Can I Tell You “How to Blow Up a Pipeline?
By Christopher L. Fici, Ph.D
Can I?
Am I allowed to tell you about this book “How To Blow Up a Pipeline,” by the Swedish student of human ecology Andreas Malm? (Also the author of Fossil Capital) Will I get put onto some kind of list? Will goons from the NSA abduct me in the alleys of DC when the shit hits the fan and I’m just out for a walk?
I even used that old lady cash to pay for this at Codex Books on Bleecker Street (alongside Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven by Uta Hanke-Heinemann). I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t get tracked for such a provocative purchase in the cybermatrix if I just used cash.
But let me confess. When I have been in a pub reading this book, I have both surreptitiously kept the cover hidden, but also at times I have brazenly shown off what I was reading for anyone who might be looking. I imagine I was trying to show off exactly which part of the avant-garde I was standing on.
Because what would you think if you saw someone reading this book at a pub? Or on an airplane? Sitting fervently on a park bench in a hoodie with a fifteen-day old shadow?
It’s a brilliant fucking title. It strikes at our ordinary expected loyalties. It’s a brilliant title for the actual book that it actually is. This is not a technical manual concerning the electronics, explosive materials, tactics, and strategies that one will require to directly attack and sabotage the planetary fossil-fuel tentacle-web. It’s not the Anarchist Cookbook for the Age of Climate Catastrophe. Rather it is the philosophical justification for those who might create and utilize such a cookbook.
Malm’s argument strikes at the heart of the Idol of Property. His essential argument is that "one reason why climate stabilisation appears such a frightfully daunting challenge is that no state seems prepared to even float this idea, because capitalist property has the status of the ultimate sacred realm." Aka the Market as God as Harvey Cox said a few moons ago.
Ah, so it is theological.
Malm goes on:
"Who dares to throw it on the scrapheap? What government is willing to send in its forces to ensure the forfeiture of this amount of profit? And so there must be someone who breaks the spell: 'Sabotage', writes R.H Lossin, one of the finest contemporary scholars in the field, 'is a sort of prefigurative, if temporary, seizure of property. It is'-in reference to the climate emergency- 'both a logical, justifiable and effective form of resistance and a direct affront to the sanctity of capitalist ownership…A refiner deprived of electricity, a digger in pieces: the stranding of assets is possible, after all.’ Property does not stand above the earth; there is no technical or natural or divine law that makes it inviolable in this emergency. If states cannot on their own initiative open up the fences, others will have to do it for them. Or property will cost us the earth.” (68)
He is also deliberately striking at the “idol” of nonviolent resistance. This may be just as provocative as his assault at the Idol of Property
Malm asks a simple but exquisitely complicated question: if the necessity to respond effectively i.e to reverse, mitigate, and justly adapt to our emerging climate catastrophe only grows more dramatic by the day, when are we justified in abandoning nonviolent strategies and methods in our fight for climate justice?
In essence, when it is absolutely necessary and justified to blow up the fucking pipelines?
Malm argues that it is naive to think all successful resistance and oppression and injustice is always blessedly nonviolent. The white-hot glee of property destruction was certainly present, in forms both strategic and anarchic. “in the popular uprisings that swirled across the globe in 2019, not only did crowds smash boutiques in Beirut with iron bars, set fire to SUVs in the posh neighborhoods overlooking Port-au-Prince…They also reveled in creative old-new technologies of warfare without guns. In Santiago, they used up to fifty handheld lasers to bring down police drones from the sky. In Hong Kong, they filled streets with ‘mini Stonehenges’-one brick laid horizontally over two standing ones-to block the path of police vehicles, and built giant wooden catapults, medieval-style, to fling petrol bombs towards the lines of the Chinese state.
No law says that symmetry in this field can never be overturned from below, nor that violence must conflict with the strength of numbers. Rather, unarmed collective violence is one expression of that strength, one way of bringing down the seemingly invincible. Property destruction has always been essential to it. Can it acquire mass proportions in the climate struggle? Only if the movement first overcomes the taboo against it.” (112-113)
At this very moment, who can demand that the people of Ukraine simply sit down and pray in front of Russian soldiers.? A single-minded devotion to nonviolence in Ukraine right now is absurd. Even Gandhi would agree.
Anyone truly and deeply concerned with the many potential futures which can emerge in the next few decades must wrestle with this one excruciating question. Will we be required to resort to the destruction of local, regional, and planetary fossil-fuel infrastructure in order to protect and preserve the future against the totalitarian edge in the age of climate catastrophe?
Because if we agree with the necessity to blow up the pipelines, philosophically both/and practically, then we are agreeing to attack and dismantle the Great Golden Idol Itself: the Idol of Mammon, the Idol of Private Property, the Idol that has the guns and the gangs and the money and the nukes.
Yet will we have a choice? Can we achieve any semblance of lasting and secure climate justice on both a local and a planetary scale through purely nonviolent techniques? Certainly ahimsa will never leave the toolkit. But will we be required to do more, to support tactics and ideas which go against all of our comfort zones. Which go against all of our bougie, neoliberal, and meta attachments, assumptions, and preferences? (The “we” and “our” here refers to anyone with any economic/cultural/spiritual privilege. You know who you are: fridge is full, trash is full, car is full of petrol)
So many of us worship the Idol. So many of us have no idea how much we depend on the Idol.
Yet the kids from the future are already here. The ones who are fucking pissed. The ones who will blow up the pipelines. They are trying to tell us that this is going to have to happen sooner rather than later.
I’m debating whether I should even seek a place to publish this essay. Because what if I’m put onto a list? What if that fucks up my precarious, late-stage capitalist life?
***
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s missive from the near-future The Ministry for the Future, Frank May, one of the rare survivors of a heat wave which kills over ten million people in India, has become the walking dead. Unspeakably traumatized by his survivor’s guilt, he is merely a shell for the rage which is all that is left of his personality. Rage at the criminals who have created such a culture and such an economy which has had such an effect on Earth Systems that millions of people could experience death in such a ghastly, unjust, and atrocious way.
Frank kidnaps Mary Murphy, the Irish head of the newly formed Ministry for the Future, created under the auspices of the Paris Agreement to accelerate the decarbonization of the planetary economy in the interests of all future generations, human, creature and plant alike. Taking Mary back to her own apartment, this conversation ensues:
Frank: “It’s not enough. Your efforts aren’t slowing the damage fast enough. They aren’t creating fixes fast enough. You can see that, because everyone can see it. Things don’t change, we’re still on track for a mass extinction event, we’re in the extinctions already. That’s what I mean by not enough. So why don’t you do something more?”
Mary: ‘We’re doing everything we can think of.’
‘But that either means you can’t think of obvious things, or you have thought of them and you won’t do them.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like identifying the worst criminals in the extinction event and going after them.’
‘We do that.’
‘With lawsuits?’
‘Yes, with lawsuits, and sanctions, and publicity campaigns, and-’
‘What about targeted assassinations?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why of course? Some of these people are committing crimes that will end up killing millions? They spend their entire lives working hard to perpetuate a system that will end in mass death.’
‘Violence begets violence,’ Mary said. ‘It cycles forever. So here we are.’
‘Having lost that battle. But look, the violence of carbon burning kills many more people that any punishment for capital crimes ever would. So really your morality is just a kind of surrender.’
She shrugged. ‘I believe in the rule of law.’”
Where do you stand on the spectrum of Frank and Mary’s viewpoints? How far would you be willing to go for the sake of climate justice? For the sake of the seven generations ahead?
The kids are speaking to us from the future. They are fucking pissed and they are fucking here and they are beginning to appear in our imaginations. The climate warrior and the climate refugee of the near-future are emerging into our everyday consciousness. They are now the most vibrant and relevant subjects in our philosophizing, our sci-fi, our cli-fi, our fiction/non fiction, our ethics, our theology, our vision, and our physics.
The first thing they are asking of us is this: why aren’t you listening to the climate refugees already in your midst? The peoples of the Niger Delta. The descendents of Ken Saro-Wira. Tuvalu and Kiribati and Vanuatu and the Maldives. Witness to these peoples. Witness to the profound sin of the selfishness of carbon and the peoples who wield it without any repentance.
The second question they are asking of us is why we are so wedded to the sacred cow of nonviolence? The obvious historical fact, as highlighted by Malm, is that the destruction of property and the wider array of violent methods has always been a vital element of the energy of revolution. Malm highlights how deeply embedded the principle of ahimsa is within the climate justice movement at large today. It is practically the core strategic and spiritual principle at the center of climate justice. This is not in anyway wrong or misguided. The climate justice movement moves in the stream of a great and grand tradition of nonviolent resistance. Nonviolent resistance will always be at the fulcrum of climate justice. What may be misguided is a total sense of devotion towards nonviolent resistance which precludes the necessity of property destruction.
As someone who instinctually embraces the heterodox, I feel it doesn’t do any immediate or ultimate good to make nonviolent resistance into some kind of impregnable orthodoxy.
Are we living with a myth that nonviolent resistance is the only true model/strategy which can wield urgent social change local and planetary? It feels like slapping Gandhi in the face to even raise the question of a violence-oriented strategy, even if the only things being destroyed are pipelines, refineries, profit margins, the hurt feelings of fossil-fuel executives, and the very cage which keeps us caged in mass-man society.
The assets are the Idol. The wealth which comes from the assets are the Idol. The property we hold can be the Idol if we value our property more than our neighbor’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our neighbors, human, creaturely, and otherwise, deserve our neighbor-love. This isn’t just sentimental, pop-song love, although a caress, a kiss, a pat on the bum between loving, consensual adults is always revolutionary. There was a reason the erotic was the most revolutionary element and therefore the most feared and repressed of all experiences in 1984. There is a reason the erotic is the most feared and the most repressed and most misunderstood of all experiences when it comes to anything connected to religion/spirituality.
The theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda argues that we should understand neighbor-love as an interpersonal and economic norm which “has two faces: compassion and justice. Neighbor-love as an ecological norm adds a third: Earth’s well-being. We have only begun to uncover the conundrums inherent in this third face of love.” (Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation, 201)
This is love which is on fire, “a fire in the bones” as Cornel West says. Whatever you may think of God in the 21st Century, (one can imagine a “God is Canceled” I don’t know meme on Tik Tok to rival the cultural impact of the classic “Is God Dead?” Time magazine cover) there is more than enough scriptural evidence that the Divine gets royally pissed on the regular at the Idol. The prophets of the Old Testament share a common rage against the machine of idolatry in the form of corruptive power and privilege. God takes sides in the struggle for justice. God does not sit in God’s own power and privilege. God uses God’s power and privilege to walk with those fighting for justice. Any priest or yoga teacher who tells you something different is someone to be avoided at all costs.
The ikon below was in Lampman Chapel during my time at Union Theological Seminary. The Christ Pantocrator. One side of his face is peaceful, tired, melancholy, the other side is cynical, exhausted, intensely angry and focused. A person who has seen and been through some shit. A person who has had quite enough with how unjust human beings are to each other. Jesus had a lot of fire in his bones, a fire obscured by centuries upon centuries of the fossilization of white supremacy, clericalism and bureaucratic fetishism. Jesus was a personality whose strategy and mission also included property destruction. Think of Jesus using his whip to clear out the profiteers from the gates of the Temple.
I also think of Krishna chewing out Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, ordering him to fight and kill for the sake of dharma, for the sake of justice. For all the kaleidoscopic interpretations of the Gita, there is still that basic primal level where Arjuna has to pick up his bow and kill those people who are committing and have committed adharma or injustice.
It is an empirical and philosophical truth that nonviolence works. Ask Gandhi. Ask King. Ask the Chipko women.
It is also an historically empirical truth that what is non-nonviolent also works. It is undeniable that strategic property destruction is a timely and timeless technique to dismantle and disable the code of power. Property destruction is violence. The question for us is whether this in an unacceptable form of violence.
The scholar Jose-Antonio Orosco, in his essay “Cesar Chavez and Principles Nonviolent Strategy” from the volume Nonviolence in Theory and Practice, argues that those who take an absolutist position in favor of nonviolent resistance:
“…fail to make a distinction between violence toward property and violence toward human beings and, then, assume that the former almost always leads to the latter…Absolutists fail to appreciate how the production of private property in our world systematically violates human rights. Once we can recognize that violence toward things is not the same as violence toward people, and that not all property rights deserve respect, especially if is property that is created and sustained through the exploitation of human beings, then property destruction can be classified as a form of civil disobedience rather than as a crime."
India’s independence was not entirely won by Gandhi’s salt march and hunger strike model. The successes of the Civil Rights Movement were supported by the ever-present threat of the “Fire Next Time.” Nonviolence and violence percolate together in the fight for justice. How do we handle this combustible mix? What are the lines that we would draw to fight for climate justice? What if your analysis is that climate criminals, the scions of the fossil-fuel industries and all the tentacles of political, economic, and cultural ideology which support them, are adjacent/equivalent to being war criminals? Are they even worse? My primary fear for the days and years and decades ahead is that these interests will amplify the code of power into a hyper-authoritarian key aka “lifeboat politics.” What would you be willing to do to stop this?
Malm’s conclusion is unmistakable:
“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.” (161)
We should not be afraid to welcome this energy into our work for climate justice. This energy is present whether we in the privileged cocoons like it or not. Our question is how we assist those rooted in justice, rooted in Earth and cosmos, and rooted in radical love to harness that energy in the most effective, just, and immediate way.
It’s okay to say you agree with blowing up the pipelines. The moral arc bends our way more and more each day. We should not be afraid.