How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

PREFACE No More Excuses for Passivity

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Before COVID-19, the climate movement was soaring to ever-greater heights of mass participation, but the fuel of every social movement has suddenly become so insalubrious as to be outlawed: crowds.

Taboos against interfering with private property have been broken. If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same?

global heating will only become progressively worse until the moment greenhouse gas emissions cease and drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere commences.

Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing.

1 Learning from Past Struggles

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In the twenty-five years after the delegates left, more carbon was released from underground stocks than in the seventy-five years before they met.

COP1 UN Climate summit, 1995

In April 1995, the month COP1 came to an end, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 stood at 363 parts per million. In April 2018, it was higher than 410 ppm.

At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?

1 to a category 5 system and took on the shape, as satellites recorded, of a monstrous saw blade. It tore through the Caribbean island of Dominica, mowing it down. The rainforests covering the hills were clear-cut, the trees chopped and thrown into the sea, the island sheared of its emblematic greenery in the course of a few hours;

hurricane Maria, September 2017

Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen?

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is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?

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All three cycles in the twenty-first century have spun out of an insight, more and more widely shared: the ruling classes really will not be talked into action.

The movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual.

the German movement reinvented the climate camp formula and brought it to a higher level of mass defiance: Ende Gelände, meaning roughly ‘here and no further’, was born.

Production can be switched off for days. No fuel can be dug up and burnt when the activists hold the premises. Arguably constituting the most advanced stage of the climate struggle in Europe, Ende Gelände spanned the cycles and grew year on year; in the summer of 2019, 6,000 people closed the largest point source of emissions in Germany,

so far, the movement has stopped short of one mode of action: offensive (or for that matter defensive) physical force. Anything that could be classified as violence has been studiously, scrupulously avoided.

science, the pleas, the millions with colourful outfits and banners – not beyond the realm of the thinkable. Imagine the greasy wheels roll as fast as ever. What do we do then? Do we say that we’ve done what we could, tried the means at our disposal and failed? Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die

Nowhere on the horizon of ongoing capital accumulation could a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy be sighted (despite the latter now being ‘consistently cheaper’, as noted by the billionaire’s rag Forbes).

as the Guardian also revealed, the three largest asset managers in the world, together handling assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, continued to pour money into oil, gas and coal at an accelerating pace.

‘the youth of fossil-based generating units worldwide is striking’, no less than 49 per cent of currently operating capacity having been commissioned after 2004, the year of COP10.

private capitalists and capitalist states are often impossible to tell apart, the latter behaving and investing just like the former.

Discarding it is not impossible; it would merely cause losses. It would liquidate capital. For this reason – economic, not technical – a unit of power generation from fossil fuels is expected to have a lifetime of around forty years.

Thus scientists can calculate the ‘committed emissions’, defined as the CO2 emissions to come if the infrastructure operates to the end of its expected lifetime.

Moral pacifism says that it is always wrong to commit acts of violence.

Moral pacifism claims to hold life in the highest regard and detest its violent termination, but a defensive act that saves lives and reduces violence is unacceptable to it insofar as it involves active physical force. This seems flawed. It also appears to yield a priori to the worst forms of evil: precisely those agents most intent on taking as many innocent lives as possible

very few believe that violence and war are inherent goods; almost all consider them prima facie bad things that can be justified only in certain cases, and then they proceed to disagree over what those cases are and what features they have in common.

A pacifist who makes exceptions is a just war theorist.

is the second version: the strategic one. It says that violence committed by social movements always takes them further from their goal. Turning to violent methods is not so much wrong as impolitic, ineffective, counterproductive – poor strategy, in short; non-violence is hallowed less as a virtue than as a superior means.

strategic pacifism is deduced from a particular reading not of faith, but of history.

Analogism has become a prime mode of argumentation and the main source of strategic thinking,

analogist strategic pacifism holds that violence is bad in all settings, because this is what history shows. Success belongs to the peaceful.

Granted, among a host of other factors, the efforts of petitioners, demonstrators and legislators contributed to the ending of slavery, but to reduce the process to their efforts – or even to make them the gist of the story – is about as accurate as the belief that yoga is the sole path to human happiness.

The suffragettes are instructive. Their tactic of choice was property destruction.

The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes: deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant action.

During his time living in South Africa, he found his British masters marching off to the Boer War – and ran after, begging them to enlist him and his fellow Indians. A few years later, the British again paraded out to the provinces, now to the Zulus who rebelled against oppressive taxes and had to be flogged and mass executed into submission, and again Gandhi asked to serve.

In early 1918, certain movements were busy trying to end the slaughter, agitating for soldiers to desert and turn against their generals, at which point Gandhi decided that more Indians had to be thrown into the trenches. ‘If I became your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men on you’, he flattered the viceroy, promising another half million Indian men on top of the one million already in regiments or graveyards,

In these recruitment drives, the mahatma pursued a logic of sorts. As long as Indians were effeminate and weak, the British would never consider them equals and grant them independence;

Gandhi’s strategy for national liberation never – this is true – condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.

The pith of non-violence, in Gandhi’s philosophy, was abstention from sexual intercourse:

during the civil rights struggle. Non-violent civil disobedience caught on because it worked – better than the alternatives, such as guerrilla warfare against the state – and was appreciated precisely as a tactic, rather than as a creed or a doctrine. With such an approach to non-violence, deviations came naturally.

The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power. That flank was associated with black violence,

Next to the threat of black revolution – Black Power, the Black Panther Party, black guerrilla groups – integration seemed a tolerable price to pay.

Social movements rarely achieve everything they want, but they secure important partial victories’ when one wing, flanking the rising tide in the mainstream, prepares to blow the status quo sky-high.

Verity Burgmann

It was Nelson Mandela who pushed for the reorientation: ‘Our policy to achieve a non-racial state by non-violence has achieved nothing’, and so ‘we will have to reconsider our tactics.

Strict instructions were given to members of the MK that we would countenance no loss of life. But if sabotage did not produce the results we wanted, we were prepared to move on to the next stage: guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

The actions had a rousing effect on the masses of the townships, who saw in them evidence that resistance was possible and streamed into the ANC.

Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax,

As everyone who has ever heard of the tax knows, the revolt culminated in mass riots in London that killed it off.

Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax

fossil fuels are not a political arrangement like limited franchise or pass laws: they and the technologies they power are productive forces imbricated in certain property relations. At this level of abstraction, the analogy with slavery does have some pertinence,

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