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From Extinction Rebellion to revolution: strategies compared
NICK WRIGHT assesses the programme and demands of the burgeoning ecological direct-action movement
An Extinction Rebellion protester eyes up a cop outside the Bank of England

EXTINCTION Rebellion (XR) has put environment politics in the popular imagination with a partisan spirit and the kind of creativity that inspires admiration.

Its daring tactics have wrong-footed political authority and the bourgeois media as well as giving the public-order police a more entertaining job than normal.

While the exotic behaviour of some XR activists gives Daily Mail editors apoplexy, the more common — and common sense — reaction from most people is to enjoy the anti-authoritarian exuberance in the same spirit that put-upon peasants and inebriated artisans in feudal Britain revelled in subverting authority when a successful armed rebellion seemed impossibly remote.

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