Can the earth be saved with nonviolence?
The climate movement has embraced nonviolent resistance as a tactic. Some radicals are itching to go further.
In 2020, the renowned Swedish climate activist and Marxist Andreas Malm published a book with a spectacularly provocative title: How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
The book serves less as a how-to guide (there are no diagrams for building bombs here) and more as an argument in favor of sabotage as a valid tool in the activist’s toolkit. The pipeline, in Malm’s formulation, is not just a literal pipeline, but the pipeline from new fossil fuel projects like mines, wells, and infrastructure, to future fossil fuel emissions. This, he believes, desperately needs blowing up.
His justification is simple and convincing: if you believe, as virtually all climate activists and scientists do, that the consequences of doing nothing about climate change are societal collapse and potentially the extinction of the human species, then activists should employ all tools at their disposal to prevent that from happening.
His argument is primarily leveled against perhaps the most influential contemporary theorists of nonviolence, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who in 2012 wrote the influential Why Civil Resistance Works, and laid out the case for engaging in nonviolence. That book has become something of a bible to many climate activists, particularly those in groups like Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement.
The debate has defined progressive movements for nearly a century now — not only whether violence can be justified in the service of change, but also whether it is tactically necessary for achieving one’s ends.
The argument for nonviolence
Chenoweth and Stephan’s argument also happens to be simple and convincing: after running the numbers on major conflicts since 1940, they found that nonviolent civil resistance has been twice as effective as violent resistance in achieving its ends. And when violent resistance does achieve its goals, it is more likely to result in a slide towards autocracy and dictatorship, or in some sort of humanitarian catastrophe. The majority of their work is an attempt to explain why this might be the case.
First and foremost: Most people view nonviolent campaigns as holding a moral high ground, especially over often violent government forces. As such, they have a much lower bar to entry than violent campaigns and they get way more participants than say, guerrilla armies or street fighters do.
Chenoweth and Stephan found that if a nonviolent campaign managed to pull out as little as 3.5% of its total population for a major event — say a march or a demonstration, or coordinated marches across the country — then the campaign almost always succeeded.
They are also clear that, in order for a campaign to succeed, it needs to use diverse tactics. You can’t just get 3.5% of the country to your protest and give up. You need to also build mutual aid networks, have a media strategy, hold strategic demonstrations, orchestrate boycotts, organize strikes, and build alternative political structures. If a movement is strategic, they’ll get more and more of the general public’s support, and they’ll eventually start eroding their opponents power.
Nonviolent campaigns are not designed to appeal to the goodness in their opponents hearts, and they are not peaceful “kumbaya” drum circles. They are often confrontational, disruptive, and heated, less focused on love and hugs than on strategically eroding an oppressor’s power base. As an example: in the case of civil rights, the strategy was never to make the racists stop being racist — it was to take their power away. So protesters didn’t focus on flipping racist elected officials, cops, or klansmen1, but instead making them unpalatable to local businessmen, who saw that racist policies hurt their bottom line after a boycott or a sit-in.
Chenoweth and Stephan found that nonviolent campaigns are effective in democratic and autocratic societies, and tend to be more resilient in the face of violent repression than violent campaigns. On this basis, their finding’s have been wholeheartedly adopted by a climate movement which wishes not just to stop the destruction of the earth, but build a better earth underneath.
The argument for violence (against property)
As a climate activist, Malm has, of course, read Chenoweth and Stephan, and while he is a seasoned veteran in the types of actions they advocate for, he still believes that in some cases, violence — specifically, sabotage — is a valid tool for activist campaigns to employ.
Malm’s argument is that the great “nonviolent” movements, whether that be the fight against apartheid, the fight for civil rights, the fight for women’s suffrage, have all had a large peaceful element with a smaller violent element standing behind it, cracking its knuckles.
Martin Luther King, Jr., the logic goes, would not have been as appealing to the whites in power if there hadn’t been black nationalists like Malcolm X ready to scoop up King’s frustrated supporters when the nonviolent movement failed to make any progress.
Malm’s strongest argument is that the fight against fossil fuels is not a fight against a set of unjust laws, or an oppressive dictator, which is where Chenoweth and Stephan pull their data from. Instead, it’s a fight against a productive economic force. So the only real comparison one can draw historically is the fight to end slavery:
Fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40 per cent or 60 per cent. All of it must go.
He goes on:
Fossil fuels will not be abolished in a week or two (nor was slavery). It won’t conclude in miraculous fashion, because fossil fuels are not a rickety superstructure like the regime of Slobodan Milošević, swept away by the blow from people who aspire to basic freedoms shared by most everyone else. Business-as-usual is not a sideshow to bourgeois democracy, a relic from an authoritarian age that requires correction — it is the material form of contemporary capitalism, neither more nor less.
Malm advocates not for violence against the police, the state, or even billionaire capitalists, but for violence against their property. The idea is that in a capitalist society, we’ve grown to see someone’s possessions as indistinguishable from their person.
He admits that this is a form of violence, in that it exerts physical force on a thing with the intent of injuring it, but says that it is fundamentally morally different than violence against a person: it’s one thing to set a rich man’s SUV on fire, it’s an entirely different thing to set fire to him.
Destruction of property, he believes, only carries the same moral weight if it’s against something that a person’s life depends on: say, their food stores, the well they use for water, the air they breathe. Climate change, of course, threatens all three.
His criticism of the nonviolence advocates is that the movements they are pulling data from virtually always included property destruction and sabotage:
Chenoweth and Stephan submit that ‘violent tactics include bombings, shootings, kidnappings, physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm to people and property’, which makes it even more impressive that they can name a single case of nonviolence. The fall of the Berlin Wall? People didn’t caress the cement.
Malm does not advocate for violence against people, particularly innocents, saying “it would be catastrophic for the movement if any part of it used terrorism,” but points out that the rich and powerful — think Donald Trump — would call any act of activist sabotage or property destruction terrorism, regardless of whether it hurt a single person.
Does it even matter which side is right?
It is normal and healthy for movements to have disagreements about strategy and tactics. Given that Malm is a Marxist and Stephan at one point worked for Obama’s Department of State in Afghanistan, it’s no wonder that these two camps are not particularly simpatico.
What’s interesting about this debate is that it matters a lot less who is right, and a lot more that the debate is happening. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. did butt heads, but their respective movements both helped move the dial on civil rights. They didn’t have to like each other for this to be the case.
Malm himself admits that radical saboteurs are effectively taking one for the team by making their opponents on the peaceful side of the movement more respectable:
It is the duty of the erstwhile radicals to denounce the new flank and accuse it of undermining their endeavours. If they were to applaud the troublemakers who threaten or commit acts of violence, they would not gain the edge of respectability and receive no invitation to the policy-making chambers.
This was to an extent the strategy of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army during the Troubles in Ireland. Sinn Fein denied all connection to the IRA, but their collusion with the renowned terrorist group was an open secret2. Their longtime leader, Gerry Adams, was widely known to have been a leader in the militia prior to his rise in the political wing. But the nominal division between the two allowed Sinn Fein to capitalize on situations that the militant IRA created. Peaceniks and militants may hate each other, but their relationship, if managed well, is often symbiotic and mutually beneficial.
As a final note: even though Malm’s book was published under three years ago, it has already been made into a movie. The movie features a group of environmental activists who, tired of protesting and handing out flyers, decide to sabotage a section of Texas pipeline. It is a surprisingly excellent thriller, and you can watch it on Hulu.
Sometimes one person was all three!
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is an absolutely fantastic account of the tensions this caused during the peacemaking process.
