Just Stop Oil's grand finale: What was it all for?

We’re all familiar with Just Stop Oil by now as the environmental campaign group who threw the soup on the Sunflowers, blocked the M25, smashed the glass on the Magna Carta and spent most of the last few years being called “loons”, “terrorists” and “eco-zealots” by every right wing paper in the UK, not to mention “drum-banging net zero extremists” by our very own Prime Minister Keir Starmer. As of last month, JSO has publicly announced that they are no longer active as a campaign group and will be in their words “hanging up the hi vis”.

The announcement and final ceremony in which activists took off their iconic JSO orange hi vis vests was mostly passing me by with some inevitable questions hanging over me. Their stated rationale for stopping now is victory - the government has committed to no new fossil fuel developments. Surely, I thought, they can’t actually think that’s “victory”. The next government, especially if it turns out to be Reform, can easily overturn that decision and even if they didn’t, when your name is Just Stop Oil it feels a bit damp to declare victory when you’ve technically stopped some of the oil. Then I saw an Instagram reel posted by Just Stop Oil and Jamie Bellinger which raised a new set of far more tantalising questions

In this reel, a clip of a JSO protester saying “this is to make people join other organisations, not this one” is followed directly by text from a study which claims that activists deploying “unpopular tactics” drives more people to join different orgs in the same movement or dedicated to the same cause. As the activists at the final “hanging up the hi vis” ceremony took off their vests they revealed question marks beneath the JSO logos. Just Stop Oil, we are being told, was trying to drive people into other organisations the whole time.

I find the central claim of this reel fascinating. I find it pointed that one of the headlines highlighted in the reel refers to JSO activists as clowns.

Clowns are a lot of things, and despite the common understanding of silliness as a superficial, simple and easy performance, an intense amount of thought and social theory goes into clowning, both in the literal sense that people train for years to be actual clowns, and in another sense: the activist clown.

In Jeremy Bentham’s famous model of surveillance, the panopticon, prisoners can all see each other and the warden can see every prisoner, but they cannot see where the jailer is looking. This model gives us two important concepts in surveillance: 1, when we feel watched we behave whether we know we are being watched or not; and 2, we can all be deputised in surveillance when we are made to watch each other.

Clowns are lots of things, but among them clowns are annoying, mischievous and attention grabbing. Clowns are disruptive. They wear bright colours and surprise unwitting participants with unexpected props and pranks.

When all the prisoners know that they are all watching the clown, and that the jailer probably is too, the clown sets the agenda, and the prisoners can talk with more assumed privacy. It also makes clear to everyone which prisoners can be trusted and which ones have the prison guard in their mind. Right wing rags like the Daily Mail have been eager to report over and over again on “heroic” motorists attacking Just Stop Oil protesters who block roads.

This is related to the situationist concept of detournement, or “turning away”. The opposite to the process by which capitalism defangs radical ideas and symbols known as “recuperation”, detournement is about hijacking existing cultural structures to get radical messaging to the general population.

In the wake of Just Stop Oil’s public victory announcement and self proclaimed ending, reports have been popping up of other groups engaging in a variety of tactics towards the same goal - ending the ruling class’ ecocide. The Citizens Arrest Network made the CFO of Thames Water quit by performing a public citizens arrest for public nuisance.

One of the most interesting groups to emerge has been Shut The System, a direct action group adopting the same model as notorious anti zionist org Palestine Action who have repeatedly broken into factories belonging to weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems to destroy the weaponry being made for the extermination of Palestinians. Shut The System are engaging in direct sabotage of the systems killing the planet in a directly comparable way.

And their meme game is semi-decent

We all have our own “theories of change”, a term that has become quite ubiquitous in the english speaking climate movement over the last few years. I outlined mine in some detail in my video essay The World Is Not Ending.

The assumption from the outside that many people have made is that “just stop oil” is a message to the government. A demand that they hope will be met if enough media attention is given to the issue due to frequent disruptive action. If the claim of this reel from JSO is that the message was always to us, not to the government, and furthermore, that it’s working.

The important takeaway if it is true would be that their theory of change and the Palestine Action theory of change are actually the same, despite what many would have assumed watching JSO actions over the last few years. If this claim were true and Just Stop Oil were situationist clowns all along, this theory of change accomodates a whole ecosystem of tactics, rather than each org having it’s own theory of change that says only its work matters.

We can never know, but it is an interesting possibility to discuss, and discuss it we must. Perhaps they were just a liberal org trying to lobby the government with public disruption tactics, and when the government technically sort of stopped oil they were happy and decided to go home.

Last week at the London Marathon, protesters against the UK arming Israel jumped the barriers and threw red powder paint on the course, before being assaulted and dragged off the road by a motorcycle steward and then grabbed by police. Who’s laughing? Time will tell.