| HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE Learning To Fight in a World On Fire Andreas Malm London: Verso, January 2021 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1839760259 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1839760257 | 200pp. | SC | $19.95 | |
Born in Sweden in 1977, Andreas Malm came early to recognition of the dangers of global warming. Naomi Klein has called him one of the most original thinkers on the subject of climate change. He's done his share of protesting, most notably over the Hambach Forest, which Germany wants to uproot to expand a brown coal mine.
He is currently a senior lecturer in human ecology and associate professor of human geography at Lund University. In this book, he argues that few protest movements succeed without an extremist faction willing to selectively damage property. One example he cites is the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, where the nonviolence of Martin Luther King played out alongside threats of violence from the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and other militant groups. The idea is that the risk of escalation makes the demands of the nonviolent group more palatable. He calls this the radical flank effect.
The theory of the radical flank effect has applications far beyond the African-American struggle. The history of working-class politics in twentieth-century western Europe serves as an illustrative example. The vote, the eight-hour working day, the rudiments of a welfare state — the progress made by the reformist labour movement would have been inconceivable without the flank to the left and east of it. 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 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. – Page 50 |
He contrasts this with the immaculate nonviolence of the global North's protests against inaction on climate. It is remarkable that climate protests have been so peaceable, given the degree of harm impended by climate change. Protests in America during the 1960s were far more aggressive, with the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and other militant groups — and the threats, while severe, were far less so than climate disruption. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that climate change is impersonal: no individual or political party overtly promotes it, as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson promoted the Vietnam War.1
Robert Heinlein's tale with this title, written in 1939, posits a large nuclear power station with a finite risk of detonating in a runaway fission excursion, amid scientific dispute about how severe such an explosion might be. Under the daily burden of this responsibility, the engineers in charge of the plant are themselves at risk of "blowups": psychological breakdowns that might end in one of them sabotaging the plant.
Dr. Silard waited unhappily for the ensuing twenty minutes until his own relief arrived. Perhaps he had been hasty. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that Harper had at last broken under the strain of tending the most dangerous machine in the world—an atomic power plant. But if he had made a mistake, it had to be on the safe side—slips must not happen in this business; not when a slip might result in the atomic detonation of two and a half tons of uranium. – Paragraph 9 of Metallicman's edition |
Back then, before any nuclear power plants had been prototyped, or even designed, such fears were germane. This was also true of nuclear weapons. There were serious concerns that the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo might ignite Earth's atmosphere. These were discounted on theoretical grounds — much as the most extreme reactor explosion was in Heinlein's tale.
Ongoing warming of Earth's atmosphere due to fossil-fuel combustion is not in the same league with a sudden burst of nuclear devastation. But it could, over the long term, be just as destructive to human civilization. That is why "Blowups Happen" is a good analogy to a planet reaching ambient temperatures fatal to most of the life existing on it. We know there's a risk of this; we just don't know how soon it might happen, or whether the warming might slip out of our control.
And that is also the reason why, when the rational advice of scientists and the peaceful protests of climate activists are ignored by our political leaders, forcing them into action by well-targeted property damage becomes ever more justified.
Indeed, Ketchley and his colleague Mohammad Ali Kadivar have sifted through all the democratic transitions that occurred between 1980 and 2010 and found that as a rule, dictators are unseated by people who first come in peace and then, after running into the iron-clad state, swing sticks, throw stones and hurl Molotov cocktails. They call this 'unarmed collective violence'. Practiced by civilians, improvised weapons in hand, this is not violence exercised by a standing army with high-tech weaponry. But it can be flung against the repressive state apparatus and dispensed against property to smashing effect: it 'disrupts the civic order and so raises the costs of ruling for an incumbent regime'. Unarmed collective violence was present in the lion's share of the transitions, but ignored by Chenoweth and Stephan, who had to exorcise it to generate their result, their 'twice as likely' conclusion hiding the mad multitudes from Chile to Indonesia, Pakistan to Madagascar, even Serbia. Other scholars have contributed to the debunking of their data set. Cheoweth and Stephan are not the IPCC of resistance. The remaining question is whether it is possible to locate even one minimally relevant analogue to the climate struggle that has not contained some violence. Strategic pacifism is sanitized 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 theorizing 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. It barely exists any longer as a living praxis in powerful movements or as a foil against which their demands can be set. From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s it has been defamed, antiquated, unlearned and turned unreal. With the consequent deskilling of movements comes the reluctance to recognize revolutionary violence as an integral component. This is the impasse in which the climate movement finds itself: the historical victory of capital and the ruination of the planet are one and the same thing. To break out of it, we have to learn how to fight all over again, in what might be the most unpropitious moment so far in the history of human habitation on this planet. – Pages 60-62 |
Pointing out the reality that effective protests have usually involved violence is important. Even movements remembered as completely nonviolent have included violence: Nelson Mandela's MK movement employed targeted killings, and the safe houses Martin Luther King used were described as "arsenals." Violence can of course discredit a movement, and the most carefully considered action can go awry.2 But to pretend that only a totally peaceful climate movement can succeed is to live in illusion.
The task of climate activists cannot be to take an existing level of consciousness as a given, but rather to stretch it. They should walk ahead — not too far from the masses, which would lead to isolation; nor in the median or rear, which would obviate their mission. They must prepare to be calumniated by some (anything else would be proof of inefficacy) while steering clear of tactics that would put off too many — the tightrope walked by any working vanguard. Actions should be undertaken if plan, goal and execution can be explained and garner support, in an intimate relation to the existing consciousness, to be pushed up a notch. This is one reason why it would be a very bad idea indeed to assassinate a coal executive or fly an aeroplane into an ExxonMobil skyscraper. Intelligent sabotage is something else. It should be explainable and acceptable to enough numbers in some places, and if not today, then surely after a little more of this breakdown. – Page 119 |
Like all of Malm's work I have seen, this book is very well researched. That is confirmed by the set of endnotes; they cite a number of books, papers, and videos, some of which are in Swedish. Malm is also verbose, which will make the book hard going for some readers. And there are a few grammatical errors, most of which appear to stem from deficiencies in his generally excellent grasp of English. Because of Malm's verbosity, and because the book has no index, I don't rate it a must-read. I do consider it worth reading, but people will probably get more benefit from watching the film based on it: How To Blow Up a Pipeline.3
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.