The Blueprint for System Change | Ash Sarkar Meets JSO Founder Roger Hallam
I have friends who were (and possibly are) deeply sceptical of Roger Hallam. But I think this is a really interesting interview with him about how to organise. It comes after he has spent some time in prison, now on release on a tag. Some of it (a lot of it) is really challenging for people on the left, and all the more reason to listen.
He talks about the failed culture and strategies of the green and socialist movements – but his insights are useful for people seeking radical change anywhere.
In July 2024, Hallam was jailed, alongside four other activists from Just Stop Oil (JSO), for conspiring to disrupt traffic by having protesters climb over gantries on the M25. He was caught formulating this plan on a Zoom call by a journalist from the Sun, arrested and subsequently handed five years in prison. His sentence was later reduced to four years and he was released early on 14 August. Hallam is an environmental activist best known for having co-founded Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Insulate Britain.
Listen to the interview and please join the discussion in the comments below & read his 📚 My Top 10 Reads from Prison
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I think a lot of the points made in this interview are very pertinent to the difficulties we are clearly having in building an effective modern independence movement.
My thinking too
Really interesting and thought provoking Mike – thanks for sharing.
I thought so too Martin. Hope you’re well.
I’ve read Roger Hallam’s book Common Sense for the 21st Century, and you can perhaps detect through repeated statements, that he doesn’t quite understand patterns of interaction (at least in a normal way). Or maybe he’s habitually thinking thirty years ahead.
His opening comments on prison (a school that makes you stronger), which are clipped out of context, seem incredibly crass considering all the revelations of institutional sexual abuse and torture at ‘Borstals’ and so forth, possibly ventriloquises the Left, but later qualified by comments on marginalised always going to prison. His follow-up opinion on his Your Party comments bring in the moment’ is another sign of incapacity to see outcomes (along with many others, of course). Irresponsible editing fronting clickbait?
Two rather obvious criticisms of Hallam’s ‘civil resistance model’ are that 1) authorities learn from the past too, and 2) if your cause can use these methods successfully, what’s to stop others, some of which may be antipathetic? There are objections to, and problems with, his particular ‘reading from history’ that emerge later. But really, common sense should expect unintended consequences.
Yes, new communication like mass online calls changes the game, but lowers the cost of infiltration, surveillance and countermeasures. Hallam’s language can be somewhat exclusive too, although perhaps this is his more hurried interview mode.
Anyway, I agree with much Hallam says (to a point), whether his groups are on the radical flank or not. Although how much of what he says is (mis)calculated provocation? Or informed by non-realistic ideology? See reading list.
But healthy socialisation (a humanism) is no longer enough, since humans now degrade and have potential to destroy life on a planetary scale. The latter should be the greater part of government. #biocracynow
Hallam cannot justify his claim that no-one has previously listened to people met on door-knocking campaigns (domestic tyrants, work ‘characters’, pub bores, preachers, trolls, teachers and trainers…). And workers’ interests parties are only incidentally Left, and sometimes Right.
Most people can moderate their language, adopt mirroring techniques etc, so where they don’t, may suggest disrespect or disruptive intent (or outgroup antagonism) rather than incapacity. My oft-swearing neighbour doesn’t swear when talking to me, etc.
As an anti-Establishment strategist, Hallam will know that only open strategies are defensible against state/corporate/etc infiltration and capture, yet open strategies give your gameplan away to your opponents (though deranged hierarchs still tend to seek foreign ringleaders in the shadows rather than accept that a mass movement is against them). Hence Hallam speaks somewhat ambiguously about good and bad outcomes.
Second half analysis follows…
Hallam indulges in a bit of sophistry about people being irrational so rational approaches don’t work, yet contradicts that with a model of a recruitment engine with onboarding programme to a campaign machine. The great campaigns for, say, abolition of slavery or women’s suffrage won the rational arguments first (indeed, over time distilled these winning arguments into a purified rational structure, unlike the waffling prose or flowery poetry that came prior), before waging a final battle against evil vested interests and sentiment, when the Establishment was supposed to be Enlightened. That is why Science is the bedrock for the Ecology/Environmental/Climate movement. And how Mary Wollstonecraft ran rings around Edmund Burke. And why the British Establishment and Anglican Church has to rely on hypocrisy and cant, at their continual peril.
When Hallam talks about these new phases in strategy, there is a potential glossing over of campaign methods that are counterproductive (were predictably counterproductive). I get the whole Zen (too early to tell)/radical flank effect. People are still debating the effectiveness of Suffragette tactics. Hallam is surely right that activism has to be field-tested and there are positive aspects to the social bonds it creates. But unlike past campaigns to rectify human injustices, we’re running out of time for experimentation.
Civil disobedience, mutual aid, assemblies/elections as a complex, adaptive system are not enough. For a start, who educates the young and old? What are the critical thinking capabilities and scientific understanding of the populace? What if Christianity (generally pro-slavery, anti-woman, pro-Empire, anti-Science, pro-child-abuse in past struggles anyway) gets coopted by the Christo-deviants of faith-immigrant Tommy Robinson?
Ash Sarkar is quite right to note that Hallam’s movements share Leninist Vanguardism. I can see the name ‘Your Party’ causing endless confusion in interviews. Sortition can be invisibly hacked these days, although Hallam’s arguments for it are rational. I think private education, inherited privileges and dynastic marriage are more significantly socially divisive than university education, though. Hallam is right about the burden of direct democracy. But he still has to row back and say people will be rational (rise to the occasion). But what happens once people are radicalised in a group while finding their individual voices?
Hallam has not here addressed human relations with nonhuman animals and the rest of nature, which are reliable predictors of psychopathy etc. Odd, since he mentions being a farmer, and Sarkar mentioned her cat. His farm workers example was essentially a trade union story. What about animal welfare? How about expanding repertoire in that direction? Humans are Nazis to animals and all that. It was anarchist Peter Kropotkin who wrote Mutual Aid, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution