I read Andreas Malm's book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline a few months ago, then watched the movie, and then was reminded of it all again by Abigail Thorn's latest Philosophy Tube video about being plagiarized by a man.
Thorn explains how subtle sexism led to free labour in the home. Even today, women get the lion's share of household chores, even if they're working the same or more hours outside the home, through "Social Reproduction" - the reproduction of beliefs that enables the continuation of existing power structures, which go so far as to make up "facts" about a group of people in order to further their exploitation, for instance, by propagating the notion that women are better suited for this type of work. I once dated a guy who, when I suggested he do dishes more often, insisted, "But you're better at doing dishes." This is a version of learned helplessness that serves to reinforce the status quo and keep some men firmly on the couch with their feet up.
But Thorn further explains a bump in the road that happens when society accepts people who are trans:
"If Mrs. Mansley can become Mr. Mansley, then the idea of an essential female nature starts to look a little bit shakey. If Burt can become Berta and be happier for it, then the idea that women are inferior also starts to look shaky. If they can both become Mx. Mansley, nonbinary partners in loving communions, then who the fuck is gonna work at the Chrysler dealership?"
I thought a discussion of Locke might come out of all this because he exposed this essentialist specialization of roles bullshit with respect to the questionable inborn ability of the royal class at the time of King Charles II and Oliver Cromwell. His epistemology, that we're all a blank slate from birth, affected his politics: there's nothing inherently special about royalty, and we should vote on the best leaders! He wrote anonymously knowing what a ruckus that would cause!! Now we're in the same situation but instead of the monarchy exploiting the peasant's labour, we're looking at a shift in men's exploitation of women's labour.
But she doesn't go that far down that particular road.
She brings up Malm's book to relate the fight against climate change to the fight against patriarchy. For both, we've been told for decades to spread the word and raise awareness, but WE ALL KNOW already!! We know that people are exploited and that the climate is being destroyed. As long as people can benefit from pretending they don't know this and that more education is all that's necessary, then there will always be people pushing the stories that tell us it's all okay. But we know it's not, and we need to make some noise. Of course, the same could be said for the Covid situation. Denial is a hell of a drug!
For climate, anyone who's put all their investment eggs in the fossil fuel basket are going to fight tooth and nail to keep those industries afloat. Even Trudeau found it too hard to turn his back on the money that could be made from our crappy bitumen. Similarly McKinsey and Company, who have profited from promoting fossil fuels, tobacco, and opioids, is working to keep vaccines and meds as the only tools to help the Covid crisis because they're the most profitable, locking the much better tools (N95s and CR boxes) in the toolbox as long as they can get away with it. And, as Gloria Steinem wrote of patriarchal role divisions in 1978, "the power justifications would go on and on. If we let them."
Doing what we've always done is comfortable. Don't rock the boat; women should support their men; human beings can't affect something as big as the climate, and Covid already ended. What are you worried about?
Another similarity between climate, covid, and suffragettes, is the divisiveness created through adversity. Thorn points out that many suffragettes took the side of fascists (or eugenicists in Canada). Citing Walter Benjamin, Thorn explains that "fascism replaces politics with aesthetics. Instead of letting you have control over your own life, it gives you the chance to express things that liberal society says you shouldn't, like anger, spite, bloodlust, xenophobia, and strength." It appealed to women who were exploited by men to be able to assert their will over others, to get to feel something instead of just complaining in a corner. They're not against a group getting screwed over provided it's not them. Fascism gave them a "platform from which they could criticize other women. . . . You get turkeys to vote for Christmas by letting other turkeys get stuffed." We really see this with the climate-deniers and anti-mask trolls who, for instance, recently delighted in threatening doctors who were just explaining how much Covid they saw in the ER the previous night!
Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, and this new atmosphere that allows for open displays of vitriol enables the exploited to experience a power they might never have otherwise. But the real solution is to dismantle the hierarchy altogether!
Thorn asks, "How many more women need to be exploited, harassed, assaulted, murdered, before we just sabotage the machinery of patriarchy with our own hand?" She doesn't even get to the elimination of bodily rights happening in many states. This is a more metaphorical machinery than blowing up pipelines, but the suffragettes smashed a lot of windows in their day, arguing in 1912:
"Rather broken windows that broken promises. . . This vaguely-titled 'Great Militant Protest' was a skillfully planned secret attack that would involve over 150 women armed with hammers, stones and clubs simultaneously smashing the windows of shops and offices in London's West End."
It kinda feels like it might be time to smash things up, doesn't it? But with the purpose of stopping harm and making the outrage of the public known, not in, you know, an insurrectionist way, right? If that day three years ago was all about protesting climate, would we look at it differently? And how do you feel about Just Stop Oil's move to throw food at artwork (with glass protecting it) or gluing themselves to the frame of famous piece (again, without actually damaging the works)?
Andreas Malm's book starts with a preface that acknowledges that the writing process finished before Covid struck. In March 2020, he wrote:
"I should like to believe that the arguments put forth here have a decent chance of surviving this pandemic, insofar as the movement rebounds. . . . Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing" (3).
He was at the very first Conferences of the Parties, or COP 1, in 1995, involved in blocking the delegates from leaving, chanting, "No more blah-blah-blah . . . Action now! . . . The delegates snuck out through a back door. Since then, total annual CO2 emissions in the world have grown by some 60%" (6).
Lanchester's Paradox:
The crux of the book asks,
"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 hand? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?" (8)
Definitely the same could be asked about discrimination and about Covid. To be clear from the start, Malm makes a strong case for breaking things only as clearly distinguished and separated from harming people or anything they need to survive (food, water, homes). With climate change, the objects for destruction can be clearly linked to the cause of destruction: machinery, pipelines, SUVs. With other issues, the objects should be connected to the exploiters but might be further removed from the direct cause, like smashing some windows.
Malm quotes John Lanchester: "Terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world's most effective form of political action" (11), yet we largely refuse to use it against the most life-threatening policies. Malm sites six factors that make it even more puzzling to have such a deficit of action:
"First, the magnitude of what is at stake: close to all living beings in heaven and on earth. Second, the ubiquity of potential targets in advanced capitalist countries. A petrol station or an SUV is rarely more than a stone's throw away. . . . Third, the facility with which such things could be taken out of service; no very complicated instruments would have to be employed. Fourth, the awareness of the structure and dimensions of the crisis weighing rather heavier on people's minds than an issue like animal rights. To these easily ascertainable factors, Lanchester added a fifth of a speculative nature: the efficacy of a campaign to take out the most emissions-intensive devices. . . One could adduce a sixth factor that is always fully evident: the enormity of the injustice being perpetrated" (12-13).
Our species won't make it if we continue on like this, and there are tons of targets relatively easily dismantled in order to right this wrong.
Three Cycles of Change:
At COP15, in 2009, 100,000 people marched in the street to little effect and with no discernible leader. Malm called this the end of the first cycle, with the second cycle beginning in 2011 in the US when Obama failed to legislate climate action. A group of activists reacted, led by Bill McKibben, focusing on Keystone XL, and they were loud enough for Obama to reject the pipeline deal. This cycle ended when Trump got into power in 2017 and announced more pipeline construction. In 2018, after a particularly hot summer, Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion (XR), and Ende Gelände ("here and no further") rose up with with an explosive growth in protesters in 2019 with Fridays for Future putting protests in the millions.
"All three cycles in the 21st century have spun out of an insight, more and more widely shared: the ruling classes really will not be talked into action. They are not amenable to persuasion; the louder the sirens wail, the more material they rush to the fire, and so it is evident that change will have to be forced upon them. The movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual. To this end, it has developed an impressive repertoire: blockades, occupations, sit-ins, divestment, school strikes, the shutdown of city centres, the signal tactic of the climate camp. . . . They slide down into dusty craters and climb the diggers or lie down on the railway tracks ferrying coal to the furnaces. Production can be switched off for days. No fuel can be dug up and burnt when the activists hold the premises. . . . Thus the cycles have not returned to square one, but rather formed a cumulative process and rising loop, like the climate crisis itself" (20-21).
Ende Gelände avoids violence, explaining "The strictures against violence extend to property destruction . . . solemnly pledged that 'we will not damage machines or infrastructure" (23). They didn't want to be smeared with a terrorist label and hoped that the huge numbers protesting would be impossible for leaders to ignore. But, Malm coaxes,
"Imagine a different scenario: a few years down the road, the kids of the Thunberg generation and the rest of us wake up one morning and realise that business-as-usual is still on, regardless of all the strikes, the science, the pleas, the millions with colourful outfits and banners. . . . Is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?" (24-25).
There is a growing disconnect between capitalist world-economy and the predictions of climate scientists. We are still operating business-as-usual. Can we survive the moral high ground of non-violence?
"Moral pacifism claims to hold life in the highest regard and detest its violent termination, but a defensive act that saves lives and reduces violence is unacceptable to it insofar as it involves active physical force. This seems flawed. It also appears to yield a priori to the worst forms of evil: precisely those agents most intent on taking as many innocent lives as possible" (31).
McKibben, Extinction Rebellion, and other activist groups take the stance that violence will not optimize success. They argue historical precedence, bad PR, and doomerism. Malm takes on all of these.
Historical Precedence:
Malm suggests that the non-violent change being showcased is from a selective memory of how change happened, as if a shift in ethics altered all the injustices of the past with just "ordinary people writing letters, refusing to pay the tax, volunteering to go to jail." Malm recounts a different version:
"The first sweeping emancipation of slaves occurred in the Haitian Revolution--hardly a bloodless affair. As some recall, slavery in the US was terminated by a civil war. . . . Talk! Talk! Talk! That will never free the slaves! What is needed is action" (39). Suffragettes were "breaking windowpanes in the prime minister's residence" (40) and down the street, setting fire to mailboxes, claiming "To be militant in some form or other is a moral obligation" (41). Gandhi never "condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them" (43). The bus boycott and sit-ins of the 1960s are well known, but "in the Deep South, rural African American communities had developed a long tradition of staving off murderous assaults with weapons" (47). Reformist labour movements are "more likely to be achieved when activists behave in extremist, even confrontational ways" (50). "Greta Thunberg might well be the climate equivalent of Rosa Parks, an inspiration she has acknowledged and often been compared to. But she is not (yet) an Angela Davis or a Stokely Carmichael." (51).
After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 Nelson Mandela said: "'Our policy to achieve a non-racial state by non-violence has achieved nothing', and so we will have to reconsider our tactics. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy" (51). Later he said, "I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective as a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked" (53). Like James Hansen argued, Malm says, "fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40% or 60%. All of it must go" (55).
Disabling Devices - and Capitalism
Climate scientist Dan Tong concluded that, "1.5°C still remained 'technically possible on two conditions: First, to have a reasonable chance of respecting the limit, human societies would have to institute a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices," which leaders won't do, so we need millions of protesters to "announce and enforce the prohibition." Her second condition: "substantial reductions in the historical lifetimes of fossil fuel infrastructure" (67). We have to deactivate older devices.
But, Malm explains,
"One reason why climate stabilisation appears such a frightfully daunting challenge is that no state seems prepared to even float this idea, because capitalist property has the status of the ultimate sacred realm. . . and so there must be someone who breaks the spell. . . . A campaign against CO2-emitting property would be twofold: establishing a disincentive to invest in more of it and demonstrating that it can be put out of business. . . . "The aim would be to force states to proclaim the prohibition and begin retiring the stock. . . . Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like" (68-70).
It requires disabling enough devices to communicate the risk in a focused and intentional way. He explains how easy it is to sabotage pipelines and deflate the tires of SUVs in wealthier neighbourhoods with a windshield pamphlet explaining,
"We have deflated one or more of the tyres on your SUV. Don't take it personally. It's your SUV we dislike. You are certainly aware of how much gas it guzzles, so we don't need to enlighten you about it. But 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" (80).
Consumption is part of the problem, particularly the unfettered over-consumption by the wealthiest 10% (which quite likely includes you).
"If you want to emit as much CO2 as possible, there is no faster way than to go on a flying binge. . . . There are 56 countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York" (86).
Malm provides six reasons why luxury emissions are so much worse now:
"First, the harm they inflict now is immediate . . . secondly, the main source of luxury emissions - the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving - is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations. . . . Third, luxury emissions represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual. . . . Fourth, that money could be diverted to helping the victims. . . . Fifth, if we are going to start cutting emissions, on any plausible principles, luxury will have to be the first thing to go. . . . From this derives the sixth and last reason: the very special strategic status of luxury emissions. They are supremely demoralising for mitigation efforts . . . . reading about the still-soaring sales figures for the most gas-guzzling cars on the market is enough to break anyone's hope that we will ever bend the curve" (90-92).
Violence as Bad Public Relations for the Cause
However, lots of people won't be part of any organization that advocates property damage. Not only is it illegal, but it also crosses a moral line for many. They see any kind of destruction as a form of violence, and they believe violence is always wrong with a two wrongs don't make a right type of argument. The bad guys use violence, therefore we shouldn't. Many activists prefer the energy of presenting a unified front in a protest rather than throwing stones. And many can't risk getting arrested or losing their jobs because they have family depending on them.
Malm recognizes it's not popular, but it has become necessary:
"One should not succumb to an argumentum ad populum, but neither should one ascribe meaning to words that deviate too much from the common language. . . . We must accept that property destruction is violence insofar as it intentionally exerts physical force to inflict injury on a thing owned by someone who does not want it to happen. But in the very same breath, we must insist on it being different in kind from the violence that hits a human (or an animal) in the face: one cannot treat a car cruelly or make it cry" (102).
He takes backing from Martin Luther King Jr., who said, after the riots of 1967,
"Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people, and within the genus of violent acts, this made all the difference: 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" (102-3).
It's not a capitulation to destruction for kicks or to let off steam; the circumstances need to be pressing enough to take this path. The graphs we're seeing this year, in particular, with extremes completely off the charts, supports the sentiment that time's up for other options.
Theorist William Smith explains the balancing act necessary to get to a point when people can justify damage in order to dissuade their opponents from their current trajectory:
"'First, direct action should be limited to disrupting practices that might result in, or imminently threaten to generate, serious and irreversible harm. . . . Second, there must be grounds for believing that mellower tactics have led nowhere, and that this lack of progress is itself a symptom of the structural depth of the ills. Third, there should be, at least ideally, some higher charter, convention or edict the wrongdoers have flouted and violated and that the activists can refer to'. . . . But Smith concedes that all three criteria need not be fully satisfied. 'The severity or urgency of the harm' may be such that direct action needs no further warrant" (106).
Nelson Mandela explained one reason for his shift from a more passive to active approach: "Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people?" (110).
McKibben points out that once you use violence against property, the state can feel justified in using far greater violence on activists, but Malm's retort is that the state has greater power in all areas and can wait out any peaceful protest and ignore all the angry letters while the world burns.
George Monbiot said, in 2003:
"Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs' retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we to war with Hitler" (114).
Recently, and obviously not in the book, Monbiot maintained this stance:
"I define violence as assaults on people. We constantly see governments and police and courts trying to define violence as assaults on property, but that's not violence. You can say it's criminal damage, but that's not the same as violence. Violence is hurting a person or potentially another living animal. It's hurting something sentient which can feel pain. Damage to property, in many cases, I believe that is justifiable, particularly when that property is being used as an instrument to cause much much greater damage. For instance if it's an oil pipeline or mining equipment which is destroying our precious Earth systems - damage which will be felt for the whole of the rest of the span of humanity's time on Earth - then absolutely you can commit the crime of criminal damage to prevent a far greater crime. That's always been seen, under sensible laws, as a defence. In many cases it's been used successfully as a defence by nonviolent direct activists."
Another opposing argument is that "throwing oneself into the arms of the police is a sign of privilege" (115). I completely accept that this is something for the most privileged to do. It reminds me of the 1963 Birmingham Children's March (5 minute Drunk History version here) during the civil rights movement in the US, when adults felt they couldn't march because they'd lose their jobs, so the children stood up and decided to march. It provoked MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. The cops sprayed the kids with firehoses and set dogs on them, on children, and the news footage of that flipped a switch in people's minds. Many of the suffragettes in England caught damaging property were sentenced to six months of hard labour for their crimes, which affected the public view of the legislature. Sometimes suffering is essential to turning a corner.
Necessary Division of Labour:
In 1961, in Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon said, "We are too many and too manifold to fit into one boat: the only vessel that can make room for the level of participation required to win this 'fight of our lives' is 'a diversity and plurality of tactics'" (116).
Just FYI, Hannah Arendt criticized Fanon for provoking the "hodge-podge" of unfocused violence on campuses at the time. She argues that Fanon's book suggests the idea that violence can heal the wounds it has inflicted is like saying "revenge would be the cure-all for most of our ills." She also goes down the road of a specific version of history in which violence uprisings rarely actually helped the cause. But her concern appears to be with the unfocused violence coming from rage as opposed to organized action against the instruments of destruction. She leans towards gaining power by refusing to grant power to harmful governments and corporations, refusing to obey them, to grant power, in order to change everything. Chomsky and Chris Hedges sometimes go down this road as well, advocating for refusing to allow the system to work, and my problem with that is I have no idea what it looks like besides sit-ins and marches. (Check out this interesting discussion on violence from 1967 between Chomsky, Arendt, and others.) Anyway...
Malm advocates for a division of labour in which,
"moderates and radicals perform very different roles: the latter stoke up the crisis to a breaking-point, the former offer a way out. It follows that prospective militants should expect and even hope for condemnation from the mainstream, without which the two would become indistinguishable and the effect be lost" (120-1).
It's not about trying to get everyone up in arms, but only militants who are bound by a sense of duty to possibly sacrifice their own freedoms and future in order to advance the cause, like with Climate Camps that plan their actions well in advance, erect camp, dismantle devices, and disembark. He explains the importance of this again:
"A climate movement without social anger will not acquire the required striking capacity . . . Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes" (127).
It's Not Too Late
Some groups have formed that think protests are just wishful thinking. I've definitely got one foot in that camp, and I mainly hope we can go out with as much compassion of one another as humanly possible. But I also believe that the antidote to despair is action.
Malm says groups like Dark Mountain Project are united by "reification of despair" (141). His rebuttal to that faction:
"Imagination is a pivotal faculty here. . . . Not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system than in the economic system; it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider some militant resistance. Climate fatalism does all in its power to confirm these paralysing absurdities. Indeed, that is its vocation" (142-3).
It's similar to the fight against Covid. People have learned to live with it by getting it over and over again and learning to tolerate being sick or caring for someone sick almost all the time. They've missed that we can also live with it by taking some very easy measures to prevent it. There is a massive giving up going on, and I continue to be amazed at how many have lied down in front of this disease.
Malm continues,
"It is not a question of whether we can limit warming but whether we choose to do so. . . . The precise level of future warming depends largely on infrastructure that has not yet been built. It could be blocked. . . . Every gigaton matters, every single plant and terminal and pipeline and SUV and super-yacht makes a difference to the aggregate damage done, and this is just as true about 400 ppm and 1°C as it is below. . . . A demand such as the prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices loses none of its relevance at higher concentrations and temperatures, but precisely the opposite; the later in the day, the more imperative to enforce it by any means necessary" (145-6).
He quotes Rebecca Solnit: "Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door somewhere.' Or, more poignantly still, 'hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.'" (147) We might not be able to actually save anything, but fighting the forces that harm others is a better path than passively watching it all happen as an impotent unified front:
"Disparagement of the defeated can be reframed in terms of just war theory: resistance, including armed self-defence, is justified only if it is likely to stave off the threat. A victim has no right to fight back if she is doomed in advance. But this 'success condition' has objectionable consequences, regarding, for instance, the Warsaw ghetto uprising. . . . 'This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history'. . . . The rebels affirmed life so extraordinarily robustly because death was certain and still they fought on. It can never, ever be too late for that gesture. . . . 'It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees' - better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively - but we shall hope, of course, that it never comes to this. If we resist fatalism, it might not. . . . . 'That's how we get to smile, eventually, by fully inhabiting catastrophe space, in the same way that eventually a nightmare can become so horrible that you start laughing'" (149-51).
Finally, he ends with a bit more of Frantz Fanon on violence:
"It frees the native 'from his despair and inaction: it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect'. . . . There has been a time for a Gandhian climate movement; perhaps there might come a time for a Fanonian one. The breaking of fences may one day be seen as a very minor misdemeanour indeed" (161).
Destroying property is a controversial suggestions, and Malm aims to hit every type of opposition. Did he succeed? I'm not all in on property destruction, but absolutely something's got to give when it comes to people's rights to be treated fairly, saving people from an easily preventable disease, and facing the unfathomable crisis of a warming planet.
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