About Blowing Up Pipelines
A while ago I saw a post about fossil fuels, under which someone posted: "What are you waiting for? Let's blow up the pipelines!" Which is very fair. But someone else came to post under it: "No! Think of the environmental harm! You need to go vote!"
And, let's be honest here: It is very likely that neither of them have actually read the book that the "blow up a pipeline" wording comes from. How to Blow up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. Which in its core argues that sabotage is good, because voting doesn't do shit.
Now, don't get me wrong. There is a ton of important elections coming up - especially in the US, but soon in Germany as well. And you need to go vote to prevent another Trump presedency! However: There is nobody you can vote for, who will actually stop pipelines from being build, who will actually limit the size of cars folks drive, and who will actually put pressure on natural gas, coal and what not. Heck, even in the best case that on a local level there might be some who want to build out bike lanes and public transport... Those changes often take too long to bring them through during one term and if someone else is in charge next term, chances are, the projects will be cancelled.
So, basically what Malm argues in his book: Voting will not change those things, partly because of lobbyism. Protests will be ignored, partly because politicians care more about the lobbyists. Same goes with petitions. So, the usual ways that technically a democracy will leave for people to engage and influence politics do not work.
But, so Malm says, sabotage does.
Now, he does actually not directly argue for literally blowing up pipelines. But he is arguing for sabotage. He notes: "If just a few people with their keys run through a city during the night and scratch up all the SUVs, a lot fewer people will on the long term use SUVs." He even talks about something like this that he participated in in Sweden and what effects it had.
And yes, he does give ideas of how to deal with pipelines in ways that will do a lot of financial damage, which makes pipelines and hence fossil fuels a lot less attractive to energy providers. Because they are going to need to pay for all that damage.
Even with smaller sabotage... yes, there will be some environmental damage. But try to think of it this way: If enough folks do this, if there is enough damage done on the pipelines (and other forms of creating and transporting fossil fuels), then less of them will be build, will be used. And given that those pipelines and other fossil fuels will leak into the environment either way, and over time will do a lot more damage than a few cases of sabotage will do.
And I really gotta say: Yeah, no, I do agree with Malm. On all the fronts.
So, please... The book is actually super short. Just go an read it, alright?
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happy pride reccing some anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist books and texts
BOOKS
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2012)
"Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin' out," what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?"
Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come by Leslie Feinberg (1992)
This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender.
Transgender Warriors: Making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg (1996)
[Leslie Feinberg's] book celebrated the resistance to transphobia and a vision of trans liberation articulated from the perspective of class struggle. It understood that no liberation from transphobia or any of the divisive and violent oppressions in class society is possible without the transformation of capitalism into socialism.
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell (1977)
Stories told of these times make the faggots and their friends weep. The second revolutions made many of the people less poor and a small group of men without color very rich. With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance.
Also this interview
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein, and S. Bear Bergman (2010)
Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being.
Made In India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects by Suparna Bhaskaran (2004)
Made In India explores the making of "queer" and "heterosexual" consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism.
That's Revolting: Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2008)
As the growing gay mainstream prioritises the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance or cultural value.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm (2021)
Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and "climate fatalism" outside it.
On Connection by Kae Tempest (2020)
On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davies (2003)
If you know anything about Angela Davis—anti-racist activist, Marxist-feminist scholar—you know that her answer to the question posed in the title is "Yes." This is a short primer on the prison abolition movement
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
This profound, urgent, beautiful, and necessary book is an invitation to imagine and organize for a less violent and more liberatory world.
Black Marxism by Cedric Johnson (1983)
Influenced by many African American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved. The book does not build from nor reiterate Marxist thought, but rather introduces racial analysis to the Marxist tradition.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice by Shon Faye (2021)
[Shon Faye] provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.
Burn The Binary: selected writings on the politics of being trans, genderqueer, and non-binary by Riki Wilchins (2017)
This single volume offers a selection of Riki’s most penetrating and insightful pieces, as well as the best of two decades of Riki’s online columns for The Advocate never before collected, from "Where Have All the Butches Gone," to "Attack of the 6-Foot Intersex People"
ARTICLES
Assuming The Perspective Of The Ancestor by Claire Schwartz (2022)
Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on building constructive, future-oriented politics, at scale.
The Gender Binary Is A Tool For White Supremacy by Kravitz Marshall (2020)
A brief history of gender expansiveness - and how colonialism slaughtered it
Meet Chris Smalls, the man who organized Amazon workers in New York By Anna Betts, Greg Jaffe, and Rachel Lerman (2022)
The fired worker and former rapper did what nobody else has done in the U.S.
The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake by David Brooks (2020)
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being by Donna Lu (2020)
Extinction Isn’t the Worst That Can Happen by Kai Heron (2021)
"This brings us to the third problem with eschatological framings of the climate crisis: they overlook the fact that for many, the end of the world has already happened. In October last year, Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani woman, mother and leader, wrote a desperate letter to the western world reminding us that for Indigenous peoples, “the fires are raging still”."
MISC
Manifesto: An Aromantic Manifesto by yingchen and yingtong
free to read
their tumblr (with further resources)
Essay: I Dream Of Canteens by Rebecca May Johnson (2019)
There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and cleaned toilets. So many chairs so that no one is without one.
Acceptance Speech (video and text): The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters speech by Ursula Le Guin
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
And here's a video to cleanse the soul: bell hooks: Transgression
bell hooks & Gloria Steinem at Eugene Lang College
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