The New Republic, Benjamin
Kunkel<https://newrepublic.com/authors/benjamin-kunkel>/May 26, 2021
The Climate Case for Property Destruction
Andreas Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” urges activists to turn
to tougher tactics.
ILLUSTRATION BY ROGER PEET
Political protest in the twenty-first century has so far been
distinguished by its sheer numerical scale—and its ineffectuality. In
2003, crowds assembled in cities across the planet to register their
opposition the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, amounting to the largest street
demonstration in history to that date—only to see themselves belittled
as a “focus group
<https://legacy.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2003/feb/030218.gonyea.html>”
by President George W. Bush as he proceeded to rain shock and awe on
Baghdad. In 2011, the so-called Arab Spring brought huge public
demonstrations against autocracy to half a dozen Middle Eastern and
African countries—with the result, a decade later, of just one
precarious new democracy, in Tunisia, while larger states such as Egypt
have redoubled their oppression. Later in 2011, this same “movement of
the squares” migrated to the rich countries on either side of the
Atlantic, in the form of Occupy Wall Street and kindred encampments
against income inequality—an eruption of indignation that did less than
nothing to narrow the economic chasm between the one percent and the
rest, which only grew thereafter.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by Andreas Malm
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9781839760259>
Verso Books, 208 pp., $19.95
Vast protest, null effect: By this point, the formula appears something
like a global law. Toward the end of last year, Slate published an
article about the concerted rebellion of tens of millions ofIndian
farmers
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/india-farmer-protests-modi.html>and
their allies against the ruinous agricultural policies of the Modi
government. “India Just Had the Biggest Protest in World History,”
announced the headline. Just as tellingly, the subhead read: “Will it
make a difference?” Given that similar demonstrations, of like
magnitude, took place in 2016 and 2018, the question sounds a rhetorical
note.
This demoralizing vista of the ineffectual sublime—innumerable
protesters, undetectable results—lies behind/How to Blow Up a Pipeline/,
a brief, intense argument in favor of destroying fossil fuel
infrastructure by the Swedish eco-Marxist thinker Andreas Malm. As Malm
points out, the same rule has held for the movement against climate
disruption: magnified protests, perfect futility. On the one hand, the
climate movement has over the last dozen years “undergone several cycles
of intense activity, each on a larger scale than before.” Malm registers
high-water marks of each tide of protest: 100,000 people on the streets
of Copenhagen in 2009; 400,000 participants (I was one) in the People’s
Climate March of September 2014, in New York City; and, on March 15,
2019, a million and a half schoolchildren in Europe and elsewhere,
playing hooky from classes to demand a livable planet. Six months later,
as many as four million kids across the globe, taking inspiration from
Malm’s compatriot Greta Thunberg, were striking onFridays for Future
<https://www.vox.com/2019/9/17/20864740/greta-thunberg-youth-climate-strike-fridays-future>.
On the other hand, this graph of rising climate militancy has been
accompanied by an even steeper graph showing CO2 emissions. In 1995,
Malm was among the demonstrators outside the first U.N. Conference of
the Parties summit, in Berlin, chanting: “Action now! No more
blah-blah.... Action now!” In the quarter-century since, more carbon has
been spewed out than in the 75 years before. And investment in fossil
infrastructure has continued just as relentlessly: “Two-thirds of
capital placed in projects for generating energy in the year 2018 went
to oil, gas, and coal—that is, to/additional/facilities for extracting
and combusting such fuels, on top of that already spanning the globe.”
These investments, chasing quarterly returns, have very long-term
effects: Plants, refineries, and pipelines commissioned in 2020 will
generate emissions down through 2060.
Malm cites a study by the University of California climate scientist Dan
Tong and her colleagues in China and the United States, whichconcludes
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1364-3>that carbon released
by power plants already in operation—not counting CO2 resulting from
other sources such as transportation and deforestation—would by itself
suffice to heat the planet above the 1.5 degrees Celsius that the Paris
accord of 2016 enshrined as the limit of tolerable warming. “Combined
with/proposed/plants,” Malm summarizes, “they would nearly exhaust the
budget for the amount of carbon that can be released while still giving
the world some chance of staying below 2°C.” In order to remain below
1.5°C, Tong found, governments would need not only to impose an
immediate ban on “all new CO2-emitting devices” but to rapidly
decommission already existing power plants. Dozens of countries,
including such industrial powers as Japan and Germany and, recently, the
United States under President Biden, havepledged
<https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/06/14/countries-net-zero-climate-goal/>to
achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, but their money has never yet been
where their mouths are.
What, then, is to be done? The main argument of/How to Blow Up a
Pipeline/is simple: The climate movement should itself enact, through
direct action, that prohibition on new fossil fuel infrastructure, and
that dismantling of existing pipelines and power plants, which
governments have so far refused to take on. Only if such equipment is
damaged often and badly enough as to make its continued operation
unprofitable does the stabilization of the climate stand a chance. For
climate activists to confine themselves to peaceful protest is meanwhile
to watch the earth become less and less hospitable to human life. Plenty
of readers will react (as I did) with a sort of instinctive skepticism
to Malm’s case that only widespread property destruction can forestall
civilizational suicide, but his case deserves a hearing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The title of his book is a misnomer: The text within does not
explain/how/to blow up a pipeline so much as argue for/why/to do so.
It’s no use trying to change the minds of politicians and corporate
boards through mere demonstrations, Malm contends. Instead, “the
movement must learn to/disrupt/business-as-usual.” Some tactics that are
already in use—blockades, occupations, sit-ins, and school
strikes—impede the everyday functioning of a fossil-fueled civilization
rushing toward ecological collapse. Property destruction would be the
next step.
Malm wants the climate movement to consider this for two reasons. The
first is that damaging or destroying fossil fuel infrastructure would
directly impair the functioning of fossil capital. He describes with
admiration thedrone attack
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-refineries-drone-attack.html>that
Houthi rebels in Yemen launched against Saudi Aramco’s refineries in
Abqaiq in 2019: “The unmanned vehicles swarmed into the precincts to
puncture storage tanks, light fires, disable processing trains; in one
fell stroke, half of the oil production in Saudi Arabia, accounting for
7 per cent of global supplies, had to be taken offline. No single action
in the history of sabotage and guerrilla war had achieved a commensurate
break on the pumping of oil.” Carbon pollution is of course a planetary
phenomenon, more or less evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere,
but the infrastructure responsible for it is, by contrast, very
geographically concentrated and isolated. Malm does not say so, but
these features render power plants, refineries, and pipelines
exceptionally vulnerable—and attractive—to saboteurs.
A second purpose of ecologically minded property destruction is more
abstract. Malm contends that it would contribute to the morale of the
climate movement, and make nonviolent petitions for governmental action
look mild and reasonable by comparison. The blowing up of pipelines
would, he argues, constitute increasingly effective propaganda for
climate justice. Naturally, critics will wag their fingers at the
saboteurs of fossil capital—so be it. Malm believes that climate
activists “must be prepared to be calumniated by some … while steering
clear of tactics that would put off too many.” They should act as a
vanguard that will eventually lead a large part of the public to the
same goal that they have: “They should walk ahead”—not too far in front,
which would isolate them from the masses, but also not hovering too near
the middle, which would never get them anywhere.
The argument is similar to one made back in 2003 by Michael Specter in
the eminently respectable/New Yorker/about theanimal rights outfit PETA
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/14/the-extremist>. PETA,
Specter argued, had been continually condemned by right-thinking people
for its extremist rhetoric and theatrical tactics (such as throwing red
paint on fur coats)—and had at the same time continually succeeded in
shifting the Overton window in the direction of animal rights. Ordinary
citizens would invariably object that the radicals had gone too far—and
in the next breath concede that they had a point: Animals truly deserved
better treatment. And U.S. law on animal rights has since changed
accordingly.
For Malm, “intelligent sabotage” of the fossil fuel industry would
unleash a similar dynamic. The destruction of pipelines and damage of
refineries would presumably elicit the enthusiasm of some political
factions and the condemnation of others—while shifting “the existing
consciousness” of everyone in a green direction.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Standing in the way of Malm’s counsel of strategic property destruction
is, of course, the virtual taboo on any such thing that has
characterized the climate movement to date. The pacifism of climate
activists appears in two main forms, Malm observes. A few subscribe to
“moral pacifism,” which “says that it is always wrong to commit acts of
violence.” Malm makes short work of this doctrine by pointing out that
unchecked climate change would entail the premature death of tens if not
hundreds of millions of people. (An article in this magazine by James
Robins hasmade the case
<https://newrepublic.com/article/159472/case-calling-climate-change-genocide>for
considering climate change a form of genocide.) If the use of force
could prevent this enormity, it would be a dereliction of duty to refrain.
It’s a second kind of pacifism—“the strategic one”—that really bedevils
the climate movement, and that Malm takes more seriously. Strategic
pacifism “says that violence committed by social movements always takes
them further from their goal.” On this account of things, nonviolent
demonstrations are an effective tactic because they tend to rally an
observing public to the cause, whereas violence and property destruction
are ineffective because they alienate would-be sympathizers and invite
massive state repression. Malm devotes a chapter, “Learning from Past
Struggles,” to refuting this case for strategic pacificism, especially
as enunciated in the handbook ofExtinction Rebellion
<https://extinctionrebellion.uk/>, the U.K.-based group that through its
colorful street demonstrations has become one of the most visible
instances of the climate movement in recent years. “The social science
is totally clear on this,” the handbook states: “violence does not
optimize the chance of successful, progressive outcomes.”
To rebuke this reading of history, Malm examines the use of violence and
property destruction in a series of emancipatory movements. These range
from the mass liberation of slaves in the Haitian Revolution of the late
eighteenth century, through the suffragette struggle of the early
twentieth (“Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament,
the suffragettes soon specialized in ‘the argument of the broken pane,’
sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every
window they passed”), to the ANC’s anti-apartheid campaign in South
Africa, among other instructive cases. He quotes a Nelson
Mandeladifferent
<https://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/court_statement_1964.shtml>from
the familiar figure of sanitized, official commemoration: “Our policy to
achieve a non-racial state by non-violence has achieved nothing,”
Mandela said in 1964. In his 1994 memoir, he recalled his thinking: “Our
strategy was to make selective forays against military installations,
power plants, telephone lines and transportation links; targets that
would not only hamper the military effectiveness of the state, but
frighten National Party supporters, scare away foreign capital, and
weaken the economy.... But if sabotage did not produce the results we
wanted, we were prepared to move on to the next stage: guerrilla warfare
and terrorism.”
Malm’s contention is not that property destruction should replace
peaceful demonstration as the principal tactic of the climate movement,
but that nearly all successful social movements have employed both
peaceful and destructive means, and that there is no reason the climate
movement should provide an exception to this rule. Indeed violence (at
least against property, rather than people) and nonviolence are,
typically, symbiotic features of a movement, as in the American civil
rights struggle. Malm quotes the sociologist Herbert Haines: “Nonviolent
direct action struck at the heart of powerful political interests
because it could so easily turn to violence.” Not only sit-ins in the
South but urban riots, highly destructive of private property,
throughout the United States lay behind the passing of the Civil Rights
Act of 1968. As Malm puts it, “Next to the threat of black
revolution—Black Power, the Black Panther Party, black guerrilla
groups—integration seemed a tolerable price to pay. Without Malcolm X,
there might not have been a Martin Luther King (and vice versa).”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eloquent as Malm is (in a second language, no less), his brief for
“ecotage,” as he calls it, provokes a few natural objections. One is:
Would it actually work? Particularly for an American audience, the
specter of ecological sabotage is likely to call up images of the
hapless campaigns of such radical green outfits as Earth First! and the
Earth Liberation Front during the 1980s and 1990s. If peaceful protest,
on Malm’s account, has proved unable to redirect the stream of events
during the first two decades of this century, the eco-sabotage of the
last two decades of the prior century surely matched and exceeded it for
pointlessness. The militants involved spiked some trees, destroyed some
SUVs, wrote out some graffiti, and (thrillingly, from my point of view
at the time)burned down
<https://www.outtherecolorado.com/features/looking-back-at-the-night-vail-resort-went-up-in-flames-following-a-terrorist-attack/article_8d8d90b4-d751-5848-97f6-cab9f72f66ef.html>a
ski lodge in the Colorado county where I grew up. But this delirious
monkey-wrenching did approximately nothing either to derail the
juggernaut of ecocidal capitalism or to convert the voting public to the
cause. Its main result was long prison sentences for some activists,
from a federal government intent on classing vandalism as “terrorism,”
and exile abroad for others.
It wasn’t that a piously reformist American environmental movement
didn’t all along imply a logic of property destruction, should its own
lobbying initiatives prove unavailing. In/The Ecocentrists/
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780231165891>(2018), a superb history of
radical environmentalism in the United States, Keith Makoto Woodhouse
quotes a 1971 speech by Sierra Club president Phil Berry: “No
responsible conservationists advocate violence and certainly I don’t,
but it is worth noting that if we fail in our efforts, others who might
assume leadership in the conservation field would be unwilling to work
through existing institutions.” Mainstream environmental organizations
may have succeeded in setting aside pristine tracts of land for
preservation as “wilderness,” but they failed to rally the general
population to a new land ethic, or to convince the government to take
climate change seriously. In this sense, their shortcomings supplied the
rationale of more radical environmentalists. And yet the saboteurs of
Earth First!, the Animal Liberation Front, and the ELF no more launched
a mass movement against the despoliation of the earth than did the
responsible statesmen of the Sierra Club.
Woodhouse suggests in/The Ecocentrists/that both the mainstream
environmental movement, devoted to lobbying, and its radical
stepchildren, bent on direct action, made a mistake, as long ago as the
late 1960s, when they divorced their campaign to protect nonhuman nature
from programs for the renovation of society. The result was a
misanthropic movement that wrote off as hopeless or, at best,
inconvenient the very constituency—the population of industrial
societies—that would have been needed to effect its program.
Malm distinguishes his politics from that of the deep-green groupuscules
of past decades—with their simultaneously dramatic and useless
vandalism—through the observation that EF!, ALF, and ELF had no
relationship to any popular struggles, and indeed scorned the very idea
of connection to a mass movement. Malm is not merely a green provocateur
but an eco-Marxist: He insists that ecological rescue cannot occur
without social emancipation. No great and decisive number of people can
be expected to seek the salvation of the climate unless it
simultaneously implies the betterment of their own lives. This is of
course the insight that lies behind ideas of a Green New Deal: the
proposition that ecological rescue of the planet could also entail
economic rescue of the population at large. In this image, wind farms
and solar arrays represent full employment, unionization, and high wages.
Malm elaborates on the better living conditions that the climate
movement could promise in another recent polemic,/Corona, Climate,
Chronic Emergency/ <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781839762154>. Unlike
the restrictions mandated by Covid, he writes, “climate mitigation would
never require people to become hermits in their homes. In fact,
convivial living would be conducive to that project: riding a bus,
sharing a meal, ... spending time with loved ones in retirement homes or
paying for a concert instead of the latest console from Amazon would
be/in line/with the endeavor to live/sans/fossil fuels.” A “climate
emergency program,” Malm insists, “could offer/improvements/in the
quality of life,” rather than ascetic self-sacrifice and pain.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another obvious query to the program of/How to Blow Up a Pipeline/is
that things have changed even since Malm composed his preface in late
March of last year. Inevitably, the authors of urgent manifestos give
hostages to fortune, unable as they are to anticipate the events that
will have taken place by the time they publish. Malm is no exception.
Over the past year, both governments and investors have shown signs of
taking the climate crisis more seriously than before. As David
Wallace-Wells recentlyobserved
<https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/climate-change-after-pandemic.html>in
an essay in/New York/magazine, the costs of solar-energy generation have
fallen so far that the International Energy Agency now estimates that
India will construct 86 percent less in the way of coal-burning power
plants than was forecast only a year ago. As for governments, as
Wallace-Wells notes, since the start of the pandemic, Japan, South
Korea, the European Union, and China independently made “new net-zero
pledges, far more ambitious than those offered at Paris.” The
implication is that the coronavirus crisis has given new urgency and
legitimacy to sweeping state action on behalf of public well-being, to
the benefit of aggressive climate policy, even in the absence of large
public demonstrations, let alone pervasive ecotage.
Where does this leave the tactic of blowing up pipelines? The events of
the last year suggest (but by no means prove) that in fact peaceful
protest and technocratic undertakings may be sufficient to induce
leading powers to bring their emissions down to a survivable level, no
property destruction required. And, ultimately, Malm applies the same
standard of efficacy to sabotage that he does to nonviolent protest.
“The temptation to fetishize one kind of tactic,” he writes, “should be
resisted.”
It may be time for the climate movement to apply the insights of ecology
to itself: We can no more desire to see the ultimate triumph of one or
another political tactic than we can wish to see one particular organism
dominate a landscape. The point of a given tactic is not to prevail
against other tactics but to join an ecosystem of tactics—electoral
campaigns, community and union organizing, public demonstrations, and,
yes, property destruction—that as a group win out against an opposing
system that spells the doom of organized human life on this planet. We
should blow up no more pipelines, and drone-bomb no more refineries,
than is necessary—but also no fewer. It’s not, after all, that property
rights don’t matter. It’s that the contest is between the property of a
few—the awful ensemble of fossil fuel infrastructure—and of the many,
which is the commons of this earth.
Benjamin
Kunkel<https://newrepublic.com/authors/benjamin-kunkel>@kunktation
<https://twitter.com/kunktation>
Benjamin Kunkel’s play about global warming,/Buzz,/was published in 2014.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#8832): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8832
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83187827/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
