This writing was written by Deep Green Resistance cadre in December 2018 and is published here in English for the first time.
Message To the French People
In the past weeks we have seen an uprising of the people. Macron and his cronies in the L’Assemblee have gone too far again. The average people in France are living a precarious life. We are poor, we are sick, and we are tired of the bosses and the politicians, the little dictators.
Now they try to tell us that we are responsible for paying a tax on fuel to solve global warming. These capitalist dogs who caused the problem in the first place now want to turn around and rob us to fix it. Their fuel taxes are a form of theft from the poor, one of the many ways they rob us of life and liberty. First they exploit our labor. Then they poison us with their factories and pollution. Then they rob us as landlords. Next they commodify every part of our lives through mass advertising. These elites are vampires sucking us dry.
The French people have a true sense of our power.
Our forebearers took the rich to the Guillotines and erected the barricades in Paris. Our grandmothers and grandfathers fought the Nazi regime from the streets and rooftops and alleyways and made collaborators pay for their self-serving treachery.
Now our very own government has unleashed their trained dogs against the people, injuring hundreds and leaving the streets of France bloody. We say: no more. No more can we tolerate their capitalist lies. No more will we pay their farcical taxes. No more will we cooperate with their tyrannical vision. No more will we stand idly by as fascists step to the fore.
As the police and security forces of the state run amok through the streets of this country, we say it is time. Let us rise up. We need a radical new imagination to chart a course out of this terrible storm.
What we want:
1. We want the freedom to determine our own destiny. We can no longer rely on distant wealthy politicians.
2. We want an end to the robbery of the people. This means an end to capitalism and to the capitalist economy and a return to localized economies of sharing and cooperation. Life is incompatible with constant growth.
3. We want a true environmentalism that serves the people and the natural world, not the rich. “Green technology” and “green capitalism” are false solutions that have been sold to us through lies. but on reconnecting with the spirit of the land and changing our economic structure.
4. These goals are mutually supportive, and one cannot succeed without the other. Building a new France and a new world means dismantling mass industrial society, ending the reign of capitalism, regaining a sense of our own political power, autonomy, and responsibility, and reintegrating ourselves into the ecology of the land.
As the world falls deeper into crisis, our leaders are showing their ineptitude. They do not serve us, they serve the rich. It is up to the people of France to disarm the state through the solemn manifestation of our will. In the face of racism and bigotry, we must find solidarity. In the face of state violence and repression, we must find courage. It is our obligation to fight and win.
This episode of The Green Flame features an interview with James Darling who is currently on the 8th day of a hunger strike against logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia, Canada (occupied First Nations territory). You can contact James at: (250) 816-4321, or at james0darling@gmail.com.
In this interview, James talks about why he started the hunger strike, the old-growth logging in British Columbia, the path forward for the movement, and revolutions that have used hunger strikes.
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was born in 1916 in Berlin, which was ruled by the Weimar Republic and in the middle of World War I. She was an exceptionally bright youth and demonstrated an early aptitude for academia. As a student she had a chance encounter with Adolf Hitler, which she described as “one of the most intensive and strangest moments of my life.” Intellectually, she decided to focus on propaganda and American public opinion research. Professionally, she worked briefly for a Nazi-run publication but was soon fired for replacing unfavourable photos of Franklin Roosevelt for more flattering ones. In 1947, after witnessing the fall of the Third Reich and realising the magnitude of its horrors, Noelle-Neumann decided to focus on public opinion research in an attempt to understand what had happened.
Noelle-Neumann’s most famous contribution is the Spiral of Silence Theory, which attempts to explain why people remain silent in the face of certain types of opposition; she was probably trying to understand why people in Germany failed to effectively speak out against the Nazis when they were first coming to power, and why people remained silent even once they began to understand the evil actions which were taking place.
The Spiral of Silence occurs when people are afraid of being socially isolated or excluded for voicing their opinions; this fear is not always true and can be manufactured by the media, or by false impressions. Here are the four primary steps in the Spiral of Silence:
We can distinguish between fields where the opinions and attitudes involved are static, and fields where those opinions and attitudes are subject to changes… Where opinions are relatively definite and static – for example, “customs” – one has to express or act according to this opinion in public or run the risk of becoming isolated. In contrast, where opinions are in flux or disputed, the individual will try to find out which opinion he can express without becoming isolated.
Individuals who, when observing their environments, notice that their own personal opinion is spreading and is taken over by others, will voice this opinion self-confidently in public. On the other hand, individuals who notice that their own opinions are losing ground will be inclined to adopt a more reserved attitude when expressing their opinions in public.
It follows from this that, as the representatives of the first opinion talk quite a lot while the representatives of the second opinion remain silent, there is a definite influence on the environment: an opinion that is being reinforced in this way appears stronger than it really is, while an opinion suppressed as described will seem to be weaker than it is in reality.
The result is a spiral process which prompts other individuals to perceive the changes in opinion and follow suit, until one opinion has become established as the prevailing attitude while the other opinion will be pushed back and rejected by everybody with the exception of the hardcore that nevertheless sticks to that opinion.
In Germany, Nazis took advantage of this phenomenon by gathering in force, browbeating opponents into silence, and propagating false narratives about the popularity of their messages. In the modern world, this same phenomenon occurs online in settings where “echo chambers” form groups, browbeat opposition, and convince themselves that their ideas are more mainstream than they may be; this occurred during Trump’s election in America, both online and through rallies in strategic locations.
Historically, the environmental movement has consistently fallen victim to the Spiral of Silence, in part because those movements tended to spend more time attempting to convince their opposition than reinforcing the perceived dominance of their ideas. We can all envision the lone eco warrior preaching to an ambivalent, even hostile audience of “mainstream” people, despite ridicule — this image is a catastrophe for environmentalism because it signals to potential supporters that they will be socially isolated if they voice similar opinions.
Rather than spending time attempting to convince the opponents of environmentalism, these eco warriors should organise themselves into “brigades” and focus on reinforcing each others’ ideas in communities that are already vaguely onside, thus shoring up the dominance of their ideas within those groups. Moreover, they should aggressively browbeat moderates as a group in order to manufacture the perception that moderate ideas are unpopular and result in social isolation. These aggressive actions must be balanced out by positive interactions with other bystanders in order to demonstrate social inclusion towards people who either support the group’s ideas or, at least, don’t vocally criticise them.
These tactics may seem distasteful to some, but they are extremely effective and they are being utilised by people who are in the process of destroying life on Earth; if we do not use these tactics we will be victims of them.
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” ― Carl Sagan
David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Australia, recently warned us that “no political, social, or military system can cope” with the outcomes of climate collapse. The consequences are almost too extreme to process: global crop failures, water shortages, extreme natural disasters, dying ecosystems, and unstoppable climate feedback systems. These increasingly chaotic variables can lead to crippling uncertainty; should you dedicate all of your energy to fighting against greenhouse gas emissions and ecological destruction? Should you balance your time between resistance and preparing for adaptation? What are the skills and resources needed to survive? This article is the first in a series designed to help frame and answer those questions.
I grew up in the wilderness and was a stranger to civilization until my mid teens. Outside my childhood home I could have walked for weeks or months without encountering another human, and I often spent extended periods of time doing just that. It was a difficult environment to survive in because the summers were searing hot, the winters were far below freezing, there was little water, and vegetation was sprase. My classroom was the natural world, my teachers were the native species, and some of my tests were high stakes. I learned how to quickly build shelters, how to find clean water from miles away, and how to find enough food to survive. It was a perfect childhood, despite many challenges and hardships.
When I moved into the town I was around 14 years old. I found the endless, often arbitrary, rules perplexing and frequently amusing. The “city people” were alien to me. I was utterly convinced that they would die of dehydration if they couldn’t get water from a tap, and that if they were told to walk off a cliff by someone wearing an adequately authoritative costume, they would do so. My amusement with this alternative reality soon turned into frustration. City cultures were full of people whose minds had been filled with often useless information by school curricula that insisted knowing the names and birthdays of bygone presidents was more important that knowing how to grow your own food, purify your own water, or build your own home. I was disturbed by this culture which had stripped people of their ancestral knowledge, of their independence.
Several decades later, my frustration has given way to activism. The brutal reality is that most of us, at least among the English speakers, have no clue how to survive without industrial civilization; which makes us the slaves and victims of that dominant culture. With climate collapse rapidly approaching, one of the most radical things we can do is restore our ancestral knowledge and rebuild the self sufficiency of our families and immediate communities.
Food and Water Security
Fast moving water is generally cleaner than slow or still water. Morning dew is often abundant. Conserving water is as important as collecting it. Sand, rocks, and charcoal purify still water. Trees and bushes transpire. Beaches produce freshwater. These are the lessons we used to learn as children and they provide us with security; indigenous cultures knew thousands of these variations, and specialized them for their local ecosystems over millennia. We need to restore this knowledge and disseminate it widely among our communities, both for our own individual security and also to maintain as much social stability as possible in the midst of collapse. There will be a day when your community attempts to turn on the tap for a glass of water to discover that it’s no longer working, and the ratio of infrastructure downtime will increase until we’re left to fend for ourselves. Communities with better developed skills will be better equipped to avoid desperation and violence.
Likewise, our food security needs to be addressed. Some ecosystems will soon become completely uninhabitable, others may remain habitable but become chaotic and prone to extreme weather events. Most of the food we eat today comes from industrial scale farming, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels for pesticides, fertilizers, heavy equipment, refrigeration, and shipping. There will come a day, sooner than most people realize, when none of that infrastructure will work. This poses an immense challenge for communities whose farmers have forgotten how to produce crops without tractors and pesticides. Likewise, the average person has no idea how to grow or store their own food, and when the grocery store shelves go empty they’re going to become extremely desperate.
This is why we must prioritize local food and water security, which involves upskilling our communities and also leading efforts to build sustainable local systems. Every child needs to know the basic principles of permaculture, they need to know how to blend perennials and seasonals in regenerative rotations, they need to understand soil balance and which plants produce nitrogen, and they need to learn these things very quickly. Additionally, we need to replace lawns with gardens, ornamental plants with edibles for ourselves and pollinators, and we need to urgently protect the habitats of interdependent species and ecosystems. This starts by forming a group, knocking on your neighbours’ doors, and helping them build their first small garden.
Community Stability
Whether we like it or not, most of us are surrounded by larger communities of people. When people become too thirsty or too hungry their desperations leads to violence, which often ends up exacerbating their condition in a vicious cycle. For this reason, I think the worst possible place to be during climate collapse are cities. By nature of their design, city cultures are largely anonymous, callous, and unsustainable. The only way to feed the inhabitants of a city is to take food and other resources from the surrounding region, which will become increasingly difficult. Scarcity with lead cities to experience worsening class stratification, xenophobia, and misogyny; fear and poverty will also lead to reactionary movements and fascism, as it always does.
Communities will fare better when they’re small enough for the inhabitants to either know each other or recognize each other based on shared relations. I personally think populations between 2,000 and 5,000 are ideal because they’re large enough to significantly share resources and protect themselves, but small enough to be deeply integrated. In sufficiently rural or wilderness settings I would be inclined to live in even smaller populations.
The single most important thing you can do to maintain or prolong local stability is forge strong bonds with your neighbours, and to intentionally do so across preexisting divisions like class, race, and tribe. It’s important to foster a shared identity. One of the best ways to establish these bonds is to lead local permaculture, ecological, and economic adaptation efforts. If it can be at all avoided, never blame individuals in your local community for climate collapse or the worsening state of the world; even if it’s true, you’re now all in this together and those petty divisions can fester into dangerous conflicts as external tension builds.
Also focus on preparing today’s children. The next 10-20 years will be very difficult, but the following 50 years will be inconceivably difficult and we need to provide intensive training for the generation that will be attempting to survive it. Today’s 10 year old will probably be 25-30 years old when civilization as we know it collapses, those of us who are still alive will be relying on them to maintain order and potentially to help care for us as we age, experience illness, or become less independently capable. We will have great regrets if we fail to adequately prepare the next generation for what lies ahead.
Healthcare Essentials
Collapse will be most immediately horrific for people with serious health conditions. I relate deeply to this issue because my own medical condition, if left untreated, will probably significantly shorten my life and result in an unpleasant demise. It will be worse for people with conditions like kidney failure, who will be unable to receive dialysis treatments, or for cancer patients who will be unable to receive chemo therapy. Childbirth will also become increasingly dangerous. The good news is that we can mitigate some of these effects by connecting the dots between modern medical research and the active compounds found in various plants and fungi. Most of the world’s pharmaceuticals were initially derived from medicinal plants and fungi, and indigenous peoples have used those plants (often effectively) for countless generations. There will be increasing demand for local sources of medicine to treat things like infections, chronic pain, epilepsy, and even certain cancers. We need healthcare leaders in the future who are able to connect scientific medical research to processes which employ local plants and fungi.
We also need to improve our relationship with death because, unfortunately, there’s going to be a great deal more of it in the world. Most of our cultures have exacerbated our fear of death, in part because we have become so removed from it. For example, almost everyone eats meat, which obviously involves death, but how many people have slaughtered the animals themselves and processed through those complex emotions? Many of us have had loved ones die, but how many of us have been one of the primary caregivers, washed their body, and cremated/buried them ourselves? We have build entire economies around cultural desires to hide death behind layers of abstraction, and very few of us have learned to deal with it in healthy ways. The dominant culture prefers to pretend that death doesn’t exist; sometimes by ignoring our own mortality until the last minute, and sometimes even by denying mortality at all by propagating superstitions about eternal afterlife.
How we deal with death relates, in many ways, with my final point about healthcare: mental health. Our current frameworks for understanding and addressing mental health are deeply inadequate in the context of climate collapse. As our global and local situations progressively worsen, and as people realize that it will never return to their understanding of “normal” it will cause significant psychological trauma, persistent anxiety, and spiraling depression. I predict that suicide rates will increase dramatically, and I can’t blame those people. Likewise, it will become inceasingly difficult to deal with individuals whose mental health conditions may be significantly disruptive or even dangerous for other members of their communities. We will reach a point where we’re no longer able to access antipsychotic, antidepressant, antianxiety, bipolar, or any number of other mental health medications; this, combined with the intense psychological pressures of collapse will create great volatility among some of the most at risk members of our communities.
Part 1 Summary
This is first article is an overview of the scale of our challenges and some of the most essential priorities (food, water, community, and healthcare). As you can see, we have immense challenges ahead of us and it’s going to be a difficult road even for those of us living in the most temperature ecosystems. In the next article I’ll delve deeper into specific food and water systems, and provide detailed processes for organizing our communities toward those objectives. From a resistance perspective, it’s critical that we begin to address the details of how to resolve these issues. Our communities will be much more supportive of radical, direct action toward preventing global extinction if they feel like their most essential needs can be met in a post-collapse world. If we cannot provide and implement clear strategies for addressing these needs, people will retreat into denialism and delusions, eventually responding violently toward any group or information which threatens their fantasies. This is why we must take urgent action.
Editor’s note: DGR acknowledges that Extinction Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion Ireland are valuable and necessary contributors to a broader ecosystem of activism. The analysis in this article is relevant for many movements and it’s republished from Medium with permission from the author.
Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) is growing at a decent speed and has already hosted a number of public marches and street art performances. The movement currently follows the Extinction Rebellion International principles and policies, which make it a fully decentralised and non-hierarchical movement which is open to anyone who wants to participate. In Ireland they are currently opting for a consensus based approach to decisionmaking rather than a democratic process, and they are experimenting with using “circles” to organise around key issues like finance, tactics, and policies. The community is somewhat divided on the details, especially regarding the ambiguity of some of Extinction Rebellion’s principles and how they should be interpreted. There is also contention around the details of decisionmaking processes and key financial decisions.
This is very much a social experiment, and you can tell the movement is young and raw. Individual participants run the gamut from brand-new activists to seasoned community organisers, from upper class people to significantly underpriveleged people, and from those living in intensely rural settings to those living in the big cities. The diversity of participants is staggering. There seems to be a central division between those who espouse fundamentally capitalist beliefs and call for incremental progress through government lobbying and public relations stunts, to outright socialists who are calling for the abolition of capitalism and profound restructuring of government institions. Likewise, there is a division between those who believe that climate change is a serious concern but a vaguely distant threat, to those who believe climate collapse is actively occurring and poses a risk of near-term extinction. These divisions are obviously exploitable, and will inevitably identified by opposition forces (e.g. fossil fuel industry propaganda teams).
Below I outline some of my most immediate security concerns. Please note that I’m highlighting these concerns in order to help XRI identify and address them before they fall victim to malicious parties. I will approach these concerns from the perspective of an oppositional force in order to highlight the seriousness of these vulnerabilities.
Crippling Through Consensus
Perhaps the most easily exploitable aspect of Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) is that they’re currently using consensus rather than democracy, which means that they only progress on a tactic or solution if everyone agrees. If one participant wishes to block the decision they can grind everything to a halt. There is no process for dealing with people who consistently obstruct decisions, so it would be easy for a member of the opposition to join XRI meetings and simply blockade all decisions while pretending to do so in good faith — though even if they blockaded XRI without pretending to be sincere, there are no existing procedures for dealing with them. A small handful of malicious individuals could easily cripple XRI and prevent most progress.
Scenario: I am the head of a PR (propaganda) agency for the fossil fuel industry and I’ve identified this weakness. I hire a small team of individuals to join XRI Facebook groups, join the XRI Slack, and participate in all key meetings both in person and via Zoom. These individuals do not need to be skilled at all, so I would select them based on their cover stories. I would give preference to older individuals, since they are perceived to be more trustworthy, and I would favour anyone who has a background in “feel good” activism so that they seem credible. Their entire job will be to bring up “legitimate” concerns about every issue and to trade off on blocking decisions, that way it’s not too obvious.
Outcome: XRI decisionmaking is ground to a halt, effectively the only actions which become possible are those which the fossil fuel industry has authorised because all others are blocked by the small team of paid trolls. These blockade participants may arouse some degree of suspicion, but it is impossible to definitively accuse them of maliciousness. This tactic will continue to work so long as consensus decisionmaking is in effect and/or so long as participation is open to the general public.
Consistent, Controlled Conflict
Groups like XRI are highly diverse, and they always include big personalities. There are a handful of especially divisive issues which are guaranteed to generate conflict and endless argument. Some of the prominent issues include:
Urgently dismantling capitalist systems (“capitalism relies on infinite growth on a finite planet, which is irrational”).
Emotional violence as violence (“if we hurt someone’s feelings it constitutes violence and is against the XRI policies”)
Property destruction as nonviolence (“if we sabotage a pipeline it does not directly harm anyone and is therefore nonviolent”)
Quantifiability of tactics (“we should not pursue tactics which have no quantifiable outcomes”)
Naming and shaming (“we cannot mention any names” & “no naming and shaming only applies to XR participants and the general public”)
Leveraging these key issues to generate internal conflict would be effective because they all address valid, but generally unresolveable issues. They divide people along key lines: capitalism/socialism, idealist/pragmatist, and analytical/emotional. Each of these groups constitute a large ratio of XRI’s participants and can therefore generate substantial conflict with very little prompting. Most of these debates occur on Facebook and Slack, and can therefore be instigated and sustained by fake accounts.
Scenario: I am a member of a prominent opposition party and my objective is to cause enough sustained dissent within XRI to cripple an upcoming national strike. I coordinate a dozen party volunteers via Facebook. Each volunteer sets up 2–3 fake Facebook accounts and email addresses, primarily using images of attractive young women to ensure they are inundated with incoming friend requests, which significantly reduces the amount of work needed to create a realistic looking account. Once the accounts have several dozen friends the volunteers are prompted to add them to prominent XRI groups on Facebook, where each fake account regularly initiates arguments about one of the key issues outlined above. The volunteer trolls also engage with each others’ content in order to make the arguments appear authentic and lively. Once the accounts have become regonisable in the community they request to be added to the XRI Slack where they continue baiting arguments.
Outcome: XRI participants end up wasting time and energy on divisive arguments rather than working on actions or making progress toward resolving organisational gaps. Moreover, individuals who engage in arguments will be likely to form cliques and grudges until active members leave out of frustration and emotional exhaustion. XRI currently has no process for resolving these disputes or making critical interpretive decisions, so this tactic would work indefinitely.
Daylight Robbery
Extinction Rebellion and XRI have significant access to funding. The International account generally holds between €500,000 and €1,000,000 in cash and they are beginning to allocate relatively large amounts of funding to individual Extinction Rebellion groups. For example, XRI has been offered €10,000 without strings attached, and an additional €40,000 with minimal strings attached.
The biggest financial obstacle facing XRI and other regional XR groups is accessing funds, because they are often used for illegal activities. Under normal circumstances, XRI members would join forces and create a legal entity (e.g. limited company) to receive and process the funds; this approach requires individual XRI members to sign their name to the company and take on significant legal liabilities. Conversely, individual XR members could be directly paid out the funds as wages, which carries slightly less legal liability but lacks transparency, creates infighting, and makes resource purchases difficult. Another option is to set up an out-of-country legal entity, which provides significant legal protection but requires a trustworthy foreign national. The last option is to receive payment in bitcoin and withdraw cash from bitcoin ATMs, which provides the most legal protection but lacks transparency and requires several trustworthy individuals.
XRI is open to anyone and operates on a consensus model, which means that a dedicated group of thieves could potentially steal tens of thousands of euro by infiltrating the XRI community, driving financial decisions toward methods they can control, and working as a group to mask their actions and mitigate any risk of being caught.
Scenario: A group of 10 friends hear that XRI will soon receive €40,000 in funding. They join XRI groups, the Slack platform, and begin attending all meetings in order to build rapport. These individuals understand the logistical challenges facing XRI and they advise XRI to leverage bitcoin to receive the funds in order to take advantage of its many benefits, namely its anonymity and significantly reduced legal liability. XRI participants express concern about ensuring the funds are safely handled and can be transparently accounted. The group of thieves suggest a best practice: a “circle” of designated people should all have access to the bitcoin wallet in order to monitor the funds and keep each other honest. All 10 of the friends join the circle and insist that many people should have access in order to avoid centralisation and hierarchy. Once the funds are in the bitcoin wallet, they almost immediately disappear into another wallet and are then laundered through one of many services. The funds are eventually divided among the friends and nobody can identify who took the bitcoins.
Outcome: XRI loses €40,000 in funding and has a reduced likelihood of receiving additional funds. The Extinction Rebellion brand is tarnished and media coverage is diverted away from actions and toward the robbery. Extinction Rebellion funders are globally disenfranchised and become less likely to provide financial resources in the future.
Summary
By compiling this analysis I hope to highlight several significant security risks, which can be exploited by malicious third parties with minimal resources or expertise to cripple the Extinction Rebellion movement in Ireland. These approaches are not new, they have been used before to undermine movements, but they have not yet been used against Extinction Rebellion. My hope is that, by highlighting them, Extinction Rebellion can resolve the issues before oppositional parties exploit them or, at the very least, Extinction Rebellion participants will be more likely to identify them before they cause critical damage to the movement.
All of these weaknesses can be effectively counteracted, but only if we’re aware of them before we fall victim to them.
Editor’s note: this article is republished from an internal DGR community discussion.
by a DGR member
Definition: “Spiral theory” is a strategic approach adopted by some revolutionary movements in which violent acts are undertaken against state targets with the intention of provoking an indiscriminate repressive response against an associated social group that is relatively uninvolved with the action itself. This repressive response is sought for its ability to radicalize a population that is currently apolitical or unsupportive of violent revolution.
History: Spiral theory has been used to varying levels of success over the 20th century.
Irish Republicanism – The Irish Republican Army realized early on in the campaign against British imperialism that attacks on military installations and against British settlers would lead to indiscriminate retaliation against ethnic Irish communities by occupying forces. IRA strategists soon learned that intentionally provoking this response radicalized previously unsupportive Irish civilians against British rule more than it alienated them from the Republicans. Many of the tactics adopted by the IRA, both before and after the creation of the Irish Republic, had the unintuitive goal of increasing British violence against Irish civilians for this purpose. This strategy was originally effective, but public support for militant resistance to British occupation waned in the latter half of the 20th century as IRA actions became increasingly erratic. By the 1980s, the spiral of government and Republican violence was more exhausting and demoralizing than radicalizing for large portions of the population.
Basque Separatism – Spiral theory is perhaps most associated with the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA, a revolutionary nationalist organization with the goal of establishing a homeland for the Basque people in northern Spain. According to Cyrus Zirakzadeh, the ETA’s strategy centered around “elective attacks [that] would provoke the government into excessive and nondiscriminatory retaliation against all Basque residents.” This strategy was extremely successful during the regime of Francisco Franco, growing the ETA from a relatively small core of marginalized activists to a movement that was supported by the majority of Basque residents in Spain. The ETA was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing a Basque homeland, but their failure cannot be easily traced to their effective use of spiral theory. It is likely that spiral theory was merely insufficient, rather than ineffective, for Basque separatists.
Zionism – Early Zionist militants intentionally provoked repression against Jewish settlers in the hopes of radicalizing moderate Zionists who saw the British state as a potential ally. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, adopted a policy of bombings, assassinations, and sabotage against British soldiers as well as Palestinian civilians for this purpose. However, the British occupation forces were generally unwilling to respond with indiscriminate violence against Jewish settlers, and no “spiral” formed.
Palestinian Liberation – Spiral theory is a central strategic approach of groups like Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All of these organizations are well-known for their strategy of relatively harmless rocket attacks against Israeli settlements and cities, undertaken with the intention of provoking a disproportionate Israeli military response. These military responses further radicalize Palestinian civilians, as well as damage the international reputation of the Israeli state. Although many factors are responsible for the rise of Hamas and the marginalization of the PLO and PFLP, analysts generally see this strategy as having been incredibly effective. Hamas was relatively unpopular before adopting the policy of intermittent rocket attacks, but now holds an absolute majority of seats on the Palestinian Legislative Council. Further, public opinion among Palestinians has shifted towards militancy and away from compromise in recent years, while international criticism towards the Israeli response has intensified.
Considerations: Spiral theory requires complex practical and ethical considerations before it can be applied to Deep Green Resistance and our strategic model.
Practical – Spiral theory is traditionally utilized when an identifiable social group exists to be retaliated against. This is most commonly an ethic group, but it can be any relatively inflexible and publicly recognizable social category. Race, sex, and economic class are all at least potentially capable of being integrated into a strategy based on spiral theory, and Deep Green Resistance does some work revolving around all three. However, it is unclear what social group would be targeted by retaliation were spiral theory to be applied in the arena of environmentalism. A crucial element of spiral theory is the inability of the targeted social group to fracture, dissolve, or disassociate itself; in the face of Spanish repression, for example, Basque people cannot choose to stop being Basque. This contrasts with environmentalism, which is a political and social movement where membership is optional. Therefore, it is at least likely that intentionally provoking retaliation against environmentalists would result in people renouncing environmentalism rather than radicalizing against the corporate state. For this reason, traditional spiral theory is at the very least an uncertain strategy with the potential for severe failure.
Environmentalism is also a unique arena in which strategically effective militancy is often no more difficult than symbolic militancy. In many cases, it is much easier. Blowing up a dam, for example, is more pragmatically beneficial than violence directed at individuals, and it may also be safer and more straightforwardly accomplished. This is not the case for national liberation struggles, where striking decisive blows at the infrastructure of an occupying force is often much more difficult than violence towards “soft targets” like police, politicians, and settler populations. Spiral theory originally developed as a way to leverage relatively powerlessness by striking low-value targets and capitalizing on the response of the more powerful agent. Although environmentalists are similarly powerless, our focus on material extractive infrastructure as opposed to complex political and social organization means our ideal targets are often “softer” than those that would carry (purely) symbolic value. For this reason, spiral theory may be strictly unnecessary; it is likely that effective militancy as outlined in our DEW strategy would bring with it many of the same results that spiral theory intentionally produces.
Ethical – Spiral theory involves intentionally bringing harm to innocent people, including those who we consider allies and community members. Although we cannot legislate any individual’s moral response to strategies like these, it is likely that they conflict with Deep Green Resistance’s dedication to respecting human rights and avoiding oppressive actions. Combined with the previously mentioned practical issues, a straightforward application of spiral theory seems to be ethically unjustifiable.
Applications: Spiral theory, while effective in some revolutionary contexts, contains many liabilities and structural constraints that make it a poor fit for environmentalism. Nonetheless, environmentalists can and should analyze spiral theory to look for ways in which its underlying philosophy can be harnessed in the fight against industrialism.
Utilizing Repression for Propaganda Purposes – While it may not be justifiable to intentionally provoke retaliation against environmentalists, retaliation is nonetheless expected as the ecological catastrophe worsens and environmental activism becomes more militant. With this in mind, spiral theory can help us understand the ways in which we can utilize this retaliation and make the most of it. Already, the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile relationship to both state environmental agencies and non-state activists has altered public perception, and further crackdowns can be leveraged to increase this antagonism. Anti-environmental actions that specifically impact indigenous and non-white communities may be especially open to the dynamics described by spiral theory; although intentionally provoking these actions is likely to be unsuccessful and unethical, the strategies of revolutionary movements like the ETA and Hamas can help us understand how best to leverage these actions once they do occur as a natural byproduct of the worsening ecological crisis.
Utilizing Repression Strategically – As adherents to DEW, we recognize that legal aboveground action will not be enough to reach our goal of dismantling industrial civilization. It is likely that continued reliance on and belief in these sorts of actions is a major impediment to revolutionary success. For this reason, it may be advantageous to intentionally provoke increased legal sanction against common aboveground actions with the hope of creating conditions where underground action becomes the safer alternative, all things considered. This could be considered a form of legal spiral theory. At the very least, it is valuable to identify what aboveground actions would most likely 1) publicly fail in a way that encourages dissatisfaction and radicalization, or 2) succeed in ways that provoke increased legal sanctions and therefore create corresponding incentive for underground action. In contrast, actions that fall in the middle of this spectrum – being effective enough to maintain individual personal satisfaction but not effective enough to compel a strong state reaction – may be the most deleterious form of resistance.
Applying Spiral Theory to Bright Green Environmentalism – The proliferation of liberal reformists in the environmental movement is another serious impediment to revolutionary success. Although violence against these “bright green” activists would be unjustified, the dynamics of spiral theory can also be applied to the social relations between environmentalists. Provoking mainstream environmental organizations to adopt radical positions is, of course, the most desirable goal. However, if this is judged to be unlikely or impossible, it may be beneficial to pursue the opposite response and encourage increasingly ineffective and futile actions. This could have the effect of alienating their potential supporters. As stated above, mainstream environmental organizations that are effective enough to provide contributors with emotional gratification but not effective enough to achieve real goals may be the most harmful form of activism. If this is the case, and radicalization is unlikely, increased irrelevance and ineptitude may be preferable
Takeaways: It is likely that spiral theory as conventionally practiced by revolutionary movements would be unhelpful or harmful to the environmental movement. This is due to three primary reasons: First, there is no cohesive social group to experience and respond to state repression in the case of environmentalists. Second, effective actions against infrastructure would compel state repression to the same degree that symbolic violence would. Third, there are serious ethical concerns that would be both categorically problematic and practically harmful to the image of environmentalists.
Nonetheless, some elements of spiral theory can be applied to the struggle against industrialism in ways that are very helpful. Spiral theory can help us understand how to best leverage the inevitable state repression that will occur as the ecological crisis worsens. Spiral theory can also be applied more directly to our dialectical relationship with the legal system. Closing off unhelpful avenues of aboveground activism by provoking legal sanction may be a helpful way of steering activists towards more decisive action. Similarly, if mainstream environmental organizations reach the point of being unsalvageable, it may be beneficial to encourage their incompetence with the goal of alienating those who previously supported them.
