How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire

By Andreas Malm

Property will cost us the earth

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1839760257
• ISBN13: 9781839760259
• Release Date: January 2021
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Blow Up a Pipelines or Eat the Rich

Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not , in fact, an anarchist instruction manual (sorry, feds), but rather a scathing critique of the climate movement’s addiction to pacifism. He goes on an interesting tangent about how terrorists like Ted Kaczynski and mainstream/corporate media coverage has helped defang the climate movement. Malm doesn’t just suggest that polite protest has failed—he lays out, in brutal detail, why corporate power only responds to force and why those who genuinely want to stop climate collapse might need to start treating oil refineries the way the French Resistance treated Nazi supply lines. However, he doesn't take it quite to Ted's level of violence. Rather, he argues that very major social justice victory—whether abolition, labor rights, or anti-apartheid—was won through a combination of civil disobedience and strategic property destruction. While property has been pedastalized by capitalism and given the highest legal protection (state violence), Malm explains that property destruction, is not violence. The fact that it is treated as such (look up Jessica Reznicek). So why is the climate movement still playing nice while ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron actively and willfully wage war on the planet? We were outraged when we found out they knew the damage they were causing and hit it in the 60s, but they're not even pretending anymore. They're straight up marching towards global eco/genocide with no other plan than continue the statu-quo. And let’s be real—this discussion is more urgent than ever. We are now living under what is effectively a Trump/Elon presidency, where techno-billionaires (Vance, Ramasway, Thiel, Altman, etc) and fascists are using the Republic Party's fascist lust to Trojan Horse their own Dark Enlightenment techno-feudalist monarchy into power, dismantling democratic institutions at a breakneck pace. They aren’t just suppressing online information or manipulating elections; they’re crafting policies to criminalize dissent entirely. A recently unearthed Roger Stone memo hinted at a future where “Enemies of the State” (read: anyone opposing Trumpelon) might need to be disarmed. Bannon and the others have said much worse. Ask yourself what that means for activists, for union organizers, for anyone standing in the way of corporate power. So here’s the real question: If the government is fully captured by the forces driving planetary collapse and has been for decades, what does actual climate resistance look like? If voting, lobbying, and protesting outside Nancy Pelosi’s mansion aren’t cutting it, do we start talking about mass labor strikes, mass rent strikes, or even nonviolent economic sabotage? Do we rethink the ethics of destroying the machines that are destroying us? Malm forces us to have these conversations, whether we like it or not. And in a world where the ruling class is gearing up for total authoritarian control, maybe it’s time we stop worrying about how to resist and start worrying about what happens if we don’t.