Striking in the City, Making Love in the Fields:
Unsnarling the Wild Pedagogies of Earth Activism

Introduction

How should educators, especially those of us partly or wholly ensconced within institutions, respond to the explosion of earth activism amongst our students? From primary schools to universities, it is as if a spell has been broken. As the scales fall from their eyes, young people, arising and stumbling, shake off the trance. They awaken to a world in perilous freefall, and take to the streets in the huge global wave of climate strikes and climate rebellion. At the same time, earth activism is diversifying and fecundating, both in the author’s native UK and internationally. Whilst direct actions against fracking and roadbuilding have continued in the spirit of ecotage, groups of youth have increasingly converged to respond collectively to the crisis with forms of physical response ranging from climate-grief (Cunsulo & Ellis, 2018; Cunsulo & Landman, 2017; Psychedelic Society, 2019) to eco-sex (Anderlini-D’Onofrio, 2011; Anderlini-D’Onofrio & Hagamen, 2015; EcoSex, 2018) that emerge “out of the deep place in our bodies that is retching in the pain we are inflicting on the world” (Hagamen, 2016, p. 28).

My intention on this occasion is not to discuss how we got here, but rather to consider what happens next. What is to be done? I suggest an approach that is biocentric in theory – rigorously so, I hope – but specifically Red Biocentric (Boxley, 2019, 2022). My orientation, philosophically and practically, is towards the communist horizon (Dean, 2012), its red dawn streaked with green. What this means, in respect of the new waves of earth activism, is the application of a mode of analysis that seeks to draw out lessons for praxis, and make observations regarding wider social/ecological formations. In order to operate such a procedure of abstraction, it is necessary first to draw back from singular instances of earth activism in all their multitudinous and variegated forms, and propose some categories at the level of the functioning of communities’ activity insofar as it operates within recent capitalist societies. In this, I broadly follow the approach taken by Bertell Ollman (Ollman 2003, pp.88-9). These conceptual enclosures are intended heuristically as means of demarcation, but without forgetting that “the map is not the territory” (Korzybski in Bateson, 1979, p.110). On the contrary, there currently exists such an explosion of earth activism that its diversity will always overspill our conceptual conveniences. Nevertheless, I propose two categories, the Revel and the Strike, as our fundamental abstractions, and from these I suggest a synthesis, a third category, the Ritual of Revolution, and its attendant pedagogy.

Much earth activism is about mud and mundanity: fennel tea, talk, and tents. But from the chaos and ordinariness of life in an urban occupation, a tree-camp, or a picket line, new ways of being emerge, centered around a changed/changing sense of sustainability, resilience, striving, and struggle: liminal subjectivities. Of course, much has been written about liminality. In returning, albeit fleetingly, to the source – Van Gennep (1960) – in this piece I wish to emphasize the intention to locate the liminal in symbolic practice, rite, and ritual.

Desperate times

Desperate times require measures which may themselves be desperate, but they may also elicit a whole range of emotional responses including grief, anger, and anxiety. These in turn find expression in diverse forms, increasingly analysed in academic literature (Lehtonen & Pihkala, 2021; Pihkala, 2018; Pihkala, 2020; Pinsky, 2020), in violent expression, in sexual expression, and in many peaceful forms of protest. This cannot be surprising, since in 2022 we find ourselves daily confronted with talk of tipping points having been reached. After many years of warnings, young people are confronted with the immediacy of the crisis that is now upon us.

There are choices to be made, the consequences of all or many of which may seem utterly unpalatable to a large majority of runaround thirty- to fifty-somethings (like me) in a makework world. Yet, confronted by a gathering premonition of collapse, fuelled in some instances by fervid readings of Kingsnorth (2012), of McPherson (Baker & McPherson, 2014; McPherson, 2019; McPherson, 2020), of Bendell (2020), younger people know, really know, what they face in a world onrushing with no imaginable exit-route towards at very least two degrees further rise above the Holocene norm within their lifetime, and they must decide: Go through the motions, as if this is all going to continue as before; withdraw, relinquish, perhaps form a renunciation community; or act.

The author’s experience is that such choices are not only felt as very real and pressing in the lives of our students but, as one might expect, overspill into many aspects of their social and emotional being. If, as some anticipate, their unborn children may inherit a world much depleted in biodiversity, and full of the uncertainties of food-, water-, and wider resource-insecurity, they may question the wisdom of burdening the world and such children with this calamity (Ng, 2021). One of several well-publicized (Carrington, 2020; Scheinman, 2019) polls in 2019 (Business Insider, 2019) offered stark proof of this changing attitude towards having children, while academic studies (Wynes & Nicholas, 2017; Helm, Kemper, & White, 2021) bring home the uncomfortable reality of the dilemma.

It might be argued that such decisions remain a privilege of the rich world (Helm, Kemper & White, 2021, p.113). I don’t disagree. Nevertheless, in this context, the meaning of some of our most intimate interactions may take on a different hue. Celebrations of fertility, alongside the continuing heteronormalizing domination of sexual-relationships-for-procreation narratives, so long a feature of seemingly every culture, might be expected to fade to an echo. The performance of reclaimed and re-envisioned sex for its own sake, out of pleasure and desire, has the potential to challenge not only the reproductive order but the heteronormative patriarchy inscribed into rich world societies, and it is in part for this reason that I draw on ecosexual theory here, as elsewhere (Boxley, 2019), as contributing to the argument for a synthetic ritual of revolution.

It is these oppressive, hetero-patriarchal power structures that have given strength and legitimation to what Jane Caputi (2016, 2020) has called the “motherfucking paradigm”. Eurocentric and white traditions in theology, philosophy, and science since at least the Renaissance have characterised the feminized Earth as passive, “a subordinated, violable, rapeable, and exploitable resource” (Caputi, 2020, p.8), and so it is necessary to look beyond these to older and deeper understandings of the Mother Earth. Drawing primarily on theorists from First Nation communities and the African diaspora to ground her ecofeminism, Caputi shows how, in such ways of being, the guiding metaphors are less about feminisation of the (violated) Earth, and exploitation gives way to concepts of kinship and relationality, where the land and sea are not always explicitly gendered, but are seen as an “earth parent” (Caputi, 2020, p.18) to be honoured. However, insofar as cultures of the Global North have characterised Earth as “Mother”, it is important to consider how and why, in these desperate times, she has been “fucked”. Motherfucker – a term born out of Nineteenth Century Black slavery (Caputi, 2020, p.33) – has multiple meanings, but derives from the characterisation of the white slave masters – “the rapists, abusers, ‘pussy’ and land grabbers” (Caputi, 2020, p.5) – and bears all the negative connotations of the verb ‘to fuck’, which has come to define heteropatriarchy’s fusion of sex and violence. Here I concur with Caputi, then, that these desperate days that usher in the Anthropocene are the “Age of the Motherfucker” (Caputi, 2020, p.5).

It is against this background of violence committed against women and the Earth that the risky reclamation of Erōs in ritual is to be celebrated, and lovemaking is to dethrone motherfucking as the defining anthropic activity of the age.

Two pedagogies of earth activism

To employ a bioregional simile: The task in hand is to unpick the multitude of pedagogies-in-activism, like untangling ribbons of dried sedge from southdown sheep’s-wool snarled around the barb of a wire fence that cuts the chalkland. Our conceptual landscape, too, is fenced. On the one side, the erotic pedagogies of the revel, of rites of May, of the ‘Kral Majales’ “…which is the power of sexual youth” (Ginsberg, 1985, p. 353). On the other the labour discipline of the strike, the steadfastness of the determination that is the “sole condition for the salvation of a [screaming planet^[1]] … tortured almost to death” (Lenin, 1918). It would not be unreasonable to regard these two abstractions as exemplified in aporetic impulses, but the claim, here, is that in seeking the third term, we might discover lessons to take back to the institution.

The Earth Strike

The first felten threads of theory to untwine from our teasel: Conceptually, what is the Earth Strike and how can its necessary order operate on participants to straighten out tangled thinking? The watchwords here are: Organization, Solidarity, Discipline.

The radical democracy of the strike is deeply pedagogical. This is especially true in the case of the mass strike which, as all those who have ever been swept up in one will know, is transformative in at least two fundamental respects. Firstly, its characteristics as defined by Rosa Luxemburg (2004) include its scale and coordination but also critically its effect on the political life of a country: The mass strike is a political event by virtue of its entry into public discourse, i.e., its ‘public-pedagogical’ impact. Secondly, mass strikes mobilise and engage large numbers of people – school students among them – who were not previously class-conscious, such that participants “experience their collective power and receive a quick and groundbreaking form of political education” (Novak, 2019, p.49) that, through its rituals, reveals an expanded sense of we/ourselves for ourselves.

Wall (2020) notes that the industrial strike has, sadly, infrequently taken on a specifically environmentalist character, where workers have aligned with green groups to promote plans for a just transition within particular sectors. However, far more than narrow sectoral concern is needed for the wider transition necessary to our survival, and if the withdrawal of labour is to reclaim its rightful role as the preeminent means of mass disruption, its character must adapt to these desperate times. Nobody is claiming that the wave of mobilizations around the globe in November 2021, to coincide with the 26^th UN Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, would have been sufficient in itself to enact a significant – even an adequate – shift in policy strategy, by the richest nations in particular, towards mitigating climate change. However, the strikes that took place on the date which, in Britain, has marked Guy Fawkes’ Day for four hundred years (and long been an occasion for disorder and rioting), signaled a start (Adam et al, 2021). Earth strikes of a mass character can only really be said to have taken place in Australia thus far when, in September 2019, strikers from thirty-three unions took to the streets with school students. It was claimed that three hundred thousand took part (Henriques-Gomes et al, 2019). But the coming together of striking refuse workers and climate activists in Glasgow on November 5^th 2021 signaled an important moment, too. Nevertheless, whilst every one of the tiny number of ultra-rich, from Dubai to California, continue to impact our collective chances of survival more than hundreds of thousands of the world’s working poor, even Australia’s mass Earth Strikes fall far short of the tens of millions that will be required to take to the streets, and yes the fields too, across every continent, to wrest all Capital by degree from the clutches of our ecocidal oppressors. ‘Green’ industrial action is rightly said to occur in the spirit of Jack Mundey. The Australian communist trade union activist,^[2] who died in 2020, spearheaded the use of ‘green bans’ (Mundy, 1981), boycotts by his New South Wales Building Labourers’ Federation (NSWBLF) of environmentally damaging developments. Some fifty years ago, he understood that environmental protection required a communist vision of collective, social responsibility (Burgmann & Burgmann, 2016, p.3) to make good on any biocentric promise. The extraordinary environmentalist industrial actions of the NSWBLF “resisted the power of capital. They seriously thwarted the remorseless quest for profit at the expense of all other forms of value, which was [and is] a characteristic feature of a class-based system of exploitation of both people and the environment” (Burgmann & Burgmann, 2016, p.58). No matter how impossible it seems now, actions such as those led by Mundey will need to develop into far more widespread – indeed vast, teeming – climate strikes if the immense challenge of ecologically devastating production is to be met in the coming years.

The school strikes themselves are perhaps an odd example of such an industrial action strategy in that they are by no means as circumscribed by the rules and rituals of strike discipline as the traditional stoppage – legitimized by the binding ballot, executed and exhorted by the national executive committee, placing on members a moral imperative to observe the action in necessary unity. But the coming together of young activists with the refuse workers, street sweepers, janitors, and some education workers in Glasgow on November 5^th, for example, presents a moment of liminal possibility: School students and climate activists find themselves marching cheek by jaw with organized workers in dispute. What does this moment of possibility mean? In essence, this is about a sense – felt sometimes more dimly, sometimes more keenly – of a gathering of the forces required to actually shift the balance towards a new orientation. Whether it is possible, in reality and hard-fought practice, to bring recalcitrant world leaders to a place of realignment is not for this article to say. The point of the Earth Strike ritual as transformative moment is that its discipline, in that moment, transcends the disciplinary mechanisms of Capital itself, a discipline that forces the powers of human creativity into the service of ecocidal production practices.

The refuse workers of Glasgow, and elsewhere, live the reality of what Armiero and de Angelis (2017) call the Wasteocene, this epoch of poverty in excess, where so much unneeded yet highly profitable single-use, instantly-obsolete manufacture fuels the engine of capitalist growth. Their jobs, like all of our jobs, are shaped by the requirements of an eco-destructive system. What binds them to the climate strikers is that the organized and disciplined withdrawal of both groups’ labour is the principal means by which they can affect a great, grinding, creaking stoppage in the tidal throughput of global resource from virgin source to vast landfill. The discipline required to hold out whilst the machine cranks on is demanding indeed, and here the young climate strikers may absorb from the workers in dispute something of the resilience necessary to seeing it through to the point at which the machinery can turn no more. The Earth Strike requires not just enthusiasm, but this labour discipline.

There is magick here – Marxist magick^[3]. The world upside down. No authority but the authority of the democratically elected strike committee, no rules but the rules of strike discipline: These rituals are deeply determinative of liminal subjectivity. Yes, you “gotta serve somebody” (Dylan, 2014, p.568), but that somebody will not be the unrighteous politrickster of Babylon.

Though, it just might be Babalon (Grey, 2011)…

The Revel

… or Dionysus. The revel, the rites of May from which few “returned home againe vndefiled” (Stubbes, 1973 [1583], unpaginated) are our model for the beautiful, anarchic carnival of the current climate rebellion. I follow Hawthonn in symbolizing here the regions they occupy as Pan-controlled Zones (Hawthonn, 2019), akin to Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones (Bey, 2003): regions characterized by exuberance and excess, exemplified in the figures of XR’s hemic Dionysian ‘khoros’, the Red Brigade. These are not only occupations of city space, but also and crucially prefigurative in collapsing town and country (culture and nature) distinctions, and in bringing the wild in. Many contemporary expressions of earthen spirituality that take place far from the cities’ limits fall within this conceptual category.

The magick here is powerfully erotic (Schechner, 1993) and profoundly antiauthoritarian, these are zones for “making love in the fields, imbibing wine and mushrooms, and frolicking naked in the streets” (Hawthonn, 2019, p.12). For the purposes of this contribution, you may take the entreaty to make love in fields metaphorically or otherwise. However this is read, the enticement to unity here is tectonically strong. The watchwords here are Erōs, Liberty, Anarchy.

This impulse, perhaps the opposite to the steely discipline of the strike, is no less appropriate to November 5^th or May 1^st, the moments of the year’s turning where the impossible spins inside the whirlingball of seasonal change, high winds, and high spirits, and comes forth transformed into the newly-possible, the always-was-possible, made real. We cannot be surprised that the puritan Phillip Stubbes wrote of his disgust at the unrestrained sexuality of the Mayday revelers in 1583. The “defilement” of the lads and maids who cavorted at the margins of the town must have been, in the eyes of the Church, the essence of impropriety, as the youth fell from the protective arms of the church into the clutches of the old gods in their Pan-controlled Zones of seasonal rite.

Today, the revelry of the Extinction Rebellion, Ocean Rebellion, and the Red Rebels all contribute to the establishment and maintenance, albeit temporary, of Pan-controlled Zones. When dead mermaids washed up, naked and forlorn, upon St. Ives beach in Cornwall as the G7 summit opened nearby, it was plain that such a zone was emerging, coalescing, congealing there among the discarded trawler nets (Ocean Rebellion, 2021a). When it happened again in London and in Glasgow, the ocean spilled into the city – as surely and tragically as it will in years to come – and again, city and the wide open spaces beyond collapsed into the temporary autonomous zone of an Ocean Rebellion action, revealing for city-dwellers something of the environmental horrors of the usually invisible bottom trawling (Ocean rebellion, 2021b) that occurs beyond their furthest margins.

Within such territories – in amongst the sleeping bags, musical instruments, crazy costumes, free food distribution points – it is as if the law cannot penetrate. The watchful Red Rebels seem somehow to keep at bay the uneasy, jittery, police with the theurgy of their implacable grace. They declare, “We illuminate the magic realm beneath the surface of all things and we invite people to enter in, we make a bubble and calm the storm, we are peace in the midst of war” (Red Rebel Brigade, 2019). So unlike the picket line, yet somehow similarly generative of horizons of action and understanding that sustain a space of change, the revels of rebels define a magick circle wherein the laws that more usually enframe our thought give way to a potential both prefigurative and liminal, in that moment, to become…^[4]

What, finally and crucially, represents the sublation of these incommensuarable modes of praxis? My suggestion is that each operates through what Merrifield, in his Magical Marxism, calls ‘mística’ (Merrifield, 2011), a structure of feeling deriving as much from the heart as from the head, and transmitted through ritual and folklore. And here I mean the lores of lefts as well as greens, the labour lore of the strike, and the transgressive lore of the erotic revel (Kripal & Hanegraaf, 2008). Both represent liminal possibilies, realised only in activity – in ritual and rite. In the current period, such rites must be learnt – transmitted and absorbed – and practiced, theurgically. No ritual, no liminality. In the spirit of the new “critical magick” – a term originating with Walter Benjamin (Benjamin in Josephson-Storm, 2017, p.234) – I argue that there is a theurgic pedagogy of ritual, “of unifying activities, seen, felt and encountered in the mundane world” (Shaw, 2014, p.xxii) which offers a means of reconnection. It is this synthesis – liminality in the deep synergies of ritual – which reveals the connectedness, the internality of our relation to wider Self (Naess, 1988) – Class, Species, Nature.

A synthesis

Our world is one drained of magick, and our culture has long since drifted far, far from cosmocentrism and biocentrism. We are under the dark spell of ecocidal, egocentric rationality. We require a response to this dark spell, one which rejects the backward-looking “Radical Traditionalism” (Hale, 2011) of some magick practitioners, but which still requires recovering a deep symbolic imagination. In the theurgic terms proposed here, this is the performance of an “intellectual incantation to free us from our dark trance” (Shaw, 2014, p. xxiv). In seeking a sophisticated but revolutionary response, Red Biocentrism looks to the performance of a pedagogy of militant praxis to empower us again to re-enchant nature (Federici, 2019) by means of rites, rituals, and incantations, and to awaken us all to join the youth arising, and stumbling, “slouching towards Bethlehem”. With our sex and our strikes, we re-sacralize the streets, the field, the Earth.

Institutional teachers, then, relinquish the illusion that the classroom incantation of lessons for sustainability alone can affect the birthing of the necessary magickal liminality! Schiller (2004) was onto something in proposing aesthetic education (Grossmann, 1968) as a radical synthesis of the spontaneity of the wild mob with the democratic, ratiocinative order. Reimagining such an education as ritual – theurgic, fundamentally active – there emerges a liminal subject, de-scaled, unbowed, ready to return to the field.

Mística

Is it possible to learn spontaneity, in the revolutionary sense? This is a question about becoming attuned to the movement, the rhythm of collective being, and acting in accordance with mística. Merrifield defines this as “pre-cognitive praxis, mystic and deep, deriving as much from the heart as from the head” (Merrifield, 2011, p.76). To be swept up by the rhythm of collective action is not irrational, but neither is it entirely rational. To succumb to the structures of feeling borne by the collective is not to act against thought, but to think in the feeling of the present activity, thinking and feeling on impulse, such as to birth a practical consciousness of ongoing commitment and unification: mística!

Mística “asserts itself symbolically, through folklore and oral vernacular, through spiritualism and poetry, through music and dance, through getting angry about the world and doing something about it” (Merrifield, 2011, p.76). That is to say, it is realized as the acquisition, through the performance of practices in common, of the structuration of feeling that enables a break with the affective oppression of Capital. There are many ways to envisage this, some of which, Like Merrifield’s, employ the language of magick.

We are in thrall – under a spell cast over us by the operation of Capital to sacrifice our creative capacities to the cycle of motherfucking destruction. When our instincts are co-opted by our social formation to transform our animal desires into instruments of Capital – engines of consumption – then a means is required to overcome such sorcery, to break free of this enchantment.

The ancient Neoplatonists understood that such a spell-breaking could only be effected by the correct enactment of rituals proper to a time and place which could enable the purification of the vehicle of consciousness from its crowding, chattering overdetermination by the hypnotizing symbols of society. Such is our own all-enveloping carnival of marketing, at once flashy and spectacular, subliminal and subtle; enrapturing, entrancing, overwhelming. To shake off such influence requires a great deal of carefully choreographed ritual, re-emplacement, and re-envisioning to align will with intention. And so, we turn to our two exemplary forms, which if combined offer the possibility of just such theurgy: the discipline of the strike, and the erotic madness of the revel. The purification of consciousness, its awakening from the trance, provides the necessary condition for a resistant subjectivity which can be sustained through the humdrum between strikes or rebellions, awaiting the next purifying ritual. Though, of course, over periods of lengthy attrition, even the most resistant consciousness is tested and tempted by the magnetic mundanity of the swirling mirrors of capitalist thaumaturgy.

Merrifield speaks of a “mística of resistance”, as realized through pedagogical processes. I suggest that such processes are themselves the subjective experience of the liminal spaces of theurgic transformation, the strike and the revel, such that, in turn, “[p]owerful mística emotions animate… marches and rallies, rebellions and riots, which are tightly organized and yet spontaneous and felt as well, a creation of the moment as much as the mind” (Merrifield, 2011, p.78). Thus the ritual initiate helps to recreate the conditions for the possibility of the liminal experience of her comrades, providing the space and necessary instruments of critical magick to support their movement towards a sustainable revolutionary consciousness.

The Pan-controlled Zone, or indeed the strike-space – the picket line, march, or teach-out for example – function as territories of transition. Applying Van Gennep’s original formulation, whosoever may occupy such spaces find themselves “physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he [sic] wavers between two worlds” (Van Gennep, 1960, p.18). Those rites executed in this transitional zone he designates “liminal (or threshold) rites” (Van Gennep, 1960, p.21). The transitional rites of the rebellious revel and the strike require those spaces to persist for long enough to “acquire a certain autonomy” (emphasis added) (Van Gennep, 1960, pp. 120-21). This independence from the “neutral world” beyond^[5] maintains the magick, and must be guarded, as by XR’s Red Rebels, or indeed the elected strike steward. Zonal autonomy is crucial for the possibility of conscious transformation, since the crushing demands of the everyday can be sufficient to deflect thought from the importance of the ritual per se, and impede the fostering of hope, and belief in the possibility of change.

It is important then that those intent on creating the zones necessary for liminal effect heed the codes enacted in the various transitional practices developed through long experience by ‘místical’ activists, especially of the majority world. The strikers of the rich North forget at their peril the affective power of the theatrical rites developed by their rebellious counterparts^[6]. Steely resolve on the picket line, alone, is unlikely to elicit the changes in the consciousness of participants that revolutionary transition requires. Some on the left may criticize mística as “ritualistic” but, the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil proclaim, “without mística we cannot be militants. We are nourished from this” (Merrifield, 2011, p.78), for mística shows “the mystery of struggling, of dreaming, of having hope” (Merrifield, 2011, p.78). It is in this synthesis of the místical and the disciplined that hope is implanted deep, deep in consciousness.

The practice of theurgy helps us to re-think the mechanisms of liminal rite. The later Neoplatonists, principally Iamblichus (2003) and Proclus, elaborated a complex and fundamentally embodied form of ritual practice, turning direct theatre into magickal act, in large part by virtue of the opacity and impenetrability of its instruments. The primary ritual tools of the theurgist were of three main types; material, intermediate, and noetic. The Neoplatonist theurgist’s materials consisted of such things as pebbles, rods, pieces of wood, and incense; a given material corresponding to a certain god, group of gods, or other divine entities. Intermediate ritual tools were of two subtypes: visual and verbal/vocal. Visual ritual tools took the form of statues or other images of the gods. Verbal/vocal ritual tools were divine names or strings of vowels, the seven Greek vowels being correlated to the seven planetary deities. Shaw (2014) speculates that noetic ritual tools consisted primarily of mystical Pythagorean numerical constructs, but because no explicitly theurgic rituals are extant, this can be considered no more than conjecture. No conjecture is required, however, to conjure the magick of the contemporary rituals of revolutionary theurgy. The efficacy of mística is reliant on the constellation of elements powerfully mixed in riotous sensory combination – “candles, seeds, machetes and flags are incorporated into rituals of singing, poetry readings and theatrics” (Merrifield, p. 78) – to effect super-natural, liminal potentia: possibility out of the impossible, hope from dreams. These tools of the místical revolutionary closely correspond to those of the magickal practitioners of antiquity – material and intermediate in character, though our invention of new noetic qualities of revolutionary conscientization require much further consideration.

The ritual tools of mística function in three ways: (1) they have the power to purify bodymind; (2) they prepare us for participation in and a vision of a better life, and release the mind from any obstructions that prevent this; and (3) they enable mystical union with the collective. For Neoplatonists, the ritual tools of various types derived their power from the gods, thus differentiating their practice of theurgy from vulgar magic. These divine rituals were properly the instruments of the gods themselves, the means through which the process of creation is enacted, and simultaneously the anagogic means of return for the soul of the practicing theurgist. There is no coercion of the gods on the part of the theurgist. Rather the calling down of powers so much greater than us unite the practitioner with the force necessary to bring about the changes required to achieve the impossible vision of an existence beyond alienation and division: in Red Biocentric terms — and, I daresay, those shared by the twenty-six-year-old Marx (Marx, 1992) — the positive supersession of Capital so completely necessary to a full and genuinely sustainable Gaian life.

The practice of the Earth Strike and the Extinction Rebellion are rightly defined as ritual and theurgical, in that they intend to produce real effects by means of symbolic causes, in accordance with will. The encircling squall of the winds of mística sweep up the participant. Held still in the eye of the storm, its liminal zone, the theurgic tools – the instruments of critical magick – cleanse mind of the beclouding fug of what the Marxist in me still likes to call bourgeois consciousness, blows it away, liberating thought for conscientization and union.

Erōs

For the Neoplatonist, Erōs drew the soul back to the gods. For the Red Biocentric, there can be no revolution without Erōs (Boxley, 2019). Revolution is an erotic act, its rituals the vehicles of love. For Neoplatonists of the second century, “[a]lthough the heavenly cycles described in the Phaedrus and Timaeus were the goal to which they aspired, it was erotic madness that brought them there… Eros co-ordinated the Ideas of the intelligible world and, proceeding with them, knitted the cosmos together in a unified bond” (emphasis added) (Shaw, 2014, p. 140). It was desire that drew the soul into the mortal body, and led it back to its immortal home. The theurgist received Erōs from the gods and returned it to them in the form of ritualised acts. The magick of mística might be said to be erotic in an equally expansive sense, bearing strikers and protestors onto the street and into the field, fast-flowing, as the currents of the swollen river inundate the watershed. The angry love that carries the crowds (“getting angry about the world and doing something about it”) is the energy that takes them to the place of liminality. It requires a great deal of courage to take those steps away from the “neutral world”; indeed, without the force of Erōs, this could present an insurmountable challenge.

As the body of the rebel, the protestor, or picketer is drawn back into its collective “home” among comrades united in struggle, a deep desire is satisfied. “Why is it,” asks Richard Schechner, “that unofficial gatherings elicit, permit, or celebrate the erotic… (Schechner, 1993, p.46)? Whether it is the Earth Strike march, or the sit-down roadblock, “[w]hen people go into the streets en masse, they are celebrating life’s fertile possibilities” (Schechner, 1993, p. 46), and searching after the satisfaction it promises. These are fundamentally bio-centric acts. Schechner identifies that the erotic excitement of social dramas such as the mass strike or rebellion derives from something of the same tension that pervades a great sporting event, “that between known patterns of action, stunning instantaneous surprises, and a passionately desired yet uncertain outcome” (Schechter, 1993, p.71). The struggle holds this erotic tension in taut balance, its satisfaction intermittently glimpsed, hinting at the theurgic union proposed by such oft-derided socialist mystics as Edward Carpenter (e.g., 1907, Ch. XIII) or the equally overlooked adherents of the god-building tendency within the early Russian Social Democratic Labour Party — see, for example, Gorky’s 1908 novel, A Confession (Gorky, 2010).

God-builders like the young Gorky and Lunachasky held that communism would be unachievable without the development of ritual and symbolism, to turn theory and intention into belief and commitment (Boxley, 2017) — the essence of mística. With this orientation, Red Biocentrism largely aligns. Indeed, Red Biocentric praxis (Boxley, 2019) must allow that, as its activity intensifies, heightened by the rituals of mística, towards the revolutionary moment, discipline can give way to “erotic madness” since, in Schechner’s words, “both revolution and carnival propose a free space to satisfy desires, especially drunken and sexual desires, a new time to enact social relations more freely” (Schechner, 1993, p.47). In these free spaces, “[s]ometimes people drink, fuck, loot… But sooner or later… the liminal period ends and individuals are reinserted into their (sometimes new, sometimes old, but always defined) places in society” (Schechner, 1993, p.47). Again and again, in the wild pedagogies of the revolutionary experience of the unruly rebellion, we find echoes of the rural rites of diurnal transition. Bringing the lovemaking spirit of the Mayday fields in from beyond the city’s margins, the Earth Strike and the Extinction Rebellion ritualise the revolutionary impulse and thereby amplify its transformative potential in the liminal space.

Conclusion

It would be easy for we, educators, to fall into the trap of believing ourselves capable by dint of acts of sheer will, by means of our brilliant persuasion, by pure perseverance to affect the changes in learners’ consciousness necessary to pivot our people, our species towards sustainable – really sustainable – ways of being in the world. It has been suggested here that transformations in thinking which will sustain a lighter, lower-impact, socially and ecologically just, and biocentrically ethical life will be of a different order, one seen and felt among the tents and tarps, on the freezing picket line, in the mud, where resilience means the faith in a better future needed to hold out for change. It has further been suggested that (1) it would be fanciful to imagine that this kind of consciousness can be instilled in the classroom, and (2) fanciful too to think that it can be affected without the use of the tried and tested, invaluable instruments of emplaced ritual – here I join with Benjamin in calling it “critical magick”, in the spirit of theurgy, and under the spell of militant mística! There can be no definitive Chaldean source here, no set of nostrums capable of carrying the rising youth through fire and ferment, strike and revel to the Form of the common(ist) Good. Nevertheless, there remain rituals of revolution and wild pedagogies to be accorded proper consideration, and duly acted upon.

The revolutionary impulse represents life’s erotic possibility, something to be celebrated, as Schechner suggests, yet tempered by the collective discipline of rite. Here is to be found the deepest red of communist affirmation, and the loving embrace of all life, not — most certainly not — merely the human: biocentrism. The Red Biocentric lessons of the pedagogies of the Earth Strike and rebellious revel are yet to be taken. This article was intended merely to contribute in some small way to advancing the study of earth activism as transformative ritual.

Thanks to the good people at Coreopsis for publishing this piece. Needless to say, it drifts far too far from the shore for my Marxist Leninist comrades, whilst my adherence to the communist vision casts me beyond the environmentalist pale.

So, now, turn away from the page, and towards the street, or the field.