like its elegantly confrontational title, Malm’s book is articulate and captivating. for anyone who is on the fence about their own feelings towards property destruction in the name of activism/resistance, How to Blow Up a Pipeline will likely be a deciding factor. unfortunately, Malm is so preoccupied with legitimizing property destruction that he starts off with a few assumptions to make his audience more comfortable, such as “random acts of destruction are less effective than targeted acts of destruction” and “hurting humans is bad and should be avoided.” If his goal is to nudge centrist climate activists (and others) gradually to the radical left then this makes some sense; it takes a particular kind of coward to be involved in social justice while still having concerns about the sanctity of property, and unfortunately this is the majority of people. Trying to precipitate change by winning over a percentage of this crowd to a slightly more serious ideology is a real tactic and not one I’m dismissive of. But for me, I think that stopping short of sanctioning violence against others is despicable and useless if taken at face value. It’s that sort of position that people fall back on if Israeli children are killed, for example, or for that matter white settler children in the U.S., French children in Algeria, British children in India, and so on throughout history. Moral affront is easy and supports the status quo; violence, in the majority of cases, is necessary, or if not necessary then at least not deplorable when you get down to it.

There is also the larger issue with Malm’s work, which takes issue with the ahistorical focus on non-violence in climate activism and suggests, as a well-tried tactic, violence. I think that pulling back, it is possible to argue that neither violence nor non-violence have had the direct effect on changing regimes, policies, etc. that people think they have. There are larger (and smaller) historical forces at play that contribute equally to the swift inversion of the status quo. Culture, finance, climate, as well as smaller bits of chance like the natural deaths of potentates, sometimes make all the difference and are beyond activism in the traditional sense. So while I like Malm’s argument that non-violence needs a violent flank, a smaller and more radical company willing to destroy (and I say, kill), I think that he assumes this is sufficient to push through change and I don’t buy into the violent/non-violent binary enough to agree.