The mining of cobalt in Congo relies on working conditions approximating slavery, and so on and so forth: the fully capitalist Earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Exploitation in sweatshops is as rampant as ever. They do not exhaust the woes and worries that ought to be tackled. One could go on and take down every single trawler and bulldozer and pesticide factory and discover that we are still being herded towards extinction: consider merely the 10,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled on Earth.
Second, Monbiot’s own list is, of course, incomplete. The notion that anti-systemic struggles have less need for militant tactics than single-issue campaigns does not quite conform to the record from the past two centuries. Now it hasn’t exactly always stuck with peaceful protest either. First, if Monbiot would want to find examples of struggles in history that aimed at capitalism in its entirety, rather than this or that local injustice (if we accept the notion that something like slavery falls into this category), there seems to be only one tradition on offer: that of revolutionary socialism. There are at least four problems with this argument. Ergo, sabotage and similar militant tactics against fossil-fuel property are futile and misplaced. One could take down every single pipeline and coal mine and SUV ‘and discover that we are still committed to extinction’, because there would then be unaddressed ‘soil degradation, freshwater depletion, ocean dysbiosis, habitat destruction, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals’, each affliction ‘comparable in scale and impact to climate breakdown.’ We are here fighting not fossil capital but ‘ all capital’ (my emphasis).
‘But the revolt against environmental collapse is a revolt against the entire system.’ It is not against fossil fuels solely, but against industrial capitalism in toto. Monbiot concedes that history is replete with struggles for limited objectives – women’s franchise, abolition of slavery, liberation from colonial occupation – that deployed militant tactics and won. He advances five distinguishable arguments. In a column published in the Guardian on Friday 28 April, George Monbiot takes issue with my book How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
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