User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Malm makes convincing arguments for the role of sabatoge in the fight against climate change, but I found his side stepping of the carceral system in his arguments inexcusable.
Malm's musings on the definitions of terrorism and some parts about crime show his limited view in these areas, and takes no time to delve into the deeply political roots of these words and definitions he cites. Even in his scant mentions of punishment, he showed little understanding of the function of prisons in a capatalist society. I would expect more such as than a from someone positioning themselves as having answers for the movement. As other's have said his little disscussion of the repression climate activists have faced from police and prisons, and even less so as far as the disproportionate effects these tactics have on marginalized people, is lacking and he doesn't seem to have any answers to it.
Also his downright offensive naming of his SUV sabatoge group and snide remarks about it were unessacary, he could have just apologized and moved on. He really showed a lack of sight in the interconnectedness between colonialism and the climate crisis there.
Despite these critiques, overall I appreciated most of his arguments and think many could benefit from his insights, especially those already in the XR non violent esque camp (at times it did feel like he was writing only to them, and left out large swaths of specifically the climate justice movement). But the lack of intersectional analysis of the impacts of policing and the prison system left me to question much of the analysis.
Rating: really liked it
How to Get Pass the Title...
Preamble:
--2022 Update: I recently revisited this topic to unpick the actual debate and to synthesize the common ground. Folks are so eager to jump into disagreements, where catchy titles/slogans quickly become distractions. If we drop the advertising, an accurate title would be
“Should Environmental Movements Diversify to include Property Damage? The Limits and Blurry Margins of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience”.Highlights:
1)
The Debate: Extinction Rebellion’s roles and limits in theory:
--The most direct parts of this book is a supportive critique (in the spirit of principled solidarity) of Extinction Rebellion (“XR”; I’ve unpacked XR’s manifesto here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). Since XR is primarily based in the Global North, we will start with this (for synthesizing with the Global South, see A People’s Green New Deal). In essence, Malm wants to recognize the parallel synergy between:
a)
Reforms: surface-level/short-term immediate gains targeting mainstream appeal/legitimacy to (at its best) engage with an alienated public, shift a critical mass, alleviate acute symptoms and open space for radicals/most marginalized against overwhelming status quo violence.
b)
Radicals: principled demands creating a
“radical flank effect” to shift the “Overton window” (range of mainstream legitimacy) for mainstream reforms.
…Given the escalating urgency of ecological crises, Malm makes the case that the environmental movement needs a radical flank since XR-type resistance is no longer sufficient alone.
--XR’s value #9 “We are a nonviolent network” reads:
At the same time we also recognise that many people and movements in the world face death, displacement and abuse in defending what is theirs. We will not condemn those who justly defend their families and communities through the use of force, especially as we must also recognise that it is often our privilege which keeps us safe. We stand in solidarity with those whom have no such privilege to protect them and therefore must protect themselves through violent means; this does not mean we condone all violence, just that we understand in some cases it may be justified. Also we do not condemn other social and environmental movements that choose to damage property in order to protect themselves and nature, for example disabling a fracking rig or putting a detention centre out of action. Our network, however, will not undertake significant property damage because of risks to other participants by association. [Emphases added]
--Now, the “risks to other participants by association” to “significant property damage” I assume means criminal punishment. In a lecture, Malm has critiqued one of XR’s tactics of
welcoming arrests, contrasting this with sabotage where avoidance of arrest is crucial. Elsewhere, a 2019 “An Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion” by Global North diaspora radicals points out the privilege of XR seeking arrest/friendly relations with police (which XR now acknowledges; adaptation if not adoption). My only “no” here is when one view uses a hard “no” in pushing for their tactic, as I think all these tactics have a time and a place.
--XR’s “no” here is for itself, thus recognizing its own limitations while not directly condemning others. We can now consider their theoretical justification, where XR turns to Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. XR’s value #2 “We set our mission on what is necessary” starts with:
Mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change – such as "momentum-driven organising". The change needed is huge and yet achievable. No regime in the 20th century managed to stand against an uprising which had the active participation of up to 3.5% of the population (watch Erica Chenoweth’s TEDx talk).
--The bulk of Malm’s critique is really directed at Chenoweth’s
“Civil resistance model” framework. Since I haven’t dived into this, I’ll rely on XR’s interpretation. Despite having the solidarity rhetoric in XR’s value #9, there is much to critique with their crude historical claims of “nonviolence” as the singular winning tactic (alarm bell #1). Further alarm bells sound with Chenoweth’s supposed categorization of “nonviolence”, “democracy”, etc. and focus on mass protests toppling dictators. Such histories are indeed a can of worms given each of their complex contexts as well as how they tie into more abstract processes that contradict on various levels (i.e. geopolitics/imperialism/global capitalism), so such tidy categorizations (despite so much baggage)/singular conclusion is highly suspect.
--Malm counters with the varied roles of sabotage + violence in revolutionary/abolitionist resistance (including dynamic synergy with nonviolence) spanning mass movements in slavery abolition, Global South decolonization, anti-apartheid, civil rights, Iranian Revolution, suffragettes, etc. For more censored histories, see this playlist featuring (Vijay Prashad, Michael Parenti, etc.: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...
--A symbolic contrast is the Western liberal fetishization of Gandhi; Malm unpacks Gandhi’s nonviolence absolutism:
“moral nonviolence” (including the value in unearned suffering) and
“strategic nonviolence”, perhaps culminating in Gandhi’s abysmal martyrdom approach to resisting fascism/Nazism. We can debate at what point WWII became “inevitable”, and certainly I support radical Left approaches to target contradictions (esp. class) in hopes of sabotaging the logic of war. But Gandhi’s embrace of suffering here is dogmatic rather than some creative reframing to resolve mutual destruction.
2)
The Synthesis: Direct Action against Fossil Capitalism in practice:
--Despite the debates in theory (which I am biased to find compelling), in practice I see much more common ground. I think we need to unravel this step-by-step as follows; I was disappointed in finding this unclear in this book, which to me should have been the centerpiece (I'm still torn on dropping a star in rating, matching my rating for XR's manifesto, sigh):
i)
Direct Action: all sides agree we cannot rely on status quo political action (i.e. periodic elections, which in our capitalist system’s lobbyist/public relations/media/authoritarian workplaces is most advanced in preventing “participatory democracy”/“economic democracy”). Direct action, in contrast, involves workers/the public asserting their power directly to obtain their goals. Of course, there is a wide range here…
ii)
“Sabotage”: Malm is based in Sweden, and readily admits less experience with North America’s sociopolitical context. Unfortunately, Malm did not provide the European context of “sabotage” either (besides mention of the 19th century Luddites), so I’ll have to rely on the American one. In terms of direct action, we can start with the radical labour movement’s debates on “sabotage”. IWW describes “sabotage” as a negative connotation useful for capitalists to
publicly smear activists and push harder legal punishments. The negative smear of course equated “sabotage” with destruction of property/machines, whereas originally “sabotage” was equated to a broader form of direct action called “Collective Withdrawal of Efficiency” (in the context of the workplace) which obviously included nonviolent actions like the strike. The IWW renounced “sabotage” in 1918.
…Curiously, it was the
“deep ecology” environmental group Earth First! that helped revive “sabotage” and its controversies in the late 1980’s, with a slight revival of the IWW involved in arguing against this. For more on IWW: https://archive.iww.org/history/icons... …Malm summarizes as follows:
“Deep ecology is, as Northern environmentalism has come to realise with very few holdouts, a deeply reactionary type of ecology, which locates the source of the malaise in human civilisation as such, zooms in on overpopulation and prescribes the contraction of humanity to a fraction of its current size as the remedy.”…Now, Malm does counter the public smear concern with the examples of relative public support for BLM’s burning of the Minneapolis third precinct police station as well as Yellow Vests protests in France.
...We can also consider that the IWW were focused on workplace property/machines, where the end goal is for workers to take over the property/machines (anarcho-syndicalism) and operate for social needs rather than for private absentee shareholder profits. Thus, destruction can seem counterproductive; still, we can take a nuanced
Luddite position also consider the capitalist design of certain machines/work processes (i.e. Taylorism/“scientific management”) to disempower workers (extreme compartmentalization, mass surveillance) and squeeze the maximum output regardless of workers’ health and social needs for the output: Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism.
...“Deep ecology” targeted a vague notion of “industrial civilization” and thus risked divisive negative effects on the public (ex. losing power). Malm would prioritize new fossil fuel projects that the public does not yet rely on but would lock in Fossil Capital for future generations. At the end of the day, certain Fossil Capital infrastructure clearly needs to be dismantled. However, “How to Blow Up A Pipeline” provides no instructions on the range of “sabotage”, thus little reassurance on its scope/safety.
iii)
Blockades: we finally arrive at the synthesis that was right in front of Malm, but would sacrifice the book’s catchy title (still, no one has yet written
“How to build Blockadia”!). After all, Malm praises the more radical direction of Ende Gelände despite also being a self-proclaimed non-violent civil disobedience movement who are using “climate camps” to train and then to apply blockades. In the same way a labour strike directly ceases capitalist production (the arteries of Industrial Capitalism’s profit-seeking) rather than the public spectacles of parades/marches far from the production process, blockades target the arteries of Fossil Capitalism (Ende Gelände targets coal mines for blockades/occupations). This is property trespassing/disruption rather than “significant property damage”. Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate has an entire chapter titled “Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors”, but the rest of the book only whispers the word “sabotage” twice.
…Given Malm’s background in dissecting the materialist flows of Fossil Capitalism (Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming), this seems to deserve the bulk of the attention beyond Malm’s brief case studies on vandalizing luxury SUVs and asymmetrical guerilla warfare of Yemeni Houthi drone strikes targeting Saudi Arabian oil refineries. How does Finance flood Fossil Capitalism with cheap credit and subsidies, and how can these projects be disrupted (i.e. direct action:
“we are the investment risk” transforming fixed fossil capital investments with 40 year lifespans into stranded assets to scare further investments and accelerate State commitment to immediate infrastructural transition). People' Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons has a useful chapter featuring the Financialization of Fossil Capital.
--If we take a big step back into theory, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity highlights how unique
Roman law property rights is with its third principle: the right to damage one’s own property; perhaps it should be no surprise that damaging someone else’s “property” is doubly offensive. I’m curious what insights are in Graeber’s Direct Action: An Ethnography.
…A key theme Varoufakis uses to distinguish capitalism is its abstraction (capitalist property rights) which is crucial to build social consent (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). This abstraction has sprawled into a modern Doomsday Machine of Finance (The Bubble and Beyond); in application to current material conditions, Varoufakis considers how this colossal Ponzi scheme’s
systemic fragility can be targeted by sabotaging financial instruments, and how this can be scaled up/made participatory: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present.
--Of course, COVID has proven the fragility of corporate globalization’s
global supply chain, with key nodes (ports/databases/satellites) being prime targets for direct action: Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain. Traditional labour unions with their national perspectives were bypassed by Neoliberalism’s global outsourcing/subcontracting decentralization, so capital must be challenged on the international stage (ex. multipolarity against Western Financial imperialism, internationalist coordination like Progressive International).
Rating: really liked it
3 chapters on the utility of sabotage as a sort of "left flank" strategy for moving the global climate justice movement (in particular in the Global North) from its infatuation with non-violence in all its forms. i'm sympathetic to the argument and have written as much (in my "violence and vulnerability..." piece on DAPL security). everyone loves to pile on Malm for some reason, and I don't mean to do the same (am giving this 4 stars anyway). but the big missing element here is that Malm can't conceive that a sabotage movement doesn't just have to win in the court of public opinion but also in real life. in comparison to the Global South movements throughout history who have successfully targeted fossil fuel infrastructure which he cites, the US at least has a much more robust and well-funded security and policing apparatus that makes even the most tepid of property destruction liable to remove comrades from the struggle indefinitely. Malm tries to pre-empt this by suggesting that 'that's not a reason not to act'...but in some cases it is--otherwise, sabotage and property destruction can only remain a "weapon of the weak" and is unlikely to result in the sort of escalating pressure he imagines.
I wonder if the gap that Malm can't imagine which afflicts both of these recent books is that the state (e.g., the US) is largely a policing apparatus at this historical moment. the idea that one can compel the state to take adequate climate action via mass movement (Corona book) or property destruction (Pipeline book) just seems incongruous to me. which is not a fatalist position at all, except wrt to the potential of the currently-existing state.
i've been toying with writing an article about a 2008 DHS research paper on critical infrastructure security which is largely about the need for security from concerted pipeline destruction conducted by marxists--it's somewhat mythic but the hammer is already poised
Rating: really liked it
This doesn’t answer the question the title suggests (“how do I blow up a pipeline?”), instead it asks and attempts to answer a few related ones “*should* I blow up a pipeline?” and “why hasn’t the climate movement been blowing stuff up more already?”.
The thrust of Malm’s argument is that the climate movement's commitment to pacifism with regards to property destruction is misguided, and the book is a spirited provocation to try out this type of action and see where it leads. It takes stock of some of the recent history of the climate movement, mainly since the 1990s, it finds that despite the rapid growth of the movement, and the rapidly worsening objective situation of global heating, the movement remains steadfastly pacifist, its leaders staunchly eschewing violence directed at individuals as well as property destruction and vandalism.
The commitment to pacifism has a few sources, first the mainly middle class basis of the movement in the global north. Middle class young people tend to have a cultural distaste for property destruction and believe that maintaining a program of civil disobedience generally within the rule of law should result in desired political change without resorting to tactical violence. But Malm points out that movement leaders have drawn on a selective reading of social movement history in order to reach these conclusions, and shows how some of the broadly analogous cases of wide-scale social change more often than not have a radical flank which does engage in property destruction (US civil rights, indian independence, anti-apartheid etc).
He doesn’t fetishize property destruction but suggests that as part of a larger movement, it might help to galvanize activists and prompt real state action. Proposed targets for property destruction include sabotage of all new and expanding fossil fuel infrastructure (pipelines, mines etc), as well as the most extreme sources of fossil fuel consumption by private individuals (luxury vehicles like yachts and SUVs). Luxury vehicles because they are the least connected to anyones subsistence fossil fuel consumption and because they are demoralizing to took at (if we can’t get society to at least give up these obscenely wasteful luxuries, how can we expect people to take on the more taxing climate conscious changes like restricting meat consumption and flights?). Proposed sabotage of new infrastructure is in less-so to discourage private owners from stopping production altogether of their own volition, since destruction at the scale necessary for this is basically impossible, but instead to cleate investment risk and chaos which may help push states towards more radical action. While Malm is clear that property destruction is no silver-bullet — since in his own words: “at the end of the day, it will be states that ram through the transition or no one will” — but the book makes a compelling case for giving it a shot.
Malm has appeared on many podcast interviews promoting the book, and while I was glad to read it as part of a book club, and to learn some of the more detailed histories and new sets of statistics to draw on, a podcast tldr is basically sufficient to understand the thrust of the books actual arguments.
Rating: really liked it
kind of impossible to rate but i can say this: NOT a beach read haha!
i have a lot of thoughts, most of which make me want to hurl, so i will try to be concise (edit to say the gag is i was not concise):
-i think the question of "why isn't the climate movement more militant 🤔" has many obvious answers; perhaps most saliently that if what we are really talking about is, say, disrupting and upending a world order (colonization holding hands w capitalism) hundreds of years old, the ruling class who does have an iron fist on this world would be pretty invested in killing any militant environmentalist dead and you and me wouldn't know anything about it. a really easy way to wind up dead is to be an environmental activist especially in the global south and the fact that he doesn't talk about how many environmentalists (militant or not) get killed each year is a glaring blindspot
-it's lip service when he does interact with the sacrifice it takes to be a militant activist and he basically asks why hasn't anyone martyred themselves for the movement??? i wonder if he has ever considered taking that on because he has all these ideas and is annoying...
-effective in that it made me climb the fucking walls with anger about how the world is quite literally ending right this second and we are so invested in this fantasy that the world goes on forever that we're like what career will i end up in and when can me and Bradley have a baby to also experience global catastrophe with us in 5 years probably
-if his thesis is we must physically attack capital to stop climate change then fine i agree
-all of his philosophizing about violence and terrorism and the meanings & values of these tactics got really hairy really fast
-essentially i don't know what verso is up to with these books that are like how could these things like police brutality & global warming get and continue to be so bad without us doing anything ????? without giving the context of colonialism/white supremacy/capitalism/whatever we are calling that rat king at this point lmk. he also can't be bothered to spell out his acronyms on first mention which is, for me, tacky
-so actually i hate this book and i think it was bad
i hope the one person who finished reading this (my designated NSA agent) has a lovely evening and a tender kiss planted on their forehead 💋
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars. As someone who spent 5+ years doing direct action organizing within the climate movement, I'm very glad that Andreas Malm wrote this book. It reminds me of many post-meeting rants at the bar. I have some relatively minor issues with it, but overall, the points he makes are very good and necessary.
I'm really glad that he tore into the Chenoweth study - that crap is the bane of my existence. A+ for that.
His criticisms of XR are also on point. However, it really bothered me when he suggested that a radical flank could allow XR a seat at the table to negotiate climate policy, as if white liberals who don't care about social justice or racism are who we want at the table. I get that he's trying to illustrate a point about how radical flanks work and trying to keep things short, but it still bugs me. There's a bit too much centering of XR as "the movement."
Even though I don't think it's totally necessary to delve into the subject of climate justice in order for him to make his main points, its absence bothers me and I think he could have included some of those dynamics in the discussion. Like, who is more likely to want to shut down a refinery than the people who live around it and are poisoned by it every day? That seems like even further justification for the righteousness of such action.
It seems like his target audience is the mostly white, liberal mainstream climate movement in the global north and that he intended to specifically convince them to be supportive of sabotage as a tactic. Those people do need convincing, although I tend to think most of them are incapable of changing their minds. Regardless, the case needs to be made. Despite my criticisms, I believe that escalated tactics are absolutely necessary for all the reasons he discusses and I hope a lot of people read this.
Rating: really liked it
I have been very excited to read this book since it came out. This excitement came from my early recognition that while groups like XR are brilliant at getting attention for an issue the historical movements are supported by a more violent counterpart movement. It is this which moves the Overton window, the acceptability of the non-violent option. However, this book has been very disappointing and I found regularly missed the point.
Firstly, the point both Malm and I seem to recognise, that non-violence is useful in it’s relationship with violence (largely against property) is poorly addressed throughout. This is not for want of trying, but Malm generally focuses on the contradictions or failures of the non-violent movement rather than the role played by their more violent sister movements. For example, he focuses on Gandhi and Martin Luther King while not mentioning Subhas Chandra Bose (a violent Indian Nationalist) or Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. This is not to say there isn’t some engagement with these groups, but I don’t think one would be amiss expecting some engagement with the success and failures of these movements. Equally, in an interrogation of the tactics of the suffragettes, a more violent social movement, he totally forgets to mention the suffragists, their pacifist sister group.
Where Malm looks at movements who have uses violence against property he largely draws from examples in the Global South, from Hamas to the Arab Spring. There are many examples, but he seems to not mention the ultimate failure of these movements and the brutal repression they unleash. For example, he criticises the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King for it’s slow pace but continues to use the Palestinian struggle as an example of political violence towards a cause. The Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, as one can gather from Malm’s writing, pre-dates Israel’s advent and existed during the time of the British protectorate. This is not something that Malm stops to recognise and one wonders if he has even noticed this bloody struggle has continued for almost a century. This plays into a wider simplistic approach to facts and context which run through the book, he uses Gandhi’s early experiences in South Africa as a tool to smear his later non-violence. Falling foul of the facts but also the common fallacy that sees historical figures as fixed icons devoid of the change and development across their life which gives dynamism to more contemporary historical figures.
He reserves special criticism for Extinction Rebellion (XR), using many of worn out and cliched criticism the group receives from sections of both the right and the left. At this point I must admit I am a card-carrying member of extinction rebellion as much as a criminal record can be considered a card. However, I am not opposed to criticism of the movement and have often been critical myself. He criticises the groups whiteness, which is legitimate to an extent however his criticism for the group not representing the diversity of the cities they often protest in holds little weight as cities are not representative, necessarily, of a country or the world. He is also very critical of the action at Canning Town, as am I for many of the same reasons, however his criticism of the kicking out of one of the participants and smearing the movement for the action, which was largely condemned by XR members, is more indicative of criticisms that should and could be levelled at his idea of a good, more confrontationally violent climate movement. He equally fails to engage with much of the work done by XR to address criticisms for their relationship to police. His generalisations about XR rarely hold up to scrutiny for example that it is a movement that doesn’t have an anti-capitalist element.
He levels particularly pointed criticism at individuals such as Roger Hallam and Bill McKibben. I am not necessarily a defender of Roger Hallam and have at times felt he deserved some criticism. But I am surprised at Malm’s criticism of Hallam’s attempt to shut down Heathrow for saying what they were going to do before. Maybe this was a bad strategic move on the part of Hallam but seems to be more in fitting with Malm’s desire for targeted aggressive action against some of the largest polluters that hits them in their wallets.
The finger pointing and criticism Malm reserves for others within the environmental movement is indicative of the failures of the left to create a polite unity among groups whose objectives are different. This is also, I wager, due to the lack of movements working to the aims endorsed by Malm. This view that there is limited space on the left for movements rather than that movement create an ecosystem that feeds off each other. While not unique to the Marxist/Socialist block of the left it is an area I have found they specialise in, anyone who has engaged with the Socialist Workers Party knows it is difficult to get them to leave their SWP banners at the door.
Finally, on the point of inclusivity. Malm criticizes groups like XR for their whiteness and the lack of inclusivity of their actions. Arrest is not the only strategies these groups use but this is often forgotten. However, what Malm suggests would increase the risk dramatically to BIPOC communities that are seen by state power to be connected to violent political movements. One only needs to look at BLM to see how violence is met with violence by the state and this violence is often likely to be targeted at those who are already at threat of state violence. His criticism of the one kick levelled, arguably in self-defence, by a XR protester pails in comparison to the risks posed of violent encounters with the government and establishment and the way they will spin them to their advantage. Protesters at the recent #killthebill protests were cajoled by the police into rioting and the riot led to police claiming, falsely, various serious injuries to their number. The risks of violent action are high and Malm is right, although me mentions it as a counter-point, that violence is often exactly what the violent capitalist system wants from dissent.
Malm’s book is replete with factual errors, it’s argument is often unbalanced and this book is unfortunately yet another book by an embittered misanthrope of the left. I remain open to the idea of a more confrontational environment movement and would be interested to see what Malm’s group would look like, but if he was involved I would steer well clear. A disappointing book!
Rating: really liked it
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a passionate argument in favor of property damage in the climate change cause.
Malm makes a series of points to support this. If climate change is a dire threat to humanity, including mass deaths and suffering, surely meeting it justifies a form of violence when peaceful means fail to change the status quo? Violence can certainly grab people's attention very well, which can be useful in changing hearts and minds. If one considers climate devastation to be a form of violence against humanity and the natural world, then violence in response suits many people who aren't committed pacifists. And if climate change is already in motion, already starting to bring about terrible effects, then we might not have time to spend in patiently building and rebuilding nonviolent coalitions.
On a different level, Malm makes an old fashioned left wing argument. He sees neoliberalism at the heart of the climate crisis, and wants us to defeat it with organization including militancy. He wants a return to revolutionary politics. It begins with shame and mobilization and includes a vanguard. "[R]ich people cannot have the right to combust others to death."(Kindle location 1954) "[A] climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home." (1438) He concludes by musing that we need to move beyond Ghandi to Fanon. (1835)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline consistently responds to objections. What about the power of nonviolence to get things done, from Indian independence to Britain's suffragettes winning women's voting to American black people winning their civil rights? Malm replies that many such nonviolent movements were actually accompanied by violent wings in many ways and the two played off of each other. Wouldn't violence let the state respond with overpowering force? Yes, but Goliaths do lose to Davids, and violence might electrify people into a force more powerful still. Is violence against people merited? No, that is a sign of despair.
Malm is very careful in his recommendations, urging the reader to destroy property in certain ways, as "controlled political violence." (1242) It should not injure people. It should focus on the materials of the very rich, and avoid injuring the lives of everyone else. He bases these recommendations on his own experience with European direct action as well as on an analysis of recent climate change activism history.
Malm's argument may remind some of you of previous pro-violence arguments within the green world, like those powering Earth First! He touches on those as formal successes (overwhelmingly focused on property, rather than human bodies) and sees their real failure as not connecting with a bigger movement. Now is different, given mass dismay at climate change.
Overall this is a striking book, at least in part for its clarity, signaled from the title. It's a straightforward call to action. It reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's
Ministry for the Future, wherein a "black wing" conducts sabotage and terror in support of a nonviolent political campaign for climate mitigation and transformation.
As a futurist, I think some will heed it.
Rating: really liked it
the main point, that climate movements need to destroy some property if it wants to win anything, is correct. he provides a quick and strong historical case explaining how basically every winning movement you think was nonviolent (the civil rights movement, anti-apartheid in south africa, the suffragettes, the indian independence movement, etc) actually fundamentally relied on tactics we'd call violent for their success. but after that first section it falls off.
he's a european dude, and he typically sounds like he's addressing to the largely white and middle class climate movements of the global north (which he himself has spent most of his life a part of), but sometimes he'll speak on movements in the global south which he has nooo expertise on. the arguments he uses are so abstracted, focusing on philosophy and things like "justice theory" or even "just war theory." this means he spends a ton of time talking about these logical extremes or niche possibilities that aren't that enlightening. he has no analysis of settler colonialism, or really much analysis of any colonialism. he obviously acknowledges the huge inequities in who is going to feel the brunt of climate collapse (the global south / colonized ppls), and who's doing the consuming, but that doesn't fundamentally inform his writing. and that analysis could help explain the huge question one is left with at the end of the book — why DO those climate movements in the 'west' cling so tightly to total pacifism despite the historical record and the material analysis?
well, one reason is bc the white middle class ppl in europe and amerika who lead those movements aren't fighting against such immediate devastation and harm like people in the global south are. so when it comes to either building an effective, radical movement or taking less personal risk & getting that arrogant purer-and-holier-than-thou mindset that pacifism gives .... well the latter feels much nicer to the big climate movements in the global north.
im definitely over simplifying some things but you get the point. and if andreas malm would think in more material, emotional, and anti-colonial terms like this instead of abstract & (falsely) universalist ones, he could get to the more needed conversations of how to practically build militant movements for climate justice & reparations in the global north! instead of just writing this book trying to Logically and Rationally explain why people need to bomb some stuff — a book which, given its intended audience and its rhetorical / argumentative style, will probably fall on unwelcoming ears.
maybe 2 stars is harsh given that the main thesis is right buuut, i just see no point in reading it. other ppl make better cases for violence, and indigenous analyses gives better understandings of the climate crisis.
Rating: really liked it
A very strong critique of white liberal climate movements (primarily XR), as well as the idea of orthodox pacifism as the only "ethical" tactic for green movements.
Within this critique of "non-violence" (at least in the understanding which sees the sabotage of inanimate property as unacceptable), Malm is careful to also criticize and caution against more extremely violent movements, those who swing the other direction in their orthodoxy - refusing to consider non-violent actions even where such tactics are useful.
Also, nowhere in this book does it say how to blow up a pipeline.
Rating: really liked it
More "What is to be Done?" than "Anarchist Cookbook," Malm does not actually provide the guide suggested in the title but poses questions of violence and tactics for social movements with a much-needed critique of non-violence and pacifism. The ideas and urgency in the book certainly merit 3 stars, but as with most books from Verso, this is lightweight in more ways than one: extremely short, a strange non-citation use of endnotes, and their trademark chalky, margin-less pages bound in an old cigarette box (seriously: I hope this material is recycled given the content of the book and it's poor quality. Given what I recently learned about their labor practices I'm not optimistic).
Even for a short book Malm spends less time than many climate writers pointing to the scoreboard and maintains an urgent tone and anti-defeatist stance. Effective use of historical example to expose some of the confusion of contemporary "non-violent" movements, though shorter on the economic perspective than I'd hoped given his other writings. The tactical and philosophical discussions are not always the most sophisticated, but I sincerely hope to see more writers take up these themes and certainly hope I can convince some of my friends to join me in taking up this call to action, deflate some SUV tires / sink some superyachts, etc.
Rating: really liked it
I read most of this book on a flight which is ironic. Review to come!
Rating: really liked it
A manifesto? Call to arms? A waffling maybe this, but maybe that shifty-eyed-foot-shuffle?
Malm begins by acknowledging that, with respect to climate action, the conditions of business-as-usual are not threatened by good arguments, science, and pacifist finger waving. There are too many opportunities for profit. Capital has been reassured by governments that their investments and capital sunk into the fossil fuel infrastructure are secure.
The author also correctly recognizes that the carbon footprint is not distributed evenly amongst 'mankind', but is highly skewed to the very rich. That luxury emissions can more easily be reduced than subsistence emissions. Luxury emissions happen because 'rich people like to wallow in the pleasure of their rank', while subsistence emissions are poor people trying to survive. In other words, there are identifiable people who are mainly responsible.
Given this, "there must be someone who breaks the spell: ‘Sabotage’, writes R. H. Lossin, one of the finest contemporary scholars in the field, ‘is a sort of prefigurative, if temporary, seizure of property. It is’ – in reference to the climate emergency – ‘both a logical, justifiable and effective form of resistance and a direct affront to the sanctity of capitalist ownership.’ A refinery deprived of electricity, a digger in pieces: the stranding of assets is possible, after all. Property does not stand above the earth; there is no technical or natural or divine law that makes it inviolable in this emergency. If states cannot on their own initiative open up the fences, others will have to do it for them. Or property will cost us the earth" (p.48).
Malm continues: "the states have fully proven that they will not be the prime movers. The question is not if sabotage from a militant wing of the climate movement will solve the crisis on its own – clearly a pipe dream – but if the disruptive commotion necessary for shaking business-as-usual out of the ruts can come about without it. It would seem foolhardy to trust in its absence and stick to tactics for normal times. Recognising the direness of the situation, it is high time for the movement to more decisively shift from protest to resistance: ‘Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too’" (p.50).
But then he seems to waffle. But there is the asymmetry of power; violent acts move onto the advantaged terrain of the state ... "The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money" (p.87). Without a mass movement behind acts of sabotage, nothing will be achieved. "All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions achieved little if anything and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void."
So, sabotage is okay (maybe), but only if there is a mass movement ready to act. But a mass movement will not emerge from its passive condition on its own, particularly in the face of State intimidation. I was buoyed by the strength of the arguments at the beginning of the book, but felt a bit betrayed by Malm's criticism of radical groups and the arguments presented in the Deep Green Resistance books - that they haven't done enough to bring the masses along with them. In the end, I don't know what Malm was really saying. Catchy title, though.
Rating: really liked it
In short: this is a very concise, timely, and fairly persuasive study of strategic property destruction as a tactic for the climate movement. The physical infrastructure of fossil capital is destroying the whole world. Why shouldn’t we destroy it? There is lots of sharp analysis here on how property destruction could be a crucial tool for upending institutional / elite complacency, for bolstering the bargaining power of the mass civil resistance climate movement, and for dramatically increasing the cost of “business as usual” for fossil capitalists. There are shortcomings in the book, particularly relating to policing and prisons. But it’s still a great read!
This book particularly soars in the first chapter, “Learning from Past Struggles,” where Malm refutes the rosy, peacewashed narratives of social movements past. While acknowledging that “a comprehensive appraisal [of the use of property destruction as a tactic in past social movements] is beyond the scope of this text,” he still offers us a brisk and persuasive rundown demonstrating that property destruction has almost always accompanied the successful social movements that are cited by climate activists as sources of inspiration. The abolition of slavery, the suffragette movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the fight to end apartheid, all of them had flanks engaged in property destruction (and beyond into armed resistance, in some cases). Some of the content was familiar to me, but some of it was really surprising! For example, I had no idea that factions of the British suffragette movement engaged in widespread window smashing, arson, bombings, destruction of statues, once ambushed the prime minister before “dousing him with pepper,” and even engaged in hand to hand combat with cops! There are (as I learned) hundreds of documented examples. “To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation,” said British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who organized such direct actions. She and her collaborators deemed the situation “urgent enough to justify incendiarism,” adding that in order to achieve change and upend the status quo, women needed to disrupt and “upset the whole orderly conduct of life.” Basically, Malm shows that the climate movement’s disciplined aversion to property destruction is in fact a historical anomaly. Which of course begs the question… why haven’t climate activists taken more direct action to destroy the literal machinery that imminently, directly threatens to harm and kill billions of people? Pipelines, fossil fuel power plants, yachts, private jets are all just sitting there — do these inanimate objects have a right to be undisturbed, at the expense of everybody else’s right to live?
While the widespread destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure has not taken place *as a tactic to fight climate change*, Malm highlights that many struggles in the global South have employed the tactic in anti-colonial, anti-authoritarian, and anti-corporate struggles. In the early 2000’s, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta [from polluting and extractive oil companies] shut down a massive amount of oil production through pipeline and platform bombings. In India, Naxalites have sabotaged coal mines and transports as part of a broader class and anti-corporate struggle. During the war in Yemen, Houthi rebels crashed unmanned, remote controlled drones into Saudi oil refineries and ended up shutting down HALF of that country’s oil production. “Commodities that combust fossil fuels may be comparatively thinly spread in the South,” writes Malm, “but it is sufficiently crisscrossed by infrastructure for their production to be home to the richest tradition of sabotage… Given this record from the past and present, the question is not whether it’s technically possible for people organized outside of the state to destroy the kind of property that destroys the planet; it evidently is… The question is why these things don’t happen — or rather, while they happen for all sorts of reasons good and bad, but not for the climate.”
Another area where Malm really shined was where he interrogated the seemingly sacrosanct findings of Dr. Erica Chenoweth and Dr. Maria Stephan, co-authors of the 2010 watershed book “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” Carefully examining their methodology (which labels property destruction as violent), he highlights examples from their dataset that paper over violent factions that were concurrently active with nonviolent, mass civil resistance movements. For example, the Egyptian Revolution, which is heralded by civil resistance proponents as a model of nonviolent success without reckoning with the fact that protestors destroyed more than half of Cairo and Alexandria’s police stations in two weeks, thus significantly “degrading the repressive capacity of the State” through property destruction. Dr. Chenoweth and Dr. Stephan have made major contributions to public thinking on civil resistance — some very helpful. But this is the first formal pushback and methodological challenge to their work that I have yet encountered, which I appreciated for expanding my perspective on that influential scholarship.
The biggest concern I have with Malm here (which, based upon a skim of other reviews, seems to be shared by many others) is his lack of rigorous engagement with how police, prisons, and other modes of state repression would move to counter and deter acts of property destruction. As an American reader in Alabama (home of some of the worst, most lethal, most punishing prisons in the world), I particularly worry about this. Malm cites the example of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya as a positive model: the two American women, both activists with the Catholic Worker movement, were indicted in 2019 for sabotaging the Dakota Access Pipeline. The charges carried a sentence of 110 years in prison. Malm reveres and lionizes their sacrifice, but… are we meant to simply resign to mass incarceration as a necessary price to pay for effective climate activism? Even a cursory Google search shows that in the year since publication, state pressure on Montoya — as well as, presumably, the suffering experience of prison — has led to Montoya cooperating with law enforcement to map information about climate activists in her network. The potential for surveillance, infiltration, state violence, and more feels immense. It’s one thing if Malm wants people to let the air out of SUV tires. But the potential for devastating state response for things like blowing up pipelines seems as though it hasn’t been reckoned with enough here.
It is worth noting: Malm puts his money where his mouth is! He describes multiple examples of personally engaging in the risks associated with destroying property as climate action, including his participation in a 2007 campaign to deflate SUV tires in Stockholm and in the 2016 Ende Gelände activist incursion, occupation, & shutdown of the coal-fired Schwarze Pumpe power station in Brandenburg. This felt important to me: Malm is not just an armchair theoretician urging his readers to throw themselves into the maw of the carceral state from the comfort of the Ivory Tower. He is a field practitioner who walks the walk. But I still don’t think he has reckoned with the carceral state or with state repression enough! Perhaps this is because he writes from a country (Sweden) that does not have a comparable history or infrastructure of mass incarceration? I’m not sure. As persuasive as his case is, I just really wish there was more strategic engagement or risk assessment with prisons and police.
Overall, I think this book offers a concise, sober, persuasive argument for the climate movement to adopt sabotage and property destruction as available tactics in the fight to preserve a habitable world. Malm has some blind spots where the case is underdeveloped, but it is still an extremely worthwhile read on a subject that can no longer afford to remain taboo.
Rating: really liked it
nothing like becoming a parent to trigger some existential fear about climate change, and this book traipsed along at the right moment to make me curious (also, inarguably a grabby title and a beautiful cover). i dont know anything about malm or internal beefs of the climate left other than the general understanding that there is a climate left, and like all lefts, it spends most of its time blogfighting with itself so as to achieve the unstated goal of never accomplishing anything.
this book is basically the missing link between academic discourse and blogfighting (spoiler they were always the same thing). he's 100% right about the big picture: it's been time to blow up pipelines/SUVs for years - it's just that we made all these laws to discourage doing stuff like that. but this is like 10 pages of big picture and 140 pages of internecine snorting. i hope the planet isnt so fried that we all go extinct but that part is above my pay grade. meanwhile i swear my next car will be electric
