Just Stop Oil have made something happen. After a series of attention-grabbing actions, the group are now promising to escalate disruptive action if the British government does not “halt all future licensing and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels” in Britain and the occupied six counties by April 10th. Whether through their attention-grabbing tactics, or in their direct threats to the state, Just Stop Oil demonstrate above all a refusal to take refuge in helplessness. Significantly, Just Stop Oil emerge from outside the institutional left, which, post-2019, has tended to be defined by a sense of helplessness, including around climate change–despite the recent welcome upsurge in industrial action.

To refuse to take refuge in helplessness is to find ways in a situation. It is a question of capacities that are latent or unused and have not been accounted for, and, equally, of identifying what weak links offer opportunities. For Just Stop Oil, the weak links are found in the ecocidal state’s maintenance of its own legitimacy by protecting the popular masses from inconvenience, as well as the necessity for the state to ensure broadly stable conditions for capital accumulation. This gives a group, even a very small group, a considerable power to undermine the state’s legitimacy through disruption (as long as they are willing to risk arrest), and thus considerable leverage.

Among the left criticisms of Just Stop Oil, one particular tendency stood out: the “I would simply” criticism. Under the influence of Andreas Malm, these critics essentially argued that, rather than stage actions that risked unpopularity or inconvenience, they would simply blow up a pipeline, or assassinate an oil executive–as though it’s that easy, and as though Just Stop Oil aren’t acting strategically. For Just Stop Oil, the leverage that can be gained from generalised disruption offers greater possibilities than the sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure.² In Buda’s Wagon, Mike Davis draws on Orwell’s observation that “a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak” to show how car bombs “enfranchise previously marginal actors”.³ In the relationship between attention-grabbing actions that issue a call which subjectivates new climate militants, and the deployment of the disruptive capacity of these militants, Just Stop Oil have found just such a simple weapon. If militants are willing to be arrested, there is little answer to it. To refuse to take refuge in helplessness is to undertake concrete analysis of concrete situations–including what is possible and what one’s capacities may be–and it is to go beyond fear or hope to the finding of new weapons.

In these pieces, I want to try to think through the ‘new weapons’ of Just Stop Oil, always in the awareness that politics is prior to theory, and that theory is thus always dependent on politics. Just Stop Oil don’t need these pieces–though hopefully some of their militants will find them interesting or useful–but I needed Just Stop Oil in order to write this.

In the first part, I want to consider left criticisms of Just Stop Oil and of a politics of disruption more generally. In the second part, I will look more closely at the ‘weapons’ of Just Stop Oil, and their integration of practices with ideological and political effects within their–our–situation. In the third and final part I will then analyse the relationship between a politics of disruption and Just Stop Oil’s practical and tacit theory of the ecocidal state. I am not totally uncritical of Just Stop Oil, and so, in this part, I attempt a critique of their implicit conception of crisis, as well as the risk that their activist theorising of the state (focused on finding ways for militants to exert leverage) may slide back towards something like the politics of guarantees that much of their practice has so crucially broken from. Equally I worry that their fierce—and in many ways admirable—commitment to both tackling the main enemy at home and to attending to the discipline of the conjuncture can lead to a limiting perspective when it comes to imperialism and learning from anti-imperialist ecological struggles. However, even this critique relies on the primacy of what Just Stop Oil have made happen: their demonstration that there are capacities for resistance to ecological crisis, and that, given these capacities, to not resist is to be indifferent.

This is an introduction to a short series of texts theorising Just Stop Oil. You can read part one here.