How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Georges Canguilhem, in The Life and Death of Jean Cavaillès, noted, ‘A philosopher-mathematician loaded with explosives, lucid and reckless, resolute without optimism. If that's not a hero, what is a hero?’ (Canguilhem 1996: 35). An important French thinker himself, who inspired amongst others Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Canguilhem viewed the philosopher and anti-fascist resistance fighter Jean Cavaillès as both an intellectual and a political hero. I wonder whether Andreas Malm has come across Cavaillès. His rational and resolute defence of political violence resonates with Malm’s call to fight the forces accelerating climate change, by whatever means is necessary. A philosopher of mathematics and a follower of Spinoza, Cavaillès believed that it was a necessity to fight the Nazi occupiers of France during World War II. He would write tracts in the day and by night would break into submarine bases and blast them apart. You might call him an engaged intellectual.

Malm, an ecosocialist, a Leninist and a follower of the Fourth International (via Ernest Mandel), is both an academic and a climate activist. If he has blown anything up in the service of ecosocialism, he has been sensibly silent about it. Cavaillès was eventually caught, imprisoned by the Gestapo, using his time to finish his most important work Sur la logique et la théorie de la science, before being executed by firing squad in February 1944. Malm is in less danger, but violence in the service of class struggle and ecology is likely to involve loss of tenure and lengthy imprisonment.

In Fossil Capital, a detailed scholarly work, Malm shows that the rise of coal was an intrinsic element of capitalism and imperialism. His recently released book White Skin, Black Fuel, co-written with the Zetkin Collective, looks like a detailed account of the role of racism and the far right in the climate crisis. In contrast, How to Blow up a Pipeline is a relatively short and undemanding text, a Sunday afternoon read for leisure, rather than a dense academic account. It lacks weight and this is perhaps no bad thing, short and straightforward reads can advance struggle. However, he gives no advice on how to blow up a pipeline. This isn’t the anarchist cookbook or any account of how to make your own mayhem in any practical sense, such as the well known Ecodefense: A field guide to monkeywrenching. If anything it is a meditation on the desperate times we live in, climate change is unfolding and the chaos of an ecologically destructive capitalist society kills and maims every day. One thinks of a combination of ever more common and ever more extreme weather events, along with a capitalist order that loads the pain onto the must vulnerable.

So in the face of this Malm has written, essentially, a short, readable polemic against despair, lukewarm reformism, geo-engineering, and pacifism. He isn’t necessarily arguing we should all tool up and start removing infrastructure, he is suggesting that violence is an essential moment in politics. In turn, violence against property is endorsed as the ‘violence of the sweetest kind’. The climate movement has been dominated by Gandhi’s advocacy of non-violence; instead, argues Malm, it needs to engage with Frantz Fanon’s celebration of physical force.

Malm is largely convincing in advocating more confrontational tactics but this is hardly a new or even particularly controversial argument. While Marx, Lenin, Mao, and others have suggested that violence is a universal element of social change, it is a poorly hidden secret that the liberal political order celebrates its prisons, police, and armies. Repression is the fate of all working-class movements that do not organise and defend themselves. Malm’s approach seems to follow his own involvement with Climate Camps and similar direct-action environmental movements that have moved into disciplined, mass action against property, centring around his remembrance of Ende Gelände in 2016 – a German movement which translates roughly as ‘here and no further’, that tore down fences and attacked mining facilities in Germany. Thus Malm’s call is not for individual acts of sabotage but mass action against fossil fuel extraction.

A number of criticisms can be made of Malm’s text, however. Veteran British ecosocialist Alan Thornett has criticised the book as advocating violent adventurism, referring to his own experience learning about explosives in the military and also to Irish republicanism. He feels that Malm is encouraging reckless armed struggle rather than a disciplined approach. Given Malm’s emphasis on mass movements incorporating mass property damage, I don’t think Thornett’s cautions are appropriate. Equally Malm might be seen as undervaluing indigenous struggles against climate change, but his book focuses on his own experience in Europe as an activist rather than trying to second guess or academically dissect militancy internationally. However Malm’s account here certainly needs supplementing with similar accounts of ecological militancy from first nation perspectives, such as Nick Estes’ Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. The working class seem remote from How to blow up a pipeline; the power of workers to transform production should have merited more serious discussion in this text

To me, the case for property damage is made well. The intrinsic element of violence in politics hardly needs to be made, and given the urgency of climate change – I agree – we need more Fanon and less Gandhi. This is a relatively light piece of polemical writing and there is no harm in this, however it points to another book that needs to be written. A book that we should write with our actions as much as our words. We need to deepen our strategic understanding, our militant tactics, and our thoughtful methodologies. Ecosocialist politics needs to move from Marx to Lenin. Marx’s ecology is necessary but without Lenin it will fail to approach the question of revolution, as he poses the essential question of how to achieve liberation in its most concrete terms. While neither moralism nor a faithful copy of Lenin’s actions in 1917 are enough, a Leninist approach to ecological struggles – focused on understanding the particular historical situation we live within, an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary capitalism, and a focussed emphasis at breaking it where its link is thinnest – is vital. Any book that avoids this task, however otherwise cogent, pleasing, and inspiring, is a small crime. Malm has written about Lenin elsewhere but I would echo his statement that we need ‘more of Lenin.’ (Malm 2018: 98)

How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Andreas Malm
Verso, 2021
978183976025