How Not to Defend Blowing Up a Pipeline: A Response to Andreas Malm’s Defense of Environmental Sabotage

Abstract

How Not to Defend Blowing Up a Pipeline: A Response to Andreas Malm’s Defense of Environmental Sabotage

This article examines the defense of eco-sabotage by the Swedish eco-arxists Andreas Malm, including his explicit and implicit theoretical foundations. Malm throws questions for defense by civil funds by non-powerful activists in general and for civil disobedience in particular. Unfortunately, essential tensions in Malm's concept of defense create some confusion in his analysis. He attacks non-violent protest (including civil disobedience) in a glaring, unfair color. Since he does not explain the central ideas of his analysis-in particular the connection between political violence (violence) and non-powerful activity (violet), his theoretical framework is masking the fact that some of his suggestions are less new or subversive than he assumes; This error may be the source for a competing - and even more disturbing - tendency to support possible authoritarian answers to the climate crisis. Malm finally devalues ​​civil disobedience and overestimates the "virtues" militant eco-sabotage.