you tell us, when did you first go on to participate in protest? I've been thinking about this. So, okay, I think because you've brought up like all of these different examples of when the first time you protested were, it got me thinking actually about how similarly, whether in terms of my character, and this is a question I genuinely have, which I think I want to come back to is that why people protest. Like, I think the examples that you gave Jeremy and yours, Kier, tell me that we had it in us as children, either as a reaction to something or as a character thing. So I think the first few, like, school-level protests I want to mention is I protested against my English teacher at the shitty school that I was in Cairo, pronouncing pear as peer. And this is a school with corporal punishment. So I was really risking something, but I, you know, you could tell that I was going to be a. copywriter because I really had a problem with that. And then I was later vindicated when

the teacher found out that she was pronouncing it wrong. And then I protested teachers throwing rubbish out of the bus windows in school, again in Egypt, because I thought it was wrong. And I remember the sensation of like, this is an injustice because this is wrong, like, as a like six-year-old. So I can remember that. I think when I was slightly older and I'd moved to a much better school. When we had our first computers, I remember writing letters to the UN over trees

and stuff around nature when maybe I was around 11 or 12. That was my first kind of like petition-type action. By the time I was in university and I was about to leave university in the late 90s or the early 2000s. And by that point I was involved in performing arts. I was like hanging out with the arts-type students.

students at university. And I remember distinctly, this is the American University in Cairo, I remember distinctly somebody climbing to the top of wherever the American flag was and taking it down and putting up a Palestinian flag. And I remember thinking, this is stupid. Why is that person doing that? I was completely disinterested in what I thought politics were. I didn't grow up in a political environment. My family are definitely not into politics. My Egyptian family. no one's ever been on a demonstration or protested anything. And by that point, when I was hanging out with the art students, I thought that was weird, like that person taking action.

I kind of sneered at it. That all changed with 9-11, because at 9-11, university got surrounded by tanks, and I nearly didn't graduate. And the massive attack on people from Arab countries and people from majority Muslim countries was properly underway. And there was the escalation of the threat of war in Iraq and more violence in Palestine and annexing of more territory.

By that point, I moved to the UK, and it was just a complete single vision, totally politicised, and I was going on big marches against the war and pro-Palestinian solidarity from the age of 20, and it was that, that was it. You know, I'm very jaded about lots of forms of protest, and I'm very dismissive of what called A to B marches where you just get big marches and walk along. But, like, you know, I probably should be aware that it's because I haven't had, you know, an A to B march has not been, you know, a moment of political awakening for me

and probably it is for some people, do you know what I mean? Oh, I love it. I love it. It is for me, like playing, Samba on a Palestine demonstration or anti-war demonstration is home. The protests this year have made me feel so much better, which is ironic because it's in such terrible circumstances that we're protesting, but it's home like nothing else. There's no other place, there's no other experience where I feel happier and more myself and more grounded than playing Samba on a massive demonstration with hundreds of thousands of people in London. When somebody says protest, I think the man on the street, as they call them, I imagine, the man on the street, as they call them, I imagine that what they think about, I imagine that what they think about is, is, is, is,

a demonstration, perhaps a march where people hold placards and walk somewhere and there's a rally at the end. The reason it's called a demonstration is because the roots of it are, it was almost like a demonstration of force, if you know what I mean. That's something that armies do. They sort of demonstrate force in order to enact power without having to resort to violence, something like that. And so you'd show the level of support. You'd show the level of discipline as well, I think, is one of the things that people talk about, you know, particularly when you have the sort of first sort of modern demonstrations back in, you know, probably the 18th century, actually.

You know, it would be about showing like disciplined ranks of large numbers and it's an implicit threat in that, right? It's like the demonstration that an army would make, the demonstration of force is that this is the number of people who can do it. This is the level of discipline we've got, you know. It's almost like a threat is the original sort of etymology. of the word demonstration, because it's not quite the same anymore. And now people talk about it slightly differently. The social movement theorist Charles Tilly talks about wonk, which is, you know,

what you want to display is, it's almost more like a sort of moral thing, basically. You want to display the wonk is like worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment is the wonk. So you want to show that, Like, you are worthy. So it's a bit like Gemmiles used to say that his dad would always wear a suit when he went on a protest to show that he was worthy, you know, and the way that, in fact, when a protest gets, it's got women and children and that sort of thing and, you know, people can identify with it. That's the sort of worthiness sort of bit.

The unity bit is like the sort of tactics that go into, you know, perhaps marching in step or perhaps all wearing the same colour or these sorts of things which show that there's a unified component to it. then the numbers is you want to get as many people there as possible. And then the commitment bit is probably the sorts of protests in which you should, you know, that you're prepared to go out in the rain or something like that. That's what you're trying to sort of show that, look, we are legitimate in some sort of way. So there's this shift from demonstration being something which is related to force or the threat of force

to something which is in some way much more of a sort of like you're trying to show a certain moral position to some degree, I think. That doesn't encompass all demonstrations, but that's one way. in which the idea of a demonstration has been thought through. Yeah, but the issue with that is that there's a disjoint between that necessarily being thought through by the organisers and the participation of the vast majority of people who are involved in that tactic. But you saying, like, these are the different things that we'll think that, you know,

a way to think about, or one of the theory that you mentioned, a way to think about like demonstrating, like, you know, whether it's solidarity or like numbers or like you're trying to demonstrate a position or a thought or trying to get more people involved, these are not things that necessarily the participants are thinking about. There's a difference between the people employing the tactics or calling the tactic or initiating the tactics and those are actually involved in it. Yeah. And sometimes it's spontaneous, but sometimes it's whoever the political background of the organizers or the specific moment lends itself to a specific specific, a sort of tactic. So at 80 b or a march or a occupying of an arms factory. So

I'll just give you a small example. So there have been groups of people trying to shut down arms factories in Kent or whatever in the UK. And the people involved in that are the people who are more comfortable doing direct action than going on a march. So in that specific case, people are like, well, this is the tactic that I'm comfortable with. So this is the action that I'm going to take. And there are other situations where people are like, well, this is what's been called. So this is what I'm going to do. And there isn't thought that's taken. And they're not necessarily thinking in a conscious way about the tactics behind, like what's going to help them achieve their aims. Yeah, I think I know what you mean. You've introduced this term of direct action,

which I think is another one we should talk about because it's got his own sort of history. to it, you know, the idea of direct action, which is often put indistinction to something like an A to B March. So the direct action is, as opposed to indirect action, an indirect action would perhaps be a protest in which you are making a claim and you want somebody else to do, to enact that claim. So you're making a claim to the government, perhaps, or perhaps to the owners of a factory or something like that, and you want them to do something, whereas direct action is that you're going to get the force to do that, to enact that yourself. And it goes back. back to the idea of like to syndicalism and these sorts of things where, you know,

what you're actually aiming for is like the big mass strike. That is not a protest. That is like you were going to directly enact what you want to bring about, if you know what I mean. That's a sort of distinction. I don't think it's really held to some degree it's sort of lost that, that you are directly going to do what you want to do. And so you could, I don't think you can any longer oppose protest to direct action and say they're distinct.

I think they're overlapping to a lot. large degree. I mean, there's a lot of debate right now within sort of theorists of green strategy about the relative value of different kinds of activity and, you know, the person who's had the most traction with his attention-grabbing titles is Andreas Malm with his book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. And that is quite specifically an argument for direct action as classically conceived as distinct from, you know, the apparent sort of the futile moralism of just sort of appealing, appealing to governments or corporations to do the right thing. So I think those arguments are still, arguably, they're still fairly live. I mean,

I agree with you. I agree with you insofar as the fact as a conceptual distinction, it never really stands up. I think it's maybe worth going into where that distinction comes from in a bit more detail between the distinction between protest and direct action. I mean, This is the sort of the titty point. I mean, it's a point lots of people have made over the years. The word protest implies something quite specific. It implies that you are not trying to overturn the social order. You are trying to draw attention to an injustice.

And that injustice is one that you assume that the people witnessing the protest and the people to whom you are protesting will recognize it as an injustice. and therefore that assumes that broadly speaking, you, the protester, and the people to whom you are making your protest, if you like, will share a set of values, will share a sort of moral universe, which is why protest is something quite specific, I think, and it's conceptually different from revolution or, you know, radical struggle. And historically, you know, sections of the far left, the revolutionary left, and particularly the anarchist movement historically, it's been really good. contemptuous of the idea of protest. The anarchist slogan, I remember hearing a lot when I was younger, was the only thing that demonstrations demonstrate is your obedience. You know, the fact that you're willing to get all these people together and then have nothing but a discipline march through the streets and then go home again rather than trying to smash things up or really frighten

the authorities as seen as being sort of pathetic. And then the notion of the direct action historically was associated with the idea that basically the entire apparatus of party politics, representative politics, and bureaucratic trade unionism was all just part of the problem. And that what you want to do is you want to take immediate action to actually win games for the revolutionary movement or for the working class or for whoever and to do irreparable damage to your opponents and thereby to sort of achieve something. So historically direct action was, it was associated with ideas like squatting, because squatting is a way of actually doing something about the immediate problem of people being homeless or not having rent they can afford. But it was associated with squatting as a political practice, which was assumed to take place in a context where if you got a squat, if you got a building, you could expect to hold that building indefinitely, as happened for decades in places like Amsterdam.

And, you know, in London back in the day. I mean, there is also a material basis to it. You know, population of London was actually shrinking in the 70s. And there was lots and lots of, like, disused council buildings, basically, which council properties, sorry, I mean to say. But I think, I'll let you get back on your narrative in a minute. But, like, I think it's an interesting one squatting because it does show that, like, this distinction never really held because the earliest wave of squatting was in the immediate sort of post-war years.

It was organized by the Communist Party. where large amounts of veterans were moved into empty homes. And it was made, it was like both direct action, but that was a political claim as well. You know, it was a claim of, you know, something needs to be done about homelessness. And that did sort of still revolve around squatting in London in the 1970. Yeah, I think that's completely right.

And then also, so the term, so direct action, it was associated with certain kinds of community organising, but also with the kinds of direct sabotage that became associated with the radical green movement from the early 70s onwards. So if you actually blow up a pipeline, you've actually done some damage to the oil industry, for example. You haven't just whined about it and got people to sign a petition.

The stakes are different, right? The stakes are different in terms of what's going to happen to you as an actor within that situation. Partly, I would say, what this all goes back to is really, really the only true form of direct action that could really fulfil it to revolutionary potential according to this model is things like factory occupations. And, you know, it was the ideal of the early 20th century anarcho-sindicalists

and libertarian communists was that occupation of factories would be the basis upon which the workers' revolution would happen. Yeah, you seize control. Is it a protest and occupation? No, this is my whole point. My whole point, this was all seen as a types of activity, which were more, which were somehow, from this anarchist, protective, were radically superior to the sort of the banality and conformism of protest. But as Keir keeps saying, and I think as we keep coming back to, I mean, it was never a distinction that worked really well. But then it's a distinction, I do think it's a distinction that sort of completely collapsed in the 90s, in the English speaking world, and around things like the road protest, because basically, I would say within

the anti-roads movement in the 90s in Britain, and this had an impact on environmental campaigning in places like the States as well, there was this sort of, of slippage between an understanding of direct action, which was in some sense still in that tradition, and a quite different one. So, I mean, the actual, the theory behind the road protest movement in the 90s was it wasn't the idea that at any given moment it would actually be possible to stop a planned road being built. It was that if you caused enough trouble at road building sites, that the security costs became completely prohibitive, it would dissuade future road builders and government agencies responsible for giving

permission for them from letting them go ahead. There's some evidence, at least in the very short term, that was relatively effective as a strategy. And so people talked about that as direct action. But then increasingly people came to associate the road protest movement, not so much with the kind of long, these sort of sustained struggles to make it financially impossible to build roads. It became associated with things like having a rave on a motorway for a few hours. It became associated with the sort of street theatre, basically. And by the end of the 90s, my sense was in sort of activist culture

that most of the time when people use the phrase direct action, what they were talking about was basically just sort of short-term street theatre. And they were talking about something that those old anarchists who coined the phrase direct action would have sneered that, would have said, well, that's just protest. But all that does speak to the fact that the distinction ends up being untruthers. sustainable, I think. But isn't there also something there about part of the reason why perhaps there was a change in that definition is because public space was more taken for granted at one point. And when that, what you're calling street theatre comes in and kind of like the

occupation of the M25 or whatever, those sort of actions, it's because there was a decrease in the ability of people to hold public space. So therefore, to even hold public space became in itself a form of protest. Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah. I think one of the, one of the things it points to, though, is that, like, I do think the distinction between protest and direct action, you know, it's not particularly useful, it's not something you can hold a firm line around. The more interesting question is, like, what are these forms of acting? What are they actually doing? And not just, like, what are the intentions of the people doing them? But, like, what's their effect? Do you know what I mean? And because I think with the anti-rose protest, like,

reclaim the streets, protests, etc. You know, that wasn't direct action as in, we are going to add prohibitive costs to a particular action so that the cost-benefit analysis of the people making decisions is influenced, etc. It was seen much more as like a pedagogical thing.

Do you know what I mean? An example thing, a reclaim-the-street thing was you would block off a road, then you would reform it, perhaps you'd have a sandpit and a settee there and say, look, if roads weren't just for cars, we could have a very different city. I mean, what, they actually turned into a big raves, because that was the culture of the time. Do you know what I mean?

So it's like a pedagogical, you know, we're going to show you what it would be. That was the case for some people involved. It definitely is the case that for the key organisers thought they were making them, they were going to make road building for an anti-prohibitive. Yeah, well, maybe, yeah. I mean, because one of the places where the, where the reclaim the streets came out of, that cohort came out of the Claremont Road occupation. So this was a protest where people occupied a whole.

road which was being demolished. I only had one resident left, Dolly, who lived there, and they basically barricaded it, built tunnels underneath it. They built these towers on top of that, the houses, etc., in order to make the eviction really difficult and prohibitive. That was the sort of thing that was the core of reclaimed the streets came out of the veterans of that movement. You can sort of see the logic of this movement in a sort of way. but you know there was also you know if we want to go through that history there is a there was a recognition of of the fact that there were limitations to to what people were doing and there was a general shift in the anti-roads movement from a sort of like a single-issue campaign towards an anti-capitalist position to explicit anti-capitalist positions by the time you get to the

to reclaim the streets and afterwards and like you know that whole cycle ends up with the carnival against capitalism which is when you know there was a street protest outside the stock exchange oh it was the carbon trading exchange wasn't there and it turned into a small to medium riot where people were trying to get inside the stock exchange and the traders were coming out and trying to fight them on the escalators on the way up and all these sorts of things and that sort of was that went into the anti-globalization cycle and once again like that once again is like you're moving from something in which you can have a concrete claim and a concrete effect that we want to stop road building program of the conservative government in the early 1990s, and we're going to use

these tactics to both add costs to the road building, to make road building, you know, unpopular, all these sorts of things. Then you move to say, well, in fact, yeah, it's not just the Tory government, is it actually, like there are bigger impulses about why the car is favoured, you know, why climate change isn't being taken seriously and all these sorts of things. And you move to trying to grapple with these big, big abstract forces, such as capitalism, etc. which is much harder to get a grip on, and much harder to have a form of protest, which figures it, basically.

And so the summit protests of the anti-globalization movement, they were trying to put a place on the non-place of capital. Do you know what I mean? Or the everywhere place of capital. And there were huge problems with that because capitalism doesn't actually just exist in the G8, whatever, and it turns into a form of acting, which is quite separate from the lives that most people are living.

But that's another story. But I think it shows that there are all sorts of things going on at the same time. Sometimes protests are pedagogical. You're trying to figure something. You're trying to show something which can't be recognised. And I always think about that as that there was a big wave of women's strikes around the sort of mid-2010s, I think. Very big one in Poland, big ones in Spain as an attempt to introduce it into the UK, etc. And one of the things that was going on with the women's strike was that they were trying to make visible something

which wasn't visible, and that was like the work of social reproduction. So one of the lines was, you know, you don't notice that what the dishes getting done or who does the dishes until they start getting done. Do you know what I mean? That thing of like you're trying to reveal something. I think, in fact, that's partly what's happened with these Gaza protests, where you're trying to reveal the sort of obscured common sense of our political class. You're trying to bring into the open something that they'd actually like to keep

either hidden or hidden behind the idea that it's not a political decision. Yeah, I like that parallel actually, because I wasn't sure where you were going with that, but I like the idea that you made the parallel between the hegemonic establishment there and men, in the case of those types of protests where it's kind of like one group of people are like, this is completely obvious, and another group of people are like, I don't know what you're talking about. I think the other thing as well to think about is like protests are compositional. You know, you can have forms of acting which compose a political subject in some sort of way. Do you know what I mean?

So like one of the things to think about in terms of reclaim the streets, was like people were really thinking quite seriously about that. And so one of the things they famously did, they went and had a street protest to support the dockers who were on strike in Liverpool as a conscious attempt to escape the sort of countercultural sort of scene that they were in and to try to compose a new sort of political subject with different sectors acting in common sort of thing.

So there's a compositional element. And I think that is something that we don't see a lot. And I was thinking about this, I listened to an interview with Richard Seymour about the Gaza a protest. And he made this really interesting point that, like, perhaps one of the reasons that, like, young people so identify with the Palestinian, the Palestinian situation in the UK, but even more in the US, I think, where it's really, really noticeable, like, the age difference in attitudes towards Israel. This could be part of the, of the follow-on effects from

the Black Lives Matter protests, where people are, like, sensitized to seeing oppression and thinking of oppression as something that can be done, something you can do something about. Do you know what I mean? I think it's an interesting idea that, so when you judge movements of protests, etc., it's actually quite difficult to work out what's being successful and what hasn't, you know what I mean? And like one thing can set up, can compose certain force and compose certain sensibilities among sectors, which can lead to other things. I think that argument about perhaps Black Lives Matter, you know, it fed into a certain common sense, which then can help explain why the anti-Gaza war protests are so explosive.

The idea of hip-hop as a vehicle for some sort of collective resistance or protest has been around since the earliest days of the genre. It's a fairly obvious thing to do with rap as a form, although it hasn't been that essential a thread in hip-hop a lot of the time. I think I would have surprised a lot of the early artists, but probably the high moment of politicised hip-hop is, the late 1980s, where in the most prominent hip-hop group in the world, a public enemy, and probably one of their clearest expressions of a political critique,

which we could describe as a protest, a day-wrought protest about something, is one of my favourite public enemy tracks, is 9-1-1 is a joke. It's not about police brutality, it's about police not helping the black community in the way that they probably should do. one a long time ago. Don't you see how late they're reacting? They only come and they come when they want. So get them all the truck and then bomb they're going.

They don't care because they stay paid anyway. They treat you like your age. They can't feed the tray. I know you stumble with no use people. If your life is on the line, then you're dead to date. Late comers with the late comers stretch it. That's a body bag in disguise, y'all I'll bet you. I call them body snatches because they come to fetch you with a nautocusing ambulance

to dissect you. Okay. So some of the forms of protein. that we've been talking about seem to me to be collective in some form. So like going on a march or different forms of direct action that we've talked about, squatting, even riots we've mentioned. What about some of the different forms of protest, which are you take as an individual? Now, there might be an aggregate, the idea is that it's an aggregate effect. I mean, maybe sometimes not. But let's talk about some forms there because there's some interesting

things, tactics that people have used over history. Like boycotts, for example. That's interesting whether boycotts are collective or individual. I suppose it depends what you're boycotting. So a classic individual boycott was there was a boycott around apartheid South Africa in the 1980s in particular where people would basically refuse to buy South African goods, but they'd also be the tactic of you'd fill up your trolley with South African goods and take it to the front and make a big scene about it, basically. We did that with Palestine. We did that with Israeli goods in the supermarkets like 15 years ago, whatever, we would do that. But what I mean about individual is, yeah, that you're right,

is that when a group of people going into a supermarket and you're doing it as a collective action and it's filmed or you're making a scene or whatever, that is, you know, collective. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is because I want us to get on to the point. about the effect that this has on you as an individual or the affect effectively of demonstrating when you're boycotting something most of the time it's an individual action so it's you you are choosing not to buy something or you're choosing not to engage it's at the level of consumption and as I always say the best the easiest way of understanding Marx's idea that there's a fundamental contradiction to capitalism is that so capitalism socializes production

and privatises consumption. So consumption is always, to some extent, experienced individually. But ironically or paradoxically, or maybe just appropriately, the whole point of a boycott is it only works if there's a load of people doing it. I remember when I was younger,

this was always an issue. Were we boycotting McDonald's? Like, were we boycotting Starbucks? Like, did we not go to these places that were associated with various forms of nefarious capitalism? And I would always say there's only a point

and treating that as a political action if there's a critical mass of other people doing it, if it's recognised as a political action. Otherwise, it's just you not going to a shop. Yes, but this is, and this gets at my point about people's individual feelings and levels of guilt and feeling like they are doing their bit, is that often with boycott, it isn't tactical.

I mean, we'll talk about some, you know, and you talked about South Africa, and we've talked about Israel and South Africa and areas, and I mean, times where it was tactical. But at some point, sometimes I feel like in the rich public, people want to feel like they are doing something. So withholding their money from a specific company makes people feel better that they are taking some action. Whereas you're right, tactically, it might not be very effective because, A, you don't know how many people are doing it.

But B, you don't know if that's even effective. So, for example, I worked on sweatshops and supply chains for a long time when I was at war on one. And, you know, like I worked on this issue for 10 years and spoke to, you know, tens of thousands of people individually. And it's really interesting how people's impulse response in the UK is, well, I don't shop at Primark. When in that specific campaign issue, like whether you shop or not at Primark would have made no difference whatsoever. Because what we were trying to do was to raise the wages of workers in other countries that were producing for the UK. market and that would require a change in policy not a withholding of your pound in the UK because also the whole high street had changed their business model in that period.

So in that specific situation, the best thing that you could do was actually show solidarity with workers in countries like Bangladesh, etc. By putting pressure on the government and on companies to change policy. Like, that was what was needed, you know, but that's not what people were doing. People were going, oh, it's okay because I don't shop at this place, so I feel better about it. And we're kind of trying to get this idea across that with that campaign that you cannot buy justice in a way. That's really interesting. Well, I keep reading to write, I keep meaning to write my article on the problems of socialist organising in the age of retail politics.

Because that was exactly the impulse that led hundreds of thousands of people to do exactly what Kirstama was asking them to do and leave the Labour Party between. 21 and 23, 2020 and 22. It was exactly that notion that basically the principle form in which you imagine yourself as an agent in the world is as a consumer

and it's by withholding your money that you express something. Because the thing I heard again and again and again from people was I'm not giving them my money. Like again, I'm not giving them my money because they're not representing my politics. And I kept saying to people,

that's what they want, they don't want your money, they want you out of the party so they can enact their policy, their program. And I think it, yeah, it runs really, really deep in English, political culture. Absolutely. And this is not necessarily the case in other places.

I mean, I have to say, I don't think that my consumer boycott of Israeli products is actually going to make a difference. But everyone, I think, has their line. And, you know, it's interesting listening to you, Jeremy, talking about growing up in a household where there was discussions about, like, are we boycotting this? Are we doing this? because I think it's also linked to your identity. Like, I do not buy Israeli products as far as I can see that they're Israeli products. But I do understand that an economic boycott of Israel in the UK is not really, unless it's very symbolic and it's very visible and it's tied to all sorts of other actions is not really going to. It has to be like South Africa, you know, in terms of the visibility of it for it to work.

I mean, it might be worth going back to that like the history a little bit of that because a boycott. but it's actually, it's a funny word, and it's named after a campaign in the 1880s, I think. Yeah, against Lord Boycott. No, it's Captain Charles Boycott, actually. He's like, he was an agent in Ireland for an absentee landlord, and so, like, the Irish nationalist or Republican movement, I can't quite remember what they would be, actually. They'd have been the Home Rule movement at the time, home rule. Yeah, and it was, so it was like, and he was a particularly obnoxious agent,

and so it was like a complete boycott was, like, to have a... Absolutely nothing to do with it. We wouldn't buy it for it. We wouldn't talk to him. It would be like, you know, it'd be a non-person. Wasn't it withholding of rent? Wasn't it with holding rent? Was it with holding of rents as well? I'm not sure. You really should do some research, shouldn't we? Yeah, I thought I needed. Research before this podcast.

But the point I was trying to make before I realize that this deficiencies in my understanding. I thought you were this Statsman, weren't you? Oh, Mr. Stats, yeah. But you've got to remember about this, Mr. Stats. He's got a terrible memory. He's like, he basically doesn't do Zen meditation, so he can't even remember what he did in his 34, let alone what he did when he was two.

Anyway. Or in the last episode. No, but so, but what it indicates, I think, is that like from the first iteration where it gets his name anyway, you know, the boycott was like an organized campaign by pretty strongly organized, organization. So there's other things you can see when boycotts are really effective,

they are tied up with collective organization. And so you can think about things such as, you know, what followed Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the end of the bus, it was a boycott of the bus service and the organization of like an alternative mechanism to address that need through sort of like informal taxi services and stuff like that, which did have this huge effect, really, really, really big impact. It's really, really effective. But behind that was like a really serious, you know, that didn't want something that Rosa Parks didn't just decide one day to not sit at the back of the bus. That's like the end result of like a huge amount of organizing, etc. I think the point about like that the retail politics and this idea, this retail politics

linked to a sort of, I don't know if it's moralism or like just a sort of identitarian conception of politics where like what you do and where you spend your money should indicate who you are in some sort of way. But I think it's a quite a powerful argument actually that. but of course the thing the thing about that is then well what do we do about it do we just dismiss all boycotts as as ineffective or if you know if it does in fact prove to be the fact that in fact the boycott was also a rent strike you know well our non-payment campaigns should we put them in in retail politics the most famous non-payment campaign which is my first really big movement I was involved as the anti-pole tax campaign around 89 to 90 1990 91 I suppose it

would end, which was basically a campaign for people to not pay their poll tax, which was a change in local taxation, taxation for local councils, which basically were massively unfair, basically. What I ended up with was 13 million people refused to pay their bills, and like basically that becomes unenforceable and creates an amount of leverage which the government had to sort of semi-abandoned, well, they did abandon their hands for a poll tax, introduced a community charge instead. But what went along with that was a form of organisation, which was the Anti-Poltax Union. So it would be like groups of people, you know, sometimes on an area level, sometimes in particularly well-organised, places on a street level, who would organise together, you know, organised to prevent bailiffs, these sorts of things, organised to support people when they, if they got took to court for non-payment. So what supplemented this thing, which was an individual act, I will not pay this bill or I will not buy this good, was supplemented by large amounts of organisation.

And there was a repeat of this sort of tactics, semi-based on the anti-politics campaign, which was the don't-pay campaign from last summer, which is around energy prices, don't pay energy prices, in which the tactic was, in fact, to try to repeat this, to try to start of an individual act, but then to try to facilitate the growth of local groups and sort of local non-payment unions, if you want to put it that way. didn't quite reach that way because the government folded and gave in or reacted and basically lowered the bills through their own action before that whole sort of campaign could get through it all. The response to identifying this weakness in contemporary political subjectivity is not just to say, well, we must return to the hidden abode of production and just concentrate on workplace strikes. It's like, no, you have to think about, well, how do you address the deficiencies of particular forms of action? Because they are actions that people find attractive. That thing about withholding something, I think, is a really interesting one.

Like, whether it's withholding your pound, you know, in that consumerist reality, or like withholding payment or withholding your labour, it's quite different. I think it has a different energy to it than leaving your house and doing something. Yeah, no, definitely, yeah. Like, you don't need to, like going back to what I said in the introduction, like you don't need to show yourself up as taking part of it. in it by not doing it. You see what I mean? And that changes perhaps your relationship to your community in your physical area or the people who know you. Like, no one needs to know that you're

withholding your rich gas bill or that you didn't pay the poll tax. If it would work against you in the reality of your life, it could be a secret protest in a way. Yeah. That's always like seen as like a big weakness in the problem of free riding on this thing, basically. That's one one of the roots of like this American social movement theory, which people, which I talked about on the last episode, and we mentioned a little bit more with this Charles Tilly thing about Wonk. It goes back to this guy Olson who does this sort of like economic calculation thing about that the problem with collective action is that you can, you can have free riding on it, particularly if that action is not visible. So, you know, you can free ride on the benefits of a

strike without actually going on strike because you get the benefits of a raise and you can free ride on people not paying their bills, etc., that sort of thing. That's the whole of history, basically. There's another read, is that any campaign for freedom or any campaign for workers' rights or political rights, like there's a percentage of people who, a large percentage of people of them that are never been involved, unless, you know, it's an anti-imperialist situation where they're literally tanks or, you know, like you're being bombed. Yeah, but like that leads us to another thing of like, well, you can work out ways in which you can make things which were not necessarily visible, such as deciding not to pay your energy bills at something.

You can make that visible. So that's what the don't pay tactic was. People would pledge on a website and then you'd collect up the number of pledges. And in fact, it was a conscious decision to like lower the costs of acting because your pledge would be enacted if a million people signed up. So it's that thing of like you're trying to address this problem of invisible. but also the problem of having high cost of high costs as in like putting yourself on the line, et cetera, and I'm going, what am I going to do? If I don't pay my energy bill, I got to pay it next year to, well, I only have to pay my energy bill if a million people don't pay their energy bill.

And of course, if a million people don't pay the energy bill, that's not a problem for me anymore. That's a problem for the government and the energy companies because the whole system's collapsed, basically. We should play Ghosts of Grenfell, which are from that 2017 by low-key featuring Mia Khalil. it's not a protest against a fire but it's a protest against the conditions that allowed this fire to rip through Grenfell Tower in London

in 2017 killing 72 residents turns out that this tower was cladding in this cladding which was incredibly clamable people in their building didn't stand a chance and it came to be seen

as a sort of symbol of austerity in some sort of way of the fact that so many people's lives were disfalyed as such a big degree that their living conditions were hazardous and dangerous. The entire night, they say Yassin saw the fire, and he ran inside, who thought that would be the site where he and his family died. The street is like a graveyard, tombstone lurching over us, though shouting out to their windows, now wish they never woke them up, and hope your worst enemy to go in this position.

Now it's flowers for the dead and printing posters for the missing, come home. So, okay, what about other forms? We've talked about weak-hots and non-payment. But we haven't really taught much yet about the idea of civil disobedience, which is somewhere in between direct action, classically conceived, and the peaceful, simple, peaceful demonstration. I mean, historically, a demonstration is trying to minimize disruption, and mostly they work by demonstrating their moral authority through the sheer scale and size. Look how many people agree with us and are willing to spend a few hours walking down the street to show that they agree with us. The idea of civil discipline comes out of a pacifist tradition, which you can trace back to various places, but most obviously the Indian independence struggle in the first half of the 20th century. and usually what it involves

is some form of deliberate disruption but without any form of violence. In some ways that's the ultimate manifestation I think of the pure idea of the idea of pure protest in the sense of making a moral claim making a claim on the basis of a set of shared moral assumptions. I mean maybe that's a banal notion in itself

because also shared moral assumptions are always being tested and changed and there's always something performative about the process of reiterating them and with every reiteration you slightly change them so you're trying to sort of bring a moral community into existence

by behaving as if one already does a lot of the time I mean we did that whole episode about XR and obviously in recent years XR is the most obvious example of a movement which has had an entire theory of historical change

predicated on the assumption that civil disobedience as such is the thing that changes things. Yeah, it's sort of interesting. I wasn't really thinking of that, but it traces its route through to the peace movement. I think there is a route through that, from that to like, to sort of Quakerism and these sorts of things.

And it leads us through to that, yeah, the willingness to put yourself on the line because of this, like, really big sense of, like, is it moralism? Yeah, I think there is a not in my name element to it. But it's also like just, like, we should recognize that like a sense of fairness is like an incredibly like motivating thing. When people think something is really, really is unfair or unjust, that is the root of all of this protest sort of stuff. There's different conceptions of justice and injustice within individuals and within like cultures and society and moments and history.

I think fairness in the way that it plays out in the UK is quite specific to the UK, like something being. unfair, which seems to be a step down from injustice to me. But it is a massive motivator, I think. Perhaps we should talk about, like, sort of ultimate sort of form of protests, which are things such as like hunger strikes, where you refuse to eat until something happens, or even we could put alongside that, you know, the sort of self-immolations where people have, like, set themselves on fire. In protest of the Vietnam War, there was a monk in Vietnam.

and we set himself on fire very famously. But it's been repeated that tactic. And in Tunisia, and in Tunisia before the spark of the Arab Spring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also, but hunger strikes are slightly more common. One of the biggest, the most notable sort of organized hunger strikes were the hunger strikes by Irish Republican prisoners in the 1980s, where Bobby Sanz was the first person who starved himself to death.

But then, you know, I can't remember how many. Was it, 13 people starved themselves to death and died? And the level of sort of like commitment and discipline you need to do that, it's quite hard to recreate in my own head, you know, that sense of, well, being able to starve yourself to death for a cause, etc. I think it's really, hunger strikes are really interesting because it presupposes a constituency that is going to act upon your suffering, like your individual suffering for a larger cause. It feels like there's an assumption of some kind of democratic structure and civil society. It feels like for that to be possible. I could just imagine in the context of Egypt, with even like, you know, semi-progressive, you know, or liberal people going, somebody's starting themselves to death.

Who cares? Let them die. You know what I mean? So the idea that that is in any way going to mobilize towards some kind of policy change, I think is presupposed in those conditions. Yeah, well, I think, as like I keep saying, I think the whole notion of protest does imply a shared moral universe, a moral community of some kind. And this is partly why, you know, once you get to the point

where you just have very clearly articulated differences, either differences in material interests or differences in ideology and worldview, then you're not really talking about protest anymore. You're talking about something else. I mean, the hunger strike has a tactic, I think goes back to the suffrage movement, actually, the early 20th century. And it's historically, my understanding is that the Irish hunger strikes were directly modeled on the suffrage hunger strikes,

because in both cases, there was a very specific demand. And the demand was for the prisoners to be recognized as political prisoners rather than criminals. So it is a very, very specific claim for a specific place in a broad political universe. I keep using the word universe today. It's getting annoying. So I think, but also obviously the idea of the hunger strikeer is supposed to impress people with its moral force. And it's partly belongs to this whole tradition of the idea of martyrdom as being the thing which ultimately will convince people that you are completely sincere and that therefore your cause has some value, which goes back to like early Christian, sort of iconography and notions of, you know, what of moral were. If we go back to like the Irish Republican hangar strikes, that introduces this an interesting angle on it because they found out they didn't share a moral universe

with Margaret Lager. She didn't care, basically. She was all for them dying. But they did share a moral universe with the Catholic populations of Northern Ireland. And so famously Bobby Sands gets elected for West Belfast, which is that is the point at which, you know, the political route for Irish Republicans. some opens up, you know, and now they're the, you know, the Sinn Féin are like the biggest party in both north and, oh, the biggest party in the south. Are they the biggest party in the

north of Ireland? I think there might be actually. Anyway, the point is that like that, it had a compositional effect within Irish and nationalist communities, basically. That idea of a shared moral universe and it breaking down is interesting because perhaps that can still have an effect on the part that shares your moral universe is my point. I'm trying to make, I think. Yeah. I think Sinn Féin is the biggest party in the North now, actually. Yeah, I think it is. Because the others, because the others, because the unionists are still really fragmented. Yeah, well, that's true.

Well, that definitely was effective. I mean, it was effective in enabling Sinn Féin and the IRA to some extent to take on this position of moral leadership within that community. And it was so it was a claimed kind of intense moral sincerity, which they were making. And it was, yeah, I guess it was successful in that way. And I guess that does, that indicates the way in which protest can, as I was saying earlier, It is a means by which people try to create a moral community as well as appeal to a pre-existing word. One that follows on with that, I just want to talk about this idea of being sent to Coventry,

which follows the boycott thing because I think that the Captain Charles Boycott was people wouldn't talk to the guy, basically. Yeah, I think that was the original form. I'm not even, I still can't remember properly. I mean, he was a rent collecting agent, but I can't remember if actual rent strike came into the original boycott. The form of the campaign against him, it was to social ostracism. It was what we would call sending to Coventry. I would like to claim that my memories come back, but in fact, I've just Googled it.

It's not a rent strike. But it was like total ostracism, as in the postman refused to deliver his mail. People wouldn't work his fields, all these sorts, that sort of thing. But I saw one of the things that you could come off that is this idea of being sent to Coventry, which was a, which it came out of like the union movement,

or the phrase comes out of the union movement. Yeah, let's just say for non-British listeners, Coventry is a town in the Midlands, in the middle of England, an industrial town. And to be sent to Coventry is to have no one in your workplace or your classroom at school or whatever talk to you, and to be able to pretend you're not there. Total social ostracism pretend you don't exist. Why it's called, it's called being sent to Coventry, I have no idea. I think I have tried to find out on Wednesday and wasn't able to.

There's nothing specific about Coventry. Coventry doesn't have any specific status. in British culture that would mean that would be the place you would be sent. So I don't know why it's called that. If somebody knows, if somebody knows, please write in and tell us. We do want to know about this. The reason I want to bring it up is that because it can be really, really effective. And this being sent to Coventry as like this social ostracism brought to mind,

there's something that happened. I think it was in like 2011, which was at university in California. It started with some Occupy demonstrations on campus. and then the campus police, you know, because U.S. campuses have their own police forces, went in and like, basically, they, like, sprayed these protesters who were sat down, not that many of them, sprayed him with Mace, basically, and it became a real meme of this big cop, just spraying them so casually. It became this real meme, and it was translated, etc.

But people were really outraged at this, like, you know, really violent act against, like, really very, very peaceful and, like, not particularly disruptive protests, et cetera. And the response was, it was like a huge amount of criticism on the chancellor of this university. And they basically sent her to Coventry, said nobody will talk to you. And then they staged this thing where she left this, she left her office and she had to walk out past thousands of people who were just standing, staring at her, and it was complete silence. And it shows you how utterly effective it was because the chancellor was absolutely in pieces. She just couldn't handle it. You know, she had barely walked to her, the car where her, her

driver was waiting for her. You know, it was incredibly power, like silence is this incredibly powerful, like moral force. It's so primal. I think it's because it's so primal. The, the combination of a group of other human beings, I mean, it works with animals as well, like all staring at you, surrounding you, or in a space with you, and not saying anything, is like, it just pulls at all of kind of those Freudian childhood, like abandonment, ostracization, like, what have I done wrong, like in a just really kind of, I think, on a base level. So it's really effective, but it's very hard to enact when you have a group of people who are engaged in that opposition who are angry.

It also requires a lot of discipline and organization. But once again, I think that's sort of like trying to keep the moral high ground, because I'm pretty sure it's unpleasant to be surrounded by thousands of people shouting at you telling you you're a wanker, of course, you might, it might appear that you've lost the moral high ground. Let's play Hansworth Revolution by Steele Pulse. It's from 1978 from the album, Hansworth Revolution. So Hansworth is an area in Birmingham.

It's sort of the African-Arabian area in Birmingham. It's a reggae song about the kind of, you know, like severe racism and harassment from the police that the community in hands with and like in other African-Arabian communities around the UK were suffering particularly at that point unfortunately has not changed too much in some ways you could see it as you know a almost like a pre-protest song about the huge eruption of urban riots that took place in 1981 you know that buildup of racism around 1970 from the late 1970s and into the early 80s

you know exploded in in urban riots in 1980s in 181 and then 1985. Interestingly, Steel Pulse played Hands with Revolution at the biggest Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park. We haven't really quite talked about that idea of protests as music festivals and gigs music concerts as protests. So Rock Against Racism was this very important moment actually, started by Red Saunders in 1976, I think, in response to Eric Clapton going on a huge. racist rant at one of his gigs. And so there was a response of rock against racism. But it was a very important moment in like asserting that punk rock in particular was an

anti-racist, anti-fascist and leftist project. And part of that was trying to create a connection between reggae and punk. So we should play Hands With Revolution. So, speaking Jaja language, long, long way, we're coming from. So one of the things I cross and promise. So one of the things I mentioned at the beginning, which I wanted to talk about, and we haven't covered yet, is. is that there just seems to be a big wave of anti-protest laws, like restrictions on protest, but also discourse as well.

In a way, I suppose it's a way to try to frame protest and limit what protest is legitimate because a lot of the protests, a lot of the anti-protest law has been introducing. There's been a raft of them there's one going through at the moment, and they're all about trying to restrict protest to basically ineffective displays of moral outrage, basically, and to ban any form of sort of like the more civil disobedience or direct action or even just protest which can annoy people or which is noisy etc and so one of the groups have been really really hit by this has been you know the just stop oil which is like a post-exr protest group and that they've adopted this tactic of slow walking walking slowly down the street etc i saw a clip the

other day of two policemen running ahead of this protest trying to find a pass-a-by finding a pass by and say, this protest is very annoying for you, isn't it? And he goes, what are you on about? Like, they're trying to establish the route, some sort of justification for stopping this protest, etc. So it's an attempt to define and limit it, but there's also, like, lots

of discourse to try to make protest illegitimate in some sort of way. So around the anti-war own Gaza protests, lots and lots of, like, the commentary at. So right-wing figures, quite often right-wing figures, who

still have a pretend that they speak for the left in some sort of way, sort of saying, well, look, how many times are we going to put up with, they've made their point having these protests, that's enough now, that's enough, they can't have any more, it's disrupting the central London, etc. So patronising, it's so patronising, it's really, it's so removed. I mean, that in itself as a kind of, an aesthetic of speaking, yeah, is so infuriating. But I think that's part of the point. But once again, it's an attempt to define what protest is

and to delimit it or limit it in a certain way. So you make your point, we've got your point. Now, fuck off. Nothing's going to change. Of course, that's not the point of protest. There's nothing in the history of protest, which would indicate that that is what the point is. Do you know what I mean?

That the point is to try to stop something or to enact huge costs on people who are supporting it. And then the other day I saw this thing going around of Matthew Iglesias, he was a sort of US of centre-right pundit. Is he in the Atlantic? I can't remember.

Basically, there were these really big protests and then there was this initiation of sit-ins in train stations so the first one in the UK was initiated by Sisters Uncutt, I'm pretty sure. And then it caught on and spread around and perhaps the first one was in the US

before that, I'm not quite sure. But like, yeah, you see this sort of like new tactic emerge and then spread like wildfire and then actually sort of diminish quite quickly because the police changed their attitudes and stuff and others move on to other to different things. And so in response to, I think it was either a train blockade or a bridge blockade in the US, this Matthew Iglesias guy sort of, he made this statement and he's going,

look, these leftists, they're addicted to these forms of action, which are actually only appropriate to a place where there's no democracy. So like in colonial India or in Jim Crow America, he says, you know, when you have a democracy, you just win the battle of ideas. They're addicted to these tactics which shouldn't be within democracy. It's a stupid point. He's a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid man. But I think it's indicative of like a general sort of like anti-protest sort of discourse linked to really quite like really severe restrictions on protests.

The most glaring example is that two people were sent to jail in the UK for three years for blockade in the bridge, which is something you would only associate. with like violent crime in the past like three years in jail and they will they will serve what one and a half to two years or something which is incredible incredible sentence I mean in 2009 for an operation Ute they um they you know put like 18 year olds behind bars for going to a Palestine demonstration and throwing empty water bottle yeah like you know they go through these spurts of like wanting to restrict demonstrations of you know this is not new I know I agree. There are spasms. And like, you know, after the 2011 riots, you know, basically the law is almost ripped up and people are sent to jail for two years for licking a scoop of ice cream or something like that. But this is like a change in the law to permit this and try to make this the new standard, not just an exceptional moment, but like the new standard, basically. One of the things I want to talk about is like why is that so prevalent nowadays? Because it's not just in the UK. You can see it across Europe.

A very interesting moment at the beginning of these Gaza protests where, you know, Macron banned pro-Palestinian-posed protests, we won't bother talking about Germany. That's a whole issue in itself, in its relationship, or the relationship of its political elite to Israel and notions of anti-Semitism. But like there's something going on, I think. And I think at the beginning of like the Gaza protests, there was an attempt to try to enforce the line that had been imposed around around the campaign to eliminate. it the Labour left and defeat Jeremy Corbyn, etc. Because there was a huge wave of McCarthyism

where people were losing their jobs, et cetera, losing positions, being exposed in the newspapers, etc. for basically representing the opinions of 75% of the British population. In the US, their protesters on campuses, right-wing groups had got these vans and they would project the pictures and the home address of student protesters and they drive around the campus, trying to, like stochastic terrorism, trying to promote attacks on these students. And in fact, three students in Vermont just got shot because they were talking Arabic and wearing kaffirs just last week. Yeah, I mean, I don't feel comfortable, I have to say, when I was in my 20s, I would wear a kaffa all the time. I do not feel able to wear a kaffaia anywhere that is not a Palestine demonstration, I have to say.

But I also wanted to talk about what is going on with the story that came out that, the MET police were going to hand out leaflets to demonstrators to provide absolute clarity, apparently the article says in The Guardian, that what is an offence and what isn't an offence to the pro-person in March. So the first thing I want to say about that is I cannot imagine a situation where the MET police were handing out leaflets. I want to see a picture of this. If anybody has a picture of them, the MET police handing out leaflets, I want to know

what it looks like. That's not a new thing though, that because there was a change in policing where you'd have, I can't remember what they're called, but they wear blue, bibs, and their job is to engage with the protest and talk with them, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know what you're talking about. But the point I was going to come to, I'm not saying this is exceptional. I'm saying it's the first time I've heard about it in with regards to Palestine, specifically. And what's interesting there is it's about the story, and it's about the story trying to scare people from going on a demonstration rather than the

action of those leaflets being sent out themselves. Because if you look at the wording that's on the it's very, it's that, it's where the Tories have been, like, this is very this government, right? This is definitely, like, this is the sort of text that is signed off by, I mean, it's all over the government website. If you go to HMRC's website, if you go to, like, the home office, if you go to, like, whatever, the foreign office, they use this sort of terminology, which is, and they used it during COVID as well, which is, like, seems to be saying something, but it's incredibly vague. so you can actually give authorities this catchment to do whatever they want,

even though their claim is that they're being specific. Things like, like if you've got a list of words that you're not allowed to say on a demonstration because they will put you, you'll end up in a cell, why don't you put those list of words? But they don't do that. They say vague things like incite racial hatred. You say support Hamas or any other band organization, which is illegal.

Like, if you really want to inform people, then you should inform people. But they're not doing that. What about this question of, like, why is happening now? This, really, I do think it is an upsidgen, anti-protests, rhetoric, sentiment, and law. I suppose it's like, the answer is like, there's a general crisis of liberal democracy, and there's been a sort of centrist, centre-right counter-revolution. I don't know what, what would you call it, basically? Well, it's the counterinsurgency.

Well, it probably is a counterinsurgency, yeah. And that's a very vulnerable thing, I think, you know, there's odds with public sentiment in lots of things, et cetera. And I suppose we're also just going into a period of general crisis in which climate change is going on in the background. I'm going in. We are going. We have been in crisis for a long time.

You may be right, yeah. But, yeah, no, as in like the main target of it is to do with protest around climate change. like the initiating thing for the Tories in particular, that must be because they're anticipating this is going to be something that happens a lot more in the future as that climate crisis gets in. I think it's a really good question, and I think one of the answers could potentially be,

you know, as we've answered the question with regards to other aspects of oppression as well, is you've got a class of people who are just trying to hold on to their jobs and make as much money in the shortest amount of time possible. And they, and by oppressing people's ability to protest against their material conditions or other things going on in the world that they want to express themselves about, then you're able to accumulate more wealth and power in the time you have left. Because I think consciously or subconsciously people know that the tipping point will come at some point, you know, and things will change. I think that's right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a, you know, it's a classic symptom of a situation in which the, people in power have lost any form of moral authority. They're no longer able to exercise egemony

at the level of at the level of ideology, at the level of even relatively passive consent. So they increasingly have to crank up the repressive apparatus. It's not the first time it's happened. Of course, it's interesting to think about what is the story they tell themselves to rationalise it. Because if we're talking about people like Stamo

is exemplifying this tendency now, the story they tell themselves is that it doesn't matter if you've got 750,000 people on the streets they're still not representative of some imagined public who you are properly representing by ignoring or repressing them

I mean as Keir pointed out at the start of the show they can't really do that over the issue of Palestine because the polls are very very clear but on a whole set of other issues that is the story they'll keep telling themselves what they really want is to get back to the situation pre-2010 2008 whereby there was a

widespread perception, even on the left, that left-wing demands are really the confine of a tiny, negligible, residual rump of the population. The thing that we've seen over the past decade and a half is that they're not. In some cases, their majority demands or desires, and even where they're not, a clearly leftist perspective represents about a third of the population, and their whole political project is predicated on just completely delegitimizing. Not doing their jobs. And also just delegitimating that third. You have to pretend that the third of the people

who are basically socialist politics are just illegitimate, are just outside the sphere of what can be reasonably, you know, what can reasonably be part of the conversation and the people who can be allowed to enjoy basic democratic rights. I think it's also about making representation like, I don't know whether it's like consciously or not conscious, but the idea of representation like redundant. Yeah, I mean, that has sort of lessons to us as well, I think, because I think you're right, and I think you can sort of understand

the sort of wave of McCarthyism and the attempt to, like, basically prevent the expression of, or to delegitimize the, you know, the expression of, like, pro-Palestinian sentiment, which I do think the protest broke, basically, and I think they're broken, and I think that they suffered a really major defeat in that. But, like, you know, you can see that, like,

part of the reason they want to do that, and so you want to prevent sort of protests in which that third of the population can express their politics or have their politics expressed for them is because what they have succeeded in doing is preventing the expression of that third of the population's politics in in electoral politics basically that might change that might change but that's basically what they've succeeded in and the sort of media elite have gone along with that and said well yeah well we basically we won't like their views won't be represented in the media

either they won't be represented on TV programs Owen Jones can go on and get shouted at but then like we'll draw the line under that the odd article from Adjitia Trocoborty, but we'll draw the line under that, which does mean that, like, you know, this is not going away after the next election. And, like, you know, the idea that, like, you know, protest will be one of the ways in which that will be expressed until there's a way in which that can be expressed in the sort of formal political system again, that is going to be a big battleground, I think. And it's something we've argued before that, like, what's the response to an increasingly

authoritarian technocracy? well, it is a movement for democracy, basically. That movement for democracy has to be, you know, a movement to defend the right to protest and the right to expand the definition of protest as why it is we possibly can, I think. Like an absolute classic protest song is Give Peace a Chance, written by John Lennon,

in 1970, I think. And it emerged out of a form of protest, an idiosyncratic form of protest. It was written while John Lennon and his wife, Yergoona, were having a bed in for peace. They basically stayed in bed and invited the press in the press would interview them. And all John would say in response to questions was give peace a chance. And so they eventually decided to write a song around it. In that's all we are safe is give me the chance. All we are safe is give me the chance.

In that same vein, we could have played Imagine, which is, I think we've played before, actually, which is never sort of a piece song. But on the B side of Imagine is a song by John Lenn, which I think is much better. than you ever see called Working Class Hero, the chorus is, a working class hero is something to be. If imagine, and give peace of chance a quite utopian and otherworldly in some sort of ways, this is very bitter and very worldly, and it's about class and class reproduction. You know, the famous line is as soon as you're born, they make you feel small, etc. Ironically, it was probably at the high point of class social mobility in the UK,

but of course it's when you change classes or when you get a chance to change. class that you see class reproduction and how classes are reproduced becomes very, very obvious to you. As soon as you're born, they make you feel small by giving you no time instead of it all till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all. A working-class hero is something to be. So I'd like to cycle back to this idea about whether protest is good for you. And protest, and for lack of a better term, well-being under capitalism. So should we talk about that?

I mean, Jeremy, you mentioned, I can talk a lot about why I think demonstrations are good for you. But earlier, Jeremy, you said that, you know, you weren't sure if going on a demonstration was what you know you wanted to do tactically but you still felt that you should but my question to you there is doesn't it doesn't it have a good effect on you to be in a on a march or do you find it boring or which other form of protest do you find more enlivening yeah it's a good one it's a good question yeah I mean generally speaking I don't enjoy being in the position of having to protest something because I would rather be engaged in some form of struggle that I think has gone past the point of having moral arguments and he's just trying to contest for power against people

who we know are our enemies. So I tend to feel more enlivened in moments when I know that is happening when we're not just protesting. We've drawn the line and we're fighting over it. But being a protester, I mean, in here I am just reiterating that classic, kind of anarchist critique, which we've unpicked and deconstructed, but I guess it's still in me. The protester is sort of a supplicant. You're saying, please don't do this. I just don't enjoy being in that position really. But when mass demonstrations really pass a certain critical mass,

they become sort of historically impressive. Yeah, it is really inspiring. The physical experience of that is like hours and hours of shuffling, basically. Yeah. There is just hours and hours of shuffling, and it is deeply boring, like incredibly dull. But the experience of the 2003 demonstration, against the war in Iraq was really, really extraordinary.

And it's a sort of benchmark of what mass politics really feels like. Yeah, but we're talking about, just to bring us back to topic, we're not talking about the analysis of it. We're talking about how it physically feels. Yeah. I know, that's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm saying it felt like nothing I've ever experienced before. Because I walked, I lived in Leytonstone at the time, in northeast London, and we walked to Walthamstow Tube to, get onto the demo, which is about a half-hour walk. And absolutely every person we saw on the street, this is in outer London, really, the northeast corner of London, was walking in the same direction. Already, everybody was walking to the tube, to get on the tube, to go to the demonstration. And it was, and this sense of kind of common purpose, a collective purpose and common intention was really extraordinary. It was really empowering. It really was a lesson in

what sort of mass politics feels like. And it felt like a sort of, a certain kind of high of something to be aspired towards. And for me, that was really, and that was really, it was really fantastic as a physical experience, an emotional experience. I was just going to mention this study that was in the garden of the day about the beneficial impact of, like, doing any form of collective action has on people's mental well-being and particularly around like the sort of depression that can be brought about by the fact of climate change, basically. And, you know, the, how that can, you know, the fact of climate change can produce depression. and in fact one of the key indicators of people who are aware of this and who are aware of the and face up to the fact of climate change

one of the big distinctions is those who take some sort of collective action in fact avoid depression yeah right that's a really important point and we're saying this all the time I'm saying it all the time like it's important both to be completely kind of coldly analytical about how effective different kinds of political action are and recognize when something you'll doing is not actually going to achieve an external political objective and also to recognise well that's okay so a lot of the time the point is just to make you and your friends feel better and that is okay that is fine that is that in fact that is crucial a lot of the time i think

it's really important to be able to hold both of those thoughts in your head at the same time don't convince yourself that you have as i have seen cohort after cohort of environmental activists convince themselves that just because they managed to get a bunch of people out for an action one Saturday afternoon, we are now on the brink of World Revolution thanks to you. Do not convince yourselves of that. It's wrong. On the other hand, don't stop doing it for that reason, you know, and don't stop doing it because it's, it remains important and important in itself. Yeah, I mean, protest is not sufficient to address the world's problems, but it's a crucial part of it, basically. Yeah, it's necessary. It's necessary, but never sufficient, isn't it?

Wow, that's pretty far out.