Despite its title, Andreas Malm’s recent book How to Blow Up a Pipeline contains no concrete instructions on how to accomplish that particular deed. Malm does assure the reader that disabling pipelines is not particularly difficult, and describes a number of cases—in Iraq, South Africa, Israel/Palestine, and Nigeria--where it was done as part of political campaigns of resistance to governments and corporations. The ‘How to’ of the title is rather a matter of how to think about strategies of political resistance to the forces of ‘business-as-usual’, to the extent that such forces contribute to and indeed accelerate global warming and ecological degradation. The phrase ‘Blowing up a Pipeline’ is a synecdoche for acts of violence done with the aim of resistance. A more literal though no less startling title for the book would be Manifesto for Political Violence in the Service of Humanity.
The book consists of three chapters. The first, ‘Learning from Past Struggles’, fist sets out the need and target for action on climate change. The most distinctive problem for formulating action is the urgency of the situation, one that stems from the physical laws governing a planet with increasing atmosphere levels of carbon dioxide. The cause of this increase is the ever-intensifying ‘fossil economy’, “an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels.” (11) Malm then startlingly charges that the most recent movements of climate activists, above all Extinction Rebellion, have fetishized non-violence, allegedly resulting in their actions having fallen abysmally far from their goals. Malm further argues that the organizational charter of Extinction Rebellion falsifies the history of violent resistance. Malm ridicules the idea of ‘absolute’ pacifism, which he understands as the principled renunciation of any use of force whatsoever. More realistically, pacifism in practice is a ‘strategic’ pacifism, one which does not renounce the use of force in any and all cases, but one which argues that the use of force in some particular context is ineffectual or counter-productive. He shows that ‘non-violent’ activists like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were strategic pacifists; and that once one recognizes that the judgment of whether to use political violence is situational, a conceptual route is opened to consider the efficacy of kinds and degrees of force in political strategizing. Malm concludes with the suggestion that in any case the value of comparing past political strategies with those of present climate activism is limited by the unique characteristic of the climate crisis: our crisis is uniquely urgent on account of the various ‘tipping points’ in global heating and ecological degradation, and likewise unique in its global scope.
The second chapter, Breaking the Spell, is the core of the book, as it presents positive case for political violence. The only kind of destructiveness Malm describes in detail is not disabling pipelines, but rather an efficient and convivial way of deflating the tires of SUVs, a “direct action as prank, perhaps too jolly and tender to deserve the term ‘sabotage’.” (84) Here’s how a group of young activists did it in Stockholm in July 2007: They walked by night the streets of an affluent neighborhood. Whenever they encountered a rich person’s SUV, above all Hummers, they would unscrew the cap on the valve of a tire, insert a piece of gravel, and screw the cap back down: job done in about an hour. A leaflet left on the windshield explains that this is no ordinary prank, but an admonishment: “what you seem to not know, or not care about, is that all the gasoline you burn to drive your SUV on the city’s streets has devastating consequences for others.” These consequences would be soonest and worst for “poor people far away” who would be most affected by global warming. In defending the deflation of SUVs tires as a model of resistance, Malm reasons as follows: 1. We must renounce violence that aims at or constitutively involves harming sentient beings, but violence targeting commodities, artifacts, and infrastructures need not involve such harm and so involve no cruelty. 2. We must accept that property destruction does, at least in the global North, typically count as violence. 3. Following the philosopher Henry Shue, we distinguish luxury and subsistence emissions. Luxury emissions are paradigmatically that occur in rich people’s rapid and/or non-essential travel, such as in SUVS, super-yachts, or private jets. “Subsistence emissions occur in the pursuit of physical reproduction, in the absence of feasible alternatives. Luxury emissions can claim neither excuse.” (88) 4. “It follows that states should attack luxury emissions with axes—not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold.” (92) The position they hold is that such emissions “represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual, not only maintaining but actively championing the most unsustainable kinds of consumption.” (92) 5. Because of the unlikelihood of the ruling classes self-limiting their emissions, and because luxury emissions are “the low-hanging fruits of mitigation” of carbon emissions, it is “[t]ime to pick up some sticks and knock the fruit down.” (93) Malm concludes that “if we have to cut emissions now [which Malm considers a political and moral necessity], that means we have to start with the rich.” (94)
The rest of the second chapter and the whole of the third chapter, ‘Fighting Despair’, consider the likely effects, more psychological than physical, of committing violent acts aiming at reducing carbon dioxide emissions and ultimately transitioning humanity away from its ever-intensifying use of fossil fuels. To a range of objections that center on the claim that political violence is ineffective and self-defeating, Malm counters with the thought, the political thought, that violent climate activists will constitute a ‘radical flank’ within the broader movement and induce a shifting of political positions that might actually lead to the positive changes that the non-violent actions of Extinction Rebellion have not brought about. Psychologically, such action might destroy the sense of inevitability and invincibility of rich and the ruling classes; Malm quotes the Iranian activist Amir Parviz Pouyan on its hoped-for effect: “The spell breaks and the enemy looks like a defeated magician.” (95)
Continuing in this vein, the third chapter strikes me as strained in its suggestion that such action might end the jaded despair that we can do nothing to mitigate or stop, and ends by invoking the famous alarming quote from Franz Fanon that violence is a ‘cleansing force.’ Still, if not such targeted violence towards artifacts, then what are we to do?
References:
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (2015)
-----How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)
Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (2014)