For some evidence at this, here is one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion (Robert Hallam, who got cancelled or something, I don’t know), wrote about infighting:
You say this to them, their eyes glaze over. They don’t understand what you mean. Because they have no life experience of revolution. They have spent their comfortable lives in offices in front of computers, on social media, they can’t conceive of any time that will be different than this. In practical terms, it means that they will never support anything which upsets those in power.
...
The radical left are those people who say great stuff, but are totally hopeless at doing anything about it. They call for climate justice, they are into ‘intersectionality’, they are pro identity politics. But the main thing is not what they say they want. The main thing is they have no idea about how to make it happen. In fact, everything they actually do stops change from happening. In actual fact, they are not radical at all. They are reactionary.
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The biggest disaster of the last 30 years has been the adoption of horizontalist dogma. The notion that you should not have leaders, hierarchies or clear structures. Indeed, for many years, I believed much of this ideology. But practical experience shows it to be nonsense. This is because it imposes moral ideas on timeless truths about how people make decisions together. As such, it prevents movements from reaching a fraction of their political potential. T
Again, this is hard core, former leader of XR (who got cancelled himself at one point), making very basic fights over ideologies and primitive decisions like governance and management (and I think he got deposed or something because of it, but it’s just a big soup).
I’m sure there’s every permutation of this “left” vs “right” fighting going on constantly.
The point is that I’m skeptical that these orgs and cultures are a positive example for anything besides self-replication.
DXE Bay is not very decentralized. It’s run by the five people in ‘Core Leadership’. The leadership is elected democratically. Though there is a bit on complexity since Wayne is influential but not formally part of the leadership.
Leadership being replaced over time is not something to lament. I would strongly prefer more uhhhh ‘churn’ in EA’s leadership. I endorse the current leadership quite a bit and strongly prefer that several previous ‘Core’ members lost their elections.
note: I haven’t been very involved in DXE since I left California. Its really quite concentrated in the Bay.
The biggest disaster of the last 30 years has been the adoption of horizontalist dogma. The notion that you should not have leaders, hierarchies or clear structures.
For some evidence at this, here is one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion (Robert Hallam, who got cancelled or something, I don’t know), wrote about infighting:
...
...
Again, this is hard core, former leader of XR (who got cancelled himself at one point), making very basic fights over ideologies and primitive decisions like governance and management (and I think he got deposed or something because of it, but it’s just a big soup).
I’m sure there’s every permutation of this “left” vs “right” fighting going on constantly.
The point is that I’m skeptical that these orgs and cultures are a positive example for anything besides self-replication.
DXE Bay is not very decentralized. It’s run by the five people in ‘Core Leadership’. The leadership is elected democratically. Though there is a bit on complexity since Wayne is influential but not formally part of the leadership.
Leadership being replaced over time is not something to lament. I would strongly prefer more uhhhh ‘churn’ in EA’s leadership. I endorse the current leadership quite a bit and strongly prefer that several previous ‘Core’ members lost their elections.
note: I haven’t been very involved in DXE since I left California. Its really quite concentrated in the Bay.
I think this is a fairly common/prominent concern in left circles e.g. The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
I wouldn’t really consider DXE particularly horizontalist? Paging @sapphire
I’m also not sure in what sense these quotes would be evidence of anything about DXE