Fridays for Sabotage? The strange fascination of climate Blanquism | ROAR Magazinehttps://roarmag.org/essays/climate-blanquism/While Blanqui’s revolutionary elite was meant to pave the way for a socialist society by temporarily disarming the bourgeoisie and creating the conditions for communism, the climate Blanquism associated with groups like the Children of Kali or the EDF is primarily concerned with preventing the worst in times of global heating, ideally buying time for broader mass-based social movements to catch up and gather enough strength to push for a meaningful socio-ecological transformation.
Blanqui’s own attempts at revolution never quite succeeded — he famously spent half of his lifetime in prison for organizing multiple conspiracies and a half-dozen insurrections. The specter of the “professional revolutionary,” however, has since never ceased to haunt the radical imagination.
In his much-discussed essay “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Andreas Malm discusses a whole range of examples of effective sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure, including two Catholic social workers drilling small holes into the Dakota access pipeline, a 2006-2008 insurgency in the Niger delta, which shut down a third of the country’s oil production and a 2019 drone attack on the Abqaiq refinery in Saudi Arabia, which saw the country that accounts for 7 percent of global supplies take half of its capacity offline for days.
Rather than leaving such punctuated, surgical attacks on core infrastructure to insurgents with differing political agendas, however, Malm envisions “radical cadre-like climate SWAT-teams” intervening in the daily business of destruction. With his well-penned polemics, Malm — himself a veteran of the climate justice movement — has already inspired a new generation of activists to stretch the boundaries of civil disobedience. In Germany, a Twitter account named “Fridays for Sabotage” recently claimed responsibility for an attack on gas infrastructure, explicitly aiming to widen the strategic horizon of the movement.