#107 Climate activism and the fetishisation of nonviolence w/ Andreas Malm
Added 2021-01-10 12:38:37 +0000 UTCAndreas Malm joins PTO to talk about his new book, How To Blow Up a Pipeline. We chatted about why the climate movement is so fiercely committed to nonviolence, how that hinders climate activism, and how the advocates of nonviolence edit the history of popular struggles and liberations movements in order to downplay the importance of the more militant wings of those struggles.
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Comments
I haven’t read Malm’s book, but at least in this conversation, I feel like there’s something missing from his analysis, and that’s an examination of the ways in which, post-9/11, governments worldwide have punished – and in many cases criminalised – direct action in the same of “anti-terrorism”. Not to mention the ideological work that has been done post-9/11, by states, in order to conflate activism and terrorism, thus shaping public discourse and public understanding of activism. In terms of concrete examples I can only really speak to the Australian one that Malm raises here (given I’m Australian), but only last year for instance the Queensland government passed new anti-protest legislation, in response to XR actions in Brisbane, which banned lock-on devices, criminalised peaceful protest, and was described by the UN as “disproportionate” legislation. This comes on top of 20 years already of increasingly punitive anti-protest laws in Australia. Much as I would love to see the sabotage of coal mines, any activist in Australia who currently tried that on, *especially* in the absence of a militant mass social movement and much more widespread public support for direct action, would find themselves on a one-way ticket to a prison cell for life. I don’t think it’s just that the climate movement in the global north is dominated by a middle-class pacifism, and/or that these activists misunderstand (sometimes wilfully) the history of civil disobedience, although there is truth to both these things. It’s also that the past 20 years of the “war on terror” has had significant material and ideological effects upon social movements.
Anwen C
2021-01-15 08:04:10 +0000 UTC
