Tag: history

Collapse chats & diaries, Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors, Sense-making crisis

Collapse, capitalism, and no end to growth (extracts from an upcoming book by Tadzio Mueller: #5)

!Epic Tomorrows

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

Note: this repost continues from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.

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…From 2010 to 2015, the young, primarily left-wing radical climate movement plodded around rather unnoticed in the coal-mining regions, trying to pull new levers after the summit… and nobody gave a fuck .

…and in capitalism?

This was initially quite surprising for me, or rather frustrating, because, as I said, I need exercise to cope with major, otherwise insurmountable fears. In this case: the fear of climate collapse, of the end of the world as we know it , to quote the 90s again.

And why the sudden fear of collapse? I mean , back in the 2000s, the German left and a large part of the climate movement knew nothing about tipping points. At that time, “climate change” was mostly imagined as a more or less linear phenomenon. People were looking forward to avocado cultivation in Franconia and Caribbean vacations on Borkum. “Disasters” and the like would occur in the Global South, but here, with us, up here, with us rich people, it would simply raise the average temperature by one or two degrees. No big deal , it’s still primarily a luxury issue: it’s about polar bears and people in the Global South, in that order , and we in Germany don’t really worry about such irrelevances, unless it means we can sell more cars. I still remember a conversation with a clever comrade who asked me around 2010 whether my warning about “large-scale crop failures in the event of escalating climate change” wasn’t “too alarmist.” In retrospect, it’s a funny question, and generally speaking, the reactions of most of the German left to our new climate movement were rather hesitant: the accusation of “catastrophism” was in the air, alongside the old left-wing anti-eco-babble such as “climate protection is anti-worker”, “climate protection is a bourgeois luxury issue”, and the ever-popular classic: “because it is capitalism that is destroying the climate, we just have to destroy capitalism, then the climate will work out too.”

These were, of course, not actual substantive statements; in any case, they were about intellectually deflecting the necessity of a serious societal and/or left-wing debate about what the “climate question” would mean for the wealthy, late-imperialist plunder communities of the Global North—for example, what this “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR ) for solving the climate question, enshrined in international law at the famous “Earth Summit” in Rio in 1992, could actually mean. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to dissect the line of reasoning “because it is capitalism that is destroying the climate, we simply have to destroy capitalism, then the climate will work out too” in order to explain how simultaneously correct and utterly useless this idea is, and especially what it fails to consider. And to do that, I have to go back to my dissertation, which, as I said, was about anti-capitalist activism and the question of how it can be effective: ” how do we fight and win against capital(ism)? ” And to answer this question, I had to go back to the beginning and first really understand how “capitalism” actually works, especially its often-invoked internal “growth imperative”.

Hmm, where do I begin…? Perhaps here: Capitalism is a truly impressive system. Unlike all, and I mean all, other human-made social structures, it is capable of, and indeed dependent on, producing permanent, often socially disruptive “growth.” While all other known modes of production and ways of life (I could also say “economies,” but even the separation of “economic” from other activities is an artifact of capitalist development and didn’t exist in this way in non-capitalist societies) basically function in a more cyclical manner, or at least don’t include the permanent revolutionizing of fundamental production technologies and thus enormously increasing productivity as a lasting characteristic, societies governed by the capitalist mode of production are both capable of, and under penalty of collapse compelled to, grow permanently. And here you shouldn’t imagine “growth” as some GDP figure ( as in : “The German economy grew by 0.2% last quarter, which means God is disappointed in us, so we now have to sacrifice a few virgins and a significant portion of our social welfare system to him!”), but as something very concrete, a bit like in the now probably forgotten 80s song “We’re increasing the gross national product”: every day a capitalist – a person who owns means of production and wage capital and wants to use them to produce goods in order to earn money – gets up in order to own more capital in the evening than in the morning. And every evening they consider how to invest the additional capital (the “added value”) so that they can generate even more added value the next day. If she doesn’t do that, then the next day she will be overtaken by her competitors, because they weren’t sloppy, they made their production more efficient and thus their products cheaper, and “our” capitalist will therefore be able to sell less, therefore have less, not more, capital in the evening, and therefore, if this continues for a few days or years, she will go out of business .

The “growth imperative” inherent in capitalism, like a grumpy genie in a bottle, does not arise from macro-political decisions or from capitalist revelry around the growth totem, but from countless microeconomic decisions made by individual economic actors, and usually has little to do with any government decisions. Instead, “economic growth” typically follows upswings and downturns that remain surprisingly stable over decades (see Kondratieff and Schumpeter). In this sense, “the capitalist growth imperative” has no “center,” there is no place where we could simply switch it off: as long as a large part of social production is for the market, and as long as most people cannot survive without recourse to this market because their own means of reproduction have been stolen from them over the years and centuries, this growth imperative persists, and our lives are determined by a logic over which we have little influence, a logic that creates itself and its effects, as it were, behind our backs.

Please excuse this brief, perhaps too rapid, foray into a bit of capitalist theory; my aim was to establish an important point I encountered during my dissertation research: not only is capitalism a uniquely productive and dynamic economic system, it is also a system that has no center, no winter palace, no place that controlling it would mean that it would also be possible to shut down, revolutionize, or overthrow capitalism from there.

Completely independent of whether we could actually rally broad majorities of the population behind an anti-capitalist transformation project – we cannot, more on this below (Chapter 3) – we wouldn’t even know what these majorities should then do, because, and this is another important point that my dissertation helped me understand, and which is of course also copied from Marx: unlike all other social systems, capitalism is basically independent of what people think of it. We reproduce capitalism and the value-commodity form (the “placeless center” of capitalism) every time we buy and sell products in capitalist markets. The more frequently we do this, the further we advance the subjugation of life to the logic of capital. And since our need to ensure our reproduction through capitalist markets is truly completely independent of what we think about them, capitalism is also largely independent of our consent. A system that can grow stronger even when it generates less “mass loyalty” because it can function through silent economic coercion; that has no attackable or occupyable center; and that, through its constant internal dynamics, continually subjugates the world, thus creating ever more of a lack of alternatives… A system that we have no leverage against, that can articulate our own needs for its stabilization, and that is as unassailable as a ghost in the machine.

This did not mean, of course, that there were no possibilities for resistance, no capacity for action against “capitalism”: if our dependence on capitalism – from which the necessity to reproduce capitalism every time we satisfy our basic needs results – is the result of the disappearance of non-capitalist ways of life and “worlds,” then the counter-strategy must naturally be to create precisely such “worlds” (social spaces in which alternative “value logics” prevail to capitalism ).) to create, defend, and expand. iiHowever, this strategy suffered from two problems, the second of which will then lead us back to the climate collapse question.

First: of course, “we” anti-capitalists can build countless ” intentional communities ,” dropout collectives living a non-capitalist life, but their fate will be no better than that of all anti-capitalist communes since the mid-19th century, since Saint Simon or Robert Owen and the other “utopian socialists”: they would stagnate and/or eventually be swallowed up by capitalism. Why? Because capitalism has this built-in, cancerous or parasitic growth dynamic, while non-capitalist forms of society do not exhibit such a strong internal expansion dynamic and are therefore fundamentally inferior in “systemic competition.” This is not merely a theoretical point; a quantitative historical study of “dropping out” as an anti-capitalist strategy would confirm precisely this assumption.

The second problem with “let’s build and expand alternative forms of non-capitalist coexistence” lies in the question of time, or more precisely, on the timescale. I asked earlier whether, how, and where we can “switch off, revolutionize, or overthrow” capitalism, and the initial answer is: no. At best, we can launch alternative social projects, expand them slowly but surely (building a new society takes time), and then hope that a combination of external shock, such as a pandemic or, I don’t know, a blockade of key fossil fuel supply lines like the Strait of Hormuz, internal contradictions, and global revolt would cause capitalism to collapse, and people would turn to the alternatives we have built up over many years through arduous, painstaking work. This means, however, that the temporality of anti-capitalism is not a fragmented, revolutionary one, but rather that anti-capitalism takes a really, really long time. No short-term “revolution” – a term that, in a political sense, has become completely meaningless in highly developed capitalist societies, because what would a revolution against capitalism actually look like if there were no longer a Winter Palace for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to storm? – at best, then, a protracted “transformation,” and a “post-capitalism” coming somewhere in the very, very distant, eternal future .

Capitalism, climate, and the question of time

And the issue of time in anti-capitalism—that we have no short-term way to shut down capitalism—became a particular problem when I began to grapple with the climate issue. A quick glance at the “hockey stick graph,” extremely popular in climate communication at the end of the 2000s, revealed that global greenhouse gas emissions follow the expansion or contraction of the global economy quite closely. If the global economy grows, emissions rise; if it doesn’t grow, or even shrinks, as during the oil crisis of the early 1970s or the collapse of the Eastern Bloc economies in the early 1990s, the emission level remains the same or falls. This relationship didn’t change even with global climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, or with processes occurring more at the material, production level, such as the expansion of renewable energies: economic growth = more emissions, economic contraction = fewer emissions. And since, as just explained, economic growth does not result so much from our joint political or social decisions, as we have no real access to the growth dynamics, this also meant that we had no real access to the climate problem.

All of this wouldn’t necessarily have stressed me out if, like many at the time, I had understood “climate change” (in retrospect, a rather quaint term) as a fundamentally linear problem that would eventually, perhaps in 100 years or so, lead to a gentle, and in Germany perhaps even pleasant, increase in the average temperature of a nice one or two degrees Celsius. But because of my connections to the radical environmental movement in the UK, specifically my political friendship with a comrade, now an influential Earth scientist who frequently publishes in the Guardian, I understood from the outset that the climate issue wasn’t about a slightly smaller or larger rise in global temperatures, but about impending fundamental changes to the conditions of human life on Earth.

In short: if capitalism continues unabated, polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the inevitable result is not a linear temperature increase. Instead, the global climate system—a complex system with two fundamentally possible states: stable and unstable—would leave its unusually long stable phase of the last 12,000 years, the now-famous “Holocene,” in which the global average temperature deviated from the mean by no more than two degrees Celsius. The more greenhouse gases are emitted, the closer we get to the tipping point of this stable system, the point at which a relatively stable global climate would be replaced by an unstable one. If this tipping point were crossed—and the real meaning of the “two-degree limit,” which was already being discussed in the scientific community in the late 2000s and enshrined in international law in the “Paris Agreement,” was this: beyond two degrees of warming, the probability of tipping into an unstable global climate rises to over 50%—it would be quite likely that the conditions for stable human civilization on Earth would soon cease to exist. Furthermore, this process of “collapse” would be incredibly unjust, as I learned in 2008 from our friends in the “climate justice movement,” which had formed/split off to the left of the “climate movement” at the global climate summit level, about the principles of environmental and climate injustice: in every environmental or climate catastrophe, those who have contributed the least usually suffer the most, and conversely, those who have contributed the most suffer the least and therefore now have the resources to protect themselves from the effects of their own fossil-capitalist destructive practices. If the global sea level rises, the formerly imperial Netherlands would build floating cities, but formerly colonized Bangladesh would be submerged.

So even back then I understood that the prospect of an unchecked climate catastrophe wasn’t “a few dead polar bears, but fresh avocados from Franconia,” but rather “the end of human civilization”—what we now call “collapse,” a topic that was already being discussed to some extent in 2008 when Jared Diamond published one of the classics of collapse studies: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . The necessary endpoint of the climate catastrophe is the collapse of human civilization. The climate catastrophe is driven by a global fossil-fuel-based mass-production capitalism that we have neither the short-term material interest, nor the capacity, nor the leverage to stop, at least not in the time that was available to us then for “solving” the climate question. In a ruthless strategic summary, this meant: we were completely screwed .

Illusory ability to act in the climate catastrophe

Enter repression , because as a still relatively young anti-capitalist activist in my early thirties, I couldn’t accept this conclusion: sure, capitalism wouldn’t be able to solve the problem, and at that time I saw no way to replace it. But hadn’t I witnessed years before how social movements could make the impossible possible? Wasn’t social movement my means of dealing with my major political anxieties? Weren’t social movements the source of all true, beautiful, good things in the world?

My answer to the question of the impossible solution to the climate problem therefore necessarily lay in building a social movement on the issue of climate/climate justice, because: if the solution is impossible under given conditions, but social movements can push the boundaries of what is possible, then a social movement is the only way to solve the problem. That this was pure magical thinking, not unlike the magical thinking of emissions trading enthusiasts or technology fetishists – “Climate catastrophe? Sure, a serious problem, but first let’s create a market around it, which will magically solve it, or let people buy electric cars en masse, then everything will somehow be alright.” – I couldn’t yet recognize at the time. I hadn’t yet understood how many of our political narratives were actually myths we told each other to avoid feeling our fear, our guilt, and our shame in the face of humanity’s almost certain collective-capitalist self-destruction. Instead, I was absolutely convinced that we could build a global anti-fossil fuel and anti-capitalist movement that would develop so much momentum that it would somehow – I had already established that we couldn’t stop the capitalist drive for expansion, but I simply repressed this insight, which I had researched for several years just before, as completely as I repressed my homosexuality as a teenager – achieve the impossible.

Step one in this direction for me was the first climate camp in Germany, which I mentioned earlier. Step two was the mobilization for/against the COP15 climate summit in Hamburg: in the fight against neoliberalism, the summits of global institutions had been relevant levers, points of intervention, so why not in the fight against the climate catastrophe? Well, because these were completely different processes: neoliberalism, as a global deregulation and reregulation program, was certainly also dependent on these summits. If the signing of a free trade or investment protection agreement could be prevented, it wouldn’t have its socially corrosive effects. But a mobilization for a “climate summit”? If we were to effectively “block” it, the process of climate destruction would continue undisturbed; if a “deal” were negotiated there, as later happened in Paris, it became clear that the process of climate destruction would continue unabated anyway.

As already mentioned, the summit flopped, as did the mobilization, so we went in search of the next possible lever. The climate movements of the Global North decided to go “into the coalfields,” and we know what followed: climate camps, Ende Gelände, the fight for the Hambach Forest and Lützerath, for a coal phase-out. And what did we get for over a decade of selfless struggle? A lignite phase-out sometime in the late 2030s, while the world was already beginning to drown or go up in flames in the late 2010s. We may have won the “phase-out,” but we lost the climate fight. Even “the coalfields,” as the German government’s “coal compromise” showed, were not effective levers for advancing the climate agenda.

But the climate movement refused to be discouraged; the search for effective levers to take action in the face of the climate catastrophe continued: after the anti-coal campaigns in the mining regions, Fridays for Future appeared on the world stage, embarking on the climate movement’s penultimate attempt to make the impossible possible: friendly mass demonstrations were organized all over the world, the strongest single organization being Fridays Germany, which organized the largest demonstrations in the history of the Federal Republic on September 20, 2019, and showed: “Hey, a lot of people in society really want climate protection!”

However, even that proved ineffective, because, as demonstrated, capitalism is the root cause of the climate problem, and regardless of our personal opinions, its power stems from the lack of realistic, large-scale alternatives. Thus, Germany once again opted against genuine climate protection, until the Last Generation embarked on a final attempt, pulling the last conceivable lever – exerting maximum pressure on the world’s fossil fuel-based societies until, under the ever-increasing pressure of road blockades, they finally remembered their promise to protect the climate. The repercussions of this are still being felt today. Society became increasingly brutalized in lockstep with the tactical escalation by the Last Generation, and by around 2023, it was clear: the climate movement’s attempt to become effective in combating the climate catastrophe, to find effective levers against the destructive madness of fossil fuel capitalism, had failed. We were too few in number and our numbers were dwindling; we lacked an effective strategy, and society had turned its back on us once and for all. We couldn’t break capitalism, capitalism broke the climate, and a broken climate meant the certain collapse of human civilization.

Game Over.

And finally: capable of acting in a collapse?

Now you might be wondering why I’ve taken you on this rather lengthy journey through the recent history of social movements, why I, as a notorious “defeatist,” so vehemently celebrate movements that I ultimately accuse of failure? Because I want to show that the search inherent in social movements, the search for agency even in the face of the greatest challenges humanity can face, is still precisely what helps us deal with fear. With the exception of the climate debate, none of the conflicts described above were “lost” from the outset; there were always paths to agency, which in some cases were even followed. I don’t want us to “give up”; it’s about the exact opposite: I want to extend what I described above into a future of collapse.

So, one last time back to the chronology. What followed for me from the difficult realization of the inevitability of climate collapse, I described in more detail in the first book: first, the realization that “climate collapse” would also mean societal collapse and universal fascization; then, deep depression and the attempt at slow self-destruction in the gay Berlin party scene; and finally, the re-emergence from depression when I rediscovered “the movement” in Lützerath, and with my friend Pär Plüschke and his group “Preppa Tillsammans” (Prepping Together), the strategy of solidarity-based prepping, which was to be pursued by a possible, yet-to-be-initiated collapse movement.

But how exactly such a collapse movement would function, in what strategic space it would operate, at which leverage points it could intervene—all of that remained somewhat unclear. So now the narrative must continue: what does the social space of collapse look like? What are the “stakes,” what is at stake, who is still involved, and how do they behave? How do we, even in the midst of collapse, rediscover a shared, human capacity for action (which would place the project in question somewhere on the left and somewhere within humanism—in this new terrain, directions and projects become unclear and must be redefined), and avoid surrendering the entire territory to our eternal adversaries, the fascists?

This book, therefore, deals with the future, which will also be reflected in the nature of the intellectual and political claims I will make within it: when we talk about the future, especially a future that represents a fundamental break with what the future has been in our immediate past, not everything, or increasingly less, is necessarily “provable.” This is a book full of political and social hypotheses, of statements like “X is the most likely scenario, and should X occur, then strategy Y would be optimal.”

The first book dealt with the failure of an old movement in a collapsing world, and the search for new paths where our failure wasn’t predetermined. This book is about the emergence of a new movement in a collapsing world, and the paths along which it returns to solidarity and self-efficacy. It is not a book about hope, but about fear and agency, solidarity, and finding meaning in community (movement) in an increasingly dark world. If the first book was a travelogue, a political-emotional diary, this one is a programmatic opening: at best, it will be a kind of “what to do in a collapse?”

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors

Origins of the climate movement (extracts from an upcoming book by Tadzio Mueller: #4)

!Epic Tomorrows

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

Note: this repost continues from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.

Capable of taking action in the face of the climate catastrophe?

…But after the frustration of the anti-war movement, I didn’t go directly into activism. Instead, I returned to university, where I had the enormous luck and privilege of writing my dissertation on anti-capitalist activism within the anti-globalization movement—essentially a critical retrospective, a strategic debrief on the movement that had so profoundly changed my life and, at least a little, the world. The research question was essentially: what means do we “anti-capitalists” in the anti-globalization and other movements actually use to fight our great enemy, the final boss, whom we hold responsible for so much of the world’s evil, and how effective are these means?

When I finally finished my dissertation in the autumn of 2006, not only was I finished with university, but the world was also finished with the anti-globalization movement: one of our last major actions in the Global North was the attempt to disrupt the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. But while a few hundred or a few thousand radical leftists were chased through the Scottish Highlands by well-organized police, the vast majority of people who had come to Scotland to protest were not demonstrating against the G8, but rather under the banner of “Make Poverty History” for an expansion of the powers of precisely those multilateral political-economic institutions whose delegitimization had been one of the central strategies of our movement. The radical wing isolated, the moderate wing co-opted (integrated into the power project), the British government transformed from antagonist of the movement into its tamer: the movement was dead .

Long live the movement!

And what do people do for whom “movement” and “struggle” are central parts of their identity, what do “activists” do when a movement, when their movement ends? Of course, some of us then go home for good, start some well-paid or overly demanding job, have two, three, many children – but for activist self-efficacy junkies like me, it was clear that it had to continue with a new movement. Cold turkey – brrrr, absolutely not.

Fortunately, our British comrades had already shown a way out of the now irrelevant anti-neoliberal globalization movement: while the black-red wing of the movement, to which I belonged, was still preoccupied with the major global summits in 2005, having been convinced in Seattle that these were the key levers on which to apply our limited energies to achieve maximum change, and therefore mobilized for Gleneagles, the influential eco-anarchist wing in the UK had long since abandoned this idea, this illusion, and was instead planning the first “climate camp.” At the end of August 2006, precisely when I was sitting at my desk in Brighton finishing my dissertation on a movement that was by then no longer relevant, a new cycle of social struggles, a new social movement, began at the first Camp for Climate Action at the Drax coal-fired power station , the largest CO2 emitter in the UK: we would later come to know it as the “climate movement.”

2007 wasn’t just the year of my gay coming out and move to the queer-hedonistic mecca of Berlin; it was also the year of my personal climate conversion. Like many German leftists and radical leftists, I had previously held an absurdly arrogant attitude towards anything that even remotely resembled an “environmental issue.” I thought, as many leftists still do, that environmental issues were privileged, bourgeois feel-good nonsense, that environmental issues were about cute megafauna like polar bears and turtles, maybe trees, perhaps a little bit about agriculture, but that the truly important issues were the classic leftist themes: control of the means of production, class struggle, redistribution, socialization, etc. Without ever having really engaged with them, I had internalized the anti-ecological leftist prejudice that the real leftist issues were about people, about exploitation versus liberation, while environmental issues were luxury topics to be addressed sometime after the revolution.

The climate question

The mid-2000s, when the world’s first climate agreement came into force (the now justifiably largely forgotten “Kyoto Protocol”), when a climate policy slide show by a former US Vice President won the Oscar for Best Documentary, was also the time when the Global North, in the context of increasingly escalating climate catastrophe consequences, slowly began to take the climate issue seriously. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005, played a particularly important role here: until then, the wealthy world (myself included, as a scion of the cosmopolitan upper middle class) had happily indulged in the illusion that the climate catastrophe was a “somewhere, sometime” problem. But when the richest and most powerful country in the world experienced an “environmental catastrophe” that, due to historical racial and class-based injustices, immediately manifested itself as a social catastrophe as well, when Mexican troops entered Texas to provide food for evacuees …When George W. Bush and his Republicans suffered a crushing defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, partly because they had so disastrously botched the disaster response , and especially because all of this took place in the USA, where the rest of the West can always see a bit of its own future – it began to become clear to the rich world that this “climate change” had probably received too little attention so far.

Institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund began talking about “green loans,” positioning themselves, after years of quite effective delegitimization by our movement, as the institutions that could finance and enable a global ” green transition .” And when, in 2007, during what was truly the last major anti-globalization action in Europe, at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, the brilliant political tactician Angela Merkel actually managed to completely thwart our summit blockades by positioning the G8 not as the neoliberal governess of the world, but as a globally solidarity-based institution of savvy climate saviors, I began for the first time to recognize the world-changing relevance of the issue. Initially, not because I considered the topic important myself, but because I understood that our old adversaries – the global institutions and factions of capital that had driven the project of “neoliberal globalization” – were beginning to reorient themselves, adopting a new rhetoric in the midst of the emerging major crisis of capitalism: “Look, we are no longer evil neoliberals; we recognize that a potential catastrophe is looming, and we will not only solve it, we will use the energy it releases to unleash a new, enlightened, sustainable, green growth cycle that can pull us out of the deepest global economic crisis since the Great Depression .”

The climate movement…

So I began to engage with the climate issue both activistically and academically, and I quickly got the impression that it could be a bigger deal than I had previously understood. A number of German activists participated in the 2nd Climate Camp (Camp for Climate Action) in the summer of 2007, and we were so enthusiastic about this form of action that we decided to organize the first climate camp in Germany in 2008, which then took place in Hamburg-Moorburg as the first German “Anti-Racist and Climate Camp.” From there, we moved on to the “Copenhagen Mobilization,” when the emerging activist climate movement, along with pretty much the rest of the world, pinned its hopes on the possibility that success at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen could somehow influence the already rapidly escalating “climate change.” But as some of you may remember, the summit flopped, as did the large demonstrations and actions that took place around and against it , and after 2009 things became pretty quiet around the climate issue. From 2010 to 2015, the young, primarily left-wing radical climate movement plodded along rather unnoticed in the coal-mining regions, trying to pull new levers after the summit… and nobody gave a fuck.

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

Incapable of acting in war: without leverage, there is no power (extracts from an upcoming book by Tadzio Mueller: #3)

!Epic Tomorrows

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

Note: continuing from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here, this is the second part of the latest introduction. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.

Incapable of action in war: no movement without leverage

Seattle changed me: before, I saw my likely career path in some more or less progressive UN institution—perhaps in some environmental department of the World Bank, or in one of those small, left-leaning UN research institutes like UNRISD—but afterward, I knew that my political future lay in activism, in social movements. Everything else seemed like utter nonsense. What could be better than the experience I had in Seattle? What better response to major political anxieties than to build a social movement around and against them, within which we could then collectively and powerfully address the fear and the problem that triggered it?

The next political problem was not long in coming: during 2002, when I was living in England to write my dissertation on anti-capitalist activism at Sussex University, it became clear that the US empire, led by Dick Cheney and his glorified sock puppet George W. Bush, would attack Iraq without any legal or moral basis, and would be supported in this by the British poodle Tony Blair. I know that it has now become completely normal again to constantly see fighter jets and other military aircraft overhead, even in the privileged countries of the world, but at the beginning of the 2000s, after a good ten years of the “peace dividend”—the rather silly and hyper-privileged assumption in retrospect that after the end of the Cold War a kind of permanent global peace would prevail, that the Pax Americana would extend forever across the entire world—it was deeply frightening to live in a country that, together with the global bully hegemon, was planning an illegal war of aggression that would result in bombers taking off from British Air Force bases ” to murder Iraqi children ,” as we somewhat polemically put it at the time. But the protests were of course not only about humanitarian concern for people in Iraq, however present that was: many of us in the British anti-war movement were driven by the fear of a world in which wars would once again become a perfectly normal form of enforcing imperial or even “national” interests – a world that we had been promised was over since 1989.

Anti-War Movement 2002-2003

Since Seattle, I had become an “activist” and experienced “limitless agency” through shared radical (disobedient, rule-breaking, even confrontational) street activism, so the reaction to the looming war, which was simultaneously a kind of moral bankruptcy for the victorious side in the Cold War – the “new world order” apparently wasn’t so different from the old one, in which the rich, late-imperial societies of the global North simply take what they want and provide some kind of bullshit justification (just like in Iraq back then, and in Venezuela today) – was almost predetermined: let’s build an anti-war movement .

And so we did . But not all activism is successful, not every movement conveys heroic agency—on average, unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. “Activism” is a very particular kind of magic that can only unfold its full effect under very specific, and in most cases not truly predictable, conditions, and these conditions are usually not met. A key condition for success that was lacking in the British anti-war movement is the existence of leverage .

Sure, a collective mass of people on the streets is important and encouraging, and organizing a huge demonstration, or an action that successfully achieves its goal and (for example) blocks or peacefully sabotages something, is definitely a great feeling. But if these demonstrations or actions repeatedly come to nothing, if they don’t generate any expanding momentum in the sense of a constantly growing wave of mobilization, especially if what is being fought against eventually becomes irrevocably real: then the movement produces the exact opposite of the empowering experience that motivates people to become active as “activists” (or “organizers,” if the term “activist” has acquired too many negative connotations these days), to get involved in social movements. Then the movement feels just as lame as sitting around in the shrinking local grassroots organization of some political party, waiting at just after 10 p.m. for the secretary to correctly present the minutes from last week’s meeting. Even worse, since the promise of activism is precisely that of an almost explosive capacity for action, regardless of how long it actually takes to achieve political success, this very promise then becomes a problem, because while party work is deliberately designed for the long term, it is a major challenge for movements to survive the rigors of the political level and to secure their internal stability and resilience between peak mobilization phases: if movement work falters, the movement is often immediately threatened with extinction.

That’s exactly what happened to the British anti-war movement. While we achieved incredible mobilization successes in 2002, the year of war preparations, with local anti-war groups organizing themselves practically across the entire country and very, very clear majorities positioning themselves against an illegal war of aggression, we as a movement seemed to think that would be enough. Sure, there was a radical wing, to which our Sussex Action for Peace group also belonged, which repeatedly attracted attention with acts of civil disobedience, street blockades, and other forms of protest, but at its core, the strategy was the same one that the German climate movement would later rely on: large demonstrations and attention-grabbing actions were supposed to generate clear societal majorities for or against something, then the government would cave in, because alienating societal majorities should be a problem for a democratically elected government.

Leverage

But is it ? The statement sounds plausible at first, but consider the (then) British two-party system: if, realistically, the only choice is between Labour and the Tories, and the Tories are generally in favor of war, and Labour is pushing for this specific war, then “shifting public opinion” isn’t a viable tool because there were no effective electoral sanctions if Labour went to war. “Whatcha gonna do – vote for the effin’ Tories, ey?”

The whole sorry spectacle of a huge, well-organized movement without any real power reached its climax on February 15, 2003, when 1.5 million people, in the largest political demonstration in British history, laboriously and relentlessly wound their way through the streets of London: the outbreak of war was just weeks away, and the movement’s stated goal was to prevent it. At the same time, the Blair government had loudly and clearly signaled that it didn’t care about public opinion; it would definitely support the USA in this war, so crucial for human rights and democracy. This, in turn, meant that there was actually no reason at all for 1.5 million people to be in the streets, except for mutual reassurance. If we had used this boring demonstration, which never decided to, for example, sit down in the street and block London, or perhaps have a small party in front of 10 Downing Street, during which, and I’m just spitballing here , one could indeed have beautified the facade of the house in which an illegal imperialist war of aggression was being planned, then something could have been achieved.

But nobody sat down, nobody celebrated exuberantly with pyrotechnics in Downing Street, nobody decided to resort to any means other than friendly persuasion. And so it happened as it had to: we went to London, the demonstration was huge (and terribly quiet: England doesn’t really have a strong slogan-chanting culture, but to see 1.5 million people marching through the city virtually silently was quite oppressive), then we went back home, and nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed regarding the war plans. February 15, 2003, was the day I lost my last bit of respect for what we radical leftists disparagingly call “walking demonstrations,” and finally and completely dedicated myself to mass civil disobedience, to breaking the rules together for a good cause. ( A side note on the history of the movement : Roger Hallam, later co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil/Last Generation, was also at this demonstration, and his entirely correct insight that a government and/or society that will not listen may have to feel was formed there.)

A few weeks later, on Thursday, March 20, 2003, the war actually began. I remember it very clearly: we, a group of radical left-wing activists, drove to a ” last ditch” action at the Fairford Air Force Base, how we, along with others from the radical wing, tried to storm the base ( crazy idea : in retrospect, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if we had succeeded) to prevent bombers and the like from taking off. But what I remember most vividly is the feeling of utter powerlessness as I lay in a small ditch in front of a fence after a police officer pushed me back, and I saw the bombers taking off overhead, flying towards Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul: I howled, screamed, and trembled with frustration and helplessness. That moment is seared into my memory, much like its opposite in Seattle: never again such powerless activism, I swore to myself back then…

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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.

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.