I back saboteurs who have acted with courage and coherence, but I won’t blow up a pipeline. Here’s why

There’s a fundamental principle that should apply to every conflict. Don’t urge others to do what you are not prepared to do yourself. How many wars would be fought if the presidents or prime ministers who declared them were obliged to lead their troops into battle?

I can see why How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the book by Andreas Malm which has inspired a new film with the same title, has captured imaginations. It offers a lively and persuasive retelling of the history of popular protest, showing how violence and sabotage have been essential components of most large and successful transformations, many of which have been mischaracterised by modern campaigners as entirely peaceful.

Malm shows how violence was a crucial component of the campaigns against slavery, imperial rule in India, apartheid and Britain’s poll tax, of the demand for women’s suffrage and even of the famously “peaceful” revolutions in Iran and Egypt. He argues that by ruling out violence and sabotage, those of us who seek to defend the habitable planet are fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. He urges us to develop a “radical flank”, prepared to demolish, burn, blow up or use “any other means necessary” against “CO2emitting property”.

It’s essential that we know these histories. Malm forces us to confront questions of strategy and to justify or reject those we have chosen. No one can deny that current campaigns have failed: capital’s assaults on the living planet have only accelerated. Nor can we deny that, as he says, we have been too “placid and composed” or that the climate crisis is insufficiently politicised. Should we, as he urges, begin a campaign of violent attacks on the industrial economy? While his case is compelling, I feel something is missing.

Malm’s strongest comparisons are with the heroic struggles of women’s rights and civil rights activists, anti-slavery, independence, anti-apartheid and economic justice campaigners. These movements directly confronted massive powers. Their outcomes were, in most cases, binary. Either the British Raj persisted or it didn’t. Either women would get the vote or they wouldn’t. Either there was a poll tax or there wasn’t.

But the revolt against environmental collapse is a revolt against the entire system. To prevent the destruc