“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”
Anon
How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?
That’s it. That’s the blog.
This is mostly bullet points, scattered “rhetoric” (doggerel) and my usual “robustness” (1), because, for reasons (2) I am continuing to not deliver (but still gestate) that promised poetic palaver about what the JSO action “means”. You can see my 11 theses (sank without trace more on that below) here.
How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?
We will come back to the How. Let’s skip for now to we. Who is “we”? Probably you. It’s people who “get” climate change (not as many as there should be, 35 years into the public phase of the crisis). Even if you think the soup throwers were worse than useless (and I sympathise with that view!), please read on, because by honour I do not mean celebrate.
Principally I am aiming these challenges (3) at people who want to see a better (i.e. less “being killed at ever-higher velocity and ferocity”) world.
“We” is those who try to take action, spread the word about the overlapping crises, including climate, and who think that the soup-throwers are at worst misguided or at best brave, clear Examples To Us All. If you are on that spectrum, then great (4).
Honour?
I do not mean celebrate.
I do. NOT. mean. Celebrate.
I do not mean “turn into plaster saints and martyrs.” (though that might be part of how we support them).
I mean, how do we take what they did seriously? Not the action, necessarily, but the willingness to face consequences.
And what do I mean by “soup-throwers”?
Synecdoche. There’s these non-violent symbolic actions (NVSA) and then there’s also the NVDA undertaken by people blocking oil refineries etc. And getting into arms factories. And let’s remember that in many many parts of the world environmental activists are lucky if they end up in jail. A more permanent punishment (bullet in the neck, body in a ditch, or … disappeared) is common and getting commoner.
So. Pause a second. You’ve read this far. Have you asked yourself that question before now? If yes, think on your answer. Happy? If not, go on. Jot something else down.
Never thought about it before? Jot something down.
I do not care about my answers (some are below, and more will follow but sfw). You should not care about my answers (sfw, right?).
Please care about YOUR answers. And about how you arrive at them. In discussion with who? And what you then DO about those answers. If you take anything from the rest of this rant (and it is a rant), that is it.
YOUR answers to that question – answers you do not have to arrive at on your own, alone in a box right now – are what matters. Well, to be precise, the actions you take after you come to provisional answers are what matters.
If you think you have no answers and will never have any and therefore can stop reading. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GAIA I IMPLORE YOU TO RESIST THAT UNDERSTANDABLE IMPULSE, THAT REACHING FOR THE COMFORT OF OBLIVION.
Because
- You DO have answers. You are just scared of them and their implications
- Even before you have answers that satisfy you (and they may never satisfy you. Mine never have and I am an old fucker), you can help other people find their answers. That, already, is a contribution.
Still here? Well, okay, so I lied. There are four questions. I lie a lot about this sort of stuff. Bait and switch.. It doesn’t matter
How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?
- As individuals? Here, now, next week.
- As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?
- As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?
- How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?
I am going to set out in the rest of this rant (and it is still a rant) what MY answer the first question is, sorta. And have a light pass at the fourth, and beg your help.
I am going to make a commitment (it won’t last, but then again, maybe it will). That’s gonna be called MAB – Marc’s Andon Board. No, don’t click on the link. It’s repeated below.
I am going to ask you to begin to answer these four questions, and to encourage other people to answer those questions. Especially any prominent people you know, people who spend their time telling everyone about how fucked the world is and how awful the State-Corporate response to climate change has been, is being, but who rarely if ever ponder our 35 years of failure to force the State-Corporate beast to behave itself.
How do we honour the soup throwers as individuals?
The standard answer is let’s “Redouble our efforts” As per Boxer in Animal Farm, whenever confronted with failure, his answer was always – “I will work harder.
Yes, but if we’re doing the wrong things (and sometimes we are), doing them twice as much and twice as fast isn’t the win you think it is.
The promise feels good (until you don’t keep it, but hey, nobody’s holding your feet to the fire), but the reality after, not so much?
If we really want to honour the soup-throwers, we have to think hard about failure. Which is hard.
To quote Hudson’s 7th thesis on Futility
- The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz). Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.
Because until we admit that the soup-throwing is a sign of desperation, a sign of the lack of a huge mass movement that refuses to be cowed, bought off, confused, then we are stuck.
And all the way back in 2018, that was the promise, wasn’t it? Fill the jails, force the government to declare a climate emergency, force the creation of citizen assemblies that would short-circuit the power of the vested interests/institutional inertia. The Truth, told, would set us free. Yeah, nah.
But it’s too easy to blame the 2018 “crop” of activists. This isn’t about “blame” (morality tales and other ourobososes). This is about systems (more on that another post) and about courage.
Courage on its own is not enough
The soup throwers, especially the post-sentencing-of-the-first-batch-batch have enormous courage. Nobody can dispute it.
But courage is not enough.
The sound of a splat of soup versus thick glass, is the same sound as the noise of tactics without strategy. Thatt’s the noise before defeat. Well, alongside defeat
But while we are on courage, this. The soupthrowers have it. They are willing to face severe consequences: physical, financial, mental. Deprivation of liberty for prolonged periods.
Surely “we” should honour THEIR courage by matching it with some of the other forms of courage out there that don’t get talked about. Courage to face our pasts. Courage to face confronting emotions. Courage to face beliefs we have about ourselves, our tribes and our societies that maybe were never true, or maybe are no longer true: cognitive courage.
So, how do we honour them?
We honour them by being brave enough to have courage.
And courageous enough to be honest enough to know that our courage, on our own, is dreadfully and pitifully finite.
We honour them by accepting, both emotionally and intellectually, that without networks of support – networks of friends, families, neighbours, members of congregations, groups, friends we’ve had on the Internet for years whose voices we may never even have heard – we will fail. The courage will be boiled away by the firestorms of daily horror.
Without networks that we build, extend, nurture, we will be left in not just the same state we were before we decided to try to honour the soupthrowers, but WORSE, because we will have known what we needed to do, what we promised ourselves to do, and yet failed to do it.
So. Here is the unsolicited advice (come on, you always knew it was going to come).
Have a conversation with two or three different people about what honouring the soup throwers looks like FOR YOU. Is it to engage in local activism? To re-engage? To learn a new skill? To challenge, with courage and commitment, something that is not going well in a campaigning group you are in. Or something else.
- Start with your dilemma, your goal, and how you really want their help, their en-courage-ment.
- If you can be concrete, specific, then maybe that. If not, trust they will listen (but be ready, of course, if they don’t)
- Be open to their nos, to their doubts.
- Start where you are, with something small. A commitment that you will do x or y or z, and that to do that you need their support (mentorship, advice, feedback. Whatever).
And here’s the second plea. We have to be public about this. We have to try to start a conversation about “how do we honour the soupthrowers?”
It’s a lousy title, because it centres a divisive (and frankly not very clever) tactic. Soupthrowing gets people’s backs up. I’ve been using it so far as a place-holder. If I were making a Hashtag of it all I wouldn’t seriously consider any o fthese
#BlessedAreTheSoupThrowers [As per Life of Brian “It refers to any manufacturer of vegan products” ]
#SupportYourLocalSoupThrower (James Garner vibe)
#SoupThrowersOfTheWorldUnite
Canning the whole “soup-thrower” thing I tried this
#ItsNotTooLateToDieMoreClassily
#LetsFaceExtinctionWithHonour
#BetterClimateAction
#DownWithTheSmugosphere
Perhaps we just need
#CollectiveCourage
Any other suggestions?
Here’s my plea, in specifics.
Please try to get OTHER people, especially high profile people doing this. Here’s a draft letter. Modify as you see fit.
Dear X,
I like and respect your work. I’ve read your books/Twitter threads. I’ve watched your documentaries/TikToks.
I know you know we’re in deep shit.
I am writing to bring to your attention a proposal from Marc Hudson, a UK-based activist of dubious morals and pleasantness.
He is trying to get a conversation going about “how do we really honour and support the soup throwers” [the activists who threw the soup at the Van Gogh sunflowers painitng (and in fact all people struggling for freedom, dignity, sanity and survival everywhere, often under conditions far far more dangerous [deadly] than them.]
He doesn’t mean a solidarity campaign for the release of those people (though of course that’s part of the support.
He is trying to get people answering four questions. I think the questions are okay, and I am posting them here. Then again maybe you have other questions).
How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?
1, As individuals? Here, now, next week.
2, As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?
3, As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?
4, How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?
He’s suggesting the hashtag #CollectiveCourage
I am going to have a go at having conversations with people whose opinion I trust. But I only have a very small platform. It would be great if YOU would try to get wider conversations going.
Yours in parasocial bliss,
[insert name here]
Send this to folks? See if anyone does anything.
Okay, so I know all this is hubristic (not for the first time). I know it won’t “work.” But to allow that knowledge to paralyse me is to dishonour people who are facing (or indeed doing) serious time. Not to mention those corpses in the ditches and those bodies under the bombs.
Finally
What happens if we don’t do this?
We continue to fail. James Baldwin said “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Well, if we don’t face past failure, and the likelihood that any courage we try to muster will vanish instantly, we will continue to fail.
We are probably going to fail anyway. It is probably too late to salvage anything from the ruins. We’ve been warned for over 50 years about trouble ahead at a planetary level. Some of us believed, acted, but not enough of us, not enough, not with enough power. And here we are.
Why won’t we do this?
Because it’s scary. It involves us getting out of our normal roles, and talking about things we don’t feel qualified to talk about. It’s safe to stay talking about the science we were trained in, or the policy systems we know intimately.
Other people will tell us they are unhappy, threatened. They will tell us we are risking ridicule, harming our reputations.
We will worry that we have nothing to say. We will wonder if it’s because we are somehow “not smart enough”, rather merely not brave enough. And for those of us who pride ourselves on our “intelligence”, that is soul-threatening.
It involves us failing at things that really matter.
How won’t we do this?
This is easy .Three ways
- Ignore the call – click through, bookmark, but never come back.
- Smear the call(er). “What a fuckwit. What a narcissist, telling people what they should be discussing, just to cope with his irrelevance, his unwillingness to do high-risk activism. Loser.”
“What a waste of time. He wants a pity party, he wants to see us all tearing each other down. It’s probably some sort of psyop from 77th Brigade.”
3, Do it half-assed (for reasons; a) we don’t really believe in it but feel obliged to pretend we do to look brave/responsible. . b) We believe in it but are threatened by it and are going to allow our fears and uncertainties to run the show
How will we WILL do it
This is what I will do.
I will put up my Andon Board post tonight. See here.
Once I put an Andon Board up itself, I will write more over the coming days about these other questions.
I will send this post and a personal cover letter to people I know, people I respect, people I haven’t spoken to for years, people I fell out with, people I didn’t.
Ultimately, personal example doesn’t actually get anything very far. George Monbiot tried to get public figures to talk honestly about their money and where it came from. People applauded him and did not follow his lead.
If we are going to honour the soupthrowers courage – have courage, build courage, replenish courage, it will be a collective endevaour.
(as per collective hope (see my long response to the essay by Tim Winton)
Collective does not mean national or nationalised, top-down or Leninist. It can’t work like that. It means granular, local, hybrid, support.
It won’t happen. I am not a child.
It must happen.
Over to you.
Footnotes
- A bit of bracing bluntness, parrhesia. It’s easier like that.
- Medical, mostly. Resolving? Thank god for the NHS and for all people doing their best within it.
- barbs, snarks, snarbs, barks and bites and bile
- come be on my spectrum
