How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

Physical force that injures inanimate objects does not, on this view, count as violence, because it cannot have the results that constitute the prima facie wrongness of what we call violence. At a minimum, those on the receiving end must be sentient beings.

Even the man most deeply in love with his car should admit that slicing up its tyres and slicing up his lungs come with separate ethical tags.

‘Is not a woman’s life, is not her health, are not her limbs more valuable than panes of glass?’

will those in school today or born next year grow up to think that the machines of the fossil economy were accorded insufficient respect? Or will they look back on this moment in time rather like we, or at least those of us with a modicum of feminist leanings, look back on the suffragettes and see smashed windows as a price worth paying?

direct action should be limited to disrupting practices that might result in, or imminently threaten to generate, serious and irreversible harm. The urgency of the situation might be sufficient to override a presumption in favour of lawful advocacy or civil disobedience, if too much damage would occur before the process of reflection and reconsideration triggered by the latter could run its course.

Second, there must be grounds for believing that mellower tactics have led nowhere, and that this lack of progress is itself a symptom of the structural depth of the ills.

Third, there should be, at least ideally, some higher charter, convention or edict the wrongdoers have flouted and violated and that the activists can refer to.

In fact, once the gravity of the climate crisis is duly recognised, it is difficult to see what ethical precepts could be marshalled to keep that morphing at bay and uphold a ban on destroying the causative property.

so any climate militant who contemplates sabotage should abide by the original rules of the MK ‘not to endanger life in any way’

George Monbiot once observed: Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs’ retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler.

The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the absoluteness of capitalist dominance and the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence – the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology.

The weather is already political, but it is political from one side only, blowing off the steam built up by the enemy, who is not made to feel the heat or take the blame.

a ruling order that destroys the foundations of life deserves no loyalty from its subjects.

The problem with this, of course, is that ‘the right to property’ – more precisely, a very particular but very common type of property – is what must be broken. And the order-keeping state stands in the way.

Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes. Here is another dimension in which XR leaves room for radical flanks of the movement: those who dare to speak the name of the enemy.

Jonathan Franzen, a rather more senior member of the American literary pantheon. From his pulpit in the New Yorker, he has periodically held forth on how unwise it is to attempt to have climate change abated. Like Scranton, he believes that ‘planetary overheating is a done deal’. As his evidence, he points to the fact that ‘no head of state has ever made a commitment to leaving any carbon in the ground’. Before the 1790s, no head of a state had ever made a commitment to freeing African slaves; in July 1791, someone of Franzen’s disposition could have argued, on these grounds alone, that eternal slavery is a done deal.

McKinnon, has argued in the article ‘Climate Change: Against Despair’, a delightful logical evisceration of the fatalist position, it often comes down to a probability assessment. While some climate fatalists deny that it would be logically and technically possible to cut emissions to zero and then begin the work of repair and regeneration, more common is the argument that this just won’t happen, because of the way the world is. Scranton at one point acknowledges that it could be accomplished, if we managed to ‘radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that is scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, massive state investment in carbon capture and sequestration, and global coordination on a scale never seen before’ – a scenario that can be conjured up in some theoretical hemisphere of the mind but not promoted or implemented in the real world, because the forces stacked against it are so stupefyingly strong. Despair about the climate is here based on a judgement of extreme improbability, hypostatised into impossibility. The procedure is anti-political through and through.

To act politically is to reject probability assessment as a ground for action (since it could inspire no action),

not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system – what we refer to as geoengineering – than in the economic system; it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider some militant resistance.

‘It is not a question of whether we can limit warming but whether we choose to do so’,

‘The fight is, definitely, not yet lost – in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.’

‘Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door somewhere.’ Or, more poignantly still, ‘hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency’.

In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory … This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history, Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg write in Revolutionary Yiddishland

The rebels affirmed life so extraordinarily robustly because death was certain and still they fought on.

Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage.

the former would fight for the possibility of civilisation, in the sense of organised social life for Homo sapiens. Unlike the deep variety, it would target a particular deformed kind of civilisation – namely, that erected on the plinth of fossil capital – and tear it down so that another form of civilisation can endure (or none will). This implies that climate militancy would have to be articulated to a wider anti-capitalist groundswell, much as in earlier shifts of modes of production, when physical attacks on ruling classes formed only minor parts of societywide reorganisation. How could that happen? This cannot be known beforehand. It can be found out only through immersion in practice.