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‘'We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers'’ 

—Roger Hallam quoting Bayard Rustin

'If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics

I would tell you that the personal revolution

Is far more difficult

And is the first step in any revolution'

—the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

Waking up to our future of anthropogenic climate change is a painful task. While total human extinction is unlikely to happen, there will be ecological collapse (extinction of many non-human species), and likely international societal collapse. These predictions are not static, nor are they binary; there are not two separate states of climate success and failure, there is a continuum of futures which range from the almost bearable to the catastrophic. Each thing we do now and in the rest of our lives will impact exactly how bad things will be.

With this in mind, questions arise about the way we want to shape the world. While we can perhaps agree on the need for change, or even a vision for the future, the tactics, means, pathway, or direction for getting there are more difficult to pin down. Society has become addicted to the continuation of eco-colonial neoliberal capitalism. What part does violent activism have in unpicking this mode of Anthropocene? Crucially, is the use of violence legitimate in order to avoid the worst of what is to come?

Within this central inquiry are many more specific questions: what violence is; whether violence is ever legitimate; whether it is legitimate in the context of climate activism; whom or what violent activism might be used against; who might carry out violent activism; whether violence in activism is permanent and irreversible or not; whether property damage constitutes violence; whether any kinds of human harm are legitimate; and whether there are different legitimacies to fast and slow violence.

In the 21st Century, even the more disruptive British environmental action groups, such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil (JSO), have so far stayed dedicated to nonviolent direct action (NVDA) as their means of intervention. These groups have seen limited success: while some aims are met—UK government declaring a climate emergency, called for by XR, and UK government halting issuing new licences for oil and gas on British territory, called for by JSO—climate catastrophe is by no means averted. For example, the UK government declaring a climate emergency has not made any tangible difference to policy or governance in the way declaring war would. Similarly, while the UK government has halted issuing new licences for fossil fuel drilling, that has not stopped the extraction of existing sites, nor even changed the reliance on fossil fuels which the British economy has—the country still imports 50% of its gas, projections suggesting an increase to nearly 70% by 2030. Moreover, those two specific successes do not represent the more maximalist change which XR and JSO were looking for. At the global scale the IPCC is predicting 3.2°C of warming at current trajectories of emissions reductions. This implies a future of violence and chaos as the world experiences ever worsening floods, fires, droughts, food shortages, civil wars, mass migration, and so on. There is a tension between the violent futurities of climate change and the present nonviolent intervention from XR, JSO, and others to avert the worst of the damage. With JSO having recently nominally stepped back from activism at an organisational level, now seems an interesting moment within activism, when some of the themes which I explore here are perhaps especially relevant. 

At the beginning of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm explores what he calls ‘Lanchester’s paradox’. In a 2007 London Review of Books essay, Lanchester wrote 'it is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism'. In 2007 I was one year old, and I am now getting on for twenty. That is to say, a generation has passed since Lanchester wrote that article.

Now more than ever, climate change is a problem deeply rooted in our political institutions, economies, and social expectations. This may pose a problem for nonviolent activism, which may be limited in its ability to bring about revolutionary change. Andreas Malm writes 'after the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it.' His 2016 book Fossil Capital argued that hydrocarbons are ‘sociogenic’, and that fossil fuel ideology fundamentally underpins state and economic systems. The very existence of global economies rests on the existence of fossil fuels; to dismantle climate disaster is to dismantle the way that our world works. Two years prior, in This Changes Everything, Klein had also shown that

fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. This is required not only to create a political context to dramatically lower emissions, but also to help us cope with the disasters we can no longer avoid.

It is difficult to imagine peaceful activism bringing about this sort of world. Malm writes that 'the question of realism has become one of priorities: total breakdown of capital or climate; assets or lives; profits or planet.' Malm (much more so than Klein, who, in 2014, hoped that the climate movement will see an imminent ‘effervescent moment’ of activism), acknowledges that this is a very difficult transition to make peacefully; in 2024’s Overshoot, he and Carton write 'neither the Green New Deal nor degrowth or any other programme in circulation has a plan for how to strand the assets that must be stranded.' Given that all of the systems which underpin modern society—that is to say the fundamental structures of globalised capitalism—rely upon fossil fuels, these international structures must be taken apart. To dismantle this global violent system is a difficult and likely violent business. As Malm and Carton spell out, 'to destroy ExxonMobil would be to destroy JPMorgan.' If we want to avoid climate breakdown, then the way that we organise our power, money, and culture needs to change. This may be too big a task for nonviolent activism on its own.

One of the other motivations I have for writing this essay is the fact that activism appears to draw fewer participants in the present than in the past: nonviolence relies on a sufficient body-mass to work. With fewer people engaged in nonviolent resistance, I am forced to wonder whether violent action, which requires far fewer participants for effective protest, may be one of few remaining options for resistance. Outside my lifetime, at least 750 000, perhaps more than a million, gathered in London to protest against Iraq, yet at the height of XR, only 10 000 people were taking action on the streets of London. There are a few potential factors that play into this decline in protest attendance. Some point to the self-regulation of protest on the left, drawing my attention to the tactical organising that takes pained care to avoid criminality, and where it doesn't to avoid significant damage. For example, the majority of tactics have been roadblocks and marches, when the law is broken, it is through superficial interruption of traffic, minor damage to cultural artifact containers (the glass of Magna Carta, the frame of van Gogh’s Sunflowers). We are yet to see the bombing tactics of the Suffragettes, the slashing of paintings, and substantial property damage. Another potential reason is that, unlike the Iraq war or the ozone layer, there is not a temporal point of no return. Climate change operates on time-scales of slow violence outside the reach of human comprehension, meaning that there is never a reason to protest on any particular day. There will always be a tomorrow. A third reason that conversations have highlighted, along with a T.J. Clark essay in the London Review of Books, is the power of the spectacle to distract from material reality. More and more people are blinded by the phone-induced '24-hour REM,' and the misinformation and misdirection that it brings. A fourth and final reason, drawn from personal experience, is the ever more pervasive policing of protests, invasive digital filming, facial recognition algorithms, stricter laws on protest, and other state tactics of counterinsurgency. The threat of swift and lengthy incarceration is certainly dissuading, though perhaps this is just a matter of selfishness on my part. I know personally several people who have been embroiled in complicated legal cases, who have suffered house-raids, hefty fines, and imprisonment. Some people I have spoken to talk of activism as being out-equipped and out-personnelled not just by the state, but by those who disagree with climate action (worryingly signalled by parties in the UK on the right looking ready to cast aside our currently scientifically inadequate net zero targets). Keeping in mind these reasons for less engagement with activism is important when considering the practicalities of differing tactics. In the UK, we’ve also recently witnessed the criminalisation of Palestine Action, with the government voting to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation. News story after story shows the frightening consequences of this: protesters campaigning for a free Palestine, arrested for showing support for a violent ‘terrorist’ organisation, even when they bear no actual link to the arguably predominantly nonviolent group. 

At the same time of widespread tactics of nonviolence on the left, as well as a disengagement from activism, there is a rise of state- and culturally-sanctioned violence in Gaza (a very different violence: genocide), with more and more people on the right in the UK (within and without Reform) happy for violence (of varying kinds) to be carried out against Palestinians, trans folk, migrants, activists, and other minorities in the name of ‘Western civilisation’. The UK government is committing to increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with the ambition to reach 3% by the end of the next parliament. The country seems to be readying more for a position of war than peace. Moreover, activism on the right is still happy to deploy violent methods. In recent months we have seen the assassination of Democrats in Minnesota. Perhaps the shooter, Vance Boelter saw these murders as part of a political resistance. 

Understanding the moral implications of violent and nonviolent activist praxes is a pressing task because of the narrowing (or perhaps vanished) window of opportunity for decarbonisation to have any meaningful effect on long-term temperature rise. How, then, does nonviolent protest fit into a society where political violence is increasingly normalised and serious protest increasingly frowned upon? Should activists, being people with conscience, stick to nonviolence even if the legal system itself uses more and more violence to suppress dissidents? I do not personally have many significant experiences of violence, which I am very aware of when writing this. I am keen to not naively endorse or critique something I have little phenomenological or sensuous knowledge of.

introducing Judith Butler and Andreas Malm

To approach the parts that violence and nonviolence (and their intersections) might play within political resistance, I will turn to two authors which seem to be in opposition to each other: Judith Butler in The Force of Nonviolence (2020) and Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). I have picked these two works above others partly because they were written within a year of each other. This means that both authors were writing within a fairly similar temporal context. Comparison is made difficult since their conclusions are both compelling; this can be in part explained by the fact that Malm focuses upon the climate emergency, whereas Butler, who is more interested in state violence in this particular work, is not. Both of these books explicitly examine violence and nonviolence, and the two authors come to nominally opposite conclusions. Butler finds that nonviolence can do many of the things that violence is frequently but mistakenly conceived to do, and that violence itself is never excused; Malm concludes that some violence, especially property damage, may be necessary to avert climate breakdown. Judith Butler approaches the question of nonviolence philosophically for the most part. They spend a lot of time unpacking the work of Benjamin, Freud, Arendt, and Kant. Their writing engages in the logic of the western philosophical tradition, especially critical theory, rooted in the thinking of the Frankfurt school. On the other hand, Malm’s writing is partly philosophical, and partly autobiographical, drawing upon his own activism as well as bringing political commentators into dialogue. Both authors are clearly driven by a desire for moral integrity in the world around them. Butler pursues social equality with a clear awareness of injustice; for them, nonviolence is essential for the long-term struggle towards a just society, it is outside the realm of means and an end: it is a process. Malm is grounded much more by climate activism, and so is guided by a pragmatics of intervention to cultivate a liveable future. For Malm, nonviolence is a useful tactic, but a tactic which must be now (in our present time, in our current context) be supplemented by violent activism in order to dismantle current violence and to avoid a future of climate conflict. He writes 'there has been a time for a Ghandian climate movement; perhaps there might come a time for a Fanonian one.' Franz Fanon’s work The Wretched of the Earth, discussed by both Malm and Butler, works to understand and violently resist the colonial, particularly in the context of the Algerian War of Independence against France; Sartre’s preface describes how Fanon ‘demolishes the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations uniting and opposing the colonists and the “metropolitans.”’ While the title of Malm’s work may give the impression that How to Blow up a Pipeline is a guide to the kinds of precise violence which he envisions, his purpose is more to lay the groundwork in justifying violence as a political act.

First, I will outline the ways in which Butler examines nonviolence. Second, I will explore the uses and contexts of violence that Malm envisions. Third, I will bring Butler’s work to Malm’s understanding of the climate crisis in order to critique and appraise it. To conclude, I find that Malm’s calls for property damage, sabotage, and the occupation for private space are in fact compatible with Butler’s understanding of nonviolence, since to destroy the inanimate is not to violate the grievable.

While I refer to violence and nonviolence in a binary manner, it is important to realise that this is not reality. For example, JSO’s nonviolence training teaches that there is a spectrum between the three gravitational pulls of non-violence (as complete passivity), nonviolence (as respectful disruption), and violence (as aggression). JSO uses the metaphor of a stringed instrument for their activism: by maintaining a tension that is neither too taut nor too loose, music is made, and effective protest is carried out. While this may be a helpful tactical definition, Judith Butler warns that 'there is no quick way to arrive at a stable semantic distinction between the two when that distinction is so often exploited for the purposes of concealing and extending violent aims and practices'. They add that part of their purpose in writing is 'to accept the difficulty of finding and securing the definition of violence when it is subject to instrumental definitions that serve political interests and sometimes state violence itself'. This is exactly the case with Palestine Action; by defining their activism as terrorism, the UK state is able to distract from and conceal the complicity of the government in the ongoing genocide and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. We have also seen this in the case of XR, when it was labelled as terrorist, even when sticking to NVDA. Moreover, when defining violence we are liable to normalise it by doing so: surveillance, facial recognition, algorithmic tracking, incarceration, proscription, and other tactics of control have become acceptable, particularly as legal action against activists, yet are all tools for state and corporate violence. Whoever has the power to define violence owns violence. An extension from Butler’s observation is that when society strictly defines space, people, and ideas, it is easy for there to be peripheral groups which are neglected. For example, the strict definition of transgender people, the idea of gender, and the spaces which genders can inhabit has led to marginalisation of queer folk. Although this instability is present, both words, violence and nonviolence, are still useful to this work. The reader is requested to take their meanings to be broad; when more definition is needed it will be introduced. 

Judith Butler on nonviolence

Despite their resistance to a strict binary between violence and nonviolence, Butler does offer some ideas for the two. For them, nonviolence is a force. It is not the same thing as passivity; it is ‘a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction’. It is not merely resistance, but a ‘commitment to world building’ that must be ‘aggressively pursued’. For Butler, nonviolence is both an act of critique and an act of contribution. It is a refusal to be complicit in injustice and insists on working towards social equity.

Butler points to violence as that which 'assaults the interdependency that is, or should be, part of our social world'. They identify the fantasy of masculinist independence, epitomised by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as part of a history of self-centeredness that has traditionally underpinned arguments for violence, particularly self-defence. In particular, they argue that the assumptions of Hobbes and Marx have propagated this illusion. The fantasy of individual isolation ignores all of the entanglement that enables birth, care, cultural education, and social individuation, and so enables an excuse for violence grounded in the defensive rights of the individual self. Instead, Butler argues that, as humans, we are all necessarily interdependent on each other. This is an established theme in their work: in their 2004 essay collection Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, they write that this 'fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that [we] can will away'. In The Force of Non-Violence, they trace the moral argument for nonviolence back to the inherent interdependency of human and more than human existence. By departing from independence to entanglement, Butler shows that our lives are in fact dependent on the often invisible and obscured myriad of relationships that we have with all living things. The ‘other' becomes the ‘us’. From this, Butler contends that non-individualistic nonviolence can resist violent self-centredness, since it pre-contemplates the social relations between actors (activists) and those who are acted against. By contrast to the compassion of nonviolent resistance, they argue that violence fails because it concedes that there is an (often racialised) other that can be (falsely) separated out from the perpetrator. As they develop in their interview with Viktoria Heugel, nonviolence is 'forceful and effective modes of action that gain their force precisely by refusing violence'. 

What follows from Butler’s exploration of interdependency is the concept of the grievable. Grievability is the capacity for loss at the hands of violence: ‘that loss would be registered as a loss only because those lives were affirmed as having a living value, and that, in turn, means we regard those lives as worthy of grief’ (italics theirs). Given our global interdependence on all living things, all things have grievability. To distribute grievability based upon geography, species, gender, kingdom, personal knowledge, or any other act of demography is to racialise and to colonialise. Violence assaults grievability, it refuses to recognise the other as grievable. Nonviolence looks to the flattening of hierarchy, and to the attention to all other lives, the other things that constitute ‘us’. Nonviolence enacts an egalitarian imaginary which asserts the equality of grievability and resists the concept of the privileged self. Nonviolence is an ‘ethical obligation by which we are bound precisely because we are bound to one another’.

Another definition Butler gestures towards is violence as that which 'operates as an intensification of social inequality' (this is the kind of violence that can play out over a long time in the case of Nixon’s slow violence, explored later); climate change and its effects are measurably such. This last definition seems particularly apt in a context of activism, which on the Left specifically aims to bring about equity of one kind or another.

Although Butler makes a strong case for nonviolence, they caveat this in the introduction: 

One of the strongest arguments for the use of violence on the left is that it is tactically necessary in order to defeat structural or systemic violence, or to dismantle a violent regime, such as apartheid, dictatorship, or totalitarianism. That may well be right, and I don’t dispute it. But for that argument to work, we would need to know what distinguishes the violence of the regime from the violence that seeks to take it down. Is it always possible to make that distinction? Is it sometimes necessary to suffer the fact that the distinction between the one violence and the other can collapse?

It is precisely because of this caveat, and the potential collapse of meaning and morality that the dialogue between Butler and Malm matters—Malm’s work encourages us to question perceived passivity of Butlerian nonviolence; Butler’s work challenges us to consider carefully the implications of Malm’s call for a Fanonian, violent climate movement. Butler’s exploration of nonviolence as a social struggle can be used to question the consequences of violent activism and interrogate the means of resistance in order to distinguish protest from complicity, state from dissident, politics of uncare from communities of compassion. Without doing the necessary thinking, any violent acts may become distracted, misguided, or uncontrolled, resulting in the reproduction of violent systems rather than their dismantling. To avoid this danger, this collapse of meaning, it is imperative to understand the violence that is carried out currently by state and social systems, and that will be carried out in a future of climate collapse. Then, the task is to make sure that the kinds of violence that Malm calls for is distinct from the violence which is being resisted, and that the use of activist or revolutionary violence is controlled in such a way as to struggle for a nonviolent and just future. In Butler’s reasoning, an echo of Audre Lorde presents itself within the idea that the tool of oppressive violence cannot be used to dismantle violent oppression. Butler’s reasoning also draws upon Walter Benjamin, who examines how violence which works towards extra-legal ends will be met by crushing, legitimised, legal violence which aims to preserve the rule of law. Butler goes on to reason that Benjamin’s questioning of the framework of means and ends allows us to work outside that logic, and for those (like Malm) who consider violence as a provisional tactic of resistance, they fail to consider that just as an activist might utilise violence, violence might in turn make use of its user. They work on from this to suggest that violence as technē simply perpetuates violence rather than resisting it.

An apparent gap in Butler’s work is the lack of contemplating violence and nonviolence in a context of climate change, especially given climate change’s position as wanting perhaps the largest ever political, scientific, and philosophical projects. Their work to identify the ‘self’, the ‘vulnerable’, the ‘other’ (not grievable) makes a lot of sense in the context of the dyadic, game-theory based relationships which have historically underpinned abuse, war, terror, and other fast acts of violence. However, as Rob Nixon has shown, climate change is partially a condition of widespread slow violence: 'violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.' Suddenly, the relationship of the aggressor and the vulnerable becomes confused, because harm is distributed by probability and chance across space and time in such a way that culpability is almost impossible to trace. In the context of the scale of climate change effects, any ‘self’ or ‘collective’ defence is really much wider in scope than the individual, or even a large group of humans, but a defence of life at the broadest conceivable level. Whether Butler has other views on the use of violence in a condition of nigh-total-collective-defence such as this is not clear. 

I will now turn to Malm to press upon the nature of climate violence, and the context of climate activism in order to see how Butler speaks to this.

Andreas Malm on violence

In responding to climate violence, Andreas Malm draws upon the Fanonian model of resistance. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes that in a context of resistance ‘personal interests’ become the ‘collective interest’ because success or loss will be experienced at the collective level. This argument was made in response to the Algerian war; for the pro-independence fighters there would either be collective victory or defeat at the hands of the French colonial forces. Collective interest was a necessity for survival. By following Fanon, Malm, like Butler, tries to move away from individualism. He borrows the Fanonian sense of collective interest and victory in his 2016 action with Ende Gelände (meaning ‘here and no further’) of targeting the Schwarze Pumpe (Black Pump), a lignite-fired (brown coal) power station in Spremberg. Malm’s activism also takes inspiration from the acts of the suffragettes, citing the tactic of smashing windows and torching letterboxes, and the Birmingham riots of 1963. He perceives both of these movements as succeeding because of the radical flank effect. Coined by Herbert H. Haines in relation to the civil rights movement, the radical flank effect refers to the result of perceived extremist actors making moderate groups appear to be more reasonable. Malm describes how he and other Ende Gelände activists

marched away from the tracks, towards the power plant itself. In the patch of forest surrounding it, we encountered a fence. Walking, half-running in the front, my affinity group tore it down, stamped on it, and continued with the rest of the march up to the perimeters of the plant. They were marked by another, sturdier fence, also pulled down. The few private guards caught off-hand and completely outnumbered, we rushed into the compound. During my years in the climate movement, I have never felt a greater rush of exhilaration: for one throbbing, mind-expanding moment, we had a slice of the infrastructure wrecking this planet in our hands.

The CEO of Vattenfall’s continental operations described this as ‘massive criminal violence’. There is an element of the Fanonian revolutionary mindset in Malm’s activism—collective action is taken as an exhilarating imperative against the future massacre handed to us by fossil capital and industrial infrastructure (such as the power station in question). 

What is perhaps most interesting about Malm’s activism is its phenomenological quality. The sense of a ‘high’, and an ‘injection of collective empowerment’ are both at once compelling and dangerous. While it seems only right that resistance should bring about sweet emotions and neurological thrill, these affective experiences seem to also be present in the violence of right-wing rioters in the UK in 2024. Butler maintains more of a distance from the emotive characteristics of nonviolence than Malm. If there was a critique to be made of Butler’s work, it is that their exclusive focus on the philosophical grounding for nonviolence makes their book a little more disembodied than Malm’s, despite Butler’s call for the nonviolent resistance of bodies that refuse to ‘disappear so easily’.

Another of the case studies closely examined in How to Blow Up a Pipeline is the story of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who between them caused six million dollars of damage to the Dakota Access Pipeline through various acts of sabotage (hence the title of the book). In another example of property damage, Reznicek and Montoya burned out empty construction vehicles, and broke sections of the pipe using oxyacetylene cutting torches and petrol-soaked rags. They then used a press conference to own up to their industrial sabotage. Reznicek is currently serving an eight-year federal sentence, and Montoya six; their sentences were enhanced with terrorism charges.

A theme Malm frequently returns to is that of the SUV, the ‘second-largest driver of the increasing global CO2 emissions since 2010’ (the first is the power sector). In 2007, he took action along with others in Sweden to deflate the tyres of 1500 or so SUVs using pieces of ‘gravel the size of a boiled couscous grain or a corn of black pepper’ to hold down the valve. In this act of sabotage, it is individual conspicuous consumption that is targeted. Their tactics were to ‘avoid trucks used by artisans and workers, jeeps for people with disabilities, minibuses and ordinary cars, we advised any such imitators: aim straight for the SUVs of the rich’. The level of attention given to their targets extended to an on-line list of models to focus on. This was not activism that caused inconvenience to people who could not afford it.

Another mode of violent activism that Malm references is the early sabotage tactics of the South African uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), abbreviated hereafter as MK. The MK, initially led by the young Nelson Mandela, began a campaign in 1961, sabotaging pylons, electrical substations, and other infrastructural targets. This period was brought to an end by Mandela’s arrest in 1962. Malm is describing the actions of the MK specifically to show that ‘strategic pacifism adduces …sequences of struggle to admonish the climate movement against any aberration from non-violence. It is a mixture of cant and forgery’. Malm neither describes nor explores the morals of later MK bombings and landmines, which resulted in the deaths of civilians.

When examining Malm’s vision for industrial sabotage and the occupation of corporate, capitalised space (the Schwarze Pumpe, the Dakota Access Pipeline) through the lens of Butler’s understanding of violence, the actions are both nonviolent and legitimate. If violence is partially an ‘intensification of social inequality,’ then it seems that the activists Malm cites are working for social equity: they are reclaiming once common land, halting an asset of fossil capital, and causing a loss to those with a concentration of political and economic power. The livelihoods of the firm’s stakeholders are not ruined, and nor are those of the plant’s workers or private guards. It is difficult to read Malm’s activism as being ignorant to grievability, no living thing has been directly harmed though his and his fellows’ actions It can be argued that this use of force is more than simply a tactic—in many ways it embodies Butler’s struggle for a future where corporate interest does not outweigh collective persistence. By putting their bodies into the industrial landscape and destroying the material that would otherwise deny them access to that space, Malm and his friends assert their right to life, and crucially for Butler, without denying anyone else theirs. It appears that an action such as this is not violent in the Butlerian sense. Moreover, this activism does not risk the collapse of definition between violence and nonviolence. By attending to grievability, we attend to the effects of activism, avoiding the reproduction of state violence.

There is another dimension to the proportionality of corporate property damage, which is that it can be understood as materialising violence which will otherwise already occur. Given that the world will be affected by worse and more frequent disasters such as flooding, fires, and storms, property is already put at risk by the future of climate change. The property damage of Ende Gelände, and of Reznicek and Montoya precipitates a future violence into the present, with the hope of avoiding that future. In this sense, their actions are even more justified. Not only do they embody the act of struggle for a just future, but also they enact the future which they wish to avoid. Property destruction is not a performance of resistance, but the embodying of it. Here it may be possible to crudely insert a trolley bus problem: nonviolent activism pulls the lever to cause some damage in the present with the provisional hope that more serious damage is averted later.

What then of damaging or destroying the property of private individuals, in the case of SUV deflation, or the bombings the MK and suffragettes? Grievability shows us that when led for a genuine concern for the wellbeing of other people, inconvenience which does not threaten a person's long-term physical or psychological health cannot be read as violent. It is not an act which deepens or enacts social inequality. By nature, these acts of disruption are such that anyone has the nominal ability to carry them out. When activists attend to those that they affect, even when sabotaging their material possessions, they are preconceiving the grievability of the other, and are led by care and compassion. These are acts which refuse the right of the individual to threaten the wellbeing of the global ‘we’. 

a conclusion of sorts

Just how secure the foundations of ethics are is unclear to me. Jonathan Lear’s account of Plenty Coups and the decline of the Crow people helps to think about the cultural devastation that is yet to happen. He describes that just as the nomadic way of life for the Crow was destroyed through reservations and the passing of the Buffalo, so too were their psychological and philosophical frameworks. Lear’s account hinges on Plenty Coups’ remark that after the buffalo went away, ‘nothing happened’; Lear interprets this to signal that Coups’ fundamental ethical relationships with the world were broken down by the material devastation which his culture suffered. From this, Lear suggests that our ‘entire structure for evaluating the world might cease to make sense’. In another investigation into the collapse of philosophical meaning, Tim Mulgan’s Ethics for a Broken World, which imagines future academics looking back at our strange ethical frameworks, draws out the possibility for ‘affluent philosophy’ (Mulgan’s term) to fall apart in the context of climate and social breakdown. ‘If resources were so scarce that survival was threatened, then people would naturally do whatever could to survive, and therefore justice would not enter their thoughts’. Whether future people will look back with new perspectives informed by cultural collapse, heads in hands, at our failure to assassinate, to bomb, to kidnap, is not clear. The future is a foreign country. 

All this being said, I follow Butler’s thesis that violence is never legitimate, even in the context of climate activism. A violation of grievability is too much to bear, no matter whom violence is directed against, nor the reason to do so. However, when activists are led by compassion, there is a wider range of interventions, previously thought of as too extreme, that we may consider as nonviolent. When led by Butler’s conception of grievability, we find that any act which clings tight to the faith that ‘you are grievable; the loss of you is intolerable’ should be considered as not violent, whether it be industrial sabotage, the occupation of space, or the destruction of private property. Furthermore, if violence is partially that which assaults the interdependency of our social world’, then compassionate actions which bring people (especially non-activists) into conversation and community should be considered more nonviolent than actions which don’t. This is not to say that activism should not be divisive, more that activist imaginaries should work towards cohesion, peace, and resilient cultures. 

To push at the boundary of this conclusion, we can look to an imagined act of property damage: the blowing up of a pipeline. If this were to accidentally result in the death of a worker who the activists did not realise was on site, then this act of sabotage would be intolerable. The activists should have been certain that no lives would be lost in the immediate effects of their work, because all lives are grievable. If the broken pipeline indirectly stopped an elderly person from heating their home and so this person perished in the cold, then again this is intolerable and the activists are at fault, since they did not consider giving blankets to those affected. Grievability should be a guiding imperative to the acts of those who resist.

The actions which Malm calls for refute and actively work against the impending future of climate violence, while also affirming our collective right to persist in a more equitable world. Any activism which neglects the other, preys upon vulnerability, or materialises structural inequality must be considered as violence, and as such intolerable. To put it bluntly, it is the physical machinery of fossil capital which poisons our sky, not the people who fund it. To blow up a pipeline is more effective than to blow up the man that owns it.