Nonviolence should be a tactic of resistance movements, not a holy covenant As famed South African activist Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective.”
Yet today’s climate change movement, advocating against environmental destruction, have calcified into purely nonviolent pacifists. A whole range of tactics have been deployed by successful movements, even excluding violence on people but focusing on property destruction. Was the fall of the Berlin War a violent attack on a wall?
That’s the short, provocative and effective 2021 climate activism book by Andreas Malm entitled: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. It inspired a film of the same name. The movie is a fictional narrative, but the book is a challenging, but important, nonfiction read for activists.
As the author argues, the two most common defenses of nonviolence:
- moral: we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option and
- strategic: it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option
Yet this “strategic pacifism is sanitized history,” Malm writes. All so-called nonviolent movements benefited from “the radical flank effect,” in which a more violent group pushed the issue even farther. In contrast, the nonviolent movement seemed sensible. In this way, even if radical and more centrist groups despite each other, they actually work together.
As the author writes: “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- In the author’s withering critique of the ruling classes: “They can do nothing but burn their way to the end”
- “At what point do we escalate?”
- John Lanchester: “it is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism”
- Author calls the lack of action among activist for such a key problem Lanchestes paradox
- XL pipeline protest lessons, forcing Obama action
- Greta Thunberg turned angrier as the movement progressed (author is complementary)
- September climate protests and Friday for Future: intentionally global and they make pains to make clear it isn’t just rich folk demanding an end to emissions
- German Ende Gelände
- But offensive physical force has been “studiously, scrupulously avoided” , a commitment to absolute non-violence that has stiffened over the cycles of movements
- The “action consensus” for big movements like in Groningen always say they won’t damage machinery or hurt people, and in Groningen like elsewhere this peacefulness has attracted numbers and sympathy from the wider press
- (Authors hometown is Malmo)
- Nonviolence to attract big numbers: “this is the main way forward” but will it be “the only way?”
- Of nonviolence: “Must we tie ourselves to its mast”
- Analysis by Tong on committed emissions by coal plants and other infrastructure already puts 1.5 degrees
- First cycle of climate movement had no figurehead but the second had Bill McKibben, well regarded, led Keystone XL and always nonviolent (inspired by MLK’s idea of “unearned suffering)
- Two common defenses of nonviolence: moral (we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option) and strategic (it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option)
- XR Group formed with inspiration of the slavery analogy that nonviolence isn’t just good now (that it will cause a rebound of support) or in this situation but that history shows it’s always best ; suffragettes and ghandhi also viewed as non violent /-
- Civil rights and anti apartheid movements thought of as non-violent, but author challenges this
- But that’s all contested: Robin Blackburn argues the violent slave led uprisings was the very proof that the Quakers and others used as signals that change was necessary, London suffragettes did use property destruction (window panes and others documented by Diane Atlkinson’s “Rise Up”
- Gandhi didn’t condone violence against British but joined in their wars , to show strength — he was livid when other Indians damaged trains
- In November 1938, Gandhi wrote a letter after Kristallnacht encouraging Jews to stay nonviolent
- Environmentalists using half stories “to look at history with one eye”
- Charles Cobb’s 2014 book “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed” says the primary question of the Civil Rights era was “what is the best way to resist”— and in their context, nonviolence resistance proved an effective tactic more than guerilla warfare but that’s more about the particular needs of that movement and that time (my note: true mass media)
- Author thinks Gandhi’s Indian independence movement is less compelling a nonviolence story than the American Civil Rights movement, but armed Black groups and others protected those nonviolent efforts
- Dr King had guns in his home after a bombing
- “The civil rights movement won the act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.” -MLK and Malcolm x needed each other
- “The radical flank effect”
- Greta Thunberg (who was born in 2003 by the way) has been more Rosa Parks than Angela Davis or Stokley Carmichael
- As Mandela said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective”
- “Strategic pacifism turns this method into a fetish, outside of history, unrelated to time”
- Maxine Burkett, a prominent scholar on climate justice and law, has used an analogy in her work comparing aspects of climate change to slavery as productive economic forces to emphasize the moral and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis and to advocate for “climate reparations”.
- Climate scientist James Hansen argued fossil fuels are like slavery, in that it has no compromise, the whole system needs removal
- Roger Hallum of XR: climate change movement is like overthrowing a dictator, which requires 1-3% of the population to engage (which author is challenging)
- The 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is very influential among climate activists but author sees flaws in true quasi mathematical data set (contrasting violent Gaza independence protests and non violent Slovenia isn’t quite complete)
- Egyptian Revolution’s violent and peaceful factions were “synergetic and complementary” :Neil Ketchley (and this is like Iran and others)
- Ketchley and Ali Kadivar: democratic transitions 1980-2010, most successful movements start peaceful and then use violence if forced
- “Strategic pacifism is sanitized history”
- “From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s, it has been defamed, and equated, unlearned and turned unreal”
- A “deskilling of movements”
- “So here’s what this movement of millions should do for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk,” runs a slogan from Ende Galande, but the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days interrupted production per year. “If we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted, Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies,’ Bill McKibbon has argued, but a carbon tax is so 2004.”
- Damage existing plants too, “or property will cost us the earth”
- “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say, I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.,” wrote one West German columnist in 1968, relaying the words of visiting black power activist
- Why? Increase investment risk, and demonstrate an alternative path
- A pipeline in Colombia was punctured so many times by leftist guerillas that it was nicknamed the flute
- 1936: Palestinians attacked the British mandate pipeline for political combat
- Yemeni Houthi rebels in Sept 2019 used drones to attack Saudi Arabia pipeline
- Author lists many other examples of oil pipeline attacks — Nigeria, Chechnya and others
- The far right has taken violence and extremist attention
- “This is “pathological human irrationality in the midst of this crisis. Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.”
- 2007 campaign to deflate SUV tires, more “direct action as prank” than sabotage but it created a storm of attention
- But why focus on individual consumption (liberal focus), rather than the fossil systems?
- Dario Kenner’s 2019 book Carbon Inequality: “unequal ability to pollute” – tight correlation between income and wealth and CO2 production
- Otto Natire ‘s 2019 report: richest 0.54% emit 1/3 more than poorest half
- 300 super yachts in the world use as much CO2 in a year as 10m residents of Burundi
- 56 countries have a lower per capita annual Co2 output than a single flight between New York and London
- Influential 1991 essay Sunita Narain and Anil: SUV carbon is not the same as methane from subsistence farmers
- Henry Shue used that essay to develop luxury versus subsistence emissions in 1993, but author argues now we have run out of time and so now no one has a “right to emit” (fortunately what we need is not emissions but energy)
- Macron’s 2018 fuel tax viewed as subsistence not luxury emissions tax (yellow jackets)
- Reznick and Montoya: standing rock pipeline explosion
- “Righteous property destruction falls within the boundaries of nonviolence”
- Gospel of John: Jesus overturns the money changers tables and chased them from the temple for selling cattle
- Breaking the leg of a child and a table are not the same: “physical force that injures inanimate objects does not on this view count as violence because it cannot have the results that constitute the prima facie wrongness of what we call violence”
- Was Fall of Berlin Wall violence against the wall?
- Argumentum ad populum (appeal to the people/popularity) is a logical fallacy claiming something is true or good simply because many people believe, like, or do it, rather than providing actual evidence
- … but ultimately because of widespread views “ we must accept the property destruction is violence, and so far is it intentionally exerts physical force to inflict injury on a thing owned by someone who does not want it to happen”
- But injuring a subsistence farmer’s tools or groundwater is far worse violence than a luxury good
- William Smith’s three criteria for direct action:
- disrupting practices that lead to irreversible harm,
- urgency must require protection lawful advocacy (mellower tactics were tried but went nowhere) and
- third a higher charter that wrongdoers have ignored
- Terrorism is “ the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror”
- Just war theory argues separation of combatants and non combatants
- Does the state have more strength in violence? Yes but they have more of everything. It’s about creativity and intention
- Violence and mass mobilization are appendages of the same movement
- “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”
- “the American allergy” to selective political force and sabotage “is a pathology”
- Like MLK in the late 1950s, XR and other pacifist environmental groups need an extremist flank that they can denounce to give them respectability
- Haines: “ a division of labor in which moderates and radicals perform very different roles “, the latter stokes up the crisis to a breaking point, the former offers a way out
- — but per William Smith, such direct action is bound by “community of opinion” (they operate outside the legal framework) and have a “duty to advance” their cause — so overly extreme can reverse a movement
- “Negative radical flank effect”
- Author dissects XR London October 2019 movement disrupting London tube and is rightly critical but also reminds me: the climate people need to go to where the disruption is largest— super rich are in suburban enclave with SUVs in the U.S.
- Author says blocking public transit is “as if the civil rights movement would’ve blockaded the entrance to a black Baptist Church in Alabama or Egyptian revolutionaries trooping away from Tahir to attack an oppositional newspaper.”
- And white middle class action has support to get arrested that others do not
- Climate camp
- Roy Scranton’s 2018 book We’re Doomed, arguing we’ve already missed the climate window and should manage our decline
- The Sorites Paradox (from Greek soros, meaning “heap”) is a philosophical puzzle about vague terms, showing how gradual changes lead to absurd conclusions, like removing one grain of sand at a time from a heap, eventually leaving one grain, yet logic suggests it was never a heap to begin with
- Wallace-Wells: “ the fight is definitely not yet lost – in fact we’ll never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however, warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less”
- Did Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion and the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising fail in losing? Were those killings just?
- “Climate fatalism is for those on top” – aside from religious fatalism, the most at risk climate locations want action
- The ecotage and monkey wrenching of 1990s, something embodid by the degrowth today (2011 Deep Green Resistance book)
- Michael Loadenthal tracked their action : EF!, ALF, ELF never killed anyone but their attacks were widespread. The climate movement took off because it was unrelated and do capture general interest