I read Andreas Malm's brief treatise on climate violence last year. It was pretty good. As was the film loosely based off of it. The title and the subject matter of his book is obviously provocative so it's understandable and even expected that there would be some reaction. But of course, some of that reaction is so facile and/or disingenuous that it would be comical were the stakes not so high. One such take came from the masters of well actually, Vox. It's a long article so there's a lot to criticize, but I wanted to limit my commentary to one particular part; where the author takes issue with analogizing the climate struggle to other struggles:
"Yet a commitment to nonviolence is scarcely the only thing that distinguishes the climate movement from all of the auspicious precedents that Malm cites. In many respects, climate radicals simply face a much more difficult challenge than did the celebrated social movements that they wish to emulate.
The struggles against Jim Crow, apartheid, and British colonialism consisted of mass movements to secure basic rights. The injustice and indignities of apartheid structured Black South Africans’ daily lives, constraining their economic opportunities and denying their political freedoms. And the same can be said of Jim Crow’s implications for Black Americans.
By contrast, the typical Westerner does not find their basic aspirations frustrated by climate change on anything like a daily basis. Extreme weather events periodically call the problem to mind, but even then it is not always clear that rising global temperatures are responsible for a specific flood or fire.
Further, the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements could plausibly promise to redress their animating grievances, and without the advent of any new technology or cooperation of any foreign power. No technical challenge stood in the way of universal voting rights. Formal political equality could be established with the stroke of pen and enforced by existing institutions of federal law enforcement.
The climate movement, on the other hand, cannot credibly promise to eliminate the problems that it seeks to politicize. The world is going to get warmer, no matter how much we reduce emissions from this point forward. In any given rich country, climate activists can’t honestly say that their agenda will improve climatic conditions, only that it might limit the extent to which those conditions get worse, assuming that other nations enact similar policies. Malm’s radical vision of decarbonization pairs this meager, uncertain prize with clear and immediate economic costs: Any near-term ban on fossil fuels would dramatically increase energy prices, and undermine the functioning of electricity grids."
There are some straightforward issues with the logic here. Specifically, the contrast he highlights between the specific policy goals of civil rights movements and the large, sweeping vision of a green utopia is almost entirely of his own creation. By purposefully framing the contrast as such, he ignores that the struggle for civil rights absolutely had more ambitious goals than what was realized, while the fight for climate justice has had modest but real successes. His appeal to "immediate economic costs" is rhetorically irrelevant, as essentially all positive change requires somebody to do/make something, and most people don't work for free. And perhaps most glaringly is how this passage elides that Malm never really treats these struggles as perfect or even semi-perfect analogues in the first place. The actual point of these comparisons, which Malm states explicitly in the text, is to determine "whether it is possible to locate even one minimally relevant analogue to the climate struggle that has not contained some violence." Malm is not trying to sketch a blueprint, but instead make a single, critical point.
But the most dismal logic used in this piece is something similar to what I've remarked on before; namely, a dishonest and/or misguided appeal to complexity. In the case of Palestine, the argument is used to encourage full disengagement; everything is so complicated and every problem is so ingrained that you shouldn't worry about it. The subtle difference here is that the appeal is used to discourage hope. For example, the author claims that climate change does not disrupt daily lives and thus is too big or abstract to inspire action. This ignores that there is plenty of existing organization against fossil fuels; indeed, these are the very movements Malm is critiquing in his book! But this also elides that there are very clear and obvious disruptions that could and should inspire action and, perhaps more cynically, that Americans don't exactly need for something to be real to storm the capitol anyway. Once I discerned this fundamental lack of imagination in this piece, I became unable to interpret this passage (or really any part of the article) any other way. If your analysis of a political tract focused on inciting positive change implicitly forecloses reason for optimism, perhaps the issue is with your own mindset and not the relatively straightforward logic of the work you are critiquing. To invert the famous quote, if you are unable to envision the end of the problems, then perhaps all that's left is to accept the most terrible outcome.
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