Sunday, February 27, 2022

Review of "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" by Andreas Malm

Short essay with footnotes and links about the tactics and strategy of the climate movement, with the emphasis on a critique of the commitment to non-violence. Like everything that's clever it's better on diagnosis and analysis than it is on prescriptions. He's very good on all the things that has been wrong with XR, including the fetishisation of the rather dodgy analysis of Erica Chenoweh and Mariah Stephan (both of whom have links to the US intelligence establishment), the wrong lessons it has learned from the history of direct action movements, and so on. He's much less good on what is to be done, though he does talk interestingly about the distinction between violence against property and violence against persons, about coordinated vandalism against SUVs, and climate camps. 

It's not surprising, and this stuff is just hard. Getting off fossil fuels is more like dealing with an eating disorder than kicking a heroin habit. We can't live without energy, and fossil fuels are a fabulous convenient source of concentrated energy, which underwrite our social and technical system. There's no way out of them without changing all that, and there are very powerful forces standing against.

Not the end of a discussion, but a good start. Everyone interested in politics outside and against the system should read.

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