Here I’m posting my work-in-progress reflection on the Princess Bridge Block I organised for XR in Melbourne in September 2019. Feedback is welcome!
Reflections on Organising - Prince’s Bridge Block
I want to write about my experience organising the blockage of a bridge in central Melbourne with Extinction Rebellion (XR), and my reflections on what can be brought from this experience that could be useful in socialist organising.
XR had serious political and strategic failures that meant that it was unable to grow past a certain point and unable to realise its dream of a democratic, collaborative societal solution to global warming, but it also contained within it some organisational innovations that could be useful if adapted to the socialist movement. Marxist organisations almost all have a more accurate and clear-eyed view of the systemic cause of global warming, and of the need for revolution, but tend to get stuck when it comes to building a force through which its organisers can exert power to achieve these goals. Here I hope to draw out some of the useful methods that XR had that might be used by the socialist movement to build and use that kind of power.
In this article I will focus on one particular action that I organised in September 2019 to block the Princes Bridge, an iconic landmark in the centre of Melbourne. To do this, we need to organise people into 7 groups to cut circulation in 7 different places, plus a number of specialised supporting groups to make the action a success. We put this together, organised and executed it in less than 4 weeks despite a lack of experience and even some opposition from some of the local XR leaders at the time. I will look at why and how the plan was put into place, how it was organised in such a short time, what went well and what failed, and the strategic outcomes.
Background
In late November 2018, about 6,000 people participated in an [XR blockade of 5 bridges in central London] for several hours, with 70 arrested by the end of the action. This was their “Rebellion Day”, and it aimed to use a strategy of seeking arrest en masse in order to grow their movement. Part of the logic of this strategy was that by sacrificing themselves in a serious manner in this way, they would show the seriousness of the cause and the dedication of their organisers. The willingness to face arrest would also open up the possibility of maintaining the disruption of the action much longer than a normal demonstration, and pose a challenge for cops trying to disperse the crowds.
This departure from the tactic of demonstration marches would bring media attention due to its novelty, and would also attract recruits who would see in this dedication the potential to be part of a group that was serious about resistance and willing to accept some sacrifice to exert some power. In an apparent success of the strategy, I discovered the group and thought maybe it had some potential to break out of the dead-end that the climate movement had found itself in.
I started paying attention, and looked into the writings and videos made by some of XRs founders. Of particular interest was a series of texts and workshops by Roger Hallam focused on organising tactics[1], on the mass-arrest strategy, as well as the introductory “Heading for Extinction”[2] talks that XR was using as an outreach and initiation talk for potential recruits. I watched a Heading for Extinction talk online that was delivered somewhere in England. The talk was designed to make people think about the reality of the danger that the world faces from global environmental destabilisation, the likely outcome of human extinction and the death of most life on Earth, and to feel the emotions that come from that realisation, and to channel that emotion into the will to take drastic action.
For me this had a profound effect. I had sleepless nights thinking about the mass-death to come. This would come on in waves - a kind of cosmic dread that lingered in the background, always bringing on thoughts of my own death from some unknown threat - starvation, fire, disease, violence - in the decades to come.
But this induction of climate grief on its own was not enough to move me to action. The final step to move me to action was the chance to exert power through collective action. Extinction Rebellion made the obvious claim that changing personal habits to be more environmentally friendly, protesting, and voting weren’t sufficient responses to the threat, and that a popular rebellion was needed to force a societal response.
They made a proposition for how to conduct this rebellion: a sustained movement conducting mass-disruption in city centers, bringing commerce to a halt, forcing a political crisis and making inaction in the face of the environmental threat more costly than decisive action. Each Heading for Extinction talk culminated in a question: who, among those present, would be willing to face arrest for this cause? Invariably, dozens of hands would go up, and as the people looked around at each-other, there would be the sense that they could achieve something.
For me, this looked like a step up from the protest movements that existed up to that point, and potentially worth a shot. Finally people were doing something, and maybe they would even change something. I saw that a Heading for Extinction talk would be happening in my city, I went along, and joined up.
I went to an organising meeting after this and volunteered to give the talk myself. Soon I was giving Heading for Extinction talks a couple of times a week in the suburbs of Melbourne. These were a hit - I watched the numbers in our mailing list shoot into the thousands in a matter of weeks. I was invited to attend various working group meetings to work on outreach, and later, to the actions working group. In these early days the enthusiasm was palpable. There was a flurry of action from the growing dedicated core. With my new comrades I went flyering and postering around the city. Small groups were doing banner drops at major highways. Local groups were forming in different zones of the city to meet together and plan actions to grow the rebellion. Politicians offices were occupied. Bike rallies clogging busy roads. The actions working group organised its first roadblock - blocking a major thoroughfare on a Saturday morning with just a few dozen activists.
There was rapid growth, and it was clear our reach and capability was growing. At one point the government announced something that made people angry. I can’t remember what it was now, but an XR member made an event on Facebook on a Tuesday for a protest that Saturday. Very quickly the event page had thousands of people flagged as “going”, and the actions working group scrambled to organise something for the protest - a PA system, a band to play, some people to speak. 3000 people attended.
We had trouble absorbing the rapid influx of people. The demand for induction talks was greater than we could manage to deliver. Meetings of the actions working group, previously consisting of a dozen people, suddenly were attended by 30 people, and then 70 people. This become a real problem. The facilitation technique used for the dozen people that came previously just didn’t work for large meetings. I remember one particularly painful meeting: about 50 people in the room, sitting in a big circle, many in chairs cramped in the corners behind the inner ring of the circle. We were there to decide on what to do for the October uprising being planned in synchronisation with XR in London and various places around the world.
One-by-one people made their “check-in” statement, talking about why they came to the meeting. This took up half of the hour allotted for the meeting time. Then the floor was opened up for propositions on the next action to take as a city-wide chapter of the movement. A strict format was enforced for the meeting: 1 person speaks at a time, with the coordinator keeping a list of who is in line to speak. One person spoke, presenting their idea for the next action. The second person spoke, presenting another idea. A third person spoke saying they had a problem with the first idea. A fourth person spoke, giving another idea for an action. A fifth person spoke in support of the second idea. The first person spoke again defending their idea from the third person. This dynamic continued, a series of disjointed debates taking place in the remaining half hour. In this meeting only a few people contributed to the discussion, very few ideas were developed, and the general mood of the group became pretty grim as people became increasingly frustrated. Several conflicts meant that agreements were not reached. One of these was over the question of mass-arrest: many wanted to try the mass-arrest tactic, but members of the NVDA training group insisted that nobody should put themselves in an arrestable position if they hadn’t had NVDA training, and they could only train around 20 people per week. No next action was agreed upon.
This was repeated several weeks in a row - large groups of enthusiastic people coming together to try to organise a major action, but failing to get anything off the ground because the meeting format was unable to handle the number of ideas that came up and to manage the differences of opinion. This contrasted with what was happening outside of this meeting - there was an ongoing flurry of small actions happening, organised by local groups or small cliques of organisers outside of the main actions working group. University XR groups, many of whom were members of Socialist Alternative, the main Trotskyist party in Australia, organised to swarm the city one night, occupying intersections with shouty demonstrations of a few dozen activists, then dispersing when the police presence grew, only to converge on another intersection somewhere else and repeat. Police, unable to prevent these occupations or shut down the overall action, used a new tactic - identifying and arresting leaders. There were also a series of die-ins happening around the city, and activists gluing themselves to things during occupations. We were clearly capable of a lot of action - we just couldn’t coordinate anything large, complex, and disruptive.
It was in this situation that the Princess Bridge Block was born. I wanted to carry out a large, coordinated, disruptive action that would make use of the large apparatus that we had at our disposal, and that would serve as a model for the kinds of actions we might do at the October rebellion. It would also serve as a model for how the actions working group could delegate the planning of individual planning groups, and move to an oversight and coordination role. I made a plan, and started presenting it to my comrades whenever I got the chance - over drinks, while demonstrating, while chatting to people after meetings. People liked the idea. I assembled a planning group of around 8 people and organised a meeting to start planning the action in earnest. We set a date 4 weeks before the October rebellion. That gave us 3 and a half weeks to organise it. I presented my idea for the plan to the group, and we organised people into organising roles. We agreed to go ahead, and so we went to the meeting of the actions organising group - not to propose the idea, but to announce that it was happening and that we wanted people to get involved.
This was a bombshell. It was a small act of rebellion within the rebellion. Up to this point, the actions working group had implicitly reserved for itself the responsibility to organise major actions that would mobilise the entire organisation. The various actions that were happening every week were organised by small groups, but none of them proposed to draw on the resources of the entire organisation. We were, without their say-so, organising just such an action, that would draw resources from each of major working groups, as well as any local group that wanted to get involved, as well as any in the wider crowd that answered the call. And we were going to try out the mass-arrest tactic, whether people were trained or not. A small coordination group within the actions working group had emerged to try to organise some of the logistics that were the responsibility of the actions working group. We put up an event page on Facebook for the Princess Bridge Block, and told this coordination group within the actions working group that our action was happening with or without them. The coordinator of the NVDA training working group told us we couldn’t do this. I retorted that we could, citing the 10 principles of XR, and saying that if they didn’t want to be part of it then they shouldn’t come. There was a response of shock and concern, but no further attempts to block us. We proceeded with out plan
How we organised it
With three weeks to organise, we needed to move fast. We needed an organising model that would empower organisers to move forward quickly with planning decisions, while not getting becoming disjointed in our actions. I was the planning group coordinator. Everyone in the planning group was designated a role with clear responsibilities. The group was told the expectation was to make significant progress each week, or have their role withdrawn. People were encouraged to ask for help and bring on new members to help with their responsibilities. Every role could become a working group if necessary. As coordinator, I would concentrate on coordination and not busy myself with the work of other people’s roles except temporarily when someone was struggling to achieve their action points. Instead I would regularly check in with people on their progress and talk it through with them to help them make progress.
The various roles were something like this:
- Logistics: organise logistical things like sound systems, first aid, and other material needed for the action
- Media and messaging: organise the social media presence before, during, and after the action, as well as statements and liaison with the media
- Police liaison: aimed at de-escalation, this person tells the police before the action about the broad idea of the plan and that our group is committed to non-violence. They also act as a liaison between the police and the activists during the action
- Arts: create an eye-catching look and entertaining feel for the action such as with flags, banners and props
- Arrestee support: make sure every arrestee is tracked and picked up from the station after the action and appropriate people contacted
- Legal: Provide legal briefings and arrange legal support for anyone putting themselves in an arrestable role
- Fundraising: Raise funds needed for the action and use the action to raise funds for the wider organisation
- Scouting: Scout the bridge, take photos before the action for planning purposes, and act as look-outs during the action
In reality, most of these roles involved the creation of a working group subordinated to the overall planning group that would carry out the tasks on the day - often by liaising with the existing working groups of XR Melbourne that already had similar roles. Some roles would change hands from week-to-week depending on how busy people were. We had weekly planning meetings to catch-up on progress, make some collective decisions and set priorities for the next week. The organisers would then do the work they needed to do during the week, making decisions about how they would do it, and seeking feedback on those decisions from the people who would be affected by it.
In addition, there were two other major groups to be assembled for the action - those who would initially block and shut-down the intersections around the bridge to clear it of traffic, and the “bunnies” - the arrestees, who would sit on the bridge and not move until either they were arrested, or that the blockade had gone on long enough to declare victory and withdraw.
As coordinator I contacted the 15 or so XR local groups dotted around Melbourne and the countryside of Victoria to invite them to take a role in the action. I would call their coordinators, tell them about the general plan of the action and ask them if they could provide an affinity group that would be willing to block part of an intersection for 3 minutes at the start of the action. I also asked them to send a handful of people to a briefing of local groups and to be organised in their tactical roles for the day of the action. My plan was to mobilise these local groups into a coordinated, disruptive action that would make the overall blockade possible. Those taking part in this short blockade at the start of the action would be escalating their involvement in the rebellion, putting themselves on the line in a small way doing a risky action, while not doing something quite as risky as the “bunnies” that would be sitting on the bridge until the police dragged them away. These blockaders would be protected by their numbers, by having the element of surprise, and by moving on before the police could respond in force. My hope was that this would build the confidence, and the complicity, of a hundred or so activists, who would feel more confident break the law in the future.
At the same time, inviting the local groups to form the squads that would execute this part of the action took some pressure off of the planning group - the local groups all had their own internal organisational structures that were ready-formed to act as the officers for each of these squads, and so we wouldn’t need to find and appoint new leaders for each of these parts of the action. Some local groups were already big and pretty confident, and could take part of the intersection on their own. Others were smaller and were combined together to form the squad for their actions.
Another pair of briefings was organised for those who wanted to be bunnies. Local groups and XR Melbourne working groups were asked to send people to this briefing if they wanted to be in this group - with the knowledge that their arrest was very likely, but that they were crucial for the success of the action. Around 30 people were briefed at these meetings, with the understanding that more would join their ranks on the day. These briefings involved legal briefings and connection to the arrestee support group, as well as a bit of time for people to talk together, see some maps and role-play what they would do on the day. A crucial element part of this briefing was brief this group on the risk of kettling and how to avoid it - by not sitting in the middle of the bridge, but rather to sit at one end of the bridge where it would be much more difficult to be kettled.
To make this clear, I will explain the plan.
The Plan
TODO - EXPLAIN THE PLAN FROM START TO FINISH
TODO: INSERT MAPS AND DIAGRAMS HERE
What happened on the day
TBC
The aftermath
TBC
Reflections on tactics and strategy
TBC
What we can learn from this
TBC
A major example is How to win! Successful Procedures and Mechanisms for Radical Campaign Groups. The descriptions of conditional commitment, dilemma actions, attrition actions, swarm actions, as well as on the methods to conduct empowering meetings while building a movement were of particular interest. ↩︎
Citation / link to be added. ↩︎