Andreas Malm

Property will cost us the earth The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Quote from Martin Luther King Jr about 1967 riots to make the distinction between violence against people versus property

Rebecca Lum

‘A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.’ Why were the rioters ‘so violent with property then? Because property represents the white power structure, which they were attacking and trying to destroy.’

Quote from Jessica Reznicek. She and Ruby Montoya significantly vandalized and attempted to sabotage the Dakota Access Pipeline 

We never at all threatened human life. We're acting in an effort to save human life, to save our planet, to save our resources. And nothing was ever done by Ruby or me outside of peaceful, deliberate and steady loving hands.

Al-Hadaf, the weekly newspaper of the PFLP edited by Kanafani, explained that the paper of It aim was to 'hit the enemy economically, specifically in the frame of oil production'. In a recent reconstruction of the campaign of 1969, Zachary Davis Cuyler has shown that the Front understood oil as a material base for the hostile trinity - US imperialism, Israeli colonialism, Arab reaction - and sabotage as a way to ‘strike at the ligaments of empire'.

There is a long and venerable tradition of sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure, for other reasons than its impact on the climate. The [African National Congress] considered oil supply an Achilles heel of apartheid […] ‘None of the attacks… came close to bringing down the state, but they provided physical evidence of a tangible potential threat to the regime — reinforcing the sense, as Nadine Gordimer put it, that “something out there” represented a shadowy throat to the long-term future of white supremacy.’ The façade of durability had been fractured.

At that point [February 2005], the Iraqi resistance against US occupation had executed nearly 200 attacks on pipelines. ‘The sabotage campaign has created an inhospitable investment climate and scared away oil companies that were supposed to develop its oil and gas industry', the Journal snivelled; to make matters worse, similar offences were committed in the part of Kurdistan under Turkish control and in Chechnya, Assam and Colombia…

Recognising the direness of the situation, it is high from time for the movement to more decisively shift from protest to resistance: ‘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.

On the theory of the radical flank effect

In the words of Verity Burgmann, 'the history of social movement activity suggests that reforms are more likely to be achieved when activists behave in extremist, even controntational 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. 

logan chung

Would’ve benefitted from a clarification of both purpose and of audience. More along the lines of “here’s why to blow up a pipeline, and why hasn’t this happened yet?” for white left/center-left, climate-conscious circles. Dubious at times but nevertheless extremely useful, even inspiring, if only because few seem willing to even probe these questions. Essential reading this decade, and/but I hope there is far more work done to expand this arena.

Instead of banning books in America bc fascism, this should be required reading. 

ben wolfson

Bryan Alexander

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a passionate argument in favor of property damage in the climate change cause.

Malm makes a series of points to support this. If climate change is a dire threat to humanity, including mass deaths and suffering, surely meeting it justifies a form of violence when peaceful means fail to change the status quo? Violence can certainly grab people's attention very well, which can be useful in changing hearts and minds. If one considers climate devastation to be a form of violence against humanity and the natural world, then violence in response suits many people who aren't committed pacifists. And if climate change is already in motion, already starting to bring about terrible effects, then we might not have time to spend in patiently building and rebuilding nonviolent coalitions. 

On a different level, Malm makes an old fashioned left wing argument. He sees neoliberalism at the heart of the climate crisis, and wants us to defeat it with organization including militancy. He wants a return to revolutionary politics. It begins with shame and mobilization and includes a vanguard. "[R]ich people cannot have the right to combust others to death."(Kindle location 1954) "[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." (1438) He concludes by musing that we need to move beyond Ghandi to Fanon. (1835)

How to Blow Up a Pipeline consistently responds to objections. What about the power of nonviolence to get things done, from Indian independence to Britain's suffragettes winning women's voting to American black people winning their civil rights? Malm replies that many such nonviolent movements were actually accompanied by violent wings in many ways and the two played off of each other. Wouldn't violence let the state respond with overpowering force? Yes, but Goliaths do lose to Davids, and violence might electrify people into a force more powerful still. Is violence against people merited? No, that is a sign of despair.

Malm is very careful in his recommendations, urging the reader to destroy property in certain ways, as "controlled political violence." (1242) It should not injure people. It should focus on the materials of the very rich, and avoid injuring the lives of everyone else. He bases these recommendations on his own experience with European direct action as well as on an analysis of recent climate change activism history.

Malm's argument may remind some of you of previous pro-violence arguments within the green world, like those powering Earth First! He touches on those as formal successes (overwhelmingly focused on property, rather than human bodies) and sees their real failure as not connecting with a bigger movement. Now is different, given mass dismay at climate change.

Overall this is a striking book, at least in part for its clarity, signaled from the title. It's a straightforward call to action. It reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, wherein a "black wing" conducts sabotage and terror in support of a nonviolent political campaign for climate mitigation and transformation.

As a futurist, I think some will heed it.

Nikolas Matt

Nienke Timmermans

jami welch

ame 

alice browne

Anas A

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

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