Should the climate movement always reject violence? A review of Andreas Malm’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline
by Michael Coleman
Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Of the array of thinkers that have emerged from the Marxist, environmentalist left in the last couple of decades, Andreas Malm stands out as one of the most influential and one of the most provocative. As prolific as he is prominent, he has published two books in the last year, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Last year’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century was a lucid and nuanced exploration of the Covid-19 crisis, especially for one written so early in the pandemic, and its position as an immediate vector in the broader ecological crisis. In it, Malm argues for what he calls ‘ecological Leninism’, framing it is a revival of the orientation that drove the War Communism of the Bolsheviks in the wretched period that followed the Revolution of October 1917, during which the nascent workers’ state was threatened with extinction [1]. Now, he has followed this up with the longer-gestating How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
The call to end the absolute taboo against violence, which has long existed in the environmental movement, that this book is centred around, has already generated significant controversy both within and without the more radical edges of the ecosocialist movement, with some veterans of the movement seething in their condemnation. The starting point of this review, however, is that the questions Malm raises here are of fundamental importance for the overall strategy of the environmental movement, and are questions that have hitherto often been ignored. These questions, therefore, deserve serious engagement, and Malm is to be commended for framing the overall conversation in this way, even if his answers remain a bit underdeveloped at points and therefore ambiguous enough to be left open to the, arguably ungenerous interpretations some of his critics have derived from this book.
Environmentalism at an inflection point
The empirical premise that Malm’s argument in How to Blow Up a Pipeline rests on is one that is simple and difficult to argue with; despite the best efforts of the environmental movement, things are getting worse. Climate activism in the global north has, for Malm, seen three waves of intense escalation so far this century; from 2006-09 in Northern Europe, in 2011 in response to the disappointments of the Obama administration in the US, and again in 2018-19, in a phase that will forever be associated in the popular imagination with the figure of Greta Thunberg, and which saw the emergence of Extinction Rebellion as a serious force within the movement. Yet in the face of all this, the situation is significantly more dire than it was in the 1990s.
As Malm points out, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from 363 parts per million in 1995 to 410 in 2019, and continues to grow apace. Beyond this brute empirical fact, texture and a sense of urgency are added to what is essentially an abstract numerical quantification of the problem, when we consider the intensification of destructive events. From the increasing intensity of hurricane seasons, to the burning of wildfires in Australia in 2019, to, as Malm has argued elsewhere, the Covid-19 pandemic itself, numerous seemingly natural disasters can be linked back to anthropogenic climate change. However, as most of the people reading this will know, this is only the beginning. This review is not the place to detail the consequences associated with two degrees or three degrees Celsius of warming, but suffice to say that time is running out to avoid existential disaster. What is especially troubling for Malm, however, is that at present we seem to be locked into decades of increased fossil fuel consumption, or at the very least investors in fossil fuel extraction appear to be making decisions on the basis that we are. Typically it takes years for the investment in fossil fuel extraction operations to break even, yet investment capital continues to flow under the assumption that no disruption to the pumping of oil out of the ground will occur.
Malm is conscious here to praise the work that the environmental movement has done up to this point. Its advocacy has mobilised millions in a way that maybe a more militant approach would not have, but clearly, he thinks, we have reached a point where more significant disruption than has gone before is required, something that would cause the aforementioned investors to take heed. It is based on this that Malm asks fundamental questions of the environmental movement:
At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?’ [2]
Malm’s answer to these questions is that the movement ought enforce, through sabotage, the shut-down of fossil fuel production required to keep heating below a disastrous level. It is, I think, incumbent on all of us as ecosocialists to engage with this framing even if there is disagreement on the answers that Malm provides.
On the liberal fetishism of non-violence
Many on the left will take a certain pleasure, guilty or otherwise, from the manner in which Malm takes a surgical scalpel to the traditional liberal sacred cows that tend to be released whenever political violence is discussed, as well as to the overall naivety of Extinction Rebellion’s theoretical foundations. He gives short shrift to the idea of absolute moral pacifism first of all, a position which he argues that barely anyone actually holds, as it would prohibit violence even when required for self-defence or defence of others. He offers a significantly meatier critique of strategic pacifism, however. One of the main targets here is Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works, a 2011 study combining statistical analysis and case studies which argues that non-violent resistance movements tend to be more successful than movements which adopt more violent approaches[3]. Malm rightly castigates the patronising tone that seeks to chide the Palestinian people that they would be in a better situation if only they had avoided the violence of the intifadas, but, more to the point, he also demonstrates the selective ignorance of violent fractions involved in liberal civil resistance causes célébre.
Invoking the non-violence of the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, as many stressing non-violence in the climate movement do, seems like an especially strange choice in this regard. Non-violent civil resistance certainly played a very important role here, but there remains the small matter of the American Civil War, without which abolition in the southern states of the US would have been unimaginable, and which, to this day, has still claimed more American lives than any other military conflict. Further, we cannot ignore the vital role played by slave revolts, in particular the Haitian Revolution which coincided with one of the first instances of mass emancipation for slaves of African descent. Typically ignored also are the roles violence played in the crusades of Nelson Mandela and the ANC and Gandhi and the large movement for Indian Independence. Perhaps the best case, Malm concedes, for the non-violent approach would be the civil rights movement and the influence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Even here, however, the looming threat of a more radical edge of the movement provided impetus to the non-violent resistance. You must engage with me, Dr. King was able to tell the authorities, otherwise more will turn to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, who were portrayed as violent simply because they engaged in armed self defence from violent white mobs and racist police.
Violence and building a mass movement
It would be remiss not to acknowledge the criticisms that Malm’s argument has received from sections of the ecosocialist left. The main thrust of this, put most forcefully by James Wilt and Alan Thornett, and in more equivocal terms by John Molyneux [4][5][6], has been to claim that Malm ignores the threat of the oppressive apparatus of the state, and also fails to account for the ways in which violence prevents the building of a mass movement.
These critiques, I think, are fed by ambiguities as to what Malm is actually calling for, as well as in his overall intellectual approach. This reading, that the violence Malm advocates would lead to the loss of credibility and ultimately the marginalisation of the climate movement, is a reasonable one based on how contradictory Malm can be or what form violence should take, but it is also ungenerous. On a more kind reading, what Malm is actually calling for is a small, disciplined, radical fraction of the movement prepared to sabotage fossil fuel infrastructure where necessary, and which more mainstream strands of the movement, such as Extinction Rebellion, can happily disavow in the same way the more moderate elements of the civil rights movement disavowed the Black Panthers.
Nevertheless, it is undeniably the case that there is a deficit in explanation as to how this approach will help to build the mass movement needed for the changes that are required. Bue Rübner Hansens’s perceptive critique of Malm’s recent work in Viewpoint Magazine [7] suggests that this may very well be by design; Malm’s work has often displayed a tendency to put things in the stark terms of a binary decision, in this case limited use of violence versus absolute non-violence, rather than addressing problems to be overcome once that decision is made. Nevertheless, we must observe that the problem still exists, and it is undoubtedly a weakness in this book that we never get a fully satisfactory explanation of the role violence can play in building the movement to go along with the clinical dismantling of an absolute commitment to strategic pacifism.
Conclusion
It is worth noting that Malm has made an effort to respond to these criticisms [8], along with a few others this review does not have the space to delve into. In a recent blog post for Verso, he laid out the case that in very specific situations violence can focus the mind in a truly unique way. Invoking Frantz Fanon, he suggests that it can be a cleansing force that bestows a certain dignity upon those standing up to injustice, and it can also destroy the illusion of the invincible, omnipotent oppressor. He points to the burning of the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct Police building in the wake of the murder of George Floyd as such a moment, crucial as it was in the escalation of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.
This reviewer finds this to be a very persuasive argument, but it still remains the case that it is difficult to conceptualise a direct analogy in the climate movement to this kind of situation. It may well be that this is work that remains to be done. Regardless of this, however, we can determine the project that Malm has embarked on in How To Blow Up A Pipeline to be a qualified success on his own terms, and a useful contribution to an ongoing debate. If the reader engages with the fundamental questions Malm asks here concerning where the movement is going and the absolutism of a taboo against any violence, and recognises Malm’s provocative method as the nudge toward further action and thought that it is, then they will get a lot out of this book.
Notes
1. Malm, A. (2020), Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, Verso Books, London
2. Malm, A. (2021a), How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Verso Books, London
3. Chenoweth, E. and Stephan, M.J. (2011), Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic Of Non-Violent Conflict, Columbia University Press, New York
4. Wilt, J. (2021), How to blow up a movement: Andreas Malm’s new book dreams of sabotage but ignores the consequences, https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/how-to-blow-up-a-movement-malms-new-book-dreams-of-sabotage-but-ignores-consequences
5. Thornett, A. (2021), Review of Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up a Pipeline, http://www.globalecosocialistnetwork.net/2021/02/15/review-of-andreas-malm-how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline/
6. Molyneux, J. (2021), On Malm and Violence, http://www.globalecosocialistnetwork.net/2021/03/09/on-malm-and-violence/
7. Hansen, B.R. (2021), ‘The Kaleidoscope of Catastrophe- On the Clarities and Blindspots of Andreas Malm’, Viewpoint Magazine, https://viewpointmag.com/2021/04/14/the-kaleidoscope-of-catastrophe-on-the-clarities-and-blind-spots-of-andreas-malm/
8. Malm, A. (2021b), When Does the Fightback Begin? https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5061-when-does-the-fightback-begin