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.
*******
…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?”
