How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

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? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.

But 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. Indeed the commitment to absolute non-violence appears to have stiffened over the cycles, the internalisation of its ethos universal, the discipline remarkable.

Thus far, the movement for averting a spiralling climate catastrophe has not only been civil: it has been gentle and mild in the extreme.

There are two types of disruption: violent and nonviolent. Violence is a traditional method. It is brilliant at getting attention and creating chaos and disruption, but it is often disastrous when it comes to creating progressive change. Violence destroys democracy and the relationships with opponents which are vital to creating peaceful outcomes to social conflict. The social science is totally clear on this: violence does not optimize the chance of successful, progressive outcomes. In fact, it almost always leads to fascism and authoritarianism. The alternative, then, is non-violence.

Slavery was not abolished by conscientious white people gently disassembling the institution. The impulse to subvert it sprang, of course, from the enslaved Africans themselves, and they very rarely possessed the option of non-violent civil disobedience; staging a sit-in on the field or boycotting the food offered by the master could only hasten their death. From Nanny of the Maroons to Nat Turner, collective action against slavery perforce took on the character of violent resistance.

If there was one white abolitionist who helped precipitate that showdown, it was John Brown, with his armed raids on the plantations and armouries. ‘Talk! Talk! Talk!’ he exclaimed after yet another convention of a pacifist abolitionist society. ‘That will never free the slaves! What is needed is action – action.’

Blah blah blah

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. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU claimed responsibility for 337 such attacks. Few culprits were apprehended. Not a single life was lost; only empty buildings were set ablaze. The suffragettes took great pains to avoid injuring people. But they considered the situation urgent enough to justify incendiarism – 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’. Some attacks probably went unclaimed.

Guns in hand, black people chased away Klansmen in the night, guarded picket lines from a distance, accompanied marches and voter registrations not in opposition to but in unison with the civil rights movement. Committed pacifists from the North tended to adapt to these realities.

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.

The fact that (as of this writing) it has not engendered a single riot or wave of property destruction would be taken as a sign of strength by the strategic pacifists, proof of correspondence with their ideal. But could it not also be seen as the opposite – as a failure to attain social depth, articulate the antagonisms that run through this crisis and, not the least, acquire a tactical asset? Does this movement possess a radical flank? Greta Thunberg might well be the climate equivalent of Rosa Parks, an inspiration she has acknowledged and often been compared to. But she is not (yet) an Angela Davis or a Stokely Carmichael.

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. The insistence on sweeping militancy under the rug of civility – now dominant not only in the climate movement, but in most Anglo-American thinking and theorising about social movements – is itself a symptom of one of the deepest gaps between the present and all that happened from the Haitian Revolution to the poll tax riots: the demise of revolutionary politics.

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.

Given this record from the past and present, the question is not whether it’s technically possible for people organised outside of the state to destroy the kind of property that destroys the planet; it evidently is, just as it’s technically possible to shift to renewable energy. The question is why these things don’t happen – or rather, why they happen for all sorts of reasons good and bad, but not for the climate.

One facet of the retrogression in Europe in recent years is the far right’s virtual monopolisation of political violence, the France of Gilets Jaunes being the main exception. During the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, ninetytwo arsons were committed against asylum centres in Germany – a mirroring of the radical flank effect, on the farthest right – pushing the state towards closed borders; a similar spate of fires coursed through Sweden, the second main recipient of migrants in the EU. Not a single attack was registered against fossil fuel infrastructure in either country. That distribution must fall under the headline of pathological human irrationality in the midst of this crisis. Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.

Sabotage can be done softly, even gingerly.

Disarmament, indeed, but above all an attempt to break out into the only viable route for mitigation: if we have to cut emissions now, that means we have to start with the rich.

A climate fatalist of the Scranton–Franzen type (the self-sufficient hunter-farmer is a separate case) then projects this weakness of the flesh onto society, elevating the individual inability to change the established order to a universal fact. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than me skipping a filet mignon.

Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace.’ Within the range of positions this side of climate denial, none is more despicable. A