Scan barcode
okto's review against another edition
4.75
I really liked and agreed on the message of the book. I enjoyed delving into different historical events and comparisons. The middle of the book didn’t always have me as engaged as the beginning and end.
slyazx's review
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
An eye-opening read about why our environmental protest movement is so stuck and what to do about it.
Spoiler: Violence (read: destruction or sabotage of fossil infrastructure) is ptobably part of the answer if we keep going down this path.
Spoiler: Violence (read: destruction or sabotage of fossil infrastructure) is ptobably part of the answer if we keep going down this path.
savaging's review
4.0
I don't know if this book will convince anyone to commit acts of sabotage in defense of the earth and all the beings thereon (for one thing, Malm doesn't give a single hint about how to actually blow up a pipeline. Come on!). But it might help prepare readers to not turn their backs on those who are brave enough to risk it.
(Is that the sort of thing I can just write in a public Goodreads review?)
The writing's a little rough. Sometimes I wondered: do I not know how to read sentences or does this author not know how to write them? Some sections didn't seem necessary, though I appreciate that Malm reads and refutes Jonathan Franzen and Lierre Keith so I don't have to. Some arguments seem to wander.
But at a time when governments are so eager to plop the label 'terrorism' on even the tamest acts of civil disobedience in defense of ecosystems, this book might be a helpful reorientation.
(Is that the sort of thing I can just write in a public Goodreads review?)
The writing's a little rough. Sometimes I wondered: do I not know how to read sentences or does this author not know how to write them? Some sections didn't seem necessary, though I appreciate that Malm reads and refutes Jonathan Franzen and Lierre Keith so I don't have to. Some arguments seem to wander.
But at a time when governments are so eager to plop the label 'terrorism' on even the tamest acts of civil disobedience in defense of ecosystems, this book might be a helpful reorientation.
bill369's review
37–8/122
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.
39/122
If non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘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.’ Strategic pacifism turns this method into a fetish, outside of history, unrelated to time.
54/122
In the mid-1980s, cadres from the ‘anti-imperialist front’ – Action Directe (France), Rote Armee Fraktion (Germany), Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Belgium) – teamed up
for a campaign against NATO pipelines traversing their countries; a dozen pipes and pumping stations were blown up. As part of the international outcry against apartheid in the 1980s, activists firebombed petrol stations of companies that continued to trade with South Africa, notably Shell stations in the Dutch province of Groningen. Shell stations were occupied and burnt out in Sweden in the mid-1990s in revulsion against the treatment of the peoples of the Niger Delta. But for the climate, nothing of the sort.
56/122
With the little object pressing down the pin inside the valve, the tyre will be fully deflated after about an hour. Don’t forget to stick the printable leaflet under the windscreen wiper, so the owner can’t miss the tinkering and won’t drive off with empty tyres, but will have a chance to ponder his choice. Avoid trucks used by artisans and workers, jeeps for people with disabilities, minibuses and ordinary cars, we advised any imitators: aim straight for the SUVs of the rich. They don’t serve any practical purpose – SUVs are not so common on Östermalm because of the rugged terrain in that neighbourhood; rarely do they leave the soft carpet of the city asphalt – but emit excessive CO2 just to flaunt their owners’ wealth. We likened SUV drivers to the upper-class youth of Östermalm, who early in the new millennium had developed an infamous habit of purchasing bottles of ultraexpensive Champagne, uncorking them and spraying out the liquid in the neighbourhood’s bars, just to show off how much money they could waste – with the difference that this exhaust did more than wet a floor. It killed people.
62–3/122
Subsistence emissions must be overcome just as much as any other, but they have none of these features of luxury in a CO2-saturated world: wanton criminality, insulation from the fallout, waste promotion, withholding of resources for adaptation, persisting in the most odious variants and ostentatiously negating the very notion of cuts. A peasant who emits CH4 from her paddy or CO2 from her stove cannot be held morally responsible to anything like a similar degree. Indeed, the more entrenched the fossil economy, the slimmer might be her margin of choice.
70/122
Because of the temporal dimension, moreover, Pankhurst’s question must also be posed from the standpoint of future generations: will those in school today or born next year grow up to think that the machines of the fossil economy were accorded insufficient respect? Or will they look back on this moment in time rather like we, or at least those of us with a modicum of feminist leanings, look back on the suffragettes and see smashed windows as a price worth paying? But when suffragettes broke panes, torched letterboxes and hammered on paintings, these things had, in and of themselves, at most a tangential relation to the problem of male monopoly on the vote. Now the machines of the fossil economy are the problem.
80/122
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. Put differently, they should not try to convince XR or Bill McKibben or any other part of the movement committed to absolute non-violence to pick up the cocktails and the canisters – it’s not their job. It’s the job of the factions to come.
84/122
Look at it which way you will, from the angle of investment, production or consumption, it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home. A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks. That is a recipe for alienating precisely the people who have the least to gain from continued business-as- usual. A climate movement without social anger will not acquire the required striking capacity, and it should have no difficulties developing the point – and indeed, some Gilets Jaunes have touted the slogan ‘More ice sheets, fewer bankers’. Or, ‘End of the month, end of the world: same perpetrators, same fight.’ Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes. Here is another dimension in which XR leaves room for radical flanks of the movement: those who dare to speak the name of the enemy.
99–100/122
Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace.’ Within the range of positions this side of climate denial, none is more despicable.
105/122
But if destroying fences was an act of violence, it was violence of the sweetest kind. I was high for weeks afterwards. All the despair that climate breakdown generates on a daily basis was out of my system, if only temporarily; I had had an injection of collective empowerment. There is a famous line in The Wretched of the Earth where Frantz Fanon writes of violence as a ‘cleansing force’. It frees the native ‘from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’. Few processes produce as much despair as global heating. Imagine that, someday, the reservoirs of that emotion built up around the world – in the global South in particular – find their outlets. 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.
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.
39/122
If non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘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.’ Strategic pacifism turns this method into a fetish, outside of history, unrelated to time.
54/122
In the mid-1980s, cadres from the ‘anti-imperialist front’ – Action Directe (France), Rote Armee Fraktion (Germany), Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Belgium) – teamed up
for a campaign against NATO pipelines traversing their countries; a dozen pipes and pumping stations were blown up. As part of the international outcry against apartheid in the 1980s, activists firebombed petrol stations of companies that continued to trade with South Africa, notably Shell stations in the Dutch province of Groningen. Shell stations were occupied and burnt out in Sweden in the mid-1990s in revulsion against the treatment of the peoples of the Niger Delta. But for the climate, nothing of the sort.
56/122
With the little object pressing down the pin inside the valve, the tyre will be fully deflated after about an hour. Don’t forget to stick the printable leaflet under the windscreen wiper, so the owner can’t miss the tinkering and won’t drive off with empty tyres, but will have a chance to ponder his choice. Avoid trucks used by artisans and workers, jeeps for people with disabilities, minibuses and ordinary cars, we advised any imitators: aim straight for the SUVs of the rich. They don’t serve any practical purpose – SUVs are not so common on Östermalm because of the rugged terrain in that neighbourhood; rarely do they leave the soft carpet of the city asphalt – but emit excessive CO2 just to flaunt their owners’ wealth. We likened SUV drivers to the upper-class youth of Östermalm, who early in the new millennium had developed an infamous habit of purchasing bottles of ultraexpensive Champagne, uncorking them and spraying out the liquid in the neighbourhood’s bars, just to show off how much money they could waste – with the difference that this exhaust did more than wet a floor. It killed people.
62–3/122
Subsistence emissions must be overcome just as much as any other, but they have none of these features of luxury in a CO2-saturated world: wanton criminality, insulation from the fallout, waste promotion, withholding of resources for adaptation, persisting in the most odious variants and ostentatiously negating the very notion of cuts. A peasant who emits CH4 from her paddy or CO2 from her stove cannot be held morally responsible to anything like a similar degree. Indeed, the more entrenched the fossil economy, the slimmer might be her margin of choice.
70/122
Because of the temporal dimension, moreover, Pankhurst’s question must also be posed from the standpoint of future generations: will those in school today or born next year grow up to think that the machines of the fossil economy were accorded insufficient respect? Or will they look back on this moment in time rather like we, or at least those of us with a modicum of feminist leanings, look back on the suffragettes and see smashed windows as a price worth paying? But when suffragettes broke panes, torched letterboxes and hammered on paintings, these things had, in and of themselves, at most a tangential relation to the problem of male monopoly on the vote. Now the machines of the fossil economy are the problem.
80/122
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. Put differently, they should not try to convince XR or Bill McKibben or any other part of the movement committed to absolute non-violence to pick up the cocktails and the canisters – it’s not their job. It’s the job of the factions to come.
84/122
Look at it which way you will, from the angle of investment, production or consumption, it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home. A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks. That is a recipe for alienating precisely the people who have the least to gain from continued business-as- usual. A climate movement without social anger will not acquire the required striking capacity, and it should have no difficulties developing the point – and indeed, some Gilets Jaunes have touted the slogan ‘More ice sheets, fewer bankers’. Or, ‘End of the month, end of the world: same perpetrators, same fight.’ Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes. Here is another dimension in which XR leaves room for radical flanks of the movement: those who dare to speak the name of the enemy.
99–100/122
Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace.’ Within the range of positions this side of climate denial, none is more despicable.
105/122
But if destroying fences was an act of violence, it was violence of the sweetest kind. I was high for weeks afterwards. All the despair that climate breakdown generates on a daily basis was out of my system, if only temporarily; I had had an injection of collective empowerment. There is a famous line in The Wretched of the Earth where Frantz Fanon writes of violence as a ‘cleansing force’. It frees the native ‘from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’. Few processes produce as much despair as global heating. Imagine that, someday, the reservoirs of that emotion built up around the world – in the global South in particular – find their outlets. 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.