At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

‘The war has come to us!’ Skerrit cried out, struggling to contain the pain. ‘We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others. Actions that endanger our very existence … and all for the enrichment of a few elsewhere.’ He made a desperate plea to his audience. ‘We need action’ – action, that is, to cut emissions – ‘and we need it NOW!!’

It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time

What can be questioned, however, is something else. Will absolute non-violence be the only way, forever the sole admissible tactic in the struggle to abolish fossil fuels? Can we be sure that it will suffice against this enemy?

The world’s fifty largest oil companies were poised to flood markets with more of their supply. Of that group, the two companies with the most aggressive plans were Shell and ExxonMobil, which planned for production to increase by 38 and 35 per cent, respectively, until 2030; on the second rung, BP foresaw a rise by 20 per cent, Total by 12.

Once an investor has constructed a coal-fired power plant or a pipeline or any other such unit, he will not want to dismantle it. Demolition on the morrow of completion would mean pecuniary disaster.

Among ethical standpoints, there is no such thing as ‘contingent’ or ‘relative pacifism’. A pacifist who makes exceptions is a just war theorist.

the official handbook of the Rebellion

Slavery was not abolished by conscientious white people gently disassembling the institution. The impulse to subvert it sprang, of course, from the enslaved Africans themselves, and they very rarely possessed the option of non-violent civil disobedience; staging a sit-in on the field or boycotting the food offered by the master could only hasten their death. From Nanny of the Maroons to Nat Turner, collective action against slavery perforce took on the character of violent resistance. The first sweeping emancipation of slaves occurred in the Haitian Revolution –

The scholar who has most ambitiously sought to downplay the causal impact of slave revolts, Portuguese historian João Pedro Marques, has met with a barrage of criticisms from other specialists in the field. One of the most prominent, Robin Blackburn, has retorted that the very notion of slavery as unethical – harmful to the slaves, whom the masters wished to portray as happy and docile – originated in the acts of explosive refusal. Even the most pacifist Quakers pointed to the revolts as proof of the horrors of the peculiar institution.

Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: ‘To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation’, Pankhurst lectured. ‘It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her

In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU claimed responsibility for 337 such attacks. Few culprits were apprehended. Not a single life was lost; only empty buildings were set ablaze.

The incongruence of Gandhi has a different slant. Anyone who sees in him a paragon should pick up Kathryn Tidrick’s masterful biography of the mahatma.

‘What is the best way to resist?’ This was, in Cobb’s account, the question African Americans asked themselves during the civil rights struggle. Non-violent civil disobedience caught on because it worked – better than the alternatives, such as guerrilla warfare against the state – and was appreciated precisely as a tactic, rather than as a creed or a doctrine.

The theory of the radical flank effect has application far beyond the African American struggle. The history of working-class politics in twentieth-century western Europe serves as an illustrative example. The vote, the eight-hour working day, the rudiments of a welfare state – the progress made by the reformist labour movement would have been inconceivable without the flank to the left and east of it

In the words of Verity Burgmann, ‘the history of social movement activity suggests that reforms are more likely to be achieved when activists behave in extremist, even confrontational ways. Social movements rarely achieve everything they want, but they secure important partial victories’ when one wing, flanking the rising tide in the mainstream, prepares to blow the status quo sky-high.

It was Nelson Mandela who pushed for the reorientation: ‘Our policy to achieve a non-racial state by non-violence has achieved nothing’, and so ‘we will have to reconsider our tactics. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.’

violence occurred in the struggle against slavery, against male monopoly on the vote, against British and other colonial occupations, against apartheid, against the poll tax, but the struggle against fossil fuels is of a wholly different character and will succeed only on condition of utter peacefulness.

as climate scientist-cum-activist James Hansen has argued, fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40 per cent or 60 per cent. All of it must go.

here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-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

‘Sabotage’, writes R. H. Lossin, one of the finest contemporary scholars in the field, ‘is a sort of prefigurative, if temporary, seizure of property. It is’ – in reference to the climate emergency – ‘both a logical, justifiable and effective form of resistance and a direct affront to the sanctity of capitalist ownership.’ A refinery deprived of electricity, a digger in pieces: the stranding of assets is possible, after all. Property does not stand above the earth; there is no technical or natural or divine law that makes it inviolable in this emergency. If states cannot on their own initiative open up the fences, others will have to do it for them. Or property will cost us the earth.

‘Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too’, as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist.

In June 1980, commando units from MK cut holes in the security fences around two hydrogenation facilities and planted mines in their tanks. Lasting for three days, the smoke plume could be seen by electrified audiences in Johannesburg: it ‘shattered the myth of white invulnerability. It was not about the quantity of oil that was lost … it was that column of smoke that was important. Sasol was a symbol of power,’ in the words of ANC militant Frene Ginwala.

The first in the series was labelled ‘Operation Cyclone’. Between 2006 and 2008, when the insurgency stood at its height, MEND shut down a third of production in Africa’s principal oil country. ‘The stable and regularised flow of oil’, Watts observed, ‘was placed in question in an historically unprecedented way.’ For a brief moment, it seemed as though Shell, ExxonMobil and the other predators were on the verge of withdrawal.

the pipeline the Mubarak regime used to supply the state of Israel with gas – below market prices – attracted some of the popular rage. After ten sabotage actions closed the spigots, Israel cancelled payments and the agreement broke down.

sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure is not patented by the global South; in fact, it is as old as the infrastructure itself, going back to the Luddites and the Plug Plot Riots and other working-class movements taking it out on steam-engines and industrial machines in England

To be rich in the world today is to come out on top in the distribution of the ‘unequal ability to pollute’, as Dario Kenner names it in his Carbon Inequality.

One single flight from London to Edinburgh emits more CO2 than the average Somalian does in a year; from London to New York, more than the Nigerian and the Nepalese; from London to Perth, more than the Peruvian and the Egyptian, the Kenyan and the Indian

This insight was then picked up and formalised by Henry Shue, one of the most perceptive philosophers of the climate crisis, who developed a distinction, widely accepted in the literature, between luxury and subsistence emissions.

To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400 ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke.

Under the current balance of class forces, the average capitalist state with some pretension to care about the climate will rather be inclined to begin at the opposite end: with an attack on subsistence emissions.

rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.

Acts of petty sabotage in locations, establishments or whatever else belongs to the bourgeois, bureaucratic and comprador enemy, in general the rich, would expand the spectrum of initiatives. These acts of sabotage, as they continue, will especially endanger the very things the enemy is extremely afraid of losing. (…) The spell breaks and the enemy looks like a defeated magician.

A planet incinerated by the rich, and by the desire to count among them

If we were to exclude objects from the definition of violence, we would have to try to convince the world that a crowd of Gilets Jaunes marching down the Champs-Élysées and pulverising every retail store along the way would in fact be practising non-violence – more than a conceptual stretch, a waste of rhetorical effort.

We must accept that property destruction is violence, insofar as it intentionally exerts physical force to inflict injury on a thing owned by someone who does not want it to happen

Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi’s – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: ‘Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people’, and within the genus of violent acts, this made all the difference: ‘A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.’ Why were the rioters ‘so violent with property then? Because property represents the white power structure, which they were attacking and trying to destroy.’

On the standard view, which also seems to be King’s, an inanimate object can undergo violence by virtue of being property – standing in a relation, that is, to a human being, who can claim to be indirectly hurt when it is hurt.

There is, however, one exception, one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, namely that which hits material conditions for subsistence: poisoning someone’s groundwater, burning down a family’s last remaining grove of olive trees or, for that matter, firebombing a paddy field in an Indian peasant village because it emits methane would come close to a stab in the heart.

‘Is not a woman’s life, is not her health, are not her limbs more valuable than panes of glass?’ asked Emmeline Pankhurst. Or, in the words of one philosopher mulling over violent civil disobedience: if a grossly immoral war is being waged, the right of railway engineers to keep the tracks in good shape may be superseded by ‘the more important right of the people in the country to which the troops are headed, to life itself’.

direct action should be limited to disrupting practices that might result in, or imminently threaten to generate, serious and irreversible harm. The urgency of the situation might be sufficient to override a presumption in favour of lawful advocacy or civil disobedience, if too much damage would occur before the process of reflection and reconsideration triggered by the latter could run its course.

In just war theory, the differentia specifica of terrorism, the particular moral transgression that blackens its name, is the failure to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants when killing people

Someone who enters a mosque with the intention to kill the maximum number of worshippers is undertaking an act of terrorism; someone who drills a hole in a pipeline or sets a depot aflame performs ‘a categorically distinct act’, in the words of Steve Vanderheiden, leading philosopher of environmental ethics.

The unique objective of the mosque killer is to create an atmosphere where Muslims fear for their lives and go to Friday prayer in the knowledge that they could be killed at any moment just because of who they are.

Fear for the loss of property is a categorically distinct fear. It pertains to the balance sheet and budget, not the body.

The fine art to be mastered here is that of controlled political violence.

Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs’ retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler.

The task of climate activists cannot be to take an existing level of consciousness as a given, but rather to stretch it. They should walk ahead – not too far from the masses, which would lead to isolation; nor in the median or rear, which would obviate their mission.

Time and timing are of the essence. Every extreme weather event now blows with the force of accumulated emissions and gives a foretaste of misery to come. That should be the moment to strike and stretch: next time the wildfires burn through the forests of Europe, take out a digger.

It is the duty of the erstwhile radicals to denounce the new flank and accuse it of undermining their endeavours. If they were to applaud the troublemakers who threaten or commit acts of violence, they would not gain the edge of respectability and receive no invitation to the policy-making chambers.

It follows that prospective militants should expect and even hope for condemnation from the mainstream, without which the two would become indistinguishable and the effect be lost

XR has remained persistently aloof from factors of class and race, remaining based in white middling strata with no standpoint other than their own.

Unlike certain other branches of the movement, anti-capitalism and class antagonism are absent from the XR discourse –

This requires muting or switching off any finger-pointing and rich-bashing rhetoric that could alienate supporters. The Rebellion has thus positioned itself as ‘beyond politics’, neither left nor right, hailing police as much as ordinary citizens, even pandering to the concerns of conservative constituencies:

If it stays hegemonic, this doctrine will ensure that the climate movement remains, at best, the distant, well-mannered cousin of social revolt in the 2020s. Here is a contrast from late 2019: Chilean students reacting to the rise in public transport fares – championing that mode of transportation, as free and accessible for all – by organising mass trespassing through the turnstiles, attacking ticket machines, supermarkets and company headquarters and touching off a nationwide uprising against soaring inequalities in the homeland of neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the movement against climate catastrophe: placid and composed. The exigent strategic task is to wed the latter movement to the forces of the former

Imagination is a pivotal faculty here. The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities ingrained in it: not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system – what we refer to as geoengineering – than in the economic system; it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider some militant resistance.

Wallace-Wells has the science behind him when he writes: ‘The fight is, definitely, not yet lost – in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.’

the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory … This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history

This is the moment for the cliché from Emiliano Zapata: ‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees’ – better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively – but we shall hope, of course, that it never comes to this.

Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage.

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