Sabotage is the wrong climate radicalism

Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence, Vol. 2, 2024, pp. 264-268

This is part of a forum on Andreas Malm's book How to blow up a pipeline.

pdf of the forum

Brian Martin


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The climate movement is an amazing social phenomenon. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring is sometimes cited as the trigger for the modern environmental movement; at that time, climate change was not even on the agenda. Environmentalists in the 1960s and 1970s were concerned about pesticides, air pollution, forestry, species extinction, nuclear power, whaling and a host of other issues. Even for those concerned about the environmental effects of burning coal, oil and gas — the fossil fuels — the possibility of global warming decades hence was, for most campaigners, hypothetical. If mentioned at all, it was an argument why exponential growth in the use of fossil fuels could not continue indefinitely.

Over the subsequent decades, concern about climate change gradually increased in salience until, in the 2020s, it has become the biggest environmental issue worldwide, one causing angst among large numbers of people, one leading to unprecedented levels of popular support and activism. This is remarkable for two main reasons. First, the most severe effects of global warming will affect future generations. Unlike labour or feminist activism, the motivation is less about injustice today and more about injustice in the future (although extreme climate events are admittedly increasingly frequent). Second, until recently, few climate concerns have been based on overt injustices that trigger public outrage. The murder of George Floyd motivated the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #MeToo movement was motivated by high-profile reports of sexual harassment and rape. Not so the climate movement, for which one of the few motivational symbols is polar bears sitting on ice floes.

What the climate movement has in common with other social movements is that it confronts incredibly powerful opponents with vested interests. Active opponents of the movement are fossil-fuel companies and complicit governments. To these can be added the involvement of large numbers of people in consumerist societies, built around high-energy lifestyles.

To add to the challenge, climate change is seen by campaigners as an emergency. If drastic action is not taken today, or in the next few years, the consequences decades hence may be catastrophic. This leads directly to another challenge.

Action?

Given that climate action is seen as a moral imperative, and furthermore as responding to an emergency, what should be done? Conventional political action — including writing letters and articles, lobbying, election campaigning, voting and petitions — is one option. However, it is not working rapidly enough. The reason is obvious. Companies, governments and many citizens have a stake in the continued use of fossil fuels, and companies have more lobbying capacity than activist groups. Another option is nonviolent action, including boycotts, strikes and physically intervening to hinder operations, like coal mining and export, that generate greenhouse gases. Many courageous campaigners have put their bodies on the line. But this too seems insufficient to stop the fossil-fuel juggernaut.

Enter Andreas Malm, whose 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline presents a case for using sabotage as part of climate activism. Malm is not the only such advocate, but his book is the most articulate and influential voice, so it is worthwhile examining his arguments.

Malm’s argument is straightforward: climate action is both necessary and urgent, but neither conventional nor nonviolent action has been enough. Therefore — this is the crucial step — stronger action is needed, and stronger for Malm means sabotage should be part of climate activists’ repertoire.

Malm is careful to say that saboteurs should always avoid harming humans. The immediate target is objects, like pipelines. Sabotage does have an indirect effect on humans, influencing their future decisions. The key question concerns this influence. Who is influenced and how? Malm assumes sabotage will raise the costs of climate-damaging activities, causing those involved to alter their behaviour in the direction of reducing climate impacts.

He tells of his own involvement in a campaign in which activists went to wealthy suburbs of Stockholm and slashed the tyres of SUVs, leaving leaflets explaining the need to switch to climate-friendly vehicles. This campaign had, in effect, two components: damaging vehicles that contribute to global warming, and sending a message to SUV owners. Malm does not report on any follow-ups by the saboteurs on whether SUV owners switched to smaller vehicles, so we don’t know whether the first component did anything except increase purchases of SUV tyres. Malm does say the reaction of many owners was incredibly hostile, so perhaps the message was not received as intended.

Despite the lack of evidence of benefits from his own efforts, Malm argues that sabotage is a needed addition to climate activism. He proceeds by dismissing nonviolent action as insufficient and presenting an original and questionable analysis of past campaigns. One of his examples is the suffragettes in England, who campaigned for the vote for women. Some suffragettes broke windows and started fires: they engaged in property damage as a tactic. Malm assumes that the movement was successful because of this, but others have argued that the movement succeeded despite these militant methods (Lakey 2015). Similarly, Malm attributes the success of the Iranian revolution to sabotage, when there is contrary evidence (Stephan 2009). Basically, Malm believes that when both violent and nonviolent methods were used in a successful campaign, violence was essential for success.

A different understanding can be obtained by studying the dynamics of nonviolent campaigns. Gene Sharp (1973), in part three of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, presented a set of stages of nonviolent campaigns, beginning with laying the groundwork and then “challenge brings repression”. Repression here often means that activists are subject to violence — for example, beatings, arrests and shootings. Sharp says campaigners need to maintain nonviolent discipline, in other words not to respond violently in the face of attacks. If they can do this, one possible outcome is “political jiu-jitsu”: the repression is counterproductive, generating greater support for the campaign.

In Sharp’s framework, is sabotage a form of challenge that can potentially lead to political jiu-jitsu? Possibly not, given that Sharp did not include sabotage among his 198 methods of nonviolent action.

A closer examination is possible by using the backfire framework (Martin 2007). Powerful perpetrators of injustice can use a variety of methods to reduce public outrage — for example, hiding their actions, devaluing the targets and reinterpreting the events by lying, blaming and framing. These methods have been used in numerous famous cases, for example the beating of protesters at Dharasana in India in 1930 during the salt satyagraha, the shooting of protesters in Sharpeville, South Africa in 1960, and the shooting of protesters in Dili, East Timor in 1991. In each of these cases, the perpetrators of the brutality and killing accused the protesters of using violence. The point of blaming the victim is to change the outside perception from a gross injustice to a contest, however unbalanced, in which both sides use violence. The power of nonviolence against a violent opponent is that it mobilises greater support precisely because unresisted violence is seen as unfair. In Dharasana, Sharpeville and Dili, the perpetrators tried to hide or counter this perception of unfairness, but there was sufficient evidence by credible witnesses to cause the attacks to backfire.

One of the troubles with sabotage is that it is far harder to generate this backfire effect because saboteurs are the perpetrators. Slashing SUV tyres did not generate sympathy.

Backfire is not the only purpose of sabotage. Another is the direct effect on technological systems contributing to climate change, from SUVs to pipelines. Is this likely to be sufficient to compensate for political downsides? Malm does not make this argument because he is focused on the morality and urgency of direct action. However, morality and urgency do not automatically lead to effective, long-lasting campaigns. Indeed, framing climate change as an emergency has the potential downside of orienting campaigners to governments as saviours, despite governments being less likely to take action than their populations (Hodder and Martin 2009).

One of the strengths of nonviolence is increased participation: it is far easier to join many types of nonviolent action. Children, people with disabilities, women, elders — all can play useful roles in rallies, strikes and boycotts. Front-line soldiers, in contrast, are more likely to be young fit men.

What about sabotage? This depends on the sabotage, but in practice most participants have been young and fit, as shown in the film inspired by and with the same title as Malm’s book.

Another radicalism

The mainstream response to address climate change is to support renewable energy — from the sun, wind, and tides — to replace the energy obtained by burning fossil fuels. There is considerable research showing that, in many places, solar and wind power are cheaper than fossil fuels, and can be introduced far more rapidly than the other suggested alternative, nuclear power, which has its own set of problems as well as being hugely expensive. An energy system based on renewables — which has been described as a soft energy path (Lovins 1977) — has many advantages, yet it leaves the structure of society largely unchanged. Political oppression and economic inequality can exist in a low-carbon future. Is there another way?

An alternative is to promote social change that is synergistic with climate action. Imagine guerrilla actions to install insulation in housing for poor people. This is a completely different sort of nonviolent action. In contrast to attacking the rich, it is a form of “constructive resistance” (Sørensen, Vinthagen, and Johansen 2023). Transport activism has been a feature in many countries for decades, including blockades of new roads and cyclists collectively taking to the streets. Could pedestrian actions promote “walkable cities” (Balsas 2019; Speck 2012)?

A key driver of energy use is consumerism, which is promoted through advertising, planned obsolescence, and media coverage of the lifestyles of the wealthy and famous. Many people aspire to bigger houses, bigger cars and bigger offices, as well as designer clothes and ever more possessions. In contrast are those promoting a life of rich relationships with self, others, and the environment (Sclove 2022). Climate activists could connect with anti-consumerist campaigns to break the belief that having more, especially more than neighbours and co-workers, brings satisfaction.

Meat production uses a great deal of energy and other resources. Eating less meat benefits the climate as well as the welfare of animals. The climate movement has many affinities with the animal liberation movement, including addressing dilemmas over direct action and violence (Best and Nocella II 2006).

The world’s military activities contribute greatly to global warming. The peace movement should be considered a crucial ally of the climate movement (Crawford 2022).

Stronger links could be forged with trade unions. This could include developing plans to retrain workers in energy-intensive sectors of the economy for jobs in a green economy. It could include climate bans: trade union bans on participation in projects harmful to the climate, analogous to green bans (Mundey 1981; Roddewig 1978).

Banks and insurance companies play a crucial role in financing energy projects. Already, the reluctance of some banks to support new energy-intensive developments is playing a role in climate campaigning. This is aided by campaigns targeting financial institutions.

There may be a role for grassroots organising (Fisher 1984; Mann 2011)  — for example, going door-to-door to talk with residents, asking them for their suggestions on how to tackle global warming. Rather than presuming to have all the answers and telling people what they must do, organising can be more participatory, a process of mutual learning and breaking down stereotypes. Organising has the potential of bringing diverse constituencies into the climate movement and fostering creativity in campaigning methods. Organising and nonviolent action can be synergistic (Engler and Engler 2016).

The climate movement has already shown enormous strength in fostering awareness globally and sharing ideas about action. Rather than thinking nonviolence has been tried and isn’t enough, a radical alternative is to think that nonviolent alternatives have only begun to be tested and to explore a wide range of participatory actions and diverse alliances.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Mark Diesendorf, Ned Dobos, Julia LeMonde, Erin Twyford and Molly Wallace for helpful comments.

References

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