After four years of disruptive climate protests, Extinction Rebellion recently announced, in a press release provocatively entitled “We Quit,” that the movement will no longer be engaging in these direct action tactics.
“As we ring in the new year, we make a controversial resolution to temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic,” the movement writes. “We recognise and celebrate the power of disruption to raise the alarm and believe that constantly evolving tactics is a necessary approach.”
Extinction Rebellion’s announcement mirrors the conclusion I came to four years after Occupy Wall Street: movements must constantly evolve their tactics. Repeating the original tactics that gave birth to a movement will not work in the long term. Activists must either innovate or become irrelevant.
Seeing the necessity of tactical innovation is a step in the right direction. However, tactical innovation is still a hard problem. It is much easier to repeat tactics that don’t work than it is to invent tactics that do.
In The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, I proposed a unified theory of revolution. My intention was to expand the theories of change available to activists in the hopes that it would assist the creation of new forms of protest. Today I would like to put forward an evolved version of the unified theory of revolution that is more useful for protest innovators.
First, a brief recap of the unified theory of revolution:
All of activism is a mixture of four theories of change:
Voluntarism: human action creates change
Structuralism: the primary driver of change are structural forces such as economics, food prices, pandemics, etc
Subjectivism: change people’s minds to change reality
Theurgism: change is a mystical or divine or otherworldly process
These four theories can be combined in various proportions. For example, advocates of direct action lean heavily on voluntarism with minimal reliance on structuralism.
Here are a few more ways to think about each theory of change:
One of the misunderstanding I encountered most frequently when explaining the unified theory of revolution is that it was assumed I was advocating for one theory over another or that I was critiquing one of the theories. On the contrary, my point was that all theories were correct and that the challenge was to mix them in the proper proportions given the historical moment.
Another difficulty was in applying the four theories of change to creating new tactics. In The End of Protest, I left this to the reader to discover. Today I’d like to propose the following schema for the elements of protest:
Protest tactics are comprised of four elements that correspond to the four theories of change:
Action: this is the behavior that is considered a protest—from marching to meditating
Timing: this is the appropriate moment to protest. It could be a symbolic day (the Russian Revolution began on International Women’s Day) or during a crucial historical moment, such as an economic collapse.
Story: the story people are told, believe, and tell about why the protest will create change. This is the story that motivates people to join a protest.
Chance: the unplanned for accidents and surprises that often turn a protest into a movement. These cannot be predicted in advance or controlled by humans.
When seeking new tactics, we must innovate each element, if possible.