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Preface
From the 7th through the 12th of September, the largest German automotive fair will take place in Munich. Shortly after, national elections will be held. As the formerly well-established parties are continuously loosing votes, the Green Party might stand a chance to become the strongest party – or at least an indispensable partner for a coalition. Due to these upcoming occasions, we have published our first longer brochure focussing on the climate crisis, how it’s connected to capitalism, mobility and why neither the Green Party, electric cars or green capitalism will solve it. For Beyond Europe, we’ve translated an abridged version.
Capitalism, Germany, and the Automotive Industry
Capitalism has become a global destructive force with irrevocable consequences. Although capitalism is made and performed by humans, it appears to many as an inescapable law of nature, to which we must abide, rather than to the laws and developments our ecosystem. The unbridled destructiveness of capitalism is exemplified by the automotive industry. More than 1/5 of the CO2 emissions are caused by road traffic, and the total amount of emissions is still on the rise. The automotive industry is a climate killer and a huge business. It is the largest industrial sector in Germany, with annual sales in the hundreds of billions. Around 800,000 people here work in the automotive industry, and a similar number are employed in the supplier industry. It is impossible to imagine capitalism without cars. Cars are icons of the capitalist concept to produce ever more, new and bigger things while opening up more markets in the process. The car makes it possible to transport goods and workers flexibly around the world and in turn, enhancing the capitalist process.
The German state has integrated this branch of industry into itself to such an extent, that it would implode if the automotive industry were to come to an end. At least, Germany would be an entirely different state without it. So the diplomacy works tirelessly to increase sales abroad. At home, the state provides incentives – lately up to 5,000 Euros – to ensure that consumers buy one car after another, even though the five- or ten-year-old Volkswagen still fulfills its supposed core purpose, i. e. being a means of transportation, without any reasons for complaint. In addition, other options of transport, such as the railroad system, have been run down over decades. So many people have no real alternative to using a car. The demise of the railroad system is something that can be seen in many countries. In the 70s in western Europe, cars became affordable to most people. From this point on, the public train infrastructure lost its significance and its political support.
The Development Towards Electric Vehicles
So instead of trains, internal combustion SUVs are the big sellers. But the development to battery powered vehicles is where we are heading to: Exhaust emission limits, moral consumer interest and the imminent oil shortage have led to a worldwide development to supposedly “climate-neutral”, battery driven cars. One expression of this change is that Tesla has been able to establish itself as the global market leader in the automotive industry with its e-mobility in a very short time. In Germany, the ideological battle between diesel-nazis and disciples of electric cars has been fought and won by the e-faction. To ensure that Germany is not entirely left behind in this development, the state is paying a hefty price with direct investments in the companies, high premiums for buyers and the expansion of the charging infrastructure. The new technology is supposed to bail out the car companies, and to top it all off, everyone concerned is allowed to publicly claim that this is being done to save the planet. This all changes little in the business model of making profits on the basis of destroying the planet. The production of electric vehicles causes significantly higher emissions than conventional cars. The batteries require the rare resource lithium, the mining of which causes enormous water pollution. At the same time, massive protests have taken place against its extraction: In Bolivia, for example, a large lithium mining project was stopped due to protests by the affected indigenous population, from which Germany had actually already secured its substantial share for the next 70 years. Visibly, interest is shifting from the oil fields in the Middle East to the lithium deposits in South America and the Congo. However, the principle of exploiting natural resources, remains unchanged. The electric vehicle is not a solution, but only the continuation of the planets destruction. The nationwide expansion and promotion of electric mobility and other phony solutions are at the core of green capitalisms ideology.
Green Capitalism and its Annoying Morality
The Greens, as the most important party representing this ideology, are currently enjoying one election success after another. Quite a few voters see them as the only party with the right answer to the climate crisis. Yet local green governments have already beaten protestors out of forests to build highways and couldn’t even manage to accelerate the development of renewable energies. The short-term perspective is a coalition of conservatives with the green party, to which Markus Söder (leader of the Bavarian conservative party) has already welcomed the Greens. In this upcoming coalition, the Greens will always be able to pardon themselves, as it will never be their fault that they could not enforce effective measures to prevent the climate crisis.
At the same time, the Greens even pride themselves with the fact that they wish to act in the interest of the German economy. As just mentioned above, that means nothing else, than massively supporting the automobile industry. The Greens therefore do not want to touch the system of excessive use of resources, but only to replace the raw materials in the long term. According to the Greens, the vehicle fleet should be entirely replaced within the next ten or twenty years. This opens up an enormous sales market for all car manufacturers who manage to wrap some steel, a computer and a few seats around an electric motor, and will cause car sales to skyrocket once again. This, by the way, is a concept that most conservatives can easily agree on.
What is also sweeping over us with the eco-trend and unfortunately does not pass us by – like everything else – is the ideology that comes with green capitalism. Consumption is still good but it must be sustainable and is morally charged. Everywhere, where people have excess money, there must be an offer to spend it again. It is never an option under capitalism to consume less voluntarily. (You may though, take part in expensive life coach practices, where this is what you learn, provided you have the money to do so). So instead, people consume “sustainably” and “organically”. Organic products are first and foremost the means of distinction for a new middle class. It is the way of showing, that one despises how the rich drown in their free floating, champagne filled villa pools just as much as one despises how the poor do not appreciate a healthy organic sandwich. At the same time, “organic” is a new form of egoism: it is wanting to feed oneself and one’s well-tended offspring as healthy as possible. Others may gladly feed their children with vegetables coated in pesticides, while the own child is only offered the organic juices from the glass bottle. And woe betide if the so brought up child fails!
In the organic food industry, as in every capitalistically organized branch of production, products are relabeled, customers are tricked and pay is mostly lousy. To ask oneself, where and how products are made and whether one really needs something is not per se wrong and can help to put oneself and one’s own way of life into a relationship with the world. But the green lifestyle does not do that. It individualizes instead of recognizing.
So Where do we Want to Head to?
We will not watch powerlessly as society is driven against the wall, but will intervene where capitalist irrationality becomes most obvious. We want to take action against capitalism and its rule. In doing so, we do not aim to achieve an original state of nature, however defined. For the relationship of humans to nature is always a social one: every society, in order to survive, must enter into a metabolism with nature. The question is under which sign this exchange takes place. Whether it’s aim is the comprehensive satisfaction of all humans needs or if it’s for the sake of increasing capitalist profit, is crucial.
So while coal and gas infrastructure are already interrupted by regular protests, we find it necessary to take another step: Attack the automotive industry. Next to energy production, the transport sector is the biggest contributor to global warming. In it, capitalist growth and aggressive german nationalism manifested themselves, additionally patriarchal and neocolonial structures are reproduced.
That is why we will scratch at the prestige of the car wherever we can. We will fight against the construction of highways, for livable inner cities in which no one has to be afraid of big, fast, heavy, and dangerous projectiles driving too fast. For a rural life that can be lived without a car, because there is a functioning public transport network and the regional infrastructure that has not been cut for cost reasons. For wage increases in all sectors, reduction of working hours, for worldwide networking of labor and climate struggles. As always, we aim for utopia. Reduce To The Max!
Support the call for strike against racism, for self-organization and a beautiful life for everyone by the germany-wide Day of Rage initiative!
Dear friends, dear comrades,
We migrant self-organisations call on our siblings to join us for a day of enragement and a general strike on 8 May 2020. We call on people with migration heritage, Jewish people, BIPoCs and all people in solidarity to strike with us.
Why the 08 May? The date is considered the day of liberation. But while the war and the Nazi dictatorship came to an end, the Nazi ideology and its representatives lived on and so racism and anti-semitism have a long tradition in Germany. After the end of the Second World War, Germany was at most only symbolically denazified. Former members and functionaries of the NSDAP and SA held political offices here and in Europe after 1945 or ran successful businesses.
Already in the 1950s, there were acts of racist violence. In 1979, Cuban contract workers Raúl García Paret and Delfin Guerra were killed in the GDR during resistance to racist violence. During this time, attacks on immigrants were poorly or not at all documented and so we do not know all the names of victims of racist violence. But the list of names of victims we know is long and apparently endless.
On Thursday, February 19, 2020, nine people with migration heritage were shot dead by a racist in Hanau, five others were injured.
Their names:
Gökhan Gültekin
Ferhat Unvar
Mercedes Kierpacz
Sedat Gürbüz
Hamza Kurtović
Kaloyan Velkov
Vili Viorel Păun
Fatih Saraçoğlu
Said Nesar Hashemi
To this day, politics watches as our siblings, friends and our anti-fascist comrades are killed, even in the custody of state institutions, therefore we cannot rely on them. They do not protect us and at the very least since the NSU we know that in Germany, in all likelihood, protection of perpetrators continues.
We are not silent, we are not intimidated, we do not engage in racist discussions, we do not abandon the streets to Nazis. If Germany wants to continue to cosy up to Nazis, we will have no part in it!
Inspired by the Ramazan Avcı initiative, we take our fury and grief to the streets on May 8th. Get organized and call for a strike with us.
Day of Outrage, 08 May, Germany-wide
Call from Migrantifa Berlin
We cannot rely on the State – self-organize migrant protection and denazify all state apparatuses now!
We join our brothers* and sisters* in a call for all people with migration experience and inheritance, all Jewish persons, Sinti and Romani persons, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and all those who feel solidarity with us, to come together and express our rage, our grief, our remembrance, and our resistance.
May 8th is commemorated as “Tag der Befreiung” to celebrate our liberation from National Socialism – this year in Berlin it will be a legal public holiday for the very first time. Although the war and the national socialist dictatorship ended in Europe, the fascist, racist, and antisemitic ideology of National Socialism lives on. Not four years following the end of the Second World War, voices from the political and social spheres loudly demanded a stop to denazification. So it is not at all surprising that shortly after 1945 thousands of former members and officials of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) took over leading positions in politics, the justice system, national security, and the economy.
Seventy-five years after “liberation” we see a Germany where, once again, fascists and racists march on the streets and commit murder, where they insert right-wing ideology in parliaments, schools, and the police force under the guise of democracy and freedom of expression. Germany has once again become a leading player on the world stage, and it will ensure that its “interests” are enforced in order to secure its “prosperity” – no matter what the cost.
The pogroms in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, the attempted murder in Mölln, the National Socialist Underground affair (NSU-Komplex), the murders of Oury Jalloh in Dessau, Burak Bektaş in Berlin, and, most recently, Arkan Hussein K. in Celle, the attacks in Halle and in Hanau, as well as the daily murders at the European borders – all these are just a few of the thousands manifestations of the fight between an imaginary “inside” and “outside.”
It is not a poison that is responsible for this, but a State that fuels and legitimizes a racist and nationalist ideology by prioritizing national interests and by propagating a value system of “useful versus useless.” And at the same time, it is also the State that protects right-wing perpetrators with its bloody hands: relatives are blamed, files get shredded, deals are struck with dictators, and the right of asylum readily suspended. Evidently, racism and right-wing extermination ideology is not a matter of a few mentally unstable individuals. It is a structural problem within mainstream society, one that is inherent to the logic of the bourgeois State and its institutions.
So we call out and say: Enough! We will not let ourselves be divided and we refuse to tolerate more racism, more fascism, and more murders in Germany! Let us take up the torch of our parents and grandparents and continue the struggle! Let us bring our voices together loudly and express our rage, our grief, and our resolve – whether on our balconies or on the street, from a place of anger or remembrance, for the right to come, to stay and to leave, online or offline. We will exercise our rights, we will make others uncomfortable, we will organize ourselves – beyond borders, for social justice, and in solidarity and remembrance for all those affected by right-wing and racist violence! There will be no final stroke!
From Moria to Hanau, no forgiveness, no forgetting!
#rassismustötet #lagerabschaffen
In remembrance – #saytheirnames #hanauWarKeinEinzelfall
How to protest:
All information regarding time, location, printing materials, etc. will be published on our website and on our social media channels!
One Radical Planet