This interview between the NYT and the author of ‘how to blow up a pipeline’ includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between ‘political violence is never acceptable’ and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn’t support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).
This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.
spoiler
NYT: We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.
Malm: Of course we can. Why not?
NYT: That is moral hypocrisy.
Malm: I disagree.
NYT: Why?
Malm: The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.
NYT: But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?
Malm: Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.
NYT: Could you give me a reason to live?
Malm: What do you mean?
NYT: Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project.
Malm: I’m not an optimist about the human project.
Can’t find the exact passage I remember, but this is close.
But to abstain from social relations, is to abstain from life. As long as he draws or earns an income, he participates in bourgeois economy, and upholds the violence which sustains it. He is in sleeping partnership with the big bourgeoisie, and that is the essence of bourgeois economy. If two other countries are at war, he is powerless to intervene and stop them, for that means social co-operation – social co-operation issuing in coercion, like a man separating quarrelling friends and that action is by his definition barred to him. If the big bourgeoisie of his own country decide to go to war and mobilise the coercive forces, physical and moral, of the State, he can do nothing real, for the only real answer is co-operation with the proletariat to resist the coercive action of the big bourgeoisie and oust them from power. If Fascism develops, he cannot suppress it in the bud before it has built up an army to intimidate the proletariat, for he believes in ‘free speech’. He can only watch the workers being bludgeoned and beheaded by the forces he allowed to develop.
His position rests firmly on the bourgeois fallacy. He thinks that man as an individual has power. He does not see that even in the unlikely event of everyone’s taking his viewpoint and saying, ‘I will passively resist,’ his purpose will still not be achieved. For men cannot in fact cease to co-operate, because society’s work must be carried on – grain must be reaped, clothes spun, electricity generated or man will perish from the earth. Only his position as a member of a parasitic class could have given him any other illusion. A worker sees that his very life depends on economic co-operation and that this co-operation of itself imposes social relations which m bourgeois economy must be bourgeois, that is, must in greater or less measure give into the hands of the big bourgeoisie the violent issues of life and death. Passive resistance is not a real programme, but an apology for supporting the old programme. A man either participates in bourgeois economy, or he revolts and tries to establish another economy.
As long as he draws or earns an income, he participates in bourgeois economy, and upholds the violence which sustains it.
Some good stuff here, but this is almost word-for-word
I don’t think “you have no choice but to participate if you want to live, but participating makes you guilty” is all that convincing, and I’d bet a large part of its appeal stems from older Christian concepts like original sin, anyway. What’s more convincing to me is “you can either try to help or do nothing, who would you rather be?”
And this:
even in the unlikely event of everyone’s taking his viewpoint and saying, ‘I will passively resist,’ his purpose will still not be achieved
Seems dubious when you think about strikes.
