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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.
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.
all three criteria need not be fully satisfied.
the right to resistance at some point can morph into a duty.
If terrorism is to have any analytical substance, its core definition must be the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror
Is not the idea here to terrorise capitalists into submission? But the establishment of a deterrence cannot be a sufficient condition for terrorism. It is common knowledge that the prison system exists to deter citizens from infractions of the law, by threatening to abolish their freedom of movement; closed-circuit TV cameras, armed guards and a panoply of other fully normalised phenomena have similar functions. Parents have told lurid tales, raised their voice, even smacked their children to inculcate fear for unwholesome things.
Fear for the loss of property is a categorically distinct fear. It pertains to the balance sheet and budget, not the body.
The fine art to be mastered here is that of controlled political violence.
any climate militant who contemplates sabotage should abide by the original rules of the MK ‘not to endanger life in any way’ – or, with William Smith, they should be ‘constrained, proportionate and discriminating’. She should warn people of the risk of the injury where applicable, desist from harassing or intimidating persons, take precautions to avoid damage to the environment.
As part of the mass resistance in the besieged Gaza Strip in the spring of 2018, Palestinians invented techniques for sending kites and helium-inflated condoms carrying incendiary materials across the wall to burn Israeli property.
‘barriers to participation are much lower for non-violent resistance than for violent insurgency’.
Middle-class whites can count on the good manners of the cops; working-class Muslims and blacks and migrants without papers don’t have that assurance. This might be one reason why XR, in its first year of existence, was plagued by a whiteness out of all proportion to the demographics in cities like London and Malmö.
the only vessel that can make room for the level of participation required to win this ‘fight of our lives’ is ‘a diversity and plurality of tactics’.
we face an ostensible paradox here, in that the US is a vastly more violent society – as measured by the diffusion of guns, the incidence of mass shootings, the civilians killed by police, the veneration of armed heroes in popular culture, the belligerence of the state and any other yardstick – than France, and yet the intolerance for violence committed by social movements is at its highest
We should posit a law of a tendency of the receptivity to rise in a rapidly warming world; anything else would be to presume a species-wide death wish.
it. They should walk ahead – not too far from the masses, which would lead to isolation; nor in the median or rear, which would obviate their mission.
Every extreme weather event now blows with the force of accumulated emissions and gives a foretaste of misery to come. That should be the moment to strike and stretch: next time the wildfires burn through the forests of Europe, take out a digger. Next time a Caribbean island is battered beyond recognition, burst in upon a banquet of luxury emissions or a Shell board meeting.
It is the duty of the erstwhile radicals to denounce the new flank and accuse it of undermining their endeavours. If they were to applaud the troublemakers who threaten or commit acts of violence, they would not gain the edge of respectability and receive no invitation to the policy-making chambers. A positive radical flank effect
a negative radical flank effect. Extremism can make a movement look so distasteful as to deny it all influence.
this presents militants with a genuine dilemma. On the one hand, they have to trust the mainstream to reproach and disown them – a seal of the division of labour – but on the other, there might be no better source of information about deleterious consequences for the movement as a whole.
So far, few have been prepared to risk more than a couple of nights under arrest. Compared with what struggling people in history have gone through, the comfort levels of climate activism in the global North must be deemed fairly high, which does not quite bespeak the significance of the problem.
the strategy of XR has been to wreak generalised – but, mind you, non-violent – havoc on the urban fabric, in the belief that this will force politicians to respond adequately to the crisis; this is how change happens,
XR has remained persistently aloof from factors of class and race, remaining based in white middling strata with no standpoint other than their own.
A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks. That is a recipe for alienating precisely the people who have the least to gain from continued business-as-usual.
Pacifism has perhaps never existed as a real thing. What exists is the ability, or not, to distinguish between forms of violence.
what was perhaps most awesome about XR was the sheer speed of its development, velocity now being the most needed feature of action.
property destruction and other forms of violence. The tactic with the greatest potential for this movement might be something different. It might be the climate camp.
climate camps are planned long in advance, with fixed dates for erection and dismantling; neither spontaneous nor reactive, they feed into a plotted escalation.
that a pre-announced camp can give the corporations time to prepare and move out sufficient fuel and equipment to cushion against a blockade.
There is chatter in the movement about combining camps with smaller, secret, surprise hits to cause real disruption.
3 Fighting Despair
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climate fatalism
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.
Despair about the climate is here based on a judgement of extreme improbability, hypostatised into impossibility.
To act politically is to reject probability assessment as a ground for action (since it could inspire no action), and this applies to men like Scranton and Franzen too: through their writings, they seek to influence others to do one thing over another. Else they would keep their mouths shut.
Climate fatalism is a performative contradiction.
not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,
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it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight,
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Every gigaton matters, every single plant and terminal and pipeline and SUV and superyacht makes a difference to the aggregate damage done, and this is just as true above 400 ppm and 1°C as it is below.
Within these parameters, one acts or one does not. Like each grain of sand in the pile, an individual joining the counter-collective could boost its capacity on the margin, and the counter-collective could get the better of the enemy.
success is neither certain nor probable, but possible.
27,100 actions caused exactly four fatalities, all of them at the hands of attackers unaffiliated to any group (namely, the Unabomber and the man who assassinated the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn). EF!, ALF and ELF never killed anyone. 99.9 per cent of their actions caused zero injury. This was, of course, a deliberate choice: ‘Houses were checked for all forms of life, and we even moved a propane tank out of the house all the way across the street just because – in [the] worst case scenario – the firefighters could get hurt’, said a typical ELF communiqué.
