Climate crisis – Andreas Malm and righteous eco-terrorism

Andreas Malm is an influential theorist of contemporary radical climate activism and ecological Marxism. On the one hand, he is a recognized Marxist academic, but on the other hand, he quickly publishes activist-oriented pamphlets with radical theses, which even made it into the film in the eco-thriller of the same name, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” Before Malm became active in climate policy, his commitment for eight formative years was primarily focused on the “Palestinian cause,” as he himself puts it.

To date, the Swedish human geographer and author has largely kept his activism for Palestine and his theoretical interventions on the climate issue separate. In his text “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth,” Malm now tries to explicitly connect the two. This originally appeared in April 2024 as a longer blog post on the website of the left-wing British-American publisher Verso. Malm’s essay now serves as the start of the series “The Verso Palestine Pamphlets.” But what is the connection between anti-Zionist activism, radical climate policy and ecological Marxism at Malm?

Revolutionary subject “Resistance”

In the first part of the text, Malm first accuses Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in the war against Hamas in Gaza and then combines this with the description of extreme climatic events. He then spends about half of the text dealing with aspects of British colonial history in the Middle East, which for him establish the connection between fossil capitalism and colonialism. Zionism is therefore a colonial project of the British “Empire”. In the last part, Malm turns against the thesis of a Jewish lobby and declares the Jewish state to be a tool of US imperialism, to which it has been transferred since 1967. Both British colonialism and American imperialism were concerned with the “Zionist entity” for access to fossil fuels.

As the title of Malm’s essay suggests, the author sees a direct connection between the ecological destruction of the earth caused by climate change and what Malm calls the “destruction of Palestine.” But this connection remains an analogy. The fact that fossil capitalism goes hand in hand with war and terror is no more and no less true here than, for example, in the case of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine or the wars in Syria and Yemen – about which Malm never wrote in this sense.

Malm himself acknowledges the fact that all modern economies are based to a greater or lesser extent on fossil fuels. His argument is that in this situation it would be preferable for profits from fossil fuels to flow to the Palestinian “resistance” or Al Jazeera rather than to the IDF or Al-Sisi. What becomes clear here is a Manichaean worldview that clearly distinguishes between anti-imperialist and anti-colonial “resistance” on the one hand and an imperialist “Western alliance” led by the USA on the other. He presents Zionism as an imperialist project from the beginning, first of the British Empire and currently of the “US Empire”.

Malm sees the universal character of Palestine in what he understands as “resistance”. He sees the Palestinian “resistance” – and thus its authoritarian forms of organization and terror as a means of politics – as a model for the climate movement. Malm combines the idea of ​​an anti-colonial guerrilla struggle with the idea of ​​an apocalyptic struggle for the climate against the fossil fuel industry and uses this to construct a revolutionary subject. The concept of “resistance,” as the historian and philosopher Moishe Postone has pointed out, is regularly linked to a Manichean worldview that reifies both the idea of ​​domination and that of political practice and blurs distinctions between politically entirely different forms of violence.

Authoritarian state as “savior”?

Malm has become known in the climate movement and beyond through his calls for radical forms of action such as sabotage in his book “How to blow up a pipeline” and through eco-leninist ideas in “Klima|x”. Before that, he had already published two books, “Fossil Capital” and “The Progress of This Storm,” which contain incisive Marxist analyzes of the relationship between the destruction of nature and capital. But how is it possible that, on the one hand, Malm presents a Marxist-based criticism of fossil capitalism, but on the other hand, he propagates highly regressive ideas regarding political practice?

The reasons for this lie in a Leninist-Trotskyist concept of state and society, a vulgar Marxist anti-imperialism and a non-existent concept of anti-Semitism. Some reviews emphasize a contradiction in Malm’s work between state-fixated ideas and movement-oriented forms of action. In fact, these moments are connected in Malm’s theory: the militant forms of action are also aimed at getting the state to act in line with the demands of the climate movement. With this state-centered policy, Malm is at the radical end of a political line that extends from Ende Gelaende to Fridays for Future to the Last Generation. He is so successful with his concepts in the climate movement because he radicalizes and legitimizes the vulgar Marxist ideas that already exist there.

Added to this is the decolonial orientation in the movement for climate justice in recent years, which is necessary in itself but theoretically and conceptually shortened. Vulgar-Marxist anti-imperialism meets simplified decolonial ideas in the simple contrast between the oppressed and the oppressors: in both, Western countries are practically exclusively problematized as imperial and post-colonial powers. In both there is no critical concept of the state as a state of capital and as a political form of capitalist society. Malm’s text shows the regressive consequence of this worldview when the Palestinian “resistance” is seen as part of an axis that extends through Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq to Iran, Russia and China and is intended to represent a “counter-alliance” to the imperialist West .

Already in 2014, Malm refers positively to the idea of ​​a “Climate Mao”: a planetary sovereign who exercises “just terror in the interests of the future of the community”. Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, who created this scenario, designed it to warn against this. Malm, on the other hand, already claims in his text from ten years ago on “Revolution in the Age of Climate Change” that there is a line of increasing urgency that must go hand in hand with increasing radicalism – which for him in turn is synonymous with increasing authoritarianism: “The politics of containment of climate change follows a timeline that stretches from Bernstein to Trotsky to Mao and beyond.” Malm imagines “something like a dictatorship against fossil capital, based on the mobilization of the masses,” emerging could be if “in Asia the masses are brought to power through a power struggle and the states are transformed into agents of green terror, quickly putting out the fossil fuel fires in the interest of humanity’s survival.”

Ecological Redemption Anti-Semitism

For Malm, Israel, as a colonial settler project, is a base for US imperialism. Although he distances himself from obviously anti-Semitic ideas of a Jewish world conspiracy, at the same time he aggressively advocates anti-imperialist anti-Zionism. This inevitably reproduces anti-Semitic patterns, even if they now appear in a “modern” form that denies open anti-Semitism.

In the pamphlet on Palestine, this becomes clear in the comparison that runs through the entire text: on the one hand, Palestine as a natural unity of land, nature and inhabitants and, on the other hand, the colonial “Zionist structure” created by imperialism to enforce the Interests of the imperialist center and fossil capital. It is a form of “concretization of the abstract,” the “fetishization of global capital in the form of the USA and Israel,” as Postone explained. There cannot be a Jewish state in this worldview.

Only with this anti-Semitic mentality can it be understood how Malm can claim that the “destruction of Palestine” is the “destruction of the earth.” Conversely, it implies that Israel and the USA, as the embodiment of fossil capital, are responsible for both and that both can only be ended by destroying them. Based on this ideology, terror as “resistance” is necessary and justified. Such “fetishized anti-capitalist ideology,” as Postone called it, leads to an authoritarian and reactionary politics that excludes any prospect of socio-ecological self-determination and rational regulation of metabolism with nature.

Malm is an extreme example of an attitude widespread in the international left, in Anglophone academic Marxism, in critical geography, in the climate movement and in decolonial discourse. Many of them, like Malm, make important contributions to the criticism of aspects of the existing destructive conditions, but when it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism there is a lack of reflection. This does not make the criticism, as long as it hits certain aspects – in Malm’s case his criticism of fossil capitalism and postmodern understandings of nature – invalid. However, the connection between the respective criticism and the failure of reflection in relation to anti-Semitism must be examined in detail in order to be able to distinguish between what can be linked to and what cannot.

The connection between the increasingly hardened but uncertain and unstable socio-ecological and geopolitical conditions and the tendency towards authoritarian political ideas urgently requires greater clarification.

Julian Kuppe is a geographer and deals with the connection between capitalist production and reproduction relations, social-ecological crises and the subject form.

Andreas Malm: The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. Verso 2025, 114 S., br., £ 9,99.