Andreas Malm QUOTES

1 " In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend.

He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

2 " In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

3 " Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

4 " I once asked Bill McKibben, after an energising speech to a capacity crowd, when – given that the situation is as urgent as he portrayed it and we all know it is – we escalate. He was visibly ill at ease. The first part of his response presented what we might call the objection from asymmetry: as soon as a social movement engages in violent acts, it moves onto the terrain favoured by the enemy, who is overwhelmingly superior in military capabilities. The state loves a fight of arms; it knows it will win. Our strength is in numbers. This is a pet argument for strategic pacifists, but it is disingenuous. Violence is not the sole field where asymmetry prevails. The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money. If the movement should shun uphill battles, a divestment campaign seems like the worst possible choice: trying to sap fossil capital by means of capital. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

5 " Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

6 " On a slightly lower level of abstraction, we can propose the following theorem: time-space appropriation plus time-space compression equals high risk of zoonotic pandemics. Capital grows by dilating its material throughput. The more biophysical resources that can be processed into commodities and sold, the greater the profits; the greater the profits, the more resources can be acquired and so on. Capital takes hold of land where the resources sprout - a law of a tendency with few countervailing forces that can be read off from aggregate data: in the year 1700, 95 percent of the planet's ice-free land was either wild or modified and used so lightly as to be categorised as 'semi-natural.' By 2000, the proportions has been reversed. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

7 " It should now be abundantly clear that the comparison between the climate crisis and Covid-19 rests on a category mistake. It's a bit like comparing a war with a bullet. Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

8 " To be 'radical', after all, means aiming at the roots of troubles; to be radical in the chronic emergency is to aim at the ecological roots of perpetual disasters. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

9 " So 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. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

10 " No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement - and it has its fair share of radicals - ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

11 " If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

12 " Self-isolation in a slum is a contradiction in terms. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

13 " The epoch of the Capitalocene is characterized by uncontrolled speed-up in the production of hazardous nature. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

14 " Social democracy works on the assumption that time is on our side. There must be plenty of it. Then one can move slowly towards the good society, step after incremental step, without having to clash head-on with the class enemy and break up its power; it will rather leak away in drips. But if catastrophe strikes, and if it is the status quo that produces it, then the reformist calendar is shredded. Social democracy can now do one of two things. It can continue to flow with the time, deeper into catastrophe - the choice from August 1914 - or it can become something else, another taxon of socialism, one that recognises that time is up and another decade or even year of this status quo is intolerable. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

15 " If there is something the corona crisis has taught, it should be that nudging consumers to voluntarily mend their ways is a thing of the past. "

― Andreas Malm , Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

16 " Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace.’ Within the range of positions this side of climate denial, none is more despicable. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

17 " the emergency is already here, the cup of endurance fast running over – but the onrush of catastrophe does have a temporality of its own. It imposes tight constraints on those who want to fight. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

18 " Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest? "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

19 " If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

20 " 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. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline