How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire

by Andreas Malm

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. They are not amenable to persuasion; the louder the sirens wail, the more material they rush to the fire, and so it is evident that change will have to be forced upon them. The movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual.

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

‘the history of social movement activity suggests that reforms are more likely to be achieved when activists behave in extremist, even confrontational ways. 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.

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. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.’

That XR can devote an entire chapter to this struggle without mentioning this occurrence is indicative of the psychology of strategic pacifism: it is an exercise in active repression. None of the above is news or information hard to come by. The bloodletting in the slave revolts and the US civil war, the militancy of the suffragettes, Gandhi’s devotion to the imperial army, the armed protection and radical flank of the civil rights movement, the Spear of the Nation – this is all in the public domain.

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

A planet incinerated by the rich, and by the desire to count among them.

This is one reason why it would be a very bad idea indeed to assassinate a coal executive

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It does not require a willingness to submit to the law – to the contrary, that familiar paragraph in the civil disobedience protocol is becoming more obsolete by the day, as a ruling order that destroys the foundations of life deserves no loyalty from its subjects.

it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home. A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks.

Here is a contrast from late 2019: Chilean students reacting to the rise in public transport fares – championing that mode of transportation, as free and accessible for all – by organising mass trespassing through the turnstiles, attacking ticket machines, supermarkets and company headquarters and touching off a nationwide uprising against soaring inequalities in the homeland of neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the movement against climate catastrophe: placid and composed.

‘the real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in the powerless is that the powerful do not want to see their lives or property threatened’

‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees’ – better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively

‘OMG, I am the destruction. I’m part of it and I’m in it and I’m on it. It’s an aesthetic experience, I’m inside it, I’m involved, I’m implicated.’ The trick is to find enjoyment in this moment. ‘I think that’s how we get to smile, eventually, by fully inhabiting catastrophe space, in the same way that eventually a nightmare can become so horrible that you start laughing.’ You won’t hear anything like this in Dominica. You won’t hear poor people who today actually are at risk of dying in the catastrophe – in the Philippines, in Mozambique, in Peru – say, ‘I am the destruction. It’s an aesthetic experience. I may as well laugh at it.’

It brought home more absurdities of the situation: the breaking of fences could be officially framed as massiven kriminellen Gewalttaten, devastation, unimaginable damage, whereas the perpetual cloud of CO2 from Schwarze Pumpe was the mark of a peaceful normality.