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This guy completely missed the point and is mischaracterizing Malm’s historical references, criticism of existing environmental movements, and points about sabotage.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).
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'.
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.
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).
Well destroying critical infrastructure for fossil fuels is a local scandinavian thing now, duh.
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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'.
We live in a society