Running into a Dead End is Not an Escalation of the Climate Justice Movement

A Review of Andreas Malm’s Book How to Blow up a Pipeline as well as Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency

By Stephan Kimmerle

Andreas Malm is clearly a dedicated eco-socialist scholar trying to figure out how to advance the environmental movement. His radical ideas have resonated with a growing audience of eco-socialists who are deeply worried about the failure of governments and business leaders to take the dramatic actions needed to avert a climate catastrophe. Naomi Klein quotes Andreas Malm in her book This Changes Everything and describes him as “one of the most original thinkers on the subject” of climate change.

Andreas Malm outlines the need to escalate the movement to tackle climate change in his book How to Blow up a Pipeline (published by Verso, 2021). Some of the ideas mentioned also appear in Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency (Verso, 2020). In these works, Malm evokes the romanticism of individuals engaging in eco-sabotage, which he regards as an “escalation” of the movement to fight the climate crisis. Yet Malm doesn’t grapple with the question of how to build a powerful mass environmental movement. Despite using the harsh rhetoric of “war communism” and “eco-Leninism,” he offers little advice on how socialism or workers’ power can take on the fossil fuel industry.

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Some Resources:

• Andreas Malm published his book How to Blow up a Pipeline early 2021 (Verso). Before that, Andreas Malm published a pamphlet called Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency (Verso, 2020). 
• James Wilt wrote a review on March 3, 2021, in Canadian Dimension: How to blow up a movement: Andreas Malm’s new book dreams of sabotage but ignores consequences. 
• Andreas Malm was interviewed by Rupture Radio about his books, published on March 15, 2021. The magazine Rupture published a short version of the interview and a review of the book How to Blow up a Pipeline. 
• Alan Thornett wrote a review on February 15, 2021, for the Global Ecosocialist Network, with the subtitle A Reckless Short Cut

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Fighting to Accept Scarcity?

Andreas Malm uses the term “war communism” to include, on the one side, the need to scale back production and ordinary people’s living conditions and, on the other, taking drastic measures in the emergency situation created by the climate crisis.

This is an elitist idea: A self-declared vanguard will act — and the masses can disown those actions.

Andreas sets up this argument by criticizing the opposite trend among some environmentalists, including some Marxists, who argue for eco-modernism. That belief is that there are technical solutions (carbon storage, fusion energy, electric cars, etc.) that would allow us to avoid basic changes to our current model of mass production and honestly confronting our relationship between the environment and humanity.

Most Marxists, however, including Marx and Engels themselves, do not share the eco-modernist vision. Given the scale and methods that have caused the environmental disaster capitalism has created, they understand the eco-modern strategy is neither realistic nor possible. Engels himself wrote extensively about the interconnected relationship between humans and nature and how capitalism ignores the repercussions of its destruction of the environment — until the repercussions arrive. Technological advances alone will not be enough to avert the climate crisis. The unsustainability of a global economy based on fossil fuels will require not just technological change, but also a fundamental restructuring of the whole infrastructure of an economy based on fossil fuel capital.

In arguing against eco-modernism, Andreas Malm mistakenly concludes that we have to replace the endless search for profits and growth under capitalism, with the opposite — a deliberate approach that scales back consumption and production.

Fortunately, there is a much better alternative. One of the most popular slogans in the movement to combat climate change is the Green New Deal (GND). Even in the liberal form popularized by non-Marxists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, the GND promotes a transition to a carbon neutral economy in ten years, job guarantees for all with full union rights, a just transition focused on BIPOC communities, Medicare for All (free, high quality health care), food security for all, affordable green housing for all, free education and more.

How does scaling back consumption and production work in such a scenario? There is a lot of production that can be virtually eliminated, like advertisements, packaging, the weapons industry, and so on. However, there is also a need to increase production of other goods and services: childcare, elderly care, health care, teaching jobs that reduce class size, reforestation, a massive build-out of high quality affordable housing, and so on. The key is that we’ll be producing and consuming very differently but with an increase in sustainable wealth for the vast majority of people around the globe, even in advanced capitalist countries.

The Green New Deal in its best form is environmentally sound (the timeline and the measures proposed in the GND are based on science and offer a path to limit the damage). It also appeals politically to those focused on economic, gender, and racial justice, upholding the potential of a working-class based, powerful movement that takes on all forms of oppression. Andreas Malm himself calls it “the best case scenario.”

Calls for “war communism” or other overwrought terminology appears to emanate from a self-declared revolutionary who never actually grasped the history of war communism, and lacks faith in the ability of working people to build a fighting ecological movement.

Eco-Sabotage — an Elitist Strategy

There’s little analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the climate movement and its organizations globally in Malm’s How to Blow up a Pipeline. Instead he focuses on one question: pacifism versus violent action. It is in this context that Malm makes an argument for an “escalation” of the struggle. His argument for sabotaging property flirts with some historical examples of terrorism in 1970’s Europe, drawing exactly the wrong conclusions. Andreas Malm writes (my emphasis):

Extremism can make a movement look so distasteful as to deny it all influence. There is no lack of examples of movements shooting themselves in the foot. Because of the magnitude of the stakes in the climate crisis, negative effects could be unusually ruinous here. Militant formations on the flank of this movement would thus have to be especially circumspect and mindful of the principles laid down by, for instance, William Smith: practitioners of direct action are responsible before their ‘community of opinion’ and bound by the duty to advance, not retard, its cause. They may dive into a campaign of property destruction on condition of being prepared to amend or call it off, if it becomes clear that it will draw too much retaliation, vilification, embarrassment on the movement. Now this presents militants with a genuine dilemma. On the one hand, they have to trust the mainstream to reproach and disown them — a seal of the division of labor — but on the other, there might be no better source of information about deleterious consequences for the movement as a whole. When do they ignore the censure and proceed, satisfied? When do they hear it and adjust? If not a catch-22, it is certainly another tightrope. But then no one said militancy should be casual or comfortable.

The mainstream should “reproach” and publicly “disown” them, but still silently agree with them — and build on them?
This is an elitist idea: A self-declared vanguard will act — and the masses can disown those actions, but somehow these actions will still help to build a mass movement?

The actual experience from the 1970s is clear — while terrorist groups were successful in capturing some radicals’ attention, their message was that change comes from a small group of militants, rather than the people’s mass struggle. In most cases, however, the state apparatus and the ideological machine of capitalist society
used the violence by the terrorists to cut off the more advanced, impatient layers of the movement from having any influence in the larger movement.

On Violence

But if we reject left-wing sabotage by a small group as a way forward, would that leave us in the camp of pacifism? Reading Andreas Malm, it appears that these are the only two options. He writes powerfully against pacifism. He refers to past struggles against apartheid, against slavery, against the Shah in Iran, and many other movements that went beyond the framework of pacifism and employed collective resistance, including armed resistance. But there’s a difference between the armed resistance of a movement and the individualized action he advocates which he claims would help overcome the shortcomings of the movement.

In the US Civil War, no one in his right mind would have argued that the movement to abolish slavery should have “reproached” and “disowned” the violence of the Northern army. Similarly in the battle against apartheid, the first Intifada of Palestinians, and other revolutionary struggles, resistance, including armed resistance, was employed by mass movements.

In contrast, the elitist action that Andreas Malm promotes is offered as a substitute for the agency of the masses, let alone their accountability.

Malm offers no strategy to win over a majority of the working class to take action collectively.

On the left, there are two ways to discuss violence. Unfortunately, Andreas Malm falls in the camp of those who write abstractly about the necessity of violence as a tool in itself to “escalate” the struggle. This lack of understanding of the history and context of violence helps the ruling classes to portray leading activists in these movements as alien to the broader mass struggle.

On the other side, there are people writing about, defending, and using self-defense — often and rightfully not peaceful nor pacifist — such as striking workers, people protesting pipelines or attacks on Indigenous people, anti-racist rallies defending themselves against attacks by police or fascists. The second approach is one that most people understand; the right to defend yourself in a broader sense, meaning you don’t have to wait to be attacked, but can mount a militant defense in expectation of such attacks.

The first approach disarms movements, cutting off the more politically advanced activists from broader layers of society. The second approach empowers activists collectively.

Diversity of Tactics?

Andreas Malm also employs a familiar argument: “diversity of tactics.” He views peaceful mass resistance, mass civil disobedience, strike action, and the destruction of property by small groups as all equally valid tactics that we should all welcome rather than judging them objectively.

The “diversity of tactics” slogan has periodically cropped up over the last few decades among militants and some anarchist groups in the antiwar and anti-globalization movement, some environmental struggles, and the anti-fascist movement. It ignores the necessity of pursuing a strategy that actually helps activists develop the struggle and win majority support from the working class.

It allows angry minorities to pursue whatever strategy and tactics they want, including the right to commit property destruction by claiming the right to do whatever they perceive as the necessary next step, regardless of how the majority of the movement views this. This is not an approach that holds leaders and activists accountable to a movement; instead it weakens movements, and in fact divides them.

Without any hope that the working class could transform society, what is left of Andreas Malm’s harsh language about “Eco-Leninism” and “war communism”?

No Working Class

The current rift between the climate justice movement and the labor movement is a huge obstacle. How can the power of the working class be brought together with the energy and enthusiasm of the environmental movement? Too many unions and union leaders are willing to be held hostage by “their” employers, bound to the fossil fuel, car, and military industrial complexes. However, this issue is of no interest to Andreas Malm’s argument about an “escalation” of the struggle because the working class is not the agent for change in Andreas Malm’s strategy. In Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, he describes how the state needs to take measures to fight the climate crisis and then asks:

But what state? We have just argued that the capitalist state is constitutionally incapable of taking these steps. And yet there is no other form of state on offer. No workers’ state based on soviets will be miraculously born in the night. No dual power of the democratic organs of the proletariat seems likely to materialize anytime soon, if ever. Waiting for it would be both delusional and criminal, and so all we have to work with is the dreary bourgeois state, tethered to the circuits of capital as always.

There would have to be popular pressure brought to bear on it, shifting the balance of forces condensed in it, forcing apparatuses to cut the tethers and begin to move, using the plurality of methods already hinted at (some further outlined by the present author in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire). But this would clearly be a departure from the classical program of demolishing the state and building another — one of several elements of Leninism that seem ripe (or overripe) for their own obituaries.

In the podcast interview with Rupture Radio, Malm argues the same point that a workers’ state will not arise anytime soon “because the left is so incredibly weak and the working class is so deeply pushed back and on the retreat politically and to some extent, decomposing at least as an organized social force.”

The “diversity of tactics” slogan allows angry minorities to pursue whatever strategy and tactics they want.
Andreas Malm offers no vision or strategy to win over a majority of the working class to take action collectively against climate change. Free from considering how to do that, and failing to recognize the struggle of working people as the source of power for change, he instead plays with ideas of property destruction. This neither speaks to the actual struggle to build movements nor to crystallize lessons for an experienced layer of activists rooted in those movements.
Without any hope that the working class could transform society, what is left of Andreas Malm’s harsh language about “Eco-Leninism” and “war communism”? The essence of Leninism has been removed — the power of the working class and its state. There is no historical parallel today with the “war communism” of the early Soviet Union which fought a civil war and imperialist intervention to defend the achievements of the Russian Revolution. Lenin and Trotsky saw “war communism” as a tragic necessity to preserve the improvements of socialism and democracy.

The claim to follow the example of “war communism” is in fact an attempt to avoid the difficult issues of how to build an anti-capitalist mass movement against the fossil fuel industry. The strategy offered for the growing mass movement that apparently disavows such actions, can’t direct or control such actions, can’t hold anyone accountable, can’t even own the successes if they were to happen since they disowned the tactics in the first place. This is not a strategy for the climate justice movement. It’s a dead end.