In this monologue, Richard D. Bartlett reflects on how activism lacks a nuanced vocabulary for the intermediate‑sized groups that sit between households and mass movements. He uses kinship terminology—siblings, cousins, second cousins—to illustrate the rich language we have for family relationships and points out the absence of comparable terms for activist networks. Bartlett argues that isolated individual changes are unlikely to scale within the prevailing capitalist‑patriarchal‑colonial system, emphasizing instead the need for intentional, coordinated small groups (typically 3‑50 people) that can hold members accountable and drive durable behavior change. He cites Extinction Rebellion as a concrete example: a core of about twelve people designed the movement’s strategy, which then mobilized millions. The speaker highlights the importance of “accountability networks”—peers who support and challenge each other, such as a group of friends attempting to adopt vegetarianism—as the primary engine of effective activism. Overall, he calls for the invention of new ideas and language to better understand and nurture these intermediate activist circles.
Chapters
I can follow on and maybe try and weave together. It's kind of a challenge because I have a way of understanding— like, these questions of how do we be effective and how do we ensure that what we do has consequence, for me, that's an enormous question that I've given so much energy to. And I've got my way of thinking about it. And trying to package that thinking into a way that makes sense to others is maybe a challenge. I'll try. Steve, you said kinship earlier, and I really like that word because it invites in all of these related concepts that most of us understand. So we have this whole body of language around family relationships. So I have siblings, I've got parents, I might have kids one day, I've got cousins, nephews, nieces. Like, there's so many words to articulate, you know, okay, there's my siblings, and then there's my cousins, and then there's my second cousins. And then my in-laws, and there's a— it's a very sophisticated language for naming the different relationships that you have and the distance between those relationships. It's like a really scientific kind of difficult challenge to try and wrap some symbols around what those actual family networks look like, and we can do that with English, but there's a— in my view, there's like a whole missing piece of English where we have words like those kinship words, but not for family. But for the change that we're trying to make in the world. So I heard the framework of I-We-World, for instance. It's a common one. And I've heard this thing, OK, we can change our behaviors in our household. So that's one thing. That's at least a small group there. But then there's this missing gap between, OK, there's our household, and then there's the movement with millions of people. But what are the stages in between those? What are the second cousins? And the siblings once removed, half siblings, you know, that we don't really have sophisticated ways of talking or thinking about those relationships. And to me, they're the essential part. Like, I don't really believe that small changes, you know, people say small changes add up or they ripple out, and I don't really believe that in my guts. Like, I think that it's something more intentional and more coordinated than that. Like, that the, We can have billions of people on the planet making small changes, but if the framework we're in is a capitalist patriarchal colonized system, those small changes are probably just going to get— they're going to become fuel for the system. There are some bigger things going on at the same time. And so for me, the way that I feel confident in my efficacy and the way that I develop my self-care practice and the way that I'm more effective in my job and organization is because I have my siblings and my cousins and my second cousins of activism, that I have known boundaries where it's like, this person I know really has me on this issue and they hold me to account. So on the question of eating less meat, for instance, say you decide for some reason that you want to be a vegetarian, it's really hard to change your habit if you spend all your life eating meat. But if you change your habit with 5 people, some peers that you look to and you respect, infinitely more likely that you're going to actually succeed in your goal if you're doing it with buddies. But in our language, when we talk about activism, we're really lacking the ability to talk about these intermediate groups, the ones that are more than 3 and less than 50 people. And for me, that's where most of the action is actually happening. That's where, you know, we look at Extinction Rebellion, which has mobilized millions of people in the last year or so. There's 12 people who got together and spent a weekend together and really designed the details of that movement. There's an actual known list of people that have a long history of relationships and strategy that they've built and designed that. And now that is being animated by millions of people in a decentralized way, but there's a very specific group of people. That's really where my, I guess my hobby horse, my focus is really on these small groups, like how to have that first circle of really close people who are supporting each other into their better behaviors. And then how to bring those small groups together in an effective way. And it feels like I'm in territory where there's just a whole lot of missing ideas that we're having to invent by doing it together.
