Scan barcode
spav's review
3.0
This book contains references and critics to “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”, both the book and these critics are important to get a grasp of the current state of the fight against climate change as well as to bring a different view on different types of direct action in this struggle as well as to help uncover the class-struggle side of the equation.
samdalefox's review
informative
slow-paced
3.75
This a free e-book published by verso. It contains a collection of essays from various authors in response to Andreas Malm's book "How to blow up a pipeline". I do not think you need to have read this book, or any of Malm's other works, to gain benefit from "Property will cost us the Earth". The level of discussion is definitely best suited to people who already have read some broad literature on eco-socialism, the climate crisis, and revolutionary tactics. Even with my own reading in this area, I still found some of the essays difficult to get through at times; being verbose and overly academic. However, I also learnt a great deal and many of the essays give unique perspectives I've not found in other literature, with several essays from Indigenous contributors from the Global South being exclusively translated into English.
The e-book is broadly structured as follows:
The e-book is broadly structured as follows:
- Introduction
- Part 1 Global Struggle - essays from various activists in the global south, focussing on local activism againist capitalist extractivism
- Part 2 Debates in the movement - directed critique of "How to blow up a pipeline" and broader eco-socialism theory (typically authored by activists in the global north)
- Part 3 It is on utopia we now depend - More general essays perhaps leaning more towards hope and the future, also Malm offers his rebuttal here.
Read Part 1 for greater insight into the (frankly, amazing) activism already occuring in the Global South including Ecuador, Bolivia, USA, Canada, Uganda, and Mozambique. Here you learn of the devastating extractive practices, crimes against activists and the environment, and resistance tactics. These range from direct violent action againist property, to non-violent occupation, to political organisation, to legal interventions.
Read Part 2 for pointed discussion on the pros and cons of Malm's work. Many commentators are from the global north and focus on the difference in activist strategies and their effectiveness exclusively in the global north. They look at organisations such as Ende Gelände and Extinction Rebellion. There is a wonderful quote in this section that sums up my frustration with these debates:
This, paradoxically, is the problem with How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It answers a different question than its title poses—not how one could blow up a pipeline, but why one should. But “why” is an easy question to answer.
It is much harder, however, to make the case that doing so would lead to meaningful, and immediate, decarbonization. Instead of attempting it, Malm counters the moralistic case for nonviolence with a moralistic case for property destruction.
Tbh I'm not a Malm fan, and I found myself laughing with delight at some of the criticisms levied againist him, in particular how he excludes indigeous people and miriad successful cases of property destruction. I believe part 2 was more of a slog because of this overmoralising and pontificating, a call to action rather than actually organising for action. The overall conclusions I grasped from this muddle of essays is that:
- Most activists from the Global North and the Global South agree that a diversity of tactics are required in order to resist Capitalism, climate collapse, and build a sustainable more equitable future.
- Most activists from the Global North and the Global South agree that solidarity and mutal aid between different activist groups across the globe are essential to achieve this goal. Most pressing is the matter of organisation.
Read Part 3 if you read parts 1 and 2, I wouldn't recommend reading this section alone. Though it is certainly more bearable than Part 2.
Overall, a slog, but worth it. It discusses the 'why' more than the 'how' of climate activism. However, the essays introduce plenty of important new names which encourage further reading in whoever's take you most particuarly resonate with.
___________________________________________________
Some favourite quotes:
"These are starkly posed debates, but they should be: any democratic movement should be contentious and difficult. In the words of civil rights luminaries Bernice Johnson Reagon and Ella Baker, if you feel comfortable working in your activist coalition, you’re not really working in a coalition. And this is a struggle in which we need everyone to be involved."
"His audience is the mainstream environmental movement, people who have never considered sabotage, or direct action, people who are outright against it. For such an audience, Malm’s book is an important intervention. But I also hope that his audience will understand that the climate movement should not act in a void, and that in order to achieve lasting gains, it must act in dynamic relation to frontline direct action. There they will find communities who uplift a diversity of tactics; act with ingenuity and humility; make systems to protect each other from repression; support escalating action with clarity, spontaneity and integrity; and most importantly, have the fortitude to face the aftermath together."
"There’s a deeper question here: How wide is the scope of human agency? Humanity has proved itself powerful enough to change the climate at a planetary level, to spark off chains of extinctions and to permeate wildernesses with microplastics. But this was inadvertent, even if the destruction has been prolonged by its beneficiaries. Whether human beings have the collective capacity to intentionally reverse this planetary effect isn’t clear."
"This is also a theory based on the idea that the movement, workers, and ordinary people don’t recognize the legitimacy of taking power into their own hands, which is exactly what capitalists do. There has been an ideological domestication of society, which proposes that the only loci for legitimacy are bourgeois institutions and formal liberal democracy."
"Malm and the collective are no doubt right that ecological and anti-fascist causes coalesce with every fraction of a degree of warming. Their hesitance in recommending a course of action, though, might be the last symptom of the political difficulty charted in the book: nobody is sure what balance of intransigence and realism is needed, or even which of the traditional methods of mobilization might motivate governments to act at the scale required, in the time required."
"Malm is not merely a green provocateur but an eco-Marxist: he insists that ecological rescue cannot occur without social emancipation. No great and decisive number of people can be expected to seek the salvation of the climate unless it simultaneously implies the betterment of their own lives. This is, of course, the insight that lies behind ideas of a Green New Deal: the proposition that ecological rescue of the planet could also entail economic rescue of the population at large."
"Many Indigenous peoples value what is best described as kinship. Kinship codifies relationality between human and nonhuman life, such as the insect nations, water beings, wildlife nations and the land itself."
"Identity plays a big role in the climate struggle, and it is important to know what your privilege and power are under a white supremacist colonial regime. Solidarity and alliance are essential to movement building and a movement’s maintenance. This includes solidarity with the Global South and the rest of the world fighting colonial empires, extractive industries and imperialists. Our liberation is tied to one another. What created the problem will never resolve it."
"The problem now is, rather, we’re going to have to do without certain things that have been taken for granted, particularly in the core capitalist economies. Your shops are full, with food from all over the world. That’s not going to be the case so much. You’re not going to find it as easy to travel about by air, if at all. Certain capitalist freedoms, specifically capitalist freedoms, have got to go. The right is going to find a way to say, “This is a project for taking stuff away from you.” How can we confront honestly the fact that, yes, we’re going to have to give up some things—in the same way for example that, as Gilroy points out, anti-slavery activists in the eighteenth century said, “We’re not going to eat sugar, because there is blood in your sugar; it’s made by slaves”—we’re going to have to give up some things just to survive. How can we do that without it being entirely a net loss? What is potentially attractive in the eco-future?"
"Malm does not ask how effective disruptions of fossil infrastructure will affect ordinary people through price rises on essential goods. And so, he does not pose the question of how to avoid resistances and ambivalences stemming there from."
"The tragedy of the present, for Malm, may be expressed with a paraphrase of a tired old adage: it is easier to imagine the end of human civilization than the end of the capitalist state. In short, Malm’s war communism isn’t a strategic proposal as much as an exercise of the imagination: just think of what we could do with the state if we somehow controlled it. This imaginary is, Malm argues, necessary: it is, and with this I agree, hard to imagine “an actual transition” without “some coercive authority” to forcibly end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. "
"The land does not belong to anyone, we belong to it."
More...