How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

Strategic pacifism is sanitised history, bereft of realistic appraisals of what has happened and what hasn’t, what has worked and what has gone wrong: it is a guide of scant use for a movement with mighty obstacles.

‘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’, as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist.

Sabotage can be done softly, even gingerly.

the richest 1 per cent of humanity has a carbon footprint 175 times larger than that of the poorest 10 per cent;

rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.

If the self can only understand that ‘it was already dying, already dead’, then it can crash to the bottom with equanimity; if it can also understand that everything around it is fleeting and insubstantial – a speck of dust in the cosmos, to be blown away in a millisecond – it can quietly let go of the world. It won’t hurt much.

‘The context for hope is radical uncertainty’, writes McKinnon; ‘anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it’, Rebecca Solnit. ‘Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door somewhere.’