Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage
Note: this is an alternative opening to Tadzio`s upcoming book, after his first opening (published on COTW here) received some constructive feedback from his readers.
Introduction
Every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out.
It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. When a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. When an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception.
Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care. But they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.
Andy Weir, The Martian
*******
This is a book about fear and agency, about catastrophe and solidarity, about collapse and movement.
Like the first book in this series – How I Learned to Love the Future Again , aka The Little Pink Book – it is first and foremost a story about an emotional process, in this case: how I learn to cope with my fear in a collapsing world, how I try to find my way back to agency amidst this fear. It is a book about who I want to be in a future defined by fascism, by ecological and social collapse.
Instead of “learn,” I initially wanted to write “learned to deal with my anxiety,” implying a completed process, but that would honestly be nonsense. I’m still dealing with my anxieties every day, and sometimes these anxieties are so intense and loud that on those days I’m plagued by the now very, very rarely fulfilled desire to completely lose myself in Berlin’s party scene for a few days, just to escape feeling any of it.
I cannot describe here a way to deal once and for all with the anxieties triggered by the collapse of the future, because of course the process of the steady and sometimes catastrophically fractured deterioration of ecological and social conditions is frightening—how could it be otherwise? What I will describe, however, is the path I have taken in recent years, the path I have been taking since at least 2025, together with an emerging “collapse movement”: a path that leads through fear and the acceptance of the collapsing reality toward a new kind of… well, perhaps not “hope,” but rather agency, community, and meaning. This path is never complete, but this book is about movement, and movement is always a work in progress .
Activism instead of powerlessness
Precisely because this book deals with fear, and my attempts to deal with fear, it is also a book about social movements: about a movement that so far can only be seen in shadowy outlines: the “movement for a juster collapse”, in English just collapse movement, or in German in short: the collapse movement.
Why do fear and movement belong together? Because after almost 30 years of “activism,” as movement practice is often simplistically described, it has become clear to me that “movement” is my way of dealing with fear. My way of experiencing self-efficacy, agency, and empowerment in the face of gigantic problems of world-historical proportions . And as every victim of abuse, every victim of physical violence from partners, police officers, or neo-Nazi thugs knows: at the core of violent trauma lies the experience of powerlessness and inability to act.
What frightens us is not so much the pain or the anticipation of pain; it is the absolute powerlessness in the moment of experiencing violence. If trauma is the absolutization of fear, then agency is its antidote. And at least for the kind of agency I strive for in my political practice—shared, solidarity-based agency that can be experienced directly, almost physically, whether in an anti-Nazi or open-cast mine blockade, a summit protest, or a militantly hedonistic Pride march—social activism is the key.
Of course, I can also try to be self-efficacious through work in political parties, or in “civil society” (however vaguely it may be defined), or in associations, or in informal neighborhood networks, but it is “activism” and “movement” with their immediacy, with their collectivity, and not least with their… with our desperate David-versus-Goliath struggles, that produce this kick almost unique in political work: the moment of action, of street fighting, of the surprisingly gigantic demonstration can lead to a kind of collective transcendence of one’s own experience of powerlessness, and convey a unique feeling, incomparable to anything else, however illusory it may be, of agency in world history.
The Battle of Seattle
Okay, the idea of being able to act in world history sounds a bit far-fetched, but I mean it quite literally, with all the pathos and implicit hubris. Not only do I believe that everything true, beautiful, and good in the world originally stems from social movements—without the labor movement, there would be no welfare state in Germany as it still is, no universal suffrage, without the women’s movement no (unfortunately increasingly contested) right to abortion and bodily autonomy, without the queer movement, my husband and I would have far fewer rights, both on paper and in public—I have personally witnessed how social movements have repeatedly managed to push the boundaries of what is possible, not just on a small, concrete scale, but on the grandest stage.
Think back to the 1990s, or, if you’re younger than me, a Gen Xer, imagine the 1990s. During the 1980s, neoliberal capitalism had defeated and/or “co-opted” its three major adversaries, integrating them into its hegemonic project: the organized workers of the Global North, the states of the Global South, and finally, the big bad wolf of the not-quite-capitalist Eastern Bloc. The conservative American intellectual Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed “the end of history,” meaning that world history had essentially reached its end with the attainment of globalized neoliberal-democratic capitalism, the highest stage of human and historical rationality: from here on out, only the same, forever and ever; the then US President Bush Sr. spoke of the “new world order,” referring to the neoliberal American hegemony, the essence of which the entire world was now supposed to invariably recover from. Thatcher’s infamous dictum that there was “no alternative” to ever more liberalized capitalism was essentially the motto of the “world community” of the 1990s.
On an everyday political level, all this meant that for left-wing, environmental, or otherwise not completely succumbing to some kind of weird Stockholm syndrome-induced capitalism, any discussion about social progress or preventing social regression in the 1990s was blocked with the argument that it was all impossible because of globalization: more money for “social” or healthcare, stricter environmental regulations, or securing supply chains against Manchester capitalist shenanigans? “We’d love to, but you know: globalization, we can’t do anything about it – if we raise taxes/tighten environmental regulations/ban child labor, then the companies will go somewhere else, then everyone here will be unemployed and poor: is that what you leftists want?”
In everyday pop culture, the general left-wing ecological experience of the 1990s in the Global North was expressed in cult albums (albums being playlists printed on both sides of round vinyl records) like “Nevermind” or “Rage Against the Machine”: ” Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME! ” The dominant feelings were alienation from a world in which resistance had indeed become futile, as the Borg had repeatedly threatened, and fear of a future in which capitalism would increasingly subjugate the world: back then, it wasn’t global ecological collapse that frightened the left-wingers in the wealthy world, it was the prospect of a world without any difference, a world in which nothing that couldn’t be expressed in monetary terms could have any value. Not “The End of the World,” but “the end of all other worlds.” Universal subjugation to the rule of capital, with the prospect of eventually ending up in a dystopian matrix (1999) in which we humans are degraded to mere batteries for capital accumulation.
But while the world hypnotized itself with the story of the end of history, a social movement was growing on its margins, in the interstices of capitalism, a movement that would challenge capital’s supposedly all-encompassing control over the world; that would challenge neoliberalism and, as the slogan would later go , make other worlds possible. Starting with the indigenous Zapatista rebellion of the EZLN in southern Mexico, in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, which on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect proclaimed a postmodern global revolt against the unifying power of capital, this movement continued in the global “encounters” where a still embryonic “anti-globalization movement” (many of us at the time preferred the term ” mouvement altermondialiste ,” movement for a different globalization: a globalization of solidarity, not of capital) began to get to know each other and plan joint actions; from massive strikes in the public sector of France and South Korea; to our first surprise success when, in 1998, a still loose and nameless coalition of NGOs and grassroots left-wing groups brought down the planned MAI investment protection agreement ; to the legendary protests against the opening summit of the World Trade Organization on November 30, 1999 in Seattle.
On this day, when the most powerful country in human history at that time wanted to throw a huge party to celebrate the subjugation of ever more worlds to the logic of capital, a motley crew of unlikely allies—environmentalists and trade unionists, queer anarchists and Catholic nuns—brought the city to a standstill, prevented the summit from opening, forced the state governor to declare a civil emergency and send the National Guard into the streets against us, and instead of celebrating a grand neoliberal summit, the city descended into tear gas and the smoke of burning trash cans and other barricades as evening fell. When the political fog lifted a few days later, the world had changed: where resistance had previously seemed futile, other worlds had suddenly become possible, and the neoliberal project faced a new adversary: a collective “no” to the one world of capital, and many collective “yeses” to many different possible worlds. One No. Many Yeses.
After the street fight
Of course, the anti-globalization movement ultimately failed to defeat global neoliberalism; in fact, our heroic heyday lasted less than two years. While a cycle of global confrontations did develop from Seattle, in which we drove the powerful from the city centers of global hubs to the mountain peaks and deserts of the periphery, the response was swift and fierce as early as the summer of 2001, as seen in Gothenburg (EU summit, June 2001) and Genoa (G8 summit, August 2001). The global apparatus of repression closed ranks. And then, when 9/11, September 11, 2001, completely reorganized the world, our movement disappeared from newspaper front pages, from the streets of major cities, and soon from the stage of world history altogether.
But what didn’t disappear was the feeling, the memory, that had been seared into the bodies of all those who, in a gigantic, world-historical feat, managed to end history on the streets of Seattle, to make other worlds possible: after I couldn’t even grasp in 1998 that a few NGOs and a handful of global activists had been able to prevent MAI, “Seattle” (the event, not the city) replaced in me the fear of the eternal, unavoidable, unalterable victory of capital over everything true, beautiful, and good in the world with a feeling of almost limitless agency. A capacity for action that I could never have experienced alone, that would have been impossible to experience even in a party meeting: fear was replaced by, driven away by, an experience of collective power that would not have been possible without the shared gathering in the streets and the literally epic conflict between evil (riot police in uniforms and with all sorts of “non-lethal” weapons) and good (a great many different people, young, old, queer, straight, normie, leftist…). My first real experience of activism was therefore one in which, after years of feeling powerless, I suddenly experienced collective agency, and this within the context of an event that was heard and seen all over the world, that resonated throughout the world.
That’s why , for me, fear, agency, and ultimately movement are all interconnected: the first two concepts are opposites, while the last two belong together. Agency absorbs fear, and movement creates collective agency. It’s actually quite simple.
Centre of the Web 