This review essay discusses How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm. The texts are read not as academic research (presupposing methodological neutrality and objectivity of the author), but as an attempt to use the language and arguments of social sciences to revive strategic debates inside the climate movement, with the author openly disclosing his political positions and trying to convince others. Malm argues that the climate movement is now paralyzed by two myths: social-democratic temporality and non-violence. Both are based on flawed logic that advocacy and reformism can convince capitalism – as the primary cause of climate change – to commit suicide before it is too late, and on false historical analogies declaring that pacifism – not only towards people but towards private property as well – is strategically advantageous. But, he argues, since the climate crisis will only get worse and it is the status quo that creates and deepens it there is no time to wait. The climate movement should escalate conflict and directly attack capitalist economic system, not worrying too much about public support. Each book is thus an attempt to imagine an alternative to the movement’s current strategy: climate sabotage in the case of How to Blow Up a Pipeline and ecological leninism in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency.
By the time liberals triumphantly proclaimed the end of history, some environmentalists had already begun to mobilize the public against Western modernity by proclaiming the end of nature. For many people, the environmentalist agenda meant a new ideology that could replace classical ideologies; many, on the other hand, understood environmentalism as radically anti-ideological. In this text, I will focus on the relationship between nature and society that lies in the core of both environmental thought and modern emancipatory projects. I will try to expose the inherent contradictions that environmental discourse inherited from liberalism and Marxism.