sharing this for discussion, i have not read the book or seen the movie
By endorsing acts that have no real path to success, these supposedly radical products hamper revolutionary work.
Literally Anyone: "I'm going to do something."
Every Media Headline: "By doing something, you're hampering our ability to do everything else."
Just get fucked already. I'm tired of hearing how everything from AOC's DSA Electoralism to Chaz to the ACLU to Will Menaker releasing a Movie Mindset series is Undermining Real Leftism. If you've got something you want to plug as an alternative, then fucking plug it. If you want to build a movement, then build it. But this endless harping about how "We can't do MY thing until you stop doing YOUR thing" is absolutely diseased.
Also, Death to Canada.
Addressed in the article:
Historically, most attacks on property — including vandalism, sabotage, animal liberation, arson and explosives — have been highly precise in nature, attempting to directly stop or delay a harmful activity. Analyzing the relatively rare use of arson by the animal and earth liberation movement, scholar Michael Loadenthal writes that “when such a tactic is chosen, it appears to target locations viewed as integral to production and distribution, not solely retail locations typically targeted for more symbolic (yet costly) vandalism.” This same type of laser focus is exhibited by the courageous militancy of Palestine Action in the United Kingdom, which has been waging a multi-year direct action effort, including sabotage and property destruction, against local factories and businesses linked to murderous Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems. The objective with such tactics isn’t principally to pressure, persuade or raise consciousness (although these can certainly be welcome byproducts), but to materially prevent something from happening or continuing.
The author isn't saying don't engage in sabotage, they're saying don't do something that'll immediately get you merc'd and have zero material impact on the global trade of the commodity you're attacking.
that's fair and all but doesn't the How to Blow Up a Pipeline book say almost exactly the same thing?
Also critiqued in the article:
Malm takes a slightly different approach in the book. He doesn’t frame sabotage as an end in itself but rather a method of deterrence to “let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed” and to put pressure on the bourgeois state “to proclaim the prohibition and begin retiring the stock” of fossil fuel infrastructure. This chimerical proposal, hinging on a social democratic view of the neutral and pliable capitalist state, has been best critiqued by Arnold Schroder of Fight Like an Animal podcast: “Ultimately, his strategy is to sabotage his way into the hearts and minds of the people who currently inhabit the power structure. This is just one of the crazier varieties of liberalism I’ve ever encountered: this is sabotage liberalism.”
...
Can art and polemics play a role in helping cultivate such commitment, despite formal restraints or contradictions? Of course. But the “hope” and “feeling of possibility” that Goldhaber worked to generate with this film, and Malm with his book, isn’t grounded in material conditions, necessary commitments, or even an on-ramp to effective property destruction. It’s a “sabotage liberalism” that at worst will goad people into getting jailed or killed for no gain and at best waste precious time distracted by an adventurist “solution” that refuses to learn from the past or organize for a revolutionary future.I think the core disagreement between Wilt and Malm is that Wilt thinks the oil market is really resilient and would require more than just a small guerilla war (essentially) to become unprofitable. Malm thinks an achievable level of sabotage could disrupt markets enough to make oil a bad investment. This "hearts and minds" stuff is not a fair representation of Malm's argument - he says direct action has to be a real threat on its own terms for capital to be willing to neutralize it by conceding to the less-demanding nonviolent movement. I liked the linked review better.
I think that's a reasonable representation of the debate but I disagree that the "hearts and minds" is a mischaracterization. In this context, Witt is arguing that Malm's thesis must be that sabotage can create the perception that oil is a bad investment because altering the material reality would be beyond the reach of small, isolated groups of individuals acting independently against discrete targets as portrayed in the movie. As Witt notes, state actors currently have to work to make oil scarce to maintain its profitability, and so the possibility exists that the guerrillas will just make their job easier, if not just causing a momentary blip in prices that the market will easily be able to correct through other infrastructure or means. Pipelines are the cheapest way to transport oil but they aren't the only profitable way to do so, and concluding that attacking one would have an impact requires assuming that capital is essentially persuadable and incapable of adaptation.
I suppose. I think that Malm genuinely disagrees about feasibility but that's because of a different understanding of the market/subsidy situation. The movie includes some lip service about driving up oil costs due to the increased cost of maintenance, etc. Having to recheck many other miles of pipeline. IIRC, the book says the mechanism is that the possibility of attacks (painful on a company level) will make investors warier to invest in fossil fuels, driving up the cost of capital and causing a real problem for industry, but I might be making that up. In short that the irrational market is actually where "hearts and minds" works. Personally I think Witt is probably more correct, but I don't know enough about fossil fuel finance to know if he's overstating it and falling into climate fatalism.
Anyway the things I thought were missing in the book were
a) a nuts-and-bolts explanation if the current mass climate movement is actually advanced enough to benefit from a violent vanguard. The "MLK and Panthers" theory seems well supported but there was not much analysis of the current climate movement, and since the book was written I think it's actually lost momentum because of pandemic disruptions.
b) specific strategies for causing the max disruption per unit effort/risk. Not lentils-in-tire-valves propaganda, the real sabotage. Especially because the highest concentration of leftists who want to do something are in cities, physically far from fossil fuel infra. How-to manual stuff.
This realization that actually a lot of capitalist infrastructure isn't really controlled by the market but by government subsidies is also a problem for veganism. Turns out we kind of have a centrally planned economy.
It's like my great grandpappy used to say. Learn to Hack, Learn to quadcopter.
these are appealing because they place the saboteur furthest from the action, but are they really the most bang for the buck? quadcopters are good for killing people but you can't deliver an oil drum of ANFO to a pipeline that way. Most you can do is arson probably. Remember those guys who caused a big blackout by shooting at electrical substations?
i wanted like, half a book about this at least. probably necessary omission for it to be publishable but still
Honestly, in the imperial core, I would emphasis more on the learn to hack, than the quadcopters and drones. Gotta think outside the box. I feel like Malm's book may have caused a tunnelvision on the physical pipelines instead of the infrastructure that builds and maintains them. Payrolls, communications, Industrial control systems... there's a whole eco-system of interdependent systems that maintains Capital's order and they are largely digital nowadays.
Well I should have used one of slightly less plausible options from prior decades. Many great examples. Anyways looks like it's gonna be international trade not hackermans, they started banning ppls from SWIFT and started something irreversible
Because as we all know, the one thing the US is renowned for is knowing when it's been beaten.
Yeah bro I think Krugman is super smart. That's what I was saying,
Don't know how i feel about everyone throwing around unabomber fantasies & Anonymous larping. But that's what I'm saying, yeah we overextended
I meant the US is running off the cliff like Wile E Coyote with the sanctions and losing the ability to sustain our nonsensical bloated financial rentier class (they're gonna make us all pay as much as it's in their power ofc)
The US has backdoors in the hardware of the chips we use in phones and computers. There are no free CPU and GPU architectures i know of. Eyeing riscv of course
That blackout was due to kinks in the power grid and was back up very quickly, there's protection on those radiators exactly for this, and they'd add more security if waves attacks happened
This assumes that the feds can't do surveillance effectively because right wingers carry out terrorist attacks effectively, but we all know the real reason they make such "oversights"
Im gonna blow your mind. Pipelines and railroads can be sabotaged pretty similarly. Domestic oil is currently moved by over 80% in this fashion.
Is disrupting 80% of the domestic oil industry an easy market fix?
I don't think you're seeing how much volume and geographic dispersion that figure entails; it's not like they're routing it all through Penn Station.
Given the widely publicized derailment of a 1.4 mile train resulting in absolutely fuck all happening to prevent it again, I imagine it would take a complex and highly coordinated campaign just to rise above background. You're not going to accomplish much with a handful of isolated cells doing stochastic terrorism.
the oil market is really resilient and would require more than just a small guerilla war (essentially) to become unprofitable
Destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure won't necessarily make it less profitable (particularly for surviving pipeliners). But raising the perceived risk premium can shift all sorts of investment calculations, especially during periods of higher interest rates and declining fossil fuel prices.
Hah good description of someone I dated who aspired to publically humiliating herself in a closed meeting of pharma bros before getting escorted out by security & lobbying Nancy Pelosi about chronic lyme
they’re saying don’t do something that’ll immediately get you merc’d and have zero material impact
At this point, standing on a subway and announcing that you're starving gets you merc'd.
Yeah a good example of direct action, would be for example sabotaging/blockading ports that are used to export weapons during a foreign intervention.
"just" is doin a lot of work there. the FCC doesn't exactly take weekends off.
During the first days of the George Floyd protests someone was very effectively jamming CPD radio. I thought that it would be good for someone to make plans for a battery-powered radio jammer device that could fit in a backpack and be left in place, so when the FCC triangulates it there's nobody left to arrest.
Splice it directly to a power main in a swere and have the transmitter be above ground
Idk but I feel like it be a lot. Like hundreds of microwaves all running at once.
Neat! I would have assumed that one would’ve simply done evergreen upstream from the Port of New Orleans, but I know little of the technicalities of ports and such haha.
Will Menaker releasing a Movie Mindset series is Undermining Real Leftism
Not as obviously historical materialist compared to Matt's Hell on Earth series, but its probably fine
Its just amazing how many people decide Chapo is an Op designed trick leftists into watching movies.
I thought Cumtown was an Op designed to get leftists watching movies?
Let's not let those teenagers riding their suv around the park off too easily. Fuck around and find out /s
Wait, hold on, Chaz? We're gonna defend Chaz because Tucker overreacted to it?
All I hear from people that write articles is “organize”, yet all these people do is write articles. Is posting about art any less radlib than making the art? No.
Like Im Sorry James Wilt, I literally have no idea who who are, but all I’ve googled on you is just saying you’ve been posting and authoring books for 10 years. What has it led to? Why is this type of larping good larping? You think you’re an author to the revolution? This singular movie might get more eyeballs than the 10 years of writing you’ve been doing.
I have no idea what the best method is, but these fucking internet bloggers need to stop telling others the correct path of doing nothing at all and feeling good about it. I am so over this type of shit
At some point you have to discuss the best course of action, and some actions genuinely hamper progress, so we're never going to be rid of this sort of article. It's necessary, to a degree.
I think the proper approach is a mix of agnosticism -- no one really knows the best path forward -- and a healthy amount of deference to people out there trying something.
The deference is huge. The amount of negative “marxists” responses to the 2020 protests was outrageous. They acted like it was child’s play to be out in the street. Fucking what the fuck are you people doing?
If Trotsky wasn’t out their in the unorganized 1905 revolution, you think he would’ve been a leader in the 1917 revolution?
If Trotsky wasn’t out their in the unorganized 1905 revolution, you think he would’ve been a leader in the 1917 revolution?
I keep trying to impress the need to look at everything holistically rather than as individual events. While one single thing might not by itself achieve revolution it can have a significant contributory effect to future events through otherwise unknowable things occurring at that event.
Struggle for the sake of struggle has value in producing more people that will engage in struggle, as well as giving people valuable experience that they take into future struggles.
For sure. Social infrastructure and cultural knowledge is built over time. Shit goes down and people are making calls asking if people they’ve met in the past are gonna be there. There’s a whole network of protest medics in the US who are interlocked with each other.
So much of revolutionary potential is caught up not in general trends, but in the errata that alludes people specifically because it exists at the fringes. So we get very good at criticizing attempts at organizing because they failed due to the same trends we’ve seen over and over, but most of us never develop the skills necessary to praise the aspects of those failed attempts that went well, because the positives of failure exist in specifics.
Everything is easy to categorise as a failure until the revolution ultimately succeeds.
If Trotsky wasn’t out their in the unorganized 1905 revolution, you think he would’ve been a leader in the 1917 revolution?
No he'd probably still be getting soup dumped on him for not tipping lmao
I feel like he'd be a wonton soup kind of guy
I don't think the point was to suggest trots are good but that trotsky's leadership was extremely valuable and that he wouldn't have been produced without the disorganised stuff people criticise too harshly.
Trotskyists and Trotsky himself have worked really hard to ruin Trotskys legacy pre Lenin’s death.
It’s not that activism is bad or that you shouldn’t be out on the streets, but the book promises to be something more radical when all it does is pay lip service to recent movements. Like, OK, cool but the title and preamble are selling this book as something more violent when it’s really just making money off the insignificant acts of protest that have already happened. In one sentence he praises the things he’s been a part of and in another he acts like what he’s ‘proposing’ has never been done before. It’s the same grift as selling Che Guevarra T shirts in NYC bodegas.
At the risk of :fedposting: or being too doomer, what power does the left in the west even have? Surely if you're going to be crushed no matter what then someone out there has thought that adventurism was the only thing they could do at all? (in minecraft GTAV RP)
The proper approach is to study what has and has not worked, and try to systematize the answers. So far, what has stochastic eco-terrorism accomplished? Why? What has the institutional environmental movement accomplished? Why? What have environmentally-oriented liberation struggles accomplished? Why? What have revolutionary environmental organizations accomplished? Why?
A diversity of tactics is a strength because it gives us more data to figure out what works. So while we don't know the exact path forwards, we should learn as much as we can about its shape from what information is available.
It's being able to broadcast to others that you're in the ingroup. Don't read any more to it than that. If they were into action, they'd be doing it. But they're not, so writing sternly worded columns is what they do.
Is posting about art any less radlib than making the art? No.
"is masturbating to furry art any less liberal than going outside to find 3d people to fuck? no"
Folks is it counterrevolutionary to engage in the ruthless criticism of all that exists?
How many years are we going to flip out at each other for being on the computer and pretend it's impossible for people to learn from discussion
Yes but also I kinda get it, people feel powerless. HTBUAP is pretty explicit that lone wolf terror attacks won't work, the political violence has to be part of a directed political movement - but what are we gonna do, form the militant wing of the fukken extinction rebellion?
I just mean I think that the reason people are hammering each other down is because they feel powerless and are frustrated by that, so while I agree and wish it would stop I kinda get why they do it.
Having read HTBUAP and reading this article, I don't feel like the author and I read the same book.
This guy completely missed the point and is mischaracterizing Malm's historical references, criticism of existing environmental movements, and points about sabotage.
This article is spot on, the book is absolute trash and borderline racist at certain points; credits violence from revolutionaries to freedom the world over from Ireland to Cuba but when it gets to India he boils it down to Brits essentially being too bored to keep their colony when millions of Indian revolutionaries died throughout British colonial rule fighting for their freedom.
This guy completely missed the point and is mischaracterizing Malm’s historical references, criticism of existing environmental movements, and points about sabotage.
What points about sabotage moved you? His most ‘salient’ advice for aggression is literally keying SUVs and breaking windows of large suburban homes, the whitest western left activist bullshit imaginable. Oh yeah, a black person already marked by the police and the rest of society is going to lightly damage a fucking car so they can rot in jail.
Maybe I took the title too literally and thought it would be a prescriptive book about making shit happen and actually destroying critical infrastructure but it’s another haughty piece of self-agrandizing Nordic bullshit by some dude from the wealthiest region on the planet.
I honestly don't remember the India part of the book. And I do agree that he focuses a lot on sabotage of luxury vehicles in Sweden - but -- he is Swedish. Of course he's going to talk about local things. Plus those were really only as an example of the idea of sabotaging things that hurt the rich more than the poor.
I do agree that the ultimate premise of - make the market and investment untenable by proving that things will be smashed - isn't necessarily the best. It is a market solution, ultimately, but I'm not going to count on Malm to outline a pathway direct to communism in his 150 page manifesto.
To me, the biggest takeaways from the book was the look at what conditions do movements achieve where violence and sabotage are "palatable" and acceptable, and what is it about the environmental movement that hasn't got there yet. That and coming to the conclusion that the sabotage wing of a movement has to be complementary and separate from the also useful non violent wing (and also from the political wing).
And I do agree that he focuses a lot on sabotage of luxury vehicles in Sweden - but – he is Swedish. Of course he’s going to talk about local things.
Well destroying critical infrastructure for fossil fuels is a local scandinavian thing now, duh.
I mean, Malm talks about these activities, but not as a recommendation that people do it, just as an exploration of 'here is something that people did'.
You should watch the movie, it is a fun heist and it's nice to be pandered to. The book was jarringly short. Upvoting for visibility not because I agree with this particular review.
If anyone blows up a pipeline please leave a hexbear drawing there
If anyone blows up a pipeline please leave a hexbear drawing there
Please don't get me put on another list
Don't worry, I'll leave a pentagon bear, that oughta keep the feds confused.
book publisher Verso has leveraged it for another marketing push
when the radlib ideology is sus :sus-torment:
runs the real risk of promoting highly ineffective and counterproductive adventurism
anarcho-libs still use iconography of molotov cocktails (even after OWS! literally didn't learn anything) because that's all they have going for them, compare this futile "anti-fossil fuel" praxis to Marxist degrowth radicals who are actually studying science to find superior forms of energy praxis. No leftist has any answer to these intractable conflicts because they are artists not materialists
compare this futile “anti-fossil fuel” praxis to Marxist degrowth radicals
Do you think Malm is not a Marxist degrowth radical?
He’s just another dumb scandy fuck, a eugenics argument removed from being an environmental fascist
Yeah, I’m sorry there’s criticism of your favorite book we all read in our little book club.
this is perhaps the greatest flaw of HTBUAP as an ever-growing media franchise: it hawks a vision of thrilling spectacle in the name of dire urgency when the actual work required necessitates profound patience and discipline over the course of years, decades, and even lifetimes.
ITS A FUCKIN MOVIE 🍿 🍿 🍿 :wall-talk:
also there are simply not lifetimes available for climate action. it will be Too Late.
I thought Pipeline was good. as the Verso book review said:
After I talked to my movement elder, I thought again about the people I’d seen reading Malm’s book, and suddenly it began to make sense. They were indeed people more accustomed to rallies and marches, letter-writing campaigns and street theater outside the White House, people who might be used to thanking the police. This is by design. Malm is, in fact, not talking to my grumpy mentor, to those already escalating tactics, to those who have tried it, to those who have paid the price. His audience is the mainstream environmental movement, people who have never considered sabotage, or direct action, people who are outright against it. For such an audience, Malm’s book is an important intervention.
over the course of years, decades, and even lifetimes
Talk about missing the point!
“Ultimately, his strategy is to sabotage his way into the hearts and minds of the people who currently inhabit the power structure. This is just one of the crazier varieties of liberalism I’ve ever encountered: this is sabotage liberalism.”
The entire thesis of the article hinges on this quote not being specious. Too bad for him.
Pfft, k. Well answer this if you're so damn smart, leftie.
spoiler
What does specious mean?
:che-smile: has all the trappings of something that sounds correct but isn't actually correct
What part of the argument is specious lol? What actual sabotage does he prescribe in the book is aimed at actual capital and not, like, some dude’s vehicle he uses to get to get to work?
You can just say you, along with some others on this site, have become emotionally attached to the book.
You're changing the subject. The accusation in the quoted text is not that Malm's prescribed actions are insufficiently militant, but that the aim is to appeal to the hearts and minds of the ownership class.
It seems like you were expecting Malm's book to be a manual for how to carry out sabotage and are disappointed that it's actually a discussion about different movements and conditions for destructive actions and why they were or weren't effective in their particular scope
I haven't read the book, but the movie basically ended with one of the protagonists looking into the camera and saying "if we all start taking out this infrastructure we can make a difference". I like that message more than some terminally online dweeb having a smug overdose
📚 https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Andreas+malm+Pipeline
🎥 https://fmovies.to/movie/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-lxop6/1-fullI do like that The Maple, the main left media org James Wilt works at, is sharing pro-USSR Red Sails articles in their email newsletters at least.
The Dakota Access Pipeline is blown up in Rural Iowa, destroying thousands of acres of corn and cow feed pastures.
James Wilt: “This is terrible”
If only the author had any inkling what "actual revolutionary work" looked like.
