Category: Popular & established authors

Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors, Reflections

Movement Against Fear (extracts from the upcoming book: #2) by Tadzio Mueller

!Epic Tomorrows

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.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, England, Modern poetry is anarchism, Popular & established authors

last seen

!Epic Tomorrows

i want to be like them
The Missing

i want a feature in the Big Issue
the ‘ last seen’ scenario
‘she seemed fine at the drop off!’
parked at the school gates
waving goodbye to boys 6 and 8
in her favourite coat,
non branded, clean, parka green.

the despair of staying here
makes my nurture seem like torture
there’s only comfort in escape
i want to get away up the M8
music on full blast
shoebox of stashed cash
start a new life
no questions asked.

but i imagine you
led back to the school
only a weary teacher to wait with
then driven back
when I don’t return
to a house no longer a home.

i won’t leave my children
a legacy of loss.
i cant be like them.
The Missing are those who go
and stay gone
i’ll be the one
dashing back for the pick up
shouting ‘sorry i’m late’
last seen
at the school gate
clutching kids.

By Sarah Morris

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Butterfly Farm

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

It had been years since she’d been to the butterfly farm. She had to stop going because the butterflies were too beautiful. She would sit and weep as their soft wings skimmed overhead and grazed her tiny ears. Their grand wings veering wide in flight and showing her prints like African batik.
       She didn’t like being the one who always cried, sitting on the bench and looking down and over to the side. She was trying to hide the tears that rolled out like curling butterfly tongues. The butterflies didn’t know she was crying for them. They were too busy landing on velvety flowers and sucking sweet liquids out of squeaky golden stems.
       The last day she spent at the butterfly farm was the day she cried the most. She was sitting on a bench and she was talking to them. She told them they were “sweet and gentle” in a very loud voice, which surprised even her. Suddenly a slow-moving man wearing dirty beige cover-alls and holding a heavy glass jar began to walk toward her. He came and took her four favorite butterflies. She didn’t know how he knew. He stuffed them with his rough hands through the top of the jar and quickly screwed on the lid, their tiny wings wilting. Dogs barked and birds screeched and the sky turned grey with sadness. Some big bowl of hunger grew up in her and puffed her size up to the clouds. Swollen hands moving like giant wings. Her love was that big. She took the man’s bulbous arm and threw it behind his back and arrested him and took him back to the pork farm and the butterflies now sit on his shoulder and eat from dog bowls for all the rest of their days.
Popular & established authors, Reflections

Orwell #1: Animal Farm

!Epic Tomorrows

As I re-read Animal Farm recently, what struck me most was a deep sense of sadness that the masses of people, sometimes including myself, are so easily led by the propaganda of capitalism, and financial & political elites. Whether right wing, centrist or left wing, elites everywhere around the world monopolise the means of media and literary production to maintain their positions of power and privilege, at the expense of people and planet. And some people, like the poor dimmest-witted animals of Animal Farm, will never even know they have been abused and swindled.

Originally published in the Schemattic digital garden

Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors

On the Fear of the Future (extracts from the upcoming book: #1) by Tadzio Mueller

!Epic Tomorrows

Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage

On the fear of the future

Everywhere you look, fear is rampant. Fear of war and climate catastrophe, fear of reptilians and migrants, fear of job loss, rent increases, and all-powerful billionaires (sic!). The rich are building bunkers, the European Union is adopting asylum procedures where no one in Europe actually has to see the asylum seekers, global military spending is reaching new record highs, and politicians are driven by the fear of the coming fossil fuel revolt, which is as inevitable after the Iran war and the global energy crisis as the sausage porn photo on Markus Söder’s Instagram account.

But can this really be true: that fear is something that “we all”, or at least many of us, “share”? The statement doesn’t seem entirely coherent, even counterintuitive, when we look at the political discourses of our time. With the exception of the political discourse of the AfD and other right-wing extremist forces (more on that later), we find very few stories about fear. Even in the 2025 federal election campaign, the Greens plastered their posters with the slogan “Confidence!”, and while the narratives told by the current federal government do contain some references to complex crises, major dangers, and difficult challenges, (as I write this, a massive “reform package” is being negotiated within the coalition) nothing about it should cause fear; it’s all solvable, they claim, if only the right reforms, tax cuts, and gifts to capital were implemented. Sure, it’s a crisis, but crises have been ongoing ever since the global financial crisis of 2007, then the Euro crisis, then the “migration crisis,” then the Corona crisis, then the first energy crisis (2022) and the second… So, crises are constant anyway, and so far, we’ve always managed to get through them somehow. Why, then, be afraid, or at least, why admit to it?

The middle class’s fear of division

The search for “fear” in political discourse must therefore necessarily be indirect, because fear of collapse is rarely articulated; it is repressed, hidden behind other issues, anxieties, and accusations. It is a bit like a solar eclipse, an event that produces so many extreme effects that looking at it directly would be too dangerous, too confusing, too destabilizing. Or like dark matter in space, which we cannot see directly because it does not interact with light (in our analogy: rational reflection), but which has all sorts of gravitational effects in the real world from which we can draw conclusions about its existence.

One example of this is the discussion about a possible “division” or “polarization” of German society, and how this could be prevented or, if it truly existed, reversed. For example, the well-known sociologist Steffen Mau, the author of *Trigger Points of Time* says that “division (is) a fear scenario,” then explains to the German upper middle class in its courtly Pravda that the deep fear of society falling apart is unfounded, that “most people” still “group themselves in the broad middle.” What appears to be a narrative about sociological facts is actually, on the far more powerful level of emotional communication, a kind of paternal “no, dear child, you don’t need to worry, things are still as you know them, as you like them to be.” This is at least as much therapy as sociology, because when we feel fear, we seek out discourses, choosing from the various political discourse products offered to us in the highly mediated world we live in precisely those that make us feel the least bad.

When “the center” discusses polarization or division, it is expressing its deep, fundamental fear of losing control over society, of heading towards a future with likely far fewer, or at least far more contested, privileges. The narrative of the center, that one must combat “societal division,” is primarily the fear that there is no longer enough “common ground” to hold society together and maintain the center in its rather comfortable position of power. And since, from the perspective of bourgeois society, “division” can best be combated with “reason” and “communication,” which are then contrasted with the perpetual “culture war” from the right and “identity politics” from the left—communication that thus distinguishes the center from “the extremes”—we ultimately arrive at a discourse that simply says: no matter what the problem is, we just need to do more of what we already considered right, and then we’ll solve it. Yes, we are afraid that the world is changing, but if we simply don’t change anything and just remain as we are now, then we no longer need to be afraid.

My favorite and cautionary example of such discourse comes from the intellectual doyen of the black-green wing of the taz newspaper, Peter Unfried: the asserted. Not too long ago, he claimed that “without a functioning democracy, a market economy, and a strong center… there can be no climate policy,” that global warming doesn’t fit into the concept of “either the far right or the far left,” and from this he concluded that it was finally time for some reasonable (i.e., centrist) adults to sit down and find a rational compromise: “’compromise is the new progressive.’” This is quite clever: the potential division of society is identified as a problem—the fear of it is real and cannot simply be ignored by producers of political discourse—but then it’s immediately rolled back into the paternalistic reassurance that the adults will now sit down together again and solve things the way they’ve always been solved up there: through the ideology-free, reasonable, universally Habermasian discourse of societal elites. Here, too, the mode of dealing with fear in the democratic political discourse of our time becomes apparent: the problems are briefly acknowledged, there is a brief nod towards acceptance, only to then return to a narrative in which things do not have to change fundamentally, will not change fundamentally, in which, as is usual in fairy tales, everything turns out all right in the end.

The affective surplus

The problem with these pragmatic, fatherly political discourses, in which every problem can be solved by a little more of what we’ve always considered right anyway—leftists, for example, believe that a little redistribution would solve the climate problem, pragmatic Greens believe that building, buying, and driving a few more electric cars would solve the climate problem, precisely what has been demanded for decades—is that they fundamentally go against the emotional impulse of those they are meant to convince. Yes, we seek discourses that alleviate our fears, but when these discourses almost obsessively assume that problems can be solved, they easily give listeners the impression that it’s not about their feelings at all, not about them, but rather about communicating to them that their feelings are unnecessary, exaggerated, or even part of the problem itself. This leads to people turning away from these narratives because those experiencing strong emotions usually don’t want their feelings (fear) to be reversed (reassured) in communication – they want their feelings reflected and validated; they aren’t initially looking for a solution. When a good friend constantly told me about her boy troubles , she didn’t want to hear how she could overcome them; she simply wanted to be heard and seen, and not put under pressure to find a solution.

The collective emotional states—or affects — that underlie politics produce an “affective surplus” in relation to the political discourses that articulate them; they cannot be fully captured by these discourses, especially not by those whose stated goal is to deprive people of precisely the feeling that currently shapes their perception. If the everyday perception of many people is increasingly dominated by fear—I mean, why are more and more people, even full-time political professionals I know, increasingly engaging in news avoidance ? Because the world is increasingly filled with fear and negativity – and because the political narratives of our time only superficially acknowledge, reflect, and validate this feeling – the sense remains that the unreflected feeling is somehow shameful: that having “fear” is a sign of one’s own “defeatism”, that “fear” is an emotion that is primarily exploited “by the right”, and which we therefore shouldn’t feel all the time, that fear is, in a certain sense, an infantile turning away from the world, while the enlightened person (preferably a man for the sake of simplicity) faces the certainly solvable problems of our time without fear and with a great deal of rationality.

And as every good sex worker knows: the simplest way to manipulate people, to build a relationship with them in which they feel accepted and comfortable—more comfortable than in other contexts—is to acknowledge and validate their real but hidden feelings and desires. Someone who constantly has to suppress a strong feeling and then finds a place where that feeling is “accepted” will always gladly return to that place. At that point, it doesn’t really matter whether a remotely realistic solution is proposed for the problem that triggers the feeling, because, as already mentioned, for people, their feelings aren’t primarily about resolution, but rather about their acknowledgment. And since global ecological collapse triggers strong negative feelings, political discourses that cannot truly acknowledge the collapse, its insolubility, or the resulting fear leave behind an easily manipulated affective surplus that can now be articulated by political entrepreneurs and steered in a desired political direction…

Donald Trump, or: how does political communication work?

…from political entrepreneurs, such as… Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is without question the greatest political communication genius of the postmodern era. Seriously , the fact that this repulsive orange-skinned baby man was elected twice to the most powerful political office in the world—the second time as a convicted coup plotter with significant health problems, and after announcing his intention to rule as a dictator right at the start of his term (but “only for a day”), and still with a respectable majority—has by no means been sufficiently reflected upon in terms of what it means for our understanding of effective (and affective) political communication.

Of course, one could simply say that politicians always lie, people fall for these lies, and Trump’s lies cater to the reactionary views of his supporters. That may be true for part of his base, but it certainly doesn’t apply to all Trump voters. And it ignores a fact already described in 2016, during his first presidential run : “Many of his supporters don’t believe Trump’s wild claims—but they don’t care,” as the Washington Post wrote. They support him not because of, but in spite of, his positions. They aren’t concerned with ‘substance,’ which in turn explains why it never hurts Trump to be “exposed” in a lie (although, frankly, the very category of “lie” seems somewhat anachronistic when discussing and trying to understand Trump).

This is about much more than a lying politician. Trump’s political discourse is a prime example of what is called post-factual politics in Germany. The English term ” post-truth politics” goes further, however, because truths are more than just facts. While the German term gives the impression that only certain facts are being questioned, and the bourgeois-Enlightenment context in which they exist remains intact, the English term indicates that the entire conceptual framework within which facts make sense is being shaken. Trump’s political statements no longer articulate classical claims to truth. Therefore, they cannot be combated with the traditional weapons of ideological critique. For a situation in which Trump can say whatever he wants, only to claim the opposite in the next breath—and in which this doesn’t harm him— the comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “Trumpiness” on his satirical show “The Late Show.”

Trump’s supporters don’t follow a candidate who rationally justifies his political program, who appeals to their economic interests. They follow someone who feels what they feel: the anger and the disappointment, but above all, and more importantly, the yearning for recognition, for belonging again, for being someone—for having agency. “Make America(ns) feel great again.” For Colbert, Donald Trump is therefore the politician of our time: “an emotional megaphone for voters full of anger.” His actions create affective resonance. His supporters don’t cheer the content of his words, but the fact that there is someone standing there who gives them a sense of strength and relevance they haven’t felt for decades.

This means that political communication, contrary to what hegemonic West German Habermasianism suggests, does not function through substantive agreement, or even as a Popperian process of constantly falsifying hypotheses. Instead, it functions through the construction of emotional resonances, sympathetic vibrations between subjects. Of course, this analysis is not particularly new; Spinoza already argued in his Tractatus Politicus that people are “led more by passion than by reason,” and the most effective form of communication of our time, capitalist advertising, has long since internalized it. But we still seem to have largely failed to understand this fundamental fact of political communication, to have not yet integrated it into our strategies. For the only political actor with mass appeal who seems to take seriously how much fear people in this country have of an increasingly bleak future is, unfortunately, the AfD.