Andreas Malm’sHow to Blow Up a Pipeline was published on January 5, 2021, the day before the storming of the Capitol. Back then, the physical memory of being on the streets during the George Floyd rebellion loomed much larger than the phantasm of Nancy Pelosi kneeling in kente cloth with a promise of police reform. Hundreds of pages of policy recommendations from the Biden-Sanders unity task forces had made their way into the Democratic Party platform. Trump was out the door—almost. There was talk of reforming the Supreme Court; a commission was created to study the possibilities. Change was in the air. Or was it?
Two months into Biden’s term, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, an extension of the prior year’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES). Direct stimulus checks went out again, and unemployment insurance, health care subsidies, and a range of tax credits for child and dependent care and sick leave were extended or bolstered. Student debt burdens were paused repeatedly, as was the eviction moratorium, first issued via the CARES Act and then twice renewed by the Centers for Disease Control until the moratorium met its demise in the high court in August 2021. This may have been an instance of capital saving itself, or the state stepping in to save capital. But many of these gestures echoed the left’s demands. Some, like student debt relief—the work of the steadfast Debt Collective—emerged directly from our organizing. However hopeless our romanticism may have been, every instance of congruence felt like a buoy connecting us to the magic actions of the summer before.
Tax cuts for the wealthy and handouts for mega-corporations were the ligature of the entire operation. Billions went to the gluttonous airlines. Even the legislation’s progressive features took a familiar, loveless form: tax credits and subsidies rather than payouts or investments in public infrastructure. Abeyance from debt and rent rather than jubilee. This was not a break from capitalism. Neither was it Medicare for All, or even a public option. Yet here was an advance in social welfarism not experienced in at least two generations. Four hundred seventy-eight million payments worth $81 billion in checks and direct deposits and bank cards sailed all over the country. To my starved American imagination, receiving a check was straight out of the Jetsons, or even Kim Stanley Robinson.1 When Congress can do anything at all it is nothing short of stunning. But this was a miracle. The state could make things happen and it could stop things from taking place. It could act fast for—rather than against—hundreds of millions of people. Partial and provisional, bastardized and privatized, this crisis-induced redistributive turn was the closest thing to socialist planning many of us have ever known.
Quickly things started to revert to the mean. The pandemic relief aspect of Biden’s Build Back Better plan was legislated via the American Rescue Plan. But the climate component that had absorbed currents from the Green New Deal, combining commitments to the environment with investment in infrastructure and jobs, famously went nowhere.2 Inflation surged in 2021, providing political cover for Congress to sit on its hands. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator and then-chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, refused to support anything close to Biden’s proposal. Manchin, the New YorkTimes reported, “received more campaign donations from the oil, coal and gas industries than any other senator.” He owned stock worth somewhere “between $1 million and $5 million in Enersystems Inc.,” the coal brokerage firm he founded in 1988 and handed over to his son upon his election as West Virginia’s secretary of state in 2000. Opposition was varied to Build Back Better, and the Biden Administration deserves much of the blame. But if the lack of progress could be reduced to a single figure, that figure was Manchin, the grotesque embodiment of America’s bipartisan fossil-fuel consensus.
Appearing like a walk-on amid this antagonistic churn was the prolific Swedish intellectual Andreas Malm. By summer 2021, How to Blow Up a Pipeline was practically on newsstands. In July, Times columnist Ezra Klein devoted a column to the book, and in September New Yorker editor David Remnick interviewed Malm for the magazine’s podcast. A screenplay inspired by the book had already been written; the film would premiere the following year to enthusiastic reviews just about everywhere. In the book and in his many interviews, Malm was always careful to insist that he was not advocating human targets. Deflating SUV tires in Stockholm’s tony neighborhoods was his go-to example of the strategy in motion—something he had engaged in with fellow climate activists over a decade earlier. Still, it was surreal to see beacons of liberal media covering a polemic that aimed to radicalize the climate movement: a call to sabotage the very “critical infrastructure” that was protected by a spate of criminal laws passed after waves of anti-pipeline protests, including the 2016 Standing Rock encampment against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This, of course, was the same extractive technology that was now plumbing the earth at record rates. (After an initial promise to pause drilling, the Biden Administration was approving more oil-and-gas leases than Trump had.)
With climate policy in jeopardy, and torched police cars in the side-view mirror, there was a surge in genuine curiosity about the need for radical action. What could it mean? Surely our elites were not seriously entertaining the notion that the only way to avert climate collapse might be to destroy the pipelines that fuel much of the global economy. Perhaps it was sheer desperation. Or the horror of our collective future held hostage by a coal baron. In any case, the moment was soon gone. The tepid Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law in August 2022. Manchin got everything he wanted and nothing he didn’t. The rest of us were shit out of luck.
In January 2024, the Times interviewed Malm again, this time about his new book Overshoot, coauthored with Wim Carton. The words Israel and Palestine do not come up, but the October 7 attack and Israel’s retaliatory genocide loom over the conversation: a watershed with significance for the country and the globe that we cannot yet understand. The celebratory reception of the Palestinian resistance among young people, people of color, and the left in the United States—and the anti-Zionist critique undergirding it—took virtually everyone by surprise. Not least the liberal establishment. Land acknowledgments and Black Lives Matter signs were one thing, but this was something else. For a time, at least, conservatives and liberals found common cause against the left and no reason to hide it. They fired broadsides against the modes of discourse and education that seeded a shift in seeing the Palestinian struggle as a righteous anti-colonial one. The month before the interview, Republican lawmakers looked almost euphoric as they dressed down the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn for being insufficiently woke about the threat of antisemitism, while simultaneously peddling anti-Palestinian racism. TikTok, settler colonial studies, critical race theory, protest slogans—the targets of the reaction were nebulous, numerous, and intersecting. And all of them were suddenly beyond the pale.
Unlike the tentative but somewhat open-minded conversations Malm was treated to last time around, this one was psychedelic with hostility. Likely unnerved by the pro-Palestinian awakening on the US left (and Malm’s public if, in this case, unspoken solidarity with the Palestinian cause), David Marchese, the interviewer, seemed outright perturbed by Malm’s presence. “It’s hard for me to think of a realm outside of climate where mainstream publications would be engaging with someone, like you, who advocates political violence,” he begins. “Why are people open to this conversation?” From the jump, Marchese is on frontal attack; the questions are framed around political violence rather than climate activism. Near the midway point, he reads aloud a line from Overshoot: “There is no escaping the conclusion that the worst mass killers in this rapidly warming world are the billionaires, merely by dint of their lifestyles.” Marchese then asks: “Doesn’t [that] feel like a bathetic overstatement when we live in a world of terrorist violence and Putin turning Ukraine into a charnel house? Why is that a useful way of framing the problem?” Malm answers: “Spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at an excessive scale—and when it comes to luxury emissions, it is completely excessive—is an act that leads to the death of people.” But then aren’t we all killers, asks Marchese?
A live wire has been touched. Rather than the “criminal” or the “terrorist”—or, for that matter, the communist—Malm points to the fossil fuel industry and the consumption patterns of the rich. The charge to this turn in the conversation is not generated by Malm alone. He is tapping into questions newly alight from the left and the right: Who or what is the threat we face, and from whom do we need protection? The stock support for Israel against the Palestinian people is but one example of what has been scrambled.
Consider the defense of extractive and carceral development against water and forest protectors; or the open question of whether the Democratic Party represents the interests of working-class or Black and brown people any better than the Republicans. Over the past fifteen years, the long-rehearsed scripts around a constellation of fundamental conflicts within state, economy, and society—what is at stake, who we should celebrate or refuse—have become somewhat shaky, if not entirely unsettled. Is the history of America at root great, or anti-Black and settler-colonial? Is the criminal the problem, or is it the prison? Are the homeless the nuisance, or is it the real estate industry? Are the indebted the bad guys, or the debt collectors? Patriarchy or trans people? The questions of who is the savage and who is the savior are now grinding against one another, in sufficient popular contention to force American politics to stumble. “Dealignment,” batted about after the recent election, doesn’t quite cover it. Marchese cannot abide Malm’s answers, precisely because Malm is not speaking for himself.
Within this expanding, dizzying ring, the sparring continues. Malm and Marchese debate whether “[w]e live in representative democracies” (Marchese) and whether “allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it [counts as] a form of democracy” (Malm). When Marchese asserts “we’re against political violence [in all instances] or not” otherwise “[t]hat is moral hypocrisy,” Malm rejoinders:
The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence—that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.
With his strategic defense of political violence, Malm has now detonated any possible common ground—or, perhaps, the ground itself. Marchese’s subsequent questions reveal him disintegrating in real time:
Could you give me a reason to live?
Is it possible for you to summarize your psychoanalytic understanding of the climate crisis?
What about you, psychoanalytically speaking?
But what’s your deal?
Marchese has displaced onto Malm the climate crisis itself. And the enormity of redressing it. Malm is the problem, the criminal, the Marxist killjoy. Cut like a mug shot, the Times even featured a photo of Malm shaded in such a way to suggest he had donned a beard and kufi. But what’s your deal?
Malm’s reception in 2021 was a curious blip. This, on the other hand, was closer to a classic institutional response to radical critique, with the interviewer as the perennially naïve American unable to assimilate complexity or his own complicity—or even to see beyond his own shadow. But there was a twist. In the past, the interviewer wouldn’t have asked his interlocutor for a reason to live; he would have simply whisked him offstage. Now, after the diminishing returns of the dismal Biden years and the tectonic weight of a US-funded genocide, both radicalism and liberal triumphalism were equally unthinkable, with even ardent institutionalists aware that they were teetering on the edge. No one was immune from the feeling that we are flailing into an abyss.
A year and a lifetime later, after two Trump assassination attempts and a decisive presidential victory, enter Luigi Mangione. Against the despair of a disastrous election and unassimilable geopolitical upheavals (with the governing regimes of South Korea and Syria toppled in the same week), the case of the 26-year-old Mangione offers a kind of clarity: the conjuncture in a nutshell.
On December 4, the video of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson spread so rapidly as to effectively livestream the killing. Each detail—the multimodal getaway; Deny, Defend, Depose hand-scratched on the bullets; the 3D-printed ghost gun—was novel and suggestive in itself, and in sum they pointed to a degree of deliberate and (for a time) successful planning almost unimaginable in our age of surveillance. To this day, Mangione looks good on camera and seems to have an uncanny sense of where the cameras are located. Head high brows done.
You can almost hear the chattering class’s chattering teeth as they balance the need to generate clicks with their sanctimonious shock at the public’s hatred for Brian Thompson, the company he ran, and the industry he represents. Mangione (allegedly) took a straight shot at capital, and now popular ire is being directed at CEOs rather than Congress, the free market rather than the immiserating state. This won’t do.
Irony on irony, Mangione’s Ivy League credentials are the best insult the press have been able to come up with.3 (If he had been down and out—or, God forbid, a person of color or an immigrant or part of some kind of organization—it’s impossible to imagine him being compared to Robin Hood or, after his cinematic perp walk, Batman. The mainstream media would have destroyed him without reservation.) Far safer to mock Mangione, the way millennials were mocked for their supposed failure to save up for houses they could never afford. He is no working-class hero, you idiots, you can almost hear them say as they deliver each breathless update.
Lifesaving health care is not just inaccessible—it is often traded against other life necessities. In 2022, one in three adults did not get medical care recommended by a doctor because they could not afford it. Four out of ten adults postponed necessary medical care for the same reason. Almost half of all Americans have medical debt. In his manifesto, Mangione notes that the US has the most expensive health-care system in the world. Life expectancy is down, maternal and infant mortality rates are high. Commodification and financialization of health care have been its desecration, with the health insurance industry as one of the major vultures. (The brief manifesto leaves out the other feasting parties, including big pharma, hospital conglomerates, private equity firms buying up hospitals, and tech companies servicing this behemoth industry by creating AI gadgets to deny ever more claims.)
United Health Group is ranked fourth on the 2024 Fortune 500 list of the largest corporations in the United States by revenue. Eighth globally. Earnings from the third quarter came in at $100.8 billion, an $8.5 billion increase over the same period in 2023. Revenues like that don’t come from nowhere. United denies claims at a higher rate than any other major health insurer: a whopping 33 percent.
Predictably, corporate media would rather avoid this now viral line of critique. Mangione’s eyes seem to be setting ablaze the veil that typically covers capitalist social relations and the force of the criminal law to depoliticize lawbreaking as individual wrongdoing. For the legal system, the stakes are high. With the winds of social media, fan fiction, and some polling behind him, it’s hard to imagine prosecutors not panicked over taking this case to a jury. In the past few weeks they have accordingly upped the ante: first New York brought a bombastic charge of first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism, and then the feds swooped in and put the death penalty on the table. The Manhattan prosecutors allege that Mangione “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” and “to affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder.” In other words: an enemy of the state and the people. This is as much about wresting control of a narrative tailspin as it is about browbeating Mangione. The state terrorism charge and the prospect of capital punishment may be enough to compel Mangione to plead guilty rather than take his chances.
Mangione would not be the first to take such a case to trial. In the late 1960s James Johnson, a 35-year-old Black autoworker at Detroit’s Eldon Chrysler gear and axle plant, worked a job where he was expected to feed six hot, greasy brake shoes into a 380-degree oven every minute. Johnson was repeatedly injured on the job—he lost one finger and lacerated another—and was often ill from the heat. “This was one of the most despised jobs at the plant,” writes Heather Ann Thompson in her book Whose Detroit? And “all of the workers performing it were black.” Eventually Johnson was promoted to a better job at the plant, with better pay. Degradation still marked his days, as his foreman hurled racist epithets at him. One afternoon, the foreman tried to reassign him to the oven. Johnson asked to speak with his union steward, at which point the foreman fired him and Johnson left the plant. Around 5 PM, Johnson was back inside with a rifle: he shot and killed two foremen and another worker. It was July 1970, only three years after the Detroit Rebellion.
In 1970, workers at the Chrysler plant had engaged in wildcat strikes against the kinds of barbarous conditions Johnson had been exposed to. Three workers at the plant, two of them women, had died on the job in the preceding two years. As far as we know, Johnson was not involved in the strikes, or with the union or the Eldon Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement. Kenneth Cockrel, a lawyer and a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, took his case anyway. During the trial, Cockrel brought the judge and jury to the plant itself. The Ann Arbor Sun explained: “Defense strategy is to put the United Auto Workers and Chrysler on trial . . . Workers are constantly harassed and intimidated, all in an effort to keep them churning out products at ever-increasing speeds—to make the Corporations money.” Cockrel also played on the “Black rage defense.” As Luca Falciola documents in his book Up Against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s–1970s, movement lawyers at the time deployed such defenses to focus public attention on the crushing burdens of racial and economic inequality that forged the background social conditions their clients were forced to navigate. The jury found Johnson not guilty, by way of temporary insanity.4
Mangione is no autoworker, and his lawyers are not members of a revolutionary union movement. Still, a percussive line of popular support is scrambling the banal and increasingly feckless story that American politics is about fealty for two parties, rather than, say, class warfare. Mangione’s lawyers have floated the possibility of invoking temporary insanity, presumably to ease the path to jury nullification. Calls to “Free Luigi” on the streets and inside jails express solidarity not just with one man, but against the catastrophic realities of capitalism, where necessities like health care, food, and housing are financialized commodities that few can truly afford. This is the system UnitedHealthcare stands for and profits from. This is the system that Mangione (allegedly) took aim at.
Occupy Wall Street’s 2011 recasting of US politics—as about the 99% against the 1%, and the state and banks against the people—was an opening salvo for so much insurgency. But mass action in the United States has tended in the past several decades to focus on predictable sequences of state-sponsored spectacular death: executions by police and, most recently, the genocide in Gaza. Slow death of the sort associated with health care, housing insecurity, and climate devastation has not incited people to protest at scale. Unlike elsewhere in the world—or, even Puerto Rico, where there have been swells of protest against privatization, public corruption, and utilities rate hikes—it has been virtually impossible to mobilize Americans to the streets or to build militant mass organization around social wages or social welfare.5 Mangione’s was a spectacular act of protest with no protest movement behind it.
Clearly Mangione has tapped into a cauldron of rage toward health insurance and our inability to do anything about it. His manifesto comes close to blaming the American people themselves, before vaguely telegraphing the enemy lies elsewhere:
The reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed . . . and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.
Unlike the cost of health care, the climate crisis is coming for us all, regardless of our class fraction or social location. But both are born of the predictable and calculated production of slow-motion death. The crushing realities of inflation, debt, a burning planet, stagnating wages, and a carceral state within a military–industrial complex are social. So too, it turns out, is the terrifying and dislocating confusion about the path ahead. In the aftermath of the early Covid-era interregnum—an aberration that the ruling class would like us to forget—it’s unclear what we can do, individually or together, to take on the corporations that are destroying the planet and our lives. Or to bend the sedimented wills of their political representatives, who seem all too cozy in this inferno. If we know what to do, we cannot seem to muster the effort, at least not yet.
The media wrangling to mute radical critique and popular resentment against the ruling class may not feel the steady beat of confusion or malaise—but the country certainly does. We are at a real impasse. In the tides of the 2008 financial crisis, we have learned that protest is not enough. Electoral organizing is riddled with contradictions. Popular sentiment is insufficient. Mutual aid does not go the distance. What will it take?
That Ann Arbor Sun piece reporting on the Johnson trial ends this way:
The league of Revolutionary Black Workers is defending James Johnson, but they point out that his act did not result in his liberation. It was an act of resistance and not an act of revolution, and did no more than eliminate a couple of lower representatives of the system that were oppressing him. Johnson did not change the system. Only the people organized and working together over a protracted period of time can do that.
A principal objection to Malm’s argument is that however just the cause, anyone who dares to engage in sabotage in the United States—or even to think about it—will be crushed by carceral power. Carceral power is not free-floating, of course. It is expressed by more than bloated budgets and a glut of buildings. So many prosecutions occur at the behest of corporate power in a plainer way than most of us imagine. The commodification of what should be social goods is insured by prisons and police. Details are so far scant, but this case is no different. According to the New York Post, “[h]ealth insurance industry leaders leaned on” the feds to bring charges. Three of the four top officials at the Biden Justice Department worked for health insurance companies before assuming their government posts.
The twenty charges against Mangione—when you count the prosecutions by each Pennsylvania, New York, and the feds—instantiate the concern with criminalization. As does the history of Cointelpro against Black power and the Black Liberation Army or the Red Scare against communists and socialists. More recent examples abound. Consider the terrorism charges leveled by the state of Georgia against the Stop Cop City protesters, or the ongoing crackdown on campuses against students, staff, and faculty for justice in Palestine. Repression is an expression of the ruling class’s fear, but it is no romance. It is brutal, and it can end us. Cycles of birth and rebirth, under the pressures of brutal repression, disinformation, and defeat—these are the stories of the left. Feel your melancholic feelings. But now is not the time to lose faith.
It’s true that not all things are possible at all times. Black Lives Matter took off in response to dashed hopes under Obama; renewed internationalism under Biden. Is it conceivable that during Trump’s second term, a new chapter of anti-capitalist struggle will open when his promises turn to dust? The struggle against capital and for socialism is a struggle for democracy in all realms of life, from work to school to health to housing. It emerges from immiseration but must be fueled by possibility. This popular outrage and its accompanying confusion—toward a politics of life and against a promise of death—might be as good a place to start as any.
Even this remarkable number is equivalent to just 10 percent of the annual Defense Department budget. ↩
The American Families Plan—the dimension of the Biden program that focused on the care economy and included commitments to free and universal pre-K, investments in childcare, and paid parental leave—also died an unceremonious death. ↩
His family seems to be the sort of family enterprise at the heart of Melinda Cooper’s new book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Cooper argues that our current moment is defined less by a battle between small and big business, or between the libertarian and Christian right, but rather by the conflict between privately held, family-based, unincorporated businesses and publicly traded, shareholder-owned corporations. The Trumps, the Kochs, and the Devoses are the families at the center of her account. ↩
For years thereafter, Johnson was committed to a range of mental health institutions. The acquittal did not pave the way to freedom. ↩
In France the yearlong Yellow Vests protests responded to a regressive fuel tax in 2018. In Brazil several rounds of protests erupted in 2013 onward in response to bus fare increases. ↩
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