book: How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm
Malm unpicks the dynamics in activism in the climate movement.
A bulk of activists now days are staunchly nonviolent, saying that nonviolence gives them a “moral high ground”.
Malm counters:
the “nonviolent” movements of the past were effective from a ‘positive radical flank effect’: [radicals] stoke up the crisis to a breaking point, [moderates] offer a way out. Nonviolence is reified by the likes of Maria Stephan, then a lead officer of the US Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations in Afghanistan, seeking to protect US interests. Nonviolence can be ignored, until there is a looming threat of radicals/militants which makes capitulating with the nonviolent wing the preferable option.
Nonviolence may be a lie and a creation of privilege. Extinction Rebellion (XR) preaches nonviolence, instead opting to get arrested on purpose to create a lot of extra work for the legal system, no wonder XR is so white, to get arrested to flippantly. Such a model is adopted due to the moral high ground and the “wide accessibility” , ignoring that it excludes folks who cannot safely interact with the police. Nonviolent capitulation – of admitting defeat – similarly so … “I am the destruction. It’s an aesthetic experience. I may as well laugh at it,” says Timothy Morton, “compulsive luxury emitter.”
Violent/militant resistance works in tandem with moderate wings … even if, and maybe especially so, if they don’t agree and vocalize that disagreement. Do not fetishize one tactic. Strike with diverse strategies.
then: How might we perform direct action for the climate?
With precision, planning, clarity of intent. Another XR example: activists stopped a train in the Canning Town tube station in London. It is one of the poorest areas in the UK. Immediate questions: why block public transport, which is part of the solution to the climate crisis? And why here? A video of the incident, you can hear someone say “I have to get to work. I have to feed my kids.” the commuters try to pull the activists down from the train, and an activist kicks one in the face – a white man, holding up a train in a poor part of a city, kicking a black man in the face. XR went on to call the action “peaceful” and “non-violent”. Herein lays the falseness of nonviolence. This cannot happen again. Attack the top-dog perpetrators of the climate crisis. There is a difference between “luxury emissions” and “subsistence emissions” and the priority, the clear target right now, is the luxury emissions. Even if subsistence emissions contribute, there is absolute cruelty in demanding the poor stop heating their homes with firewood while allowing the rich to have superyachts … and the state, if not forced to do otherwise, will tend to crack down on the former before the latter. The statistics Malm provides are staggering.
The climate movement has other grim specters to shake off, to study so repeating their mistakes can be avoided. Again, a lack of clarity/specificity. Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front, and Earth Liberation Front all drew from Deep Ecology, that humans are the problem, blames overpopulation and prescribes decreasing the population size, and implicates technology (wind, solar, agriculture, etc included) as part of the problem … while human-harm was seldom and accidental, the actions were sometimes poorly informed, such as liberating [sic] American mink from farms in the UK and Sweden , massively boosting the issue of that species being invasive in those areas. Works such as Deep Green Resistance read like greenwashed fascist genocide fantasies.
these are white-supremacist ideas that run foundational to many parts of the green/eco movement. Be wary, and may your planning for direct action – whatever it may be – take such a history into account.
anyways
it’s short. Read it. Yay :]
though if you’re feeling Not Great / manic, approach with caution at the moment, I was in fact told to take a break from reading it when I was manic due to the potential for me to do some unplanned, unclear, drastic action in emotional fury. We are worth more to the movement alive than dead, free than in jail.
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