Andreas Malm Quotes

At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective’, as ‘a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.

If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.

To be 'radical', after all, means aiming at the roots of troubles; to be radical in the chronic emergency is to aim at the ecological roots of perpetual disasters.

If SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have ranked seventh for CO2 emissions.

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.

Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace.’ Within the range of positions this side of climate denial, none is more despicable.

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’, as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist.

The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it – this is violent’,

Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?

It should now be abundantly clear that the comparison between the climate crisis and Covid-19 rests on a category mistake. It's a bit like comparing a war with a bullet. Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.

So here is 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.

Even the reverend did: visiting Martin Luther King in his parsonage, soon after his home had been bombed, a journalist was about to sink into an armchair when he was alerted to a couple of loaded guns on it. ‘Just for self-defence,’ King explained.

In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend. He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.

I once asked Bill McKibben, after an energising speech to a capacity crowd, when – given that the situation is as urgent as he portrayed it and we all know it is – we escalate. He was visibly ill at ease. The first part of his response presented what we might call the objection from asymmetry: as soon as a social movement engages in violent acts, it moves onto the terrain favoured by the enemy, who is overwhelmingly superior in military capabilities. The state loves a fight of arms; it knows it will win. Our strength is in numbers. This is a pet argument for strategic pacifists, but it is disingenuous. Violence is not the sole field where asymmetry prevails. The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money. If the movement should shun uphill battles, a divestment campaign seems like the worst possible choice: trying to sap fossil capital by means of capital.

No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement - and it has its fair share of radicals - ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.

Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.

Gandhi’s strategy for national liberation never – this is true – condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.

If there is something the corona crisis has taught, it should be that nudging consumers to voluntarily mend their ways is a thing of the past.

Self-isolation in a slum is a contradiction in terms.

The epoch of the Capitalocene is characterized by uncontrolled speed-up in the production of hazardous nature.

The context for hope is radical uncertainty; anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.

the emergency is already here, the cup of endurance fast running over – but the onrush of catastrophe does have a temporality of its own. It imposes tight constraints on those who want to fight.

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the absoluteness of capitalist dominance and the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence – the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology.

People wielding that axe have always been told that we’re fucked, we’re doomed, we should just try to scrape by, nothing will ever change for the better; from the slave barracks to the Judenräte and onwards, every revolt has been discouraged by the elders of defeatism.

It has taken the science some time to catch up and connect the dots, but, in 2012, one pathbreaking study derived one third of all existential threats to animal species straight from the sale of goods like coffee, beef, tea, sugar and palm oil to countries of the North.

Social democracy works on the assumption that time is on our side. There must be plenty of it. Then one can move slowly towards the good society, step after incremental step, without having to clash head-on with the class enemy and break up its power; it will rather leak away in drips. But if catastrophe strikes, and if it is the status quo that produces it, then the reformist calendar is shredded. Social democracy can now do one of two things. It can continue to flow with the time, deeper into catastrophe - the choice from August 1914 - or it can become something else, another taxon of socialism, one that recognises that time is up and another decade or even year of this status quo is intolerable.

The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.

If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.

Ilona Otto and her colleagues point out that in 2017 alone – according to official rolls – forty-four individuals inherited more than $1 billion each, a total sum of $189 billion. The four largest global funds for financing adaptation to climate impacts approved projects amounting to $2.78 billion. Forty-four individuals thus cashed out sixty-eight times more unearned wealth than what the world’s victims of climate catastrophe were allocated, and most likely, some of it went straight to superyachts and the like – as if the act of injecting poison into the groundwater also coincided with snatching purification tablets out of the hands of slum-dwellers. This compounding of the crime can only intensify at higher levels.

The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.

Now the likelihood of the ruling classes implementing a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices because scientists tell them to, or because billions of people would otherwise suffer grievous harm, or because the planet could spin into a hothouse, is about the same as them lining up at the summit of the steepest mountain and meekly proceeding to throw themselves off the edge. So here is 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.

Precisely the hopelessness of the situation constituted the nobility of this resistance.

In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society.

In 2014, Google left the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in a public show of disgust: for many years, the Council, a business body specialising in drafting laws favourable to the free market, had given voice to denial. With its water-powered data centres and wind turbines flying on kites, Google wanted to be seen as part of the solution, ‘so we should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying’, an executive explained.

The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people.

Disease, in the Gandhian view, results from impurity and must be allowed to do its cleansing work, and the same goes for extreme weather and earthquakes: with unusual consistency, the mahatma preached that victims of such events had it coming.

Isn’t suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?

In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory

Property destruction was a particularly distressing prospect. If the cities burned, ‘the white man’s companies will have to take the losses’, whined one close adviser to Kennedy and Johnson.

Talk! Talk! Talk!’ he exclaimed after yet another convention of a pacifist abolitionist society. ‘That will never free the slaves! What is needed is action – action.

Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi’s – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: ‘Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people’,

People don’t need yachts – they want yachts’, in the words of a CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer.

some exercise of the imagination might allow activists to neutralise CO2-emitting devices with easily accessed means.

If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?

Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes.

Texas and the prolific Permian Basin is the epicentre of the development of new pipelines’,

And then there are the events of more recent history, beginning with the victory over apartheid, an analogy particularly popular in conjunction with divestment. ‘Just as apartheid was the moral issue’ of the late twentieth century, ‘climate change is the moral issue of our time’, McKibben has said, alluding to suffering in non-white peripheries of the world, and ‘the same kind of tactic is what’s necessary to face it’.

Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die – a position already propounded by some – and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming? Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?

How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying’,

Young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you’ – ‘change is coming, whether you like it or not’.

in the summer of 2019, 6,000 people closed the largest point source of emissions in Germany, backed up by several thousands more in the camp and some 40,000 in a Fridays for Future demonstration.

After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country.

votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that ‘we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life’.

In November 1938, in the days after Kristallnacht, the mahatma published an open letter to the Jews of Germany exhorting them to stick to the principles of non-violence and to delight in the results. ‘Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength

The pith of non-violence, in Gandhi’s philosophy, was abstention from sexual intercourse: the soul would reach exalted heights only if it learned to ‘crucify the flesh’.

To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement. If these classes ever had any senses, they have lost them all. They are not perturbed by the smell from the blazing trees. They do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stalks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink. To appeal to their reason and common sense would evidently be futile.

On the other hand, if you have been worried or frightened by what you have read, that’s good, you should be, especially on behalf of your children and their children. But don’t let fear feed inertia. Fear does not have to be paralysing. Indeed, it is often the driver of effective action. No one ever won a war while knowing no fear, and make no mistake, this is a war. Wherever we live on this magnificent planet, we all need to do our utmost to try to keep it that way. The fact that the future looks dismal is not an excuse to do nothing, to imagine it’s all too late. On the contrary, it is a call to arms. So, if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, then do it. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argues convincingly that, such is the scale of the climate crisis, sabotage and property damage are absolutely justified in the battle against fossil fuel companies and others working against the public good. I understand that this is not to everyone’s taste, but there is plenty more you can do. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle; stop flying; switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat; spread the word about the predicament we find ourselves in among your friends and family; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.

Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: ‘To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation’, Pankhurst lectured. ‘It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.’ The latest full-body portrait of the movement, Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up, Women!, gives an encyclopaedic listing of militant actions: suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill’s door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dogwhips, breaking the windows in prison cells. Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilisation. The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes: deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant action. After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU claimed responsibility for 337 such attacks. Few culprits were apprehended.

To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of the world, would be an understatement. If these classes ever had any senses, they have lost them all. They are not perturbed by the smell from the blazing trees. They do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stocks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink. To appeal to their reason and common sense would evidently be futile. The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, “How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?” The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.

It's already too hot on earth, and it's getting hotter by the year, and there's no end in sight to the heating unless emissions are cut to zero - but even then, it will still be too hot plus residual, potentially self-reinforcing heating in the atmospheric pipeline (the more of it, the longer mitigation waits), and so a worldwide cessation of fossil fuel combustion would not be enough. CO2 would also have to be drawn out of the air. This has been apparent for at least a decade: everybody says this. Everybody admits it. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done.

Corona can be an effect of climate; not the other way around. More importantly, the two are interlaced aspects, on different scale of time and space, of what is now one chronic emergency.

Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe.

On a slightly lower level of abstraction, we can propose the following theorem: time-space appropriation plus time-space compression equals high risk of zoonotic pandemics. Capital grows by dilating its material throughput. The more biophysical resources that can be processed into commodities and sold, the greater the profits; the greater the profits, the more resources can be acquired and so on. Capital takes hold of land where the resources sprout - a law of a tendency with few countervailing forces that can be read off from aggregate data: in the year 1700, 95 percent of the planet's ice-free land was either wild or modified and used so lightly as to be categorised as 'semi-natural.' By 2000, the proportions has been reversed.

More to the point, however, is that China could become the cradle of this disease only because global tendencies were present in the concentrated form.

Biodiversity decline can certainly be self-reinforcing, with inbuilt tipping points and deadlines: the Pike paper estimates that business-as-usual closes the 'window of opportunity to deal with pandemics' in 2041.

The alarm signals have echoed without being heard, as in a forgotten cave. Already in 1994, the eminent dialectical biologist Richard Levins and his colleagues warned that 'creating new habitats - for example, by bulldozing forests - permit rare or remote microorganisms to become abundant and gain access to people.

Society, not nature: this is the death sentence for multitudes. Vulnerability, Wisner et al. contended, is really a function of unequal ownership of resources. Instead of viewing disasters as chance events or 'acts of God' that irrupt into ordinary life, they should be seen as the starkest truth about that life, whose inner structure they bring to life. This is the cardinal idea of critical vulnerability theory, elaborated in countless case studies: during a drought in northern Nigeria, to take one classic example, rich households stood the test thanks to the large size of their cattle herds and other assets, whereas the poorer ones bit the dust, meaning that the drought itself was at most 'a catalyst' of selective pressure inhering in the property relations. Some owned the means for survival, others did not.