03.04.2025

They just stopped

Just Stop Oil is shutting up shop, and declaring victory - but the truth is that it has been thoroughly and predictably defeated by the state, argues Paul Demarty

So farewell then, Just Stop Oil. The noisiest and most controversial spin-off of Extinction Rebellion has decided to take the course of extinction itself. After a few years of go-slow protests and baffling assaults on works of art, co-founder Hannah Hunt showed up at Downing Street to declare victory:

Just Stop Oil’s demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history. We’ve made fossil-fuel licensing front-page news and kept over 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground, while courts have ruled new oil and gas unlawful.

To describe this as an optimistic spin on the course of events since JSO began its series of stunts would be quite an understatement. Indeed, it is so embarrassingly obvious that it is a lie that one is tempted merely to pass over it in silence, like a drunken uncle’s racist table talk. That, alas, would be irresponsible. We shall see why later on.

Back-story

What actually is the story of JSO? That requires the Extinction Rebellion back-story - XR burst onto the scene with a series of eye-catching direct actions, freezing up traffic and so forth. It came with a ready-made hero at the helm (though in reality semi-detached from this specific movement), in the person of the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. XR had an avowedly minoritarian theory of political change, allied to anarchistic internal norms (an apparent contradiction, but in fact a well-established combination in the history of progressive political struggle). It deliberately recruited some members as ‘arrestables’ - people who were happy to go out and break the law and, if necessary, face the music.

XR ultimately retreated into more narrowly legal forms of political activity, and in so doing merely became one of many such climate ginger groups, like Greenpeace and Climate Camp (both of which, of course, had themselves begun as direct-action radicals …). JSO span off with a couple of distinguishing features. One was a more narrowly focused political aim - just stop oil, leave it in the ground, etc. The other was a renewed commitment to non-violent direct action. The most prominent individual associated with it was probably Roger Hallam, currently serving a long stretch at his majesty’s pleasure for “causing a public nuisance” , and an infamously irascible old-timer in the radical green movement.

JSO’s actions initially targeted oil refineries, but these were found to be hard targets, and quickly abandoned. They then started sabotaging petrol stations; but these were too small in terms of making a media splash. (Remember Hunt’s victory claim above - “we’ve made fossil-fuel licensing front-page news”). So they reverted to XR type and organised major traffic disruption in London - that’ll get the media to take notice! - and began to attack works of art with tomato soup and orange paint. (Orange was important; according to the operative theory of political change here, branding is everything.)

There followed, inevitably, the arrests. Last year, Hallam and four others received stiff sentences of four to five years (some later reduced slightly) for blocking the M25 in 2022. Phoebe Plummer, who doused a Van Gogh sunflower in orange paint a month earlier, got 27 months for that and other offences. Already in reaction to XR’s previous protests, draconian new laws against direct action had been passed. They were duly exercised in the case of the JSO people.

That need not necessarily have happened, of course. Convictions in these cases were handed out by juries, not judges. A jury, it will be remembered, acquitted a group of anti-racist activists for the destruction of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol - a “crime” of which these people were plainly guilty. Nullification is a fine thing, so far as revolutionaries are concerned. It was not forthcoming in these cases. Why not?

It is impossible to know what was in this or that juror’s mind at the moments of decision. We can still say, with some confidence, that this is where minoritarianism can badly let you down. During the furore over Plummer’s attack on the Van Gogh painting, a JSO activist told The Guardian: “We are not trying to make friends here: we are trying to make change.” In the dock, however, you need friends; unless your strategy involves making martyrs out of people.

The activism that JSO alighted upon seems almost intended to lose friends and alienate people. Traffic obstructions tend to alienate those who must - really must - drive for a living. Nobody who got their pay docked or was late for the birth of their child is going to thank JSO for raising their consciousness. Instead, they will complain to the press, or the internet, and give the enemy ammunition to fire at the activists. What is their response? “We’re not here to make friends.” Attempted vandalism of great works of art does not decisively inconvenience anyone, but invites the accusation of nihilism. What reply can be given? “We’re not here to make friends.”

Infiltration

Though direct-action politics is very vulnerable to this sort of dead-end pseudo-activity, not all direct action politics reaches it. Though it has sometimes flirted dangerously with souping-Van-Gogh-type idiocy, Palestine Action has largely remained focused on precisely the sort of hard targets abandoned by JSO - Israeli arms operations in the UK, operated by the likes of Elbit Systems. Inevitably many of their cadres have been arrested, but at least it was for something prima facie worth the pain - something that points meaningfully towards British complicity in Israel’s genocide. By contrast, JSO was merely the remainder left over when XR failed, flailing around hopelessly. If it had deliberately designed its activities to get people sent away for long jail terms unmourned, it could hardly have done a better job.

That does, of course, raise the question - were its activities so designed? At present, we have no way of knowing. But we know that the ecological movements of the 1980s-2000s were intricately infiltrated by police agents, thanks to the ‘SpyCops’ scandals. We know that the minoritarian character of these direct action networks makes them exceptionally vulnerable to state infiltration.

We know that, when movements of this sort are infiltrated by police agents, such agents are usually to be found urging more r-r-radical action - the action urged upon Verloc by his handler, Mr Vladimir, in Joseph Conrad’s The secret agent, of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory and therefore an outrage against time itself, is more typical than it might seem. If any reader wants to take it, I’ll bet twenty quid against a hundred that at least three JSO activists will be unmasked as state operatives by 2035.

Here, I realise I may be taken as simply denouncing the JSO people as fools. That is not quite the point. Their choice of actions was, it is fair to say, extremely foolish; but there is always a rational kernel to any irrationality. In this case, the rational kernel is so obvious it is almost insulting to mention - we are already in the throes of catastrophic climate change; the warnings of generations of activists are proving all the more true every terrifying day; and yet we have lived through decades where some moderate, ‘sensible’ action to mitigate climate change has been the stuff of official ideology. At the end of all that, what have we to show for it except total, abject failure?

In other words, if I argue that JSO enacts the politics of despair, I do not argue that the despair is unfounded. Who could shield themselves from it entirely - who, that is, except the most idiotically self-deceiving? The alternative to JSO politics must be more ‘sensible’ in the narrow way that it is more likely to work. It cannot be more ‘sensible’ in any respect that obscures the gravity of the situation, or gives any credit to the ‘business as usual’ absurdities of ‘official’ climate politics (for as long as Donald Trump suffers the latter to exist).

It is this background situation that makes the ‘our work here is done’ spin put out by JSO as their justification for winding up so irresponsible. To take on the fight against global warming - whether in the form of Green Party-type politics, far-left organisation, XR/JSO direct action or even David Cameron-style eco-Toryism - is implicitly to take responsibility for that fight. We are answerable for success and failure in this extremely grave matter. It must be conceded that none of us have much to brag about, for the reasons already mentioned; but that responsibility is still on our shoulders.

Denialism

It is plain that JSO did not achieve its aims. Our roads are still clogged with internal combustion engines. Heathrow is to be expanded. Globally, we blow past one point of no return after another and the political drift is towards denialism. XR and offshoots like JSO base themselves on a dubious social science that claims a highly-motivated 3.5% of a population can drive through major changes; but in any case, nothing like 3.5% of the population was ever involved with either of them. Taking responsibility would mean confronting that failure and drawing lessons.

To claim victory under these conditions is a total abdication. It is a piece of shallow self-protection; it saves JSO the bother of facing up to the fact that several brave activists are to rot away in jail for years with none of their ambitious goals reached. Even allowing them the ‘win’ of getting these oil licenses cancelled (did they really frighten Sir Keir Starmer into it?), the net result of this wave of disruptive protest stunts was to give the political class a pretext for sweeping illegalisation of protest across the board. It shows that, for this group, it is easier to leave the door open to repeat mistakes than to account for them.

Ironically, despite Roger Hallam’s high-minded contempt for the traditional left, it is a failing all too familiar in our own parish of small-group far-left politics. Hannah Hunt’s statement was at least briefer than the interminable self-congratulation of the Socialist Workers Party’s central committee, when it writes up its perspective documents for the SWP annual conference every year; but these very different organisations share a lethal addiction to official optimism.

The same might be said of many other groups - there is never any time for critical self-reflection, when so many great opportunities and grave dangers lie before us. Until we learn the habit of self-criticism, however, opportunities will keep going to waste, and dangers will creep ever closer to us.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk