Andreas Malm’s How to blow up a pipeline: agency, violence, resistance
I have translated a longer version of my introduction to the Dutch translation of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (translated as “Ecosabotage” by Menno Grootveld). I introduce the book and place it in a Dutch context.
We were standing on a pile of rocks on a railroad track. My friends sat on the ground, unresisting, while police batons descended on them from above. We are in the Groningen earthquake zone, with more than seven hundred activists from Europe and around the corner, in solidarity with the Groningers and out of anger at the destructive practices locally and globally of NAM and Shell. I was furious — because of the cracks in the walls and trust in the government I had seen, because of the knowledge I had about the effects of gas leaks on further global warming, and because I saw how the police acted as an extension of the fossil fuel industry. One of the activists who was beaten overhead several times later complained to the European Court of Human Rights about the excessive police brutality. I, with my anger and bewilderment, stood by and watched.
The author of How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm, was also involved in this mass civil disobedience action in August 2018. He was amazed that there were stones available, and no one bent down, picked one up, and threw it. Within the climate movement, there is a fear of escalation. The largest and best-known action group at the moment is Extinction Rebellion, with local chapters worldwide that use direct action and civil disobedience to disrupt “business as usual” and force governments to take action. Extinction Rebellion’s Dutch website states that one of its principles and core values is that they are a nonviolent network: “Our strategies and tactics are nonviolent. For us, this is the most effective way to bring about fundamental change.”
How is it that despite the magnitude of the problem, despite the need for action, despite the ubiquity of targets, and despite the relative simplicity of temporarily crippling the infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry, there seems to be strict nonviolence? How is it that even when we are challenged — when our friends are clapping overhead, when we know that millions are dying because of the slow violence of climate disruption — and the means of expressing anger about it are literally the stones we stand on, there is still strict nonviolence in response?
Of course, there is an answer to that question for the specific situation in Groningen. As someone not from that area, it is only my place to do what we have collectively agreed. If we jointly decide not to escalate, I don’t escalate. After all, I do not get questions about escalations in the schoolyard or the café afterwards. Those questions go to those who live in the earthquake area and support the action. But on a broader scale, I share Malm’s wonder: why is the climate movement so toothless? And is this a tenable strategy? What prevents me from taking the slogan “we are nature, defending itself” more literally?
Andreas Malm’s interventions
His book attempts to answer that question. Malm’s work on climate disruption can be read as an attempt to intervene in a debate or start a discussion to make the climate movement more effective. I got to know Andreas at CodeROOD’s climate camp when he participated in the aforementioned mass civil disobedience action in August 2018. A bus full of Swedes had travelled to the Netherlands. He was part of that group and joined the action out of solidarity with the earthquake victims and anger at NAM and Shell. In addition to participating in various actions against climate disruption, he is also actively involved in the international solidarity movement for Palestine. However, Malm is a politically engaged activist and a solid scientist affiliated with the University of Lund, with a hefty row of publications. His 2016 dissertation, Fossil Capital, examined how our dependence on fossil fuels came about. His research on the connection between social and ecological issues sparked a resurgence of interest in Marxist ecology. In each case, Malm’s books put the finger on a sore spot and promote discussion on the important issues for stopping further climate disruption. His dissertation showed that the dependence on the fossil infrastructure we now find ourselves in is not the result of technological development but of conscious choices to gain more control over the working class and productive capacity.
With the sequel to his dissertation, The Progress of this Storm, a reference to the German-Jewish author Walter Benjamin, he attempts to show that new materialism may be philosophically exciting but severely limits the possibilities for resistance. After contrasting his position with that of sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, Malm concludes that how nature is thought of as opposed to, or instead connected to, humans impedes the unique capacity for action that allows humans to engage in resistance. In 2020, he wrote Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, pointing to the shared cause of the COVID pandemic and climate disruption: capitalism. The following year, How To Blow Up a Pipeline was released and the co-written White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism with the Zetkin Collective. The latter book tracks the role of the far right in the climate crisis: we may have a bigger problem as a global society if the far right takes climate disruption seriously and responds to it in its own unique way. His project can be characterized as a critical theory deployed to understand resistance and social change more than as a purely scientific exercise. As the forest occupiers protecting the ancient Hambacher Forest put it, climate change doesn’t wait until you finish your education.
It is said of Malm’s book that perhaps a better title would be “Why Blow Up a Pipeline.” Malm does not claim that escalating the climate justice battle toward blowing up pipelines is the only legitimate or morally responsible step. He questions whether stopping further climate disruption is possible without people using violence. That does not mean Malm writes about how he has dismantled or will dismantle pipelines in this book. He also doesn’t think you’re a bad person if you don’t bike to your local gas station with a Molotov cocktail after finishing the first chapter.
How to act.
Much ethical or CO2-neutral consumption is a form of greenwashing. ‘Greenwashing’ is a marketing ploy to divert attention from a company’s destructive practices. A positive, climate-neutral or sustainable image of a company is presented in advertising or on supermarket shelves, while that green image is only a tiny part of its operations. Milieudefensie explains well on its website how a company like Shell tries to sell a green image while still investing more than 80% of its money in destructive fossil fuels. Individuals paying a few cents more for Shell to plant a tree somewhere will not solve the climate crisis. As long as the world continues to burn and fossil fuels continue to be searched, drilled and extracted, it will take more than lifestyle changes implemented by individuals. Businesses and governments should collectively create the opportunities to make those necessary changes — and, in part, force changes. Voting and ethical consumption may help somewhat with that — the question is whether the pace and scale will be achieved without additional pressure.
The infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry has been attacked many times before, only for reasons other than climate disruption: Apartheid, colonialism, and automation. It is certain that it can be done and that people know how to find ways. So this book is not a manual on how to dismantle pipelines, but an overview of the artificial barriers and misinterpretations of the past that keep the climate movement from burning its fingers on this. As recently as the 1980s, Macros (a supermarket) went up in flames in the fight against Apartheid. Wars in the Middle East led to hundreds of sabotage actions. The most successful action in 2019, with drones, resulted in no deaths but disrupted much of the global oil supply. Why isn’t this happening in the name of climate? Malm argues that political awareness lags and climate breakdown is not sufficiently politicized.
Like Malm’s other books, How to Blow Up A Pipeline is an intervention in a debate aimed at stopping further climate disruption. The book provides the theoretical underpinnings for discussing effective resistance to the fossil fuel industry. It is not purely academic but primarily aimed at people concerned about climate breakdown. Malm makes his case in three parts: learning from past struggles, breaking the spell, and resisting despair.
The arguments in the book are strategic in that the climate movement is compared to other past struggles. The arguments are moral insofar as they appeal to stop harshly condemning and distancing oneself from people who do proceed to destroy that which is destructive. It is also an attempt to create space and sympathy for groups in the past who did go one step further.
The Dutch Climate Movement
In recent years, the climate movement has proliferated. Almost weekly demonstrations and actions now seek to put the climate on the agenda or counter climate disruption. The first climate summit in Berlin in 1995, which Malm also attended, attracted at most a hundred people from the Netherlands. Although GroenFront organized direct actions and occupations in the 1990s — the best known of which was against the Betuwe railway line from 1998 to 2001 and the forest occupation in Schinveld from 2005 to 2006 — there was not yet a broad mobilization on behalf of climate. Thirty years ago, climate was just one of many issues the environmental movement was working on, and even earlier, the struggle of the anti-nuclear movement was immense. Although organizations such as Greenpeace, Environmental Defense and even the union FNV have been working on the issue for a little longer, it is pretty recent that there have been significant mobilizations for the climate. In 2017, the largest mass civil disobedience action on behalf of the climate in the Netherlands up to that time took place, organized by CodeROOD. A few years later, over three hundred people occupying the Amsterdam harbour for a day are a joke. As of 2018, the climate has been brought to the attention with greater vigour by Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s school strike. Meanwhile, there have been several weeks of action, with over a thousand people participating in civil disobedience in various places in the Netherlands.
The uptick in attention, well-attended demonstrations, die-ins, and direct actions put climate on the map. But how many more playful actions, symbolic protests, and orchestrated die-ins are needed? Will we continue to die symbolically until the water is truly at our lips? This question plays out with students I speak with and within action groups.
The book, the extent to which it calls for violence, and how freely the moral appeal it makes can be discussed must be placed in a context of fear in public opinion of leftist violence and increasing state repression. For the Dutch public, it is relevant to remember that anarchist and feminist Joke Kaviaar received a four-month unconditional prison sentence in 2013 for, among other things, the publication of her pamphlet “Where Remains the Dutch Revolt.” In it, she asks, among other things, “Who goes along with sledge hammers and shovels, to tear down the walls of deportation camps and prisons? Who will go along to hand out the cutters with which to free people from fences and barbed wire?” After the appeal, that became a suspended sentence. Due to protest action in her probation, she ended up serving two months for her questions about our complicity in Fortress Europe’s degrading refugee policy. Sedition is a criminal offence, apparently punishable by one month per article. Any respected academic — or person not hiding behind an anonymous account or balaclava — would do well to weigh the consequences. As such, questions such as “why then Andreas Malm doesn’t set something on fire himself,” or “Why he refrains from blowing up pipelines,” cannot be understood without the context of state repression. That the government and fossil fuel companies fear climate activists is undeniable. This manifests itself, among other things, in intensified monitoring of activists. There is already a scenario with the AIVD about “climate terrorists” rebelling when policies continue to fail. Preaching violence in that context, whether in a book or on the barricades, does not make your movement more effective in carrying out direct actions. You don’t need to attach your name to incitement to make the counterforce palpable. Indeed, you are probably more effective if that happens under the radar. So here goes: I, too, washed my hands clean.
Why no violence?
Malm argues that the ruling class cannot respond adequately to climate disruption: they can do nothing but “burn their way to the end.” Reference is made to “Lanchester’s paradox”, and a connection is made between the “blah blah blah” of politicians and the tame actions of the climate movement. He points out that the social science on which Extinction Rebellion relies must be as uncontroversially established as that of climate scientists. One of the now controversial founders of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, invokes social science to justify strict nonviolence. Specifically, he references the work of Americans Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who conclude in their 2012 Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict that nonviolent struggle is always more successful than resistance movements that use violence. This is because violence raises the physical and moral barriers to joining an action, and information on how to participate in an action or social movement can be more easily shared and disseminated by nonviolent movements than by action groups seeking to do illegal things. Their study concludes that strict nonviolence is a superior strategy for social movements, both in achieving goals and the long-term interest of the society in which the struggle is waged.
Malm doubts this. The nonviolent tradition is certainly no guarantee of success. Perhaps equally important, however, is that overthrowing dictators is a very different issue from overthrowing fossil capitalism, a point with which Malm is familiar. He argues that we can get out only when we understand how we got here.
Added to this is the crucial fact that change may have to be rapid and massive with a dictator — you can’t depose a dictator’s left leg first, then his ministers, and only at the end the dictator himself. However, as CO2 emissions accumulate and the cumulative effect becomes ever more significant, every little bit helps — and even more the critical bits — like shutting down an SUV, a cruise ship, or a coal mine. Some people call the latter forms of action violent.
The combined pressures of economic damage and public opinion
In 2021, after relatively little media attention, AHOLD decided not to build in the Lutkemeerpolder after all — another company will now try to ruin things in the polder. That AHOLD pulled out may well have something to do with the few times branches of the Albert Heijn couldn’t open because the doors were glued shut. Activists believe the pressure on AHOLD came not from broad changes in public opinion but from lost revenue and the threat that that could continue.
Actions can combine economic pressure with influencing public opinion. It is also often precisely because people dare to take certain risks that others see their cause as something worth fighting for. Another example is the heroic attempt to protect the Sterrebos in Limburg in early 2022. Several forest occupiers lived in the trees for a week to stop the logging. The various hardships the activists suffered for a week set things on edge even for someone with little knowledge of the matter: apparently, this matters.
This is also how Malm describes it. It is time to show the world that the world is worth escalating the fight for. The fact that people take climate disruption so seriously that they are willing to give up their freedom does not deter them but motivates them. Being willing to sacrifice oneself for a cause can be mobilizing or inspiring.
For Malm, however, the ultimate legitimacy of an action does not necessarily lie in its mobilizing effect. In a torture machine with 1,000 sliders, every button matters. Malm represents the cumulative effect of CO2 emissions as a “torture machine with a thousand knobs. Each knob you can turn back prevents an additional intensity of torture. Malm argues that you have to do that and alleviate suffering now, not later. The climate justice issue can move forward without everyone having to choose one tactic. A diversity of tactics, with some working on mass mobilization, informing, raising awareness and doing other direct actions, can maintain each effort.
Fanonian climate movement
Malm calls for a Frantz Fanon-inspired climate movement. The psychiatrist, philosopher and freedom fighter from Martinique writes in his book The Outcasts of the Earth that only violent resistance to the colonizer can heal the psychological wounds of the colonized. In addition to physical violence, cultural discrimination and dehumanization strike deep wounds in the colonized subject. Collective catharsis occurs when the formerly oppressed revolt and expel the colonizer. “Violence frees the native from his inferiority complex created by despair and passivity. It restores his self-respect.” That more radical action can eliminate the desperation and felt futility of yet another demonstration or die-in seems convincing. It would be nice to see the comparison between decolonization and countering climate disruption further elaborated — as a reader and writer of the preface to this Dutch translation, the violence done to me by climate change is now still incomparable to the violence done to a colonized subject. So when I would defuse SUVs or blow up pipelines, it would be out of fear for the future and solidarity.
In this respect, targets that manage to connect anger about what is happening locally with countering CO2 emissions that are also destructive to the rest of the world are the best targets for action. No stones may have been thrown in Groningen — but actively blocking fossil infrastructure to shut down production was a liberating and healing action. And there are more options, including in the Netherlands, for resisting fossil fuel emissions. We can defuse SUVs or sink Jeff Bezos’ boat. The ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam are within cycling distance for many in this small country, as is the yet-to-be-constructed control tower of Lelystad Airport. Let this book be an inspiration. Despair is best fought together in joint resistance.