How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.

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? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

Hurricane Maria departed Dominica and continued towards Puerto Rico, where the scenes were repeated, flooding and mudslides shattering villages and killing people in droves. The government put the death toll at sixty-four, but several independent research teams demonstrated that the real figure was somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000. No similar assessments were conducted for Dominica.

‘How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying’,

‘Young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you’ – ‘change is coming, whether you like it or not’.

in the summer of 2019, 6,000 people closed the largest point source of emissions in Germany, backed up by several thousands more in the camp and some 40,000 in a Fridays for Future demonstration.

Isn’t suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?

After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country.

votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that ‘we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life’.

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

In November 1938, in the days after Kristallnacht, the mahatma published an open letter to the Jews of Germany exhorting them to stick to the principles of non-violence and to delight in the results. ‘Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength

The pith of non-violence, in Gandhi’s philosophy, was abstention from sexual intercourse: the soul would reach exalted heights only if it learned to ‘crucify the flesh’.

Without Malcolm X, there might not have been a Martin Luther King (and vice versa).

Angela Davis or a Stokely Carmichael.

emissions must go from ballooning to zero?

Contravening ‘the civil resistance model’, anti-regime violence and street protests were ‘synergetic and complementary’, in the words of Neil Ketchley, another student of the Egyptian Revolution. And this seems more like the rule than the exception.

the historical victory of capital and the ruination of the planet are one and the same thing.

‘Even under optimistic assumptions’, the pathways to a ‘tolerable future’ are ‘rapidly narrowing’, in the words of the umpteenth scientific supplication for ‘immediate global action’.

So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk’, runs a slogan from Ende Gelände, but the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days of interrupted production per year. ‘If we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies,’ Bill McKibben has argued, but a carbon tax is so 2004. If we can’t get a prohibition, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies and any other means necessary.

on one estimate, the instant suspension of every project in the pipeline would make 2°C achievable only if accompanied by the decommissioning of one-fifth of all power plants running on fossil fuels (this estimate is as of 2018 – more years or decades of business-as-usual would raise the requirement).

‘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.’

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.

it doesn’t have to come in the form of explosions, projectiles, pyromania; it doesn’t presuppose the military capabilities of the PFLP, the MEND or the Houthis. It can be performed without a column of smoke. That is preferable. Sabotage can be done softly, even gingerly.

To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400 ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke.

crime sold as ideal living.

in 2017 alone – according to official rolls – forty-four individuals inherited more than $1 billion each, a total sum of $189 billion. The four largest global funds for financing adaptation to climate impacts approved projects amounting to $2.78 billion. Forty-four individuals thus cashed out sixty-eight times more unearned wealth than what the world’s victims of climate catastrophe were allocated, and most likely, some of it went straight to superyachts

Amir Parviz Pouyan. In his essay ‘On the Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Theory of “Survival