"Confronting the facts can be paralysing. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, one of a number of recent books by Andreas Malm, opens by quoting an observation made in the LRB by John Lanchester (22 March 2007) that terrorism had thus far been markedly absent from the climate movement.* That might have been a sign of the times. There was little appetite in the years after 2001 for discussion of the merits of terrorism. Even if the definition is wide enough to include the ELF’s campaign of sabotage and property destruction, climate activists have been at pains to stress their non-violence. But now, Malm suggests, an insistence on pacifism as the sine qua non of the climate movement presents a paradox. Despite the urgency of the crisis and the ubiquity of appropriate targets – the SUV, the refinery, the head offices of major fossil fuel firms – that can be disabled with relative ease, no sustained action against them has been taken. For Malm, this reflects both the ‘general deficit’ of climate action and the particular form of inaction characteristic of activists themselves.
His book is a response to the new climate activism spearheaded by Extinction Rebellion, which Malm believes has been hampered by hippyish pacifism and a spurious theory of political change, based on a pastiche of old liberation movements. Their theory is quantitative: when a sufficient number of people take action, or get arrested, or simply become aware of the crisis, government resistance will collapse into shamefaced resolution. Malm is rightly sceptical of this as a basis for political action, arguing that it lacks any consideration of history, power, money or the individual subject. He adduces testimony from national liberation struggles and civil rights activists to make the point that even committed pacifists understood the advantage of having more troublesome comrades in the wings." - James Butler
