They Call Us Murderers: On Violence Pt III

 The United States government is shockingly tolerant of violence against the state. It has long encouraged violent insurrections against the government on just about every continent on earth. It has also condemned the violence and institutional political oppression deployed by world governments against their citizens, most recently in Iran for its recent crackdown on protestors and China’s dealing with citizens protesting Covid Zero policies.

As with anything regarding the United States, the contradictions are endless. In a statement by President Biden, the United States condemns Iran’s violence against peaceful protestors, but of course, the United States has both a long and recent history of doing just that. The US operates a political prisoner and torture facility in Guantanamo Bay yet they condemn Iran for imprisonment and torture, the United States has indicted citizens as terrorists for committing politically motivated property crimes, they decry China’s treatment of Uigyer Muslims yet they have the highest concentration of prisoners in the world despite having only a fraction of the world’s population - a disproportionate number of which are black and Hispanic.

The US is not wrong to condemn violence and oppression by the state, and of course, there is all sorts of justifiable violence against an oppressive government. It’s clear however that the US government is not centering violence in the context of ethics. What would logical consistency look like then? It would look a lot like amnesty for Assata Shakur.

Assata Shakur is a black revolutionary currently living out her days in political asylum in Cuba after escaping a prison facility in the 1970s. The autobiography Assata documents much of her life as a young black woman in America, her revolutionary activities, and her life as what can only be described as a political prisoner.

The United States of Assata Shakur’s youth was as racist and violent a country as you’d see being accused of such today. Preserving segregation, Jim Crow, and white supremacy with blood. The stories of her youth are rife with white mobs terrorizing her grandparent’s business, being thrown out of amusement parks for white children only, and watching a never-ending deluge of television where “black people were harassed and attacked”. Detailing what she saw happen on the news; “Martin Luther King’s house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I can still remember those ugly terrifying white mobs attacking those little children who were close to my own age…And each year I would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by police, arrested and murdered.”

The death and destruction wrought on people simply for looking the way she did, something Shakur describes as “the most primitive, reactionary, ignorant violence that exists”, created an extremism and revolutionary resistance movement that opposed the government. In one of her many sham trials, Shakur gave a speech to the jury so they might better understand the Black Liberation Army to which she belonged;

“The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the women in this country’s prisons are black and third world. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of black people in this country. And where is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement.

While big corporations make huge, tax free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I don not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.”

Throughout Assata, it’s clear that Shakur truly struggles with the more violent tendencies of this resistance movement. It took her a long time to join the Black Panther Party for this reason, but in the end, saw it was the only group adequately defending against the active brutality deployed by the United States government; “I was sick and tired of us being the only victims, and I didn’t care who knew it. As far as I was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but I despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.”

It’s clear that whatever violence she condones is of a defensive nature, not as an agent for the change she hopes to see. She’s clear that a revolutionary strategy must focus on mass movements, not military ones; “armed struggle, by itself, can never bring about a revolution…it must be part of an overall strategy for winning, and the strategy must be political as well as military.” Self-defense is the most justifiable of the whole spectrum of violence, yet simply embracing these tactics and beliefs made the entire organization a massive threat.

This is what ultimately made her and many other black revolutionaries a target of the United States government; Shakur did believe violence against a repressive state to be an inevitability. The sentiment that “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them” was often shared in her circle. And while she felt that “a war between the races would help nobody and free nobody and should be avoided at all costs”, she also knew “ a one-sided race war with Black people as the targets and white people shooting the guns is worse. We will be criminally negligent if we do not deal with racism and racist violence, and if we do not prepare to defend ourselves against it.”

Sentiments like these made Shakur the target of the United States COINTELRPO program. She began to be viciously harassed and surveilled by the FBI and law enforcement. A common practice was to surveil a revolutionary, gather enough faulty “intel” to accuse them of a number of crimes, recklessly pursue and arrest them (ideally killing them in the process as they did to Fred Hampton), and then bank on racist courts and juries to pin them to a crime and get them locked in high-security prisons.

One might be inclined to think it stops there, however as Shakur notes; “in prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell. No matter how suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled suicides. They are usually black inmates…among the most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison”. If the arrest didn’t kill you, there was a good chance you could be taken out once in prison. A number of prisoners both notable and not have been killed this way. It’s a way to deploy the justice system as a more discrete instrument of murder since if the public sees someone in the process of the courts they’re less concerned than seeing them gunned down in the streets in cold blood.

Shakur herself was almost the victim of such a garish plot. She recounts that she would stack cups in front of the door of any prison cell she was stationed in when; “one night, in the middle of the night, the cups came crashing down. I immediately awoke to find four or five male guards standing in the doorway of my cell”. She was able to scream loud enough to dissuade the guards from doing anything. This was not the only time that police and guards tried to kill her. It’s worth noting here Shakur was never even convicted of a crime, she was simply being processed.

If it wasn’t an outright murder attempt, the prison conditions themselves were horrific. Solitary confinement was leveraged against Shakur without reason. International jurists from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights who were investigating prison conditions in the United States said “one of the worst cases is that of Assata Shakur, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.” From Shakur’s own words:

“If I wrote a hundred pages describing the basement of the Middlesex county jail, it would be impossible for you to visualize it. It was a big, grayish, pukey greenish cell. The ceiling was covered with all kinds of pipes, some small, some huge, some dry, some leaky. There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open the small windows located near the ceiling. The average temperature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes.”

Assata Shakur was arrested on charges she was never guilty of, an arrest that almost killed her. She was then brutalized and stuck in solitary confinement for over a year of her life. She was deprived of her child and her loved ones were constantly being harassed. She is just one radical, there are countless others that suffered the same fate and whose stories may never be told. Hers is a crucial story told from beneath the hooves of the high horse upon which the United States rides around the world stage.

Remember the treatment of Assata Shakur and thousands of innocent black inmates at the hands of the US government, remember recent torture victims never accused of a crime, remember the sponsored bombing campaigns being undertaken against civilian populations the next time The United States Government seeks to condemn other nations for the same. The Declaration of Independence declares that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive…it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government”. The United States has justified many violent uprisings under this exact premise.

So considering this, if Assata Shakur’s only crime was opposing a government engaged in destructive behavior and escaping what was surely political imprisonment and torture, the United States can forgive these transgressions and issue a pardon to Shakur. Violence against the state is after all a hardened American value.

“I am about life…I’m gonna live as hard as I can and as full as I can until I die. And I’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind before they are even born. I’m going to live and I’m going to love, and if a child comes from that union I’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and I believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.” - Assata Shakur

COVID is Simultaneously Terrifying and No Big Deal

 

It's been two years since COVID-19 struck the United States and it has since killed over a million people in that time. Before reaction to the disease was politically polarized, back when we were uselessly wiping our groceries down before we brought them into the house, we made a series of decisions that have become a focal point in the midterm elections. Schools were closed down, offices were closed down, companies were given payroll relief, and things like unemployment benefits were expanded. 

Fast forward a year and one COVID vaccine later and schools have resumed but, along with airlines, have mask mandates in place, unemployment benefits are coming to an end, workplaces are hybrid to the extent they can be, and our supply chains are in shambles. Controversial vaccine requirements crop up to do anything from attending a concert to working at your job. COVID continues to kill thousands of people a day.

Today, schools are in full swing, mask mandates and masks themselves are almost wholly gone, vaccine mandates are minimal if existing at all, and expanded benefits programs are practically forgotten (mostly because no one wants to admit they were wrong when they pinned the blame for the workforce shortages on them). Now that our societal COVID defense measures have largely come to an end and we're trying to politically litigate what was necessary and what was damaging to the economy and society as a whole, I can honestly say I feel just as in the dark as I ever was. 

While I'm more certain of the effectiveness of some actions I can take - like wiping down my groceries is useless, getting boosted is not useless, wearing a mask on an airplane might be useless but I'm going to do it anyway - I'm not entirely sure how terrified or angry I need to be. The effectiveness of cloth masks has been challenged, some believe masks do nothing, although it seems the data leans into other types of masks being very effective, yet when there are mask mandates cloth masks are accepted. However, this doesn't seem to matter as there are effectively no mask mandates and almost no one wears them anymore. Is wearing a mask useful if I'm the only one doing it? Should we demand a return of the mandate or a more extreme one that requires KN95/N95 masks? Should we be fighting this battle?

Even the vaccine and the boosters are a cluster of conflicting information. First, the vaccine was supposed to be the end of Covid, which turned out to be false as you could still be infected and transmit the disease while vaccinated. The narrative shifted to say it lessens the likelihood of infection, this too seems to be wrong. Now the narrative is cornered into the likelihood of severe illness and death, which seems to be technically true but not valuably true. It is unsurprising then that so many Americans have opted not to get the final round of boosters.

The questions are endless. Did remote learning cause the severe suffering of public education or did the death and destruction wrought by the pandemic cause this? Are public schools even suffering as a whole or is it mostly just vulnerable populations suffering more? Did shutdowns cause our current inflation and supply chain issues or was it something else? Was expanded unemployment responsible for restaurant closures or was it workforce exploitation? 

It's even impossible to assess the risk to yourself or your loved ones as you try to weigh these various decisions. The rate of death is lower than it was, but the disease is still killing hundreds, sometimes thousands a day, and many say it could spike again. The probability of Covid killing you if you're young is low, even lower if you're a child. However, deaths of young people have trended up and down. Deaths of vaccinated people have also jumped lately, although vaccination remains the best variable against death or severe illness. Long covid is apparently a thing even if you don't get severely ill. Or maybe it isn't...a thing...at all. 

The point is the internet is so flush with quick and accessible information that essentially any sentiment, thought, or fear can be justified with data or expert opinions. I don't want to die or get very sick, I don't want my loved ones to die or become disabled from illness, especially if it was preventable. I am terrified that this could happen at any moment, worst case scenario is it happens because of something I did or didn't do. And yet it's not even clear I can do anything at all. Everything to lose with inaction, yet all action is useless. Total paralysis.

A Warm Welcome to the World

 

Ever since I discovered a love of the outdoors, environmental issues have been on my radar. Yet when I became a father last year I can't stop thinking about the long-term sustainability of our planet. It's put me in a really dark place as a result. Climate change has gotten worse, environmental degradation has gotten worse, ecological collapse is a possibility in the next century. 

To be clear, it isn't that I think the climate apocalypse is going to occur in my lifetime, I don't imagine myself fighting through a wasteland with my daughter in a shopping cart like we're in the Road or something. Instead, I have to imagine her future in an abused natural world, one that she loves now. She loves animals, and rivers, and trees, and lakes. She loves to be outside. We'll watch these things change for the worse, sometimes go away altogether. While this is an immense privilege compared to what will happen to the rest of the world in the coming years, our environment doesn't just sustain life, it's one major part of what makes it worth living. 

So now when I see the real-time destruction of our planet in the name of nothing more than profit, it sickens me like never before. Giant climate change-induced problems across the country and the world are haunting enough, but what's more immediately heartbreaking is the destruction in our own backyard. 

Sometimes literally in our backyard; our neighbor recently cut down a perfectly healthy tree because she didn't like raking leaves. Sometimes it's the change taking place in our community; dozens of acres of greenspace being bulldozed to build McMansions that won't even house over half a dozen families. 

Most recently I've noticed the beautiful Norwegian pines that border our yard have started to die. These trees have given our yard a private, densely wooded feel. I can look out my bedroom window and see nothing but pine. It makes our yard a great animal crossing to skunks, raccoons, coyotes, and deer (all of which I've seen rest in our pine thicket). They, along with every other exotic pine in our neighborhood, have been struck with a pine wilt disease that seems to be rapidly spreading thru Michigan since 2011. Many studies suggest it's exacerbated by climate change. 

Some trees in my neighborhood with pine wilt disease

Some arguments crop up, my own house sits on a plot of land that was once forest; people have to live. I obviously understand this and that we all have to reconcile our need to live and balance our quality of life against preserving our ecosystem. I would certainly be more tolerant of this argument if I felt that the destruction, extraction, and consumption of the natural world was being done with a balance in mind. If I felt humanity was taking seriously alternatives to lifestyles and methods. We are clearly not. It's unfortunate to see a forest get bulldozed to build anything, it's extra frustrating to see it's only for a few massive homes or a strip mall, it's simply unacceptable that many of these homes were for people who had perfectly fine homes to begin with or unnecessary strip malls, it's horrific when these homes and strip malls sit empty for years.

It's hard to say whether things feel extra bad now because they are actually that bad, or because I am now responsible for and profoundly invested in the life of my child the normal things just feel extra bad. Possibly some combination of both. All I can do is engage in the work of making this life more valuable for myself and others, commit to the institutions of change, and spend what time I have left making my daughter's memory of her lived experience an unequivocally positive one. 

The Passion of the Career

 Some thoughts on trying to do what you love for work.

Working in the talent acquisition space I think a lot about the nature of working for a living. I work closely with a lot of young professionals just starting out in their careers, whether they work for me directly or I work with them in their job search. I often witness this crisis - or rather I recognize it as the same one I went through at their age - where these former students watch their free time completely disappear at the same time they're devoting themselves to the very sterile, bottom-line-driven mission of their employer.

It's with this massive hit to free time and values that I watch these young people go into panic mode. Shortly into their career, they decide to "hack" this system by taking something they love doing or are passionate about and making it their full-time job. The logic being if you have to do something for 40 hours a week that's going to cut into your free time with some boring, unimportant mission you should try to transform at least the latter half of those variables. 

There are a lot of people who talk about this; doing what you love has become almost a famous platitude. Nevermind the fact that it would be impossible for everyone to follow their dreams - not many people have longed to be an HVAC technician or a logistics coordinator and yet these are essential jobs in our modern world - the conversation lacks the nuances of the sacrifices you're making when you try to make your passion your career. 

The exploitative nature of the American work life is going to be present everywhere you look. Non-profits notoriously pay awful and have terrible work/life balance, the same can be said of creative jobs. Is helping people your passion? It doesn't take much reading to find that nurses and social workers have been (especially lately) horrifically exploited. Are you passionate about education? The nation's teachers are under attack and people are flocking out of the position faster than they're going in, academia is harder and harder to break into without enduring an endless barrage of shit. Even if you love technology or learning a trade, tech workers are not immune from employer exploitation despite being one of the most lucrative types of workers in the market.

This is not to disparage any of these jobs or discourage entering any of these fields. The issue at heart is the nature of work can be oppressive across any field and there is no avoiding it. Rather than finding a job, you love, finding a job that allows you maximum free time while balancing adequate compensation is an alternative some don't consider. Which of course is only a short-term fix. The larger, more systemic change needs to be increased worker power. This can take many forms; legislative fixes like a four-day work week or federally subsidized leave programs, more worker representation in the form of unions and worker co-determination, and a great re-imagining of what work means in this country.

You and I Have Done More for the Environment than Yvon Chouinard

Ever since I read The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff (one of the first socialist texts I've ever read, the journey into a full-blown leftist and a better writer has been long lol) I have been skeptical of so-called "reluctant billionaires" who claim to manifest a different breed of capitalism aimed at doing both well and good. So as soon as I read the recent news of Patagonia owner Yvon Chouinard giving the company ownership away to an environmental stewardship trust and all future profits to a non-profit network I knew precisely what would come next. 

The letter to his customers - more accurately described as a press release - by Chouinard claims to "turn capitalism on its head by making earth our only shareholder". This phrase was published unchallenged into headlines at outlets like CNBC, Fortune Magazine, and People. Other major news outlets like NPR, the NYT, and the BBC are also all but lauding the move, parroting the company's talking points about responsible business practices. Not a single media company even vaguely questioned the premise that a billion-dollar garment company could possibly reverse the damage it's done to the environment.  

We would all like to believe that if massive corporations simply behaved the way Patagonia behaved, we wouldn't be facing the existential crises of climate change. It's very pretty to think so, however one of the best things you can do for the environment as a human being is to not create a massive garment corporation. I would argue that every person who doesn't create such a company is far more worthy of celebration than Chouinard, who still set his company up "to operate as a private, for-profit corporation based in Ventura, Calif., selling more than $1 billion worth of jackets, hats and ski pants each year". 

The fashion industry is responsible for almost 10% of carbon emissions and is the second largest consumer of water. The industry is also heavily responsible for microplastic pollution, pesticide use, and waste. While Patagonia often tries to ride the high horse over many of these problems - shirking the label "fast fashion" as though cheap poor people's clothes are the real culprit - the truth is you can't become a billion-dollar clothing company without contributing to these issues.

Microplastic pollution is a great example. Patagonia helped fund a major study on this issue, showing that synthetic jackets are releasing a massive amount of this pollution into the water system with terrible ecological effects. While Patagonia and many outdoor companies use recycled synthetic materials to reduce waste overall, the microplastics still wind up in water ways, food supplies, and the ocean. One might applaud Patagonia for funding the study on this issue, but given their market share of synthetic outdoor clothing, we should not be lauding the company for leading the way on this issue.

That's just one illustrative example of the issue with these relatively ethical operations. Under capitalism, what Patagonia is doing with sustainability and its new ownership structure might seem relatively good and ethical. Yet it's clear that Patagonia still operates on a destructive model of commerce and continues to prop up and legitimize an industry with even worse practices.

At best, Chouinard is worthy of praise relative to other billionaires. Relative to the rest of us, his damage as a billionaire clothing manufacturer has been done. Rather than singing his praises, we should expend our media bandwidth questioning whether or not billionaires can even exist alongside a healthy and sustainable planet. As David Sirota put it in his Lever News piece titled To Save the Planet, We Must Choose; 

"[Those in power] insist we can have billionaires and shared prosperity, legalized corruption with democracy, lower inflation plus corporate profiteering, and a livable planet alongside a prosperous ExxonMobil. You name the crisis, and we are infantilized to believe the world is an all-you-can-eat buffet and that either/or choices aren’t necessary."

Every Writer's Writer

 A Review of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Back in college, I had a book of writing tips from renowned crime writer Elmore Leonard. It featured 10 sort of unconventional tips for writing fiction that I thought was interesting. Leonard admonished Steinbeck several times in the book, but almost always about his novel Sweet Thursday. It's been on my list for some time. 

Sweet Thursday is the post-war sequel to Steinbeck's earlier novel Cannery Row, which I didn't realize and so have never read. What's interesting is Steinbeck's acknowledged style change between the two novels. In the prologue to Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck features a fictional monologue from one of the characters Mac about the writing in Cannery Row: 

“I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

Steinbeck makes the transformation of his fiction a central part of the novel. The plot, a sort of mundane love story between an eccentric amateur marine biologist and a rough-edged wayfaring young lady helped along by a goofy cast of characters, takes a back seat to process. None of his characters or settings are given much description aside from a couple of chapters titled Hooptedoodle 1 and 2, but Steinbeck succeeds in crafting dialogue that carries a description of the character in the reader's head, which is hard to grasp while you're reading but once you catch that you're using queues from the dialogue to imagine what the character looks like, it's pretty impressive.

It's also interesting Cannery Row takes place prior to World War 2 and Sweet Thursday is after. Himself serving as a wartime correspondent in the UK, for Steinbeck, the nature of writing is forever changed. He doesn't put out another major work of fiction after Sweet Thursday. Steinbeck's main character Doc is non-fiction, academic writer, observing marine creatures and writing about their psychology. While all of the characters in the novel are adrift, it is Doc the writer who is in existential crisis.

Finding a whole cache of baby octopi Doc sets about the task of documenting their psychological condition under extreme stress. Spoiler alert: the octopi all die, leaving Doc unable to finish his paper and left to engage in the frivolities of the novel's love story. It's not hard to imagine Steinbeck himself struggling with the death of his various subjects and characters, torturing his writing style in uncharacteristic experimentation in form until throwing away the already aimless plot for an equally uncharacteristically uninteresting love story. 

 If Sweet Thursday is Steinbeck's crack at the postwar novel about adrift and listless characters looking for meaning it's almost as though he's speaking to his fellow writers. Welcoming them to the meaningless world of postwar fiction. 

All Blood and Machine

 A review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanly Robinson

Climate change and environmental degradation have always been important issues to me but the urgency has never felt greater than when I became a father. Watching my young toddler's immense love of nature and wanting her to have a fulfilling life has driven the point home.

As Martin Hagglund says; "Our ecological crisis is a stark reminder that our lives depend not only on the fragile self-maintenance of our material bodies but also on the fragile self-maintenance of the global ecosystem to which we belong."

I picked up Kim Stanly Robinson's the Ministry for the Future on Audiobook, it had been on my radar for some time after a great interview he gave to the podcast Chapo Trap House. The novel takes place in a not-so-distant future in which the climate catastrophe has worsened and a range of organizations, nations, and individuals pitch in to try and save the planet. 

I've also noticed the novel has received mixed reviews from climate activists and the literary community. Because the Ministry of the Future is a work of fiction it's going to have some shortcomings in what it's going to be able to contribute to the climate movement. It's also flagrantly ideological and intensely interested in offering all it can to the climate movement, so it's going to subsequently blunt its literary edge at times.

I can see the frustrations as someone who loves both language and political activism. That said, where I think a novel should be able to deliver for the climate movement, the Ministry for the Future delivers. Incidentally, this is exactly where KSR's writing is at its most beautiful. 

I've always liked the quote by David Foster Wallace that suggests the role of fiction is to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable". This is exactly what fiction can offer the climate movement and what KSR does with the Ministry for the Future. KSR's framework of the immediate future is heavily detailed, acutely covering a range of possible scenes as though engaged in a type of world-building. Except the world is our world in another couple of decades. 

Since KSR's forte has always been science fiction he really excels here. When he imagines the climate catastrophe it is deeply disturbing; a lot of literary critics point to the opening chapter about a heat wave that strikes rural India while one of the novel's protagonists is there and describe it as harrowing. Seems like an understatement, the first chapter is horrific. I was listening to it while on a jog and had to stop because it was literally making me feel ill. Talk about disturbing the comfortable. The Ministry of the Future is full of tragedy that feels so incredibly real and possible, those passages alone could do more to encourage action on climate change than any white paper could hope to accomplish. But KSR's world is also a comforting one, reading about recovering eco-systems just as well-researched and possible as the tragedies can inspire a lot of hope. Something I think the climate movement has a hard time getting across is the reality of what even the immediate future can hold for us. The Ministry for the Future paints an incredible world of possibilities that can only serve to engage readers in - at the very least - thinking about which world they want their children to inherit.

If imagining the future as a type of world-building is where a novel is going to excel, the detailed logistical transition for how to achieve this future is going to be where it suffers most and indeed this is where the Ministry for the Future falls flat on its face. While KSR has done his research as to potential planet-saving technologies and philosophies, how we watch society transform is entirely vacant and improbable. The entire time I found myself asking a pivotal question: where are the mass movements?!

If one were reading Ministry of the Future as a guidebook for how to change the world their key takeaway would be either outright bloodsheding terrorism or top-down technocratic maneuvering. People need to stop flying in gasoline-powered airplanes so there is a massive terrorist attack that conveniently ends the industry entirely. Rather than the governments of the world responding with a grotesque anti-terrorism effort they...comply? Seems to be an imaginative blindspot. A new bomb technology renders the militaries of the world useless and therefore primed to pick up the mantel of environmental protection and clean-up, which they do instead of being deployed to wage war over the rest of the world's resources because....reasons.... Central banks implement a new crypto-currency that incentivizes carbon sequestration. Governments implement job guarantees and lift entire towns to make room for animal corridors without the slightest inclination of political struggle. The list goes on.

Not only are these transition passages improbable, but they're also terribly written. Forced and unfathomable monologues, Sorkin-esque diatribes that at some points felt like a left-wing Ayn Rand novel. Head of the Ministry for the Future and one of the novel's protagonists Mary Murphy gives a multi-page speech to the world's central bankers that I literally cringe through, but that "works" nonetheless. The monologues by people in other countries or climate refugees or townspeople being evicted could get cartoonish and even offensive at times (though some are beautiful and written in a totally realistic voice). Scenes of local organizing, movement building, political revolution, and democratization are entirely absent. The beautiful future KSR imagines is accomplished because it is clumsily rolled down the hill at us by technocrats and terrorists.

Despite all of this, it's still really important to read the Ministry for the Future. Ultimately fiction is mostly going to fail in helping us understand how to build a better future, organizing our communities, and engaging with one another to impart real change. But it can, as I believe KSR does, demonstrate what is at stake; what can be lost and what can be gained.

Blah Blah Blah Ethical Consumption

"There is no such thing as ethical consumption" is a phrase you'll hear often particularly as a response to people trying to affect large systemic changes using their personal consumption habits. For example, Business Insider recently posted a piece about No Buy July which featured people trying to withhold money from the economy or undesirable companies in the wake of Roe v Wade being overturned. This is obviously ridiculous; we cannot bring back Roe v Wade or eliminate judicial review or pass a federal abortion bill by growing our own food or refusing to shop at Hobby Lobby. 

The term has also transformed into a sort of annoying rhetorical crutch as well. Any insistence of changing consumptive habits will be met with comments about how individual consumption will hardly register as a blip compared to the scale of what corporations and the wealthy can accomplish with all of their power. This is annoying because even though the phrase is speaking to an innate powerlessness to consumption itself, there obviously is such a thing as ethical - if even just more ethical - consumption. 

The phrase seems to enjoy the most airtime in debates about climate change. Addressing climate change and environmental degradation will require behavioral change. Yet at the recommendation of going vegetarian or buying an electric car, the response is a hostile reminder that corporations are destroying the planet at a pace and scale beyond our individual actions. This often ignores the fact that corporations often destroy the planet because of our behavior. Beef processors are responsible for a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions, some of the worst actually. Pointing to this fact without acknowledging the reason the emissions occur is our beef consumption habits seems to obfuscate the issue. While an individual being a vegetarian will not bring down global temperatures, it is in fact a more ethical way to eat as far as the planet is concerned. Not only that, but to meaningfully address climate change will necessarily mean people will have to consume meat differently, meaning they'll certainly have to eat less of it.

On one side of this debate, ethical consumerists will often point to the success of boycotts. On the other side, you have the ethical consumerism deniers who are clear that behavioral changes are not enough to make change. The flaws in both these arguments stem from a lack of context around organizational power.

Take the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott the ethical consumerists will often point to. This was a mass movement that had a component about ethical consumption but also required real organizational power to ask people to make the sacrifices necessary to stop consuming (using) a racist bus system. It's also worth noting that this was a local-level organizational effort. Ethical consumerism deniers are right to point out that consumption itself does not have power, but organizing does and can be paired with consumption behavior that can deliver on serious demands. Famous hunger strikes, the BDS movement, the Delano Grape Strike, boycotts of companies like Nike over their labor practices, all had a component in which an organized group made changes by, among other things, changing their consumption habits. 

The real notion we need to abandon is that we can do anything as an individual. While giving up meat is an admirable life choice and is certainly an important one, encouraging friends, family, and co-workers with relational organizing, fighting for vegetarian meals in the workplace or school campus, hosting informational events with a local organization, or even just encouraging others to try your delicious vegetarian cooking is far more powerful that quietly engaging in the behavior alone. 

Kate Aronoff when asked about the individual choice of electric vehicles had this to say in Lever New's Left Wondering column: 

"Those looking to tell a positive story about the world that ambitious climate policy can build have mostly, until recently, had to tell a story about the future. But there’s no substitute for getting a taste of that yourself. A long holiday weekend is a glimpse of what a world with a four-day work week might feel like. Using an efficient metro system to breeze around a dense, pleasant city loaded with parks and other public amenities is a better sales pitch for ditching car culture and suburban sprawl than the best communications strategist could muster. If people can experience aspects of a lower-carbon world themselves, they may well be open to fighting for more of them."

 

Here and No Further

While I am not a lifelong activist I’ve probably been around protests more than an average person. I have led protests and attended as a participant, I have been a liaison to the police and I have actively avoided them, I have planned protests and been a part of vehement strategy debates.

In every event, there will inevitably be a suggestion we engage in some mild level of violence. Never anything physically harmful to a human body of course, but when I led a protest against the offices of Blue Cross Blue Shield in Lansing someone suggested throwing a brick through the window, and another suggested damaging the front door to allow us inside. When I attended planning meetings for a Green New Deal protest outside of Detroit’s Auto-show Prom in response to GM’s layoffs some suggested we storm the doors, break things, and sabotage cars.

These were always a minority of voices and they were always roundly rejected. Most argue that violence is not an effective tool for protest and even if it is in the short term (IE it could get you thru a locked door), it is morally wrong and damages long-term movement building.

Andreas Malm seeks to turn these arguments completely on their head in his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Which is sort of an odd title since Malm doesn’t really offer any complex instructions about how to sabotage a pipeline, but instead takes the pacifist hard-liners in the environmental movement to task. The book would be more aptly called “Why to Blow Up a Pipeline”

To Malm, our hands are forced, we’re in self-defense mode as humans who inhabit this earth. How to Blow Up a Pipeline centers on three distinct arguments: the first is a rejection that the success of non-violent movements in the past suggests they should serve as our singular strategy in the present, the second is an argument for why widespread destruction and sabotage of private fossil-fuel property is necessarily strategic and ethical, and finally, there is a concise argument for why apathetic despair is the true movement damaging mantra.

We Love MLK, Don’t We Folks?

The first section of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is dedicated to Malm’s complete rejection of pacifism as an exclusive tactic. Realizing the bulk of the argument for non-violent resistance comes from lessons taken from successful movements of the past, Malm spends much of this section breaking these historic moments down into the sum of their more complicated parts.

Backing up a bit, Malm’s main complaint is with climate activist veterans such as Bill McKibbon whose admiral civil disobedience activities take non-violence as a mission statement. Explicitly calling on inspiration from past movements like abolition, the enfranchisement of women, and the civil rights movement these activists believe non-violence is both a “spiritual insight” and strategic in that they believe “violence committed by social movements always takes them further than their goal”.

Malm’s point that reactionary violence was a very real and very effective tool for social change rings true even with just a cursory glance at the history. The abolition of slavery is a perfect example; “slavery was not abolished by conscientious white people gently disassembling from the institution…As some recall, slavery in the US was terminated by a civil war, whose death toll still remains close to the aggregate from all other military conflicts the country has been embroiled in”. By this measure, it would seem bizarre for hardline pacifists to claim this historic moment as a win for their tactic. It would be like claiming Hitler was defeated by pacifism by ignoring the entirety of military action in WWII.

A lesser-known history is the women’s suffrage movement. Quoting extensively from historians like Diane Atkinson and her book Rise Up, Women! Malm points out that reactionary violence was so drastic it’s hard to imagine it didn’t play a role in enfranchisement; “suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill’s door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dogwhips, breaking the windows in prison cells. Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilization.”

Of course, the real crux of any pacifist argument is going to stem from the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Malm acknowledges the successful non-violent strategies of the time as “the better case”. Far from being put in the corner, this is where Malm develops his actionable thesis; that singular strategy enforcement is the problem and constructively violent wings of the movement shouldn’t be condemned.

The theory drawn up is one that comes from analysis of the civil rights movement. “Radical Flank theory”, coined in the book Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream by Herbert H Haines, points out that radicalism and violence when accompanying non-violent resistance to systemic violence is more effective than either strategy on its own. As Malm puts it; “the civil rights movement won the act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power”.

There were hundreds of violent riots in the late 60s, many of which leveled entire city blocks. The risk of this widespread devastation to property and human well-being was precisely what bolstered the voices of the many nonviolent protesters, quoting Haines directly; “nonviolent direct action struck at the heart of powerful political interests because it could easily turn to violence”. The double pincer of reactionary violence and strategic nonviolence is put forward as the reason for the success of the civil rights movement.

Malm concludes that “Non-Violent civil disobedience caught on because it worked - better than the alternatives, such as guerilla warfare against the state - and was appreciated precisely as a tactic, rather than as a creed or a doctrine”. After concluding that the true lesson of history is an uncomfortable embrace of violent resistance as a possibility if not at times a preferred method, Malm is ready to make his case for what to do in the face of planetary destruction.

Kill Your Local Oil Baron(‘s Stuff)

Before the second argument comes in full swing, Malm reiterates; “non-violent mass mobilization should (where possible) be the first resort, militant action the last; and no movement should voluntarily suspend the former, only give it appendages”

At long last, Malm lays out what exactly he thinks the climate movement should do:

“so here is what this movement of millions should do for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition [of new C02 emissions]. Damage and destroy new C02 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed…if we can’t get a prohibition, we can impose a defacto one with our bodies and any other means necessary.”

Essentially Malm calls for widespread private property destruction, sabotage, and physical prevention of extraction. Some might argue that property destruction is not violence, but because many in the climate movement believe it to be, Malm proudly adopts the description.

This is the most controversial aspect of Malm’s work and has gotten him a lot of heat from various pundits. While the first section deals with any arguments suggesting the strategy of violence itself has always been ineffective, the second section fields arguments against the deluge of comments that claim what Malm is suggesting is immoral.

Yet Malm treats violence towards fossil fuel extraction or carbon burning property as a complex rule for self-defense. If the property was a person and was doing the same level of harm to your person and life, violent action would surely be morally justified. Since the entire planet, atmosphere, and biosphere belong to all of us, this property is in fact doing damage to, not just our personal but our life-sustaining property and we are within our right to react accordingly.

Drawing the distinction from killing - which Malm is swift to say is never justifiable as a tactic - How to Blow Up a Pipeline puts property violence on the following gradient; “one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, [is] that which hits material conditions for subsistence like poisoning someone’s groundwater for drinking…at the other end of the spectrum is the blasting of a superyacht into smithereens”. Taking this logical approach means we are being killed by the owners of private property and are being chastised for damaging that property.

Imagine being shot and before the shooter can finish you off you grab the gun and destroy it. The charge leveled at you however is that you damaged the personal property of another and therefore acted immorally.

Still, violence is only justifiable, it is not always the best tactic, as Malm states over and over again. Yet there are constantly charges of violence being leveled at activists doing the property destruction, even at Malm himself for inspiring it. The charges come from all around, the property owners themselves, the brokers of the status quo like industry figures or media pundits, and even from other environmentalists in the movement.

This anger is hard to reconcile considering the scope of harm that the property itself is doing. We’re not talking about breaking the windows of a local bookstore or fire-bombing a progressive church, we’re talking about sabotaging pipelines, decommissioning coal mines, and preventing construction equipment from deforestation among other things. If we’re forced to go through the mental gymnastics of considering the property damage as violence worthy of condemnation, surely the violence the property was engaged in is far more deserving of our action.

In addition, if we as a society are truly concerned with the violence that How to Blow Up a Pipeline could be instigating, our best bet is to rapidly adopt climate and environmental policies that prevent fossil fuel and carbon-emitting property from doing much if any damage. Radical Flank Theory at work.

Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

If Malm believes there is a detrimental stance the climate movement can take its apathy. The idea expressed by modern literary figures like Jonathan Franzen is that the damage is done so we should just clutch our loved ones. Malm also seems to put those who criticize the violence of the radical flank in this same bucket.

If strategic pacifists argue that we’re not at the point where widespread sabotage is warranted, they’re really no different than the fatalist who claims the damage is done and activism is useless. To Malm' “Fatalism of the present holds defeated struggles of the past in contempt, and so does strategic pacifism: if someone raised a weapon and lost, it was because she raised that weapon…In the universe of strategic pacifism, only the winners deserve praise”.

So while the hardline pacifists of the movement claim, with some validity, that violence does damage to the movement as a whole, Malm would argue that this unpopularity can be weaponized rather than allowed to turn the movement into something the public despises.

Malm understands that violence is not for everyone and even seems to relent that the majority of the climate movement will not necessarily participate in hostile engagements with law enforcement. However, should the activities of the radical flank arouse public condemnation, the strategy is for the less radical, bureaucratic arm of the movement to leverage the moment for systemic change.

This is where Malm seems to lose the thread. There is no question that violence, even if we can make an air-tight case for its heroic justification, is going to draw criticism and unpopularity towards the movement. Charges of terrorism have been leveled at eco-activists engaged in this work before and we must never forget that the government has a powerful War on Terror propaganda apparatus that can quickly be adapted (something Malm seems to forget as much of his movement focus is out in Europe where beat cops aren’t even armed). Malm is correct to justify violence against property destroying the earth, but the inspirational and/or deleterious effects on the movement are impossible to determine.

Even if you’re not going to drop your protest sign in favor of a monkey wrench, even if the idea of destroying something that isn’t yours, even something that is itself incredibly destructive and destroying everything you love, there is no disagreeing with Malm that the fight matters and we all need to be engaged in it somewhere:

“The alpha and omega of the science of the cumulative character of climate change run contrary to the axioms of fatalism. Every gigaton matters, every single plant and terminal and pipeline and SUV and superyacht makes a difference to the aggregate damage done.”

*All images from the 6th IPCC Report and the 4th National Climate Assessment