Holding Ground: Climate, Ecology, and the Struggle for a Livable Future
Holding Ground is a series of interviews hosted by Adam Aron. It asks: How do we respond amid increasing climate disruption, ecological overshoot, and authoritarianism?
Holding Ground is about both the inner and outer work of responding: facing difficult feelings and uncertainty while making room for joy—and organizing, strengthening communities, and struggling for a livable future without guarantees of success.
Conceived, recorded, produced & financed by Adam Aron: adamaron@ucsd.edu
Theme Music Credit: Jim Guerin
Artwork Credit: Carolina Montejo
Holding Ground: Climate, Ecology, and the Struggle for a Livable Future
Tadzio Müller - Organizing in an Age of Collapse
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Send Adam Aron your thoughts about the episode
I talk with Tadzio Müller, from Germany. Tadzio is a climate justice and queer rights activist, as well as a political scientist. For 30 years, he has been involved in struggles against globalization, nuclear waste, and coal—and, more recently, in what he sees as an antifascist struggle.
Tadzio: "If you see people having agency, knowing what they're doing, who are in a moment of catastrophe, that's quite inspiring. So you have to imagine pre-organizing these nuclei, and then catastrophes will come. And if the right nucleus of people meets the right catastrophe, we can have a sort of expansive dynamic beyond that. People saying, wow, that looks really cool, let's do that."
Image Credit: By Stefan Müller (climate stuff) from Germany - "1JahrNurBlockiert", Demonstration von Fridays For Future, Berlin, 13.12.2019, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85715757
Introduction
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Holding Ground. This is a podcast about climate, ecology, authoritarianism, and the struggle for a livable future. I'm your host, Adam Aren. In today's episode of Holding Ground, I talk with Tajo Müller from Germany. Tajjo is a climate justice and queer rights activist, as well as a political scientist. For 30 years, he's been involved in struggles against globalization, nuclear waste, and coal, and more recently in what he sees as an anti-fascist struggle. Tajjo, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. I
What does he mean the "Climate Ship Has Sailed"?
SPEAKER_00want to start out by asking you about your views on the climate struggle then and now. A few years ago, you were literally in the lignite pits in Germany trying to stop the coal industry. With your comrades, you were deeply dedicated. But in your more recent writings, you have said, quote unquote, that the climate ship has sailed. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01Well, let's start from the point where you put me in the question, namely into the coal pits. We were an extremely well-organized anti-coal movement. We were fighting quite a weak industry, a sort of declining industry. And yet, with everything we brought to the table, great actions, huge demonstrations, an enemy who was acting, was behaving stupidly, all we got in the end was a coal phase out, a lignite phase out in 2038. Now that's like 15 to 20 years after the world starts burning. So the first thing was that our struggle wasn't in that sense victorious from a climate perspective. Secondly, the problem is that the one that we can feel all around us, the climate is in fact collapsing. I mean, I when we built the anti-coal movement, it was meant to be a climate movement that contributes to the struggle against climate collapse. And clearly that struggle has been lost because the climate is collapsing. So the goal that we set ourselves was not achieved. So in that sense, the ship has sailed. But the last sense in which the ship has sailed, I think is the more most controversial one, insofar as I believe that society, which was always our main point of leverage, we always said we're going to convince society not to behave in such shitty ways, society is tired of hearing about the climate. And that means all societies in all rich countries, such as UK, US, France, Germany, Sweden, were done with this climate stuff. As societies, we're like, okay, we thought about it for a while, we thought about changing our ways, we realize it's far too difficult and expensive and makes us face questions of guilt and shame and fear. We don't want to hear about it anymore. So basically, our protests have lost their point of leverage, namely society, which says, much like an abusive boyfriend, honey, I've heard enough of your critiques, shut the fuck up.
SPEAKER_00Could it be things have changed or will change? I mean, you look at the summer of 2026 in Europe and 200,000 people have to evacuate from near Bordeaux and the whole thing is multiple heat waves and people are freaking out. Does that just, does the moment pass, does it not get political traction?
SPEAKER_01Well, all environmentalists in the global north have had, have operated from the following strategic assumption. The more the climate crisis hits in the north, the more it affects us in the north, the more climate rational we'll become. But the last few years have falsified that strategic hypothesis. In fact, the connection is the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we want to look at it. Now you will find that connection that I've just outlined in all rich countries in the world. So things have changed, shit has gotten worse, but shit getting worse in a way that reminds us of all the changes we should have made in the last 30 years, that doesn't make us more rational. It makes us more ashamed. It makes us feel more guilty. And we all know that we turn away from things that we feel guilty and ashamed by. We know this from our everyday lives. And that's exactly what's happening with the climate. The more the problem escalates, the more we are reminded of our decades of inaction, our centuries of exploitation, and essentially we're just going to turn away from it because it is the greatest fuck-up in human
But isn't "Victory Around the Corner" because of renewables?
SPEAKER_01history.
SPEAKER_00How does your view that the climate ship has sailed match up with mainstream climate advocate view these days? I'm thinking about the United States, the main policy people, the mainstream climate scientists. The mainstream view is hey, cheap solar, batteries, electric cars, and heat pumps are pushing us towards victory on climate. What do you think they get wrong?
SPEAKER_01Pretty much everything. It is a bullshit melange of magical thinking that is simply designed to make us feel less bad about shit hitting the fan. Well, to let me uh put this in slightly more analytical terms. Um I used to be an energy policy expert for a while, and one thing that's absolutely obvious when you look at the history of energy policy is that there has never been an energy transition. There's only ever been energy additions. So if you look at a history of the global energy system for the last hundreds of years, you'll find that new forms of energy, oil, gas, nuclear, simply put themselves on top of the existing energy system. They don't displace any of it. Fun fact at the height of the coal age, uh, we burnt more biomass than ever before. At the height of the oil age, we burnt more coal than ever before. And at the height of the gas age, we're building more, we're burning more oil than ever before. So basically, all these people talking about, well, there's this bit of renewable energy which will lead to fewer fossil fuels being burnt, that's simply not true. Because in a world where the hunger for energy rises faster than the production of energy, adding more renewables simply adds more energy to the global energy system. That's it, it doesn't displace fossil fuels, and the empirical data on that is very clear. And renewable energies come on top of the fossil fuel system, they don't replace it. And in fact, if you imagine sort of an electrocapitalist or what we used to call a green capitalist round of growth kicking off in the world, what that would do is simply it would radicalize all the other modes of production. Imagine a sort of green energy revolution around the world. You'd have to re-y'd have to reconfigure the entire global production system, which would require an enormous amount of effort, productive effort, which would all be run from a fossil fuel energy system. So basically, more renewables does not mean less fossils, it just means more energy in the mix.
Why isn't degrowth or post growth an answer to his critiques?
SPEAKER_00Is one response to that to be in the struggle to fight for governments to shrink material and energy use? Um, for example, using policies of degrowth or post-growth. Why wouldn't that answer many of your concerns?
SPEAKER_01Well, it would, except it's not happening, and as far as I can tell, it's also sort of not really possible. Now, I understand that basically from an ecological perspective, the degrowth argument is very straightforward. We are living beyond our ecological means. Fact. But from the perspective of each society, what do we want? We want, we usually want growth, we want jobs, we want lower prices, we want lower taxes. Like that's the shit that we want. Or more goodies from the government, right? Um, and of course, capitalists want higher profits. All that means that societies are addicted to growth. Like growth is the way we deal with our social problems, for example. We generate growth, then we have a bit more redistribution, and that's how we solve our social conflicts. We also solve our bad conscience with a bit more growth. The more we grow, the more we can redistribute in terms of quote unquote redistribute in terms of development assistance. Now, to say governments should run a degrowth policy is kind of like saying governments should like take democratic countries that have elections. Which government is going to say, guys, we're just going to cut off growth because it's ecologically bad. So that means you'll have to pay higher taxes, you'll have lower profits, you'll have less jobs and higher prices. How about that? Like we can all see that that's not a political deal in any government that relies on either votes or somehow legitimacy being granted by the population. So that was kind of a reference to China. No government that relies on votes or legitimacy given by the population is going to go for a degrowth strategy. Not a single one. So yes, there would be an abstract possibility, but it's not a real possibility.
SPEAKER_00Just to be clear about characterizing the degrowth position, right? So they're not arguing for a recession or an overall contraction whatsoever. They're talking about really it should be called selective degrowth. Some things need to go down, other things need to go up.
SPEAKER_01Well, it really? I mean, honestly, you said they don't argue for a general reduction. A degrowth position that takes itself seriously would have to support an absolute reduction in material throughput in the world economy. And that is simply not going to happen. They're going to say, well, we're going to grow the renewables a bit, we're going to shrink the fossils a little bit, but in the end, we're going to have to have a net reduction in terms of material shit that is put through the economy. And so in the end, you'd have to have an absolute reduction. Also, you'd have to have some type of redistribution because, of course, countries that right now that haven't sort of you know enjoyed hundreds of years of imperialist uh uh profits, they would have to be given some amount of resources in order not to grow. So there is simply no realistic path towards degrowth policies being enacted by governments around the world, which we saw, for example, in the first corona lockdown was in fact managed degrowth, which was consciously agreed on by governments. Now, as far as I'm aware, most societies in the rich world remember, or most societies in the world remember the first corona lockdown as a trauma. Because you suddenly, there's all this, there was a lot less freedom of movement, there was a lot less consumption opportunities, and basically we don't want to go back there. And and I think that's as much as I would find that an important place to start a political conversation from, we don't want to go back to that one point where we actually enacted degrowth policies because we found it far too traumatic.
His new book is about collapse (Kollaps!) - what does he mean by that?
SPEAKER_00Your new book is about collapse. What do you mean by collapse, Tajio? And what kind of journey do you take the reader on?
SPEAKER_01Well, the usual understanding of collapse, which is very much sort of which comes from movies like The Day After Tomorrow and also things, is a sort of St. John's Revelation, Hieronymus Bosch type collapse of everything, and everybody lives in hell, certainly. But in fact, from the perspective of us living in society, collapse is actually just the disappearance of normality. Like basically, you'd imagine a systems collapse in the agricultural or the food delivery system. That would lead to a situation not where nobody has food, but where there's less food at higher prices. And that would create all sorts of social conflicts. Or like I'm HIV positive, so I rely on my HIV meds being delivered around the world regularly. A collapse in that in that um distribution system would create a sort of chaotic situation for me, a potentially sort of lethal situation for me, but wouldn't kill anybody else in the world. Like wouldn't kill folks who aren't HIV positive. So collapse isn't the end of the immediate end of the world. It is initially the disappearance of the normalities we have become we've gotten used to. In a longer time frame, it is the end of the world of more. This is sort of the way I phrase it in German, like the a world of there's always more is a world in which we can always hope that somehow if we are defeated in our struggles for justice, we can win them the next round, or the next round, or the next round. Martin Luther King said the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. In collapse, the moral arc of the universe gets short and bends towards fascism. And so you asked what means about the journey in my book. Now, talking about these things, about the end of our normalities, about the end of the comfort of constantly accumulating more and more. That's a conversation we don't want to have. It's much like I use this the analogy of a of a really of a conflict, of an intro-relation, like a conflict in a romantic relationship. One partner is kind of an abusive arsehole, and the other one's a nice guy. The nice guy keeps telling the abusive asshole, hey, how about we talk about you being shit and we talk about you changing your behavior? We talk about maybe you going to see your therapist, or maybe like, you know, going to an AA meeting and stop drinking and taking drugs all the time. The person I'm addressing that way will simply try to avoid that conversation. And it is precisely the same thing when we talk to people about climate and so and societal collapse. It is not a conversation folks want to have. So the way I've constructed this story is not so much as a traditional political book, but think of it more as like an intervention. I basically say, hey, we've got to talk about this. And so I start out by creating emotional resonances, not by throwing lots of facts at people. I'm saying, I know that we are all scared of the future, and I know that we're not really acknowledging that fear. So how about we start talking about that? How about we start acknowledging those fears? In that sense, it's also a bit of a round of collective therapy. And in the end, once sort of people have said, let's talk about collapse, I then say, now that we've accepted this fact that shit is going to collapse, let's try and find, if not hope, because shit is just dark and I don't want to sort of sell people more false hope. But let's try and find meaning in that. Like, can we find meaning in the world that is constantly becoming worse? And my argument is yes, it is in fact very easy to find meaning in catastrophe because catastrophes escalate all sorts of existing injustices and they create fear and suffering. So that means that coming from a climate justice movement, I think there is a lot to do in a future where the climate is collapsing for us. There's in fact lots and lots of work for climate justice movements because collapse will escalate climate injustices. And that can give you meaning because basically preparing for these moments of catastrophe together with other people, and when these moments of catastrophe hit, having that knowledge and having the agency to actually create, like to help people and to create spaces of solidarity and life and love and happiness. That I think is the important point that I want to get people to. Acknowledging the future of collapse does not mean living a life of permanent depression, it means adjusting your expectations and then working sort of from there to create moments of agency that create moments of space of solidarity. And again, of meaning, because people can live without hope. That is in fact proven, but they cannot live without meaning.
SPEAKER_00What are you seeing in politics, everyday conversation, the media, um, or people's expectations for the future that tells you that people are becoming more ready to talk about collapse these days?
SPEAKER_01I have to be specific. When I say people are becoming more ready to talk about collapse, I really mean about two to three, maybe five percent of the population. Like overall, my analysis is that we live in a society of denial. Like, essentially, denial is an organized principle. Whether it's the danger of war or the danger of climate collapse or the dangers of COVID or the dangers of AI, we do not have a realistic discourse about the dangers we've created for ourselves. So most people will continue living, like at least in the global north, a relatively comfortable life, because that's easier than facing the reality of the shit that's coming down. Now, however, basically I said a society of denial. Now, denying reality is a process that takes a certain amount of energy. And the more catastrophic shit happens in reality, the more difficult it becomes to deny all of that. So every time a catastrophe happens, there is sort of a window of opportunity for like a few days or maybe weeks. And given that catastrophe will happen more and more, in these windows of opportunity, we can talk to those people who are done with those, with the unrealistic discourses of denial and of false hope that are being pedaled inside our political system. So I don't look, I don't think that we're going to be a majority movement with this sort of preparing together for catastrophe. But you don't need to have a majority in the beginning. You just need to create the groups that will have agency in those moments of catastrophe, and then you start thinking from there. Like this is the new political reality. Catastrophe will become a permanent state of affairs. Most people will deny that fact. But those who do not want to deny it, those are the people I want to talk to.
How does his concept of collapse fit with other forms such as Deep Adaptation?
SPEAKER_00Staying with collapse for a bit. So collapse has been a thing in the climate environmental space for 10 years or more. I'm interested in what you have to say about how your idea of collapse and what must be done about it differs from the field of collapseology, from the deep adaptation movement, and from what is called climate doomism.
SPEAKER_01First of all, I have a lot of respect for the folks who developed the collapsiologie in France and for Jem Bendel and his deep adaptation folks. Because first of all, Pablo Cervini, who wrote the first collapsiologie book in France, helped us understand what collapse actually means and in a way how unavoidable it is. But that remains a largely academic discourse. Then a few years later, Jem Bendel writes his paper, Deep Adaptation, and starts a sort of project in which is very much about doing the emotional labor of accepting that collapse is going to come, which is a super important step. But the folks, like basically the those of us in Germany who have who have sort of tried to work on this new collapse movement, as we call it, um, we come from a much more activist background. And activism is about finding agency in the face of sometimes insurmountable seeming problems. So this is the core of the way we talk about collapse. Not just how can we accept this as a fact, but how do we find radical, and there's an adjective in German, but I'll just translate it badly, solidaristic agency. Like our story about collapse is not about just about acceptance or understanding. It is about agency and practical solidarity. And as such, I think it is the most energizing of all the existing collapse discourses because it sort of brings the dynamic of a powerful anti-coal and climate movement that we had in Germany. I mean, we had demonstrations with 1.4 million people, the largest demonstration in post-war German history was organized by us by the climate movement. And some of the most awesome actions like around the climate have come from Germany. And I think that that sort of fire that we bring to the collapse discourse, which is like, no, we're not done fighting for justice. Just because shit is happening, like shit is going down, does not mean that the struggle for justice and for the better life has ended. We just need to adjust our expectations and then keep on doing what we've been doing. And I think that's the difference. And this is also what I try in the book. I tell sort of a long story of how social movements have always found agency in the face of insurmountable and incredibly huge challenges, capitalism, war, etc., slavery, uh, patriarchy. And that's the sort of dynamic we're bringing to this collapse story. Like, all right, let's look at this thing, collapse. Wow, that really sucks. But the question remains the same. Where is the point of leverage? How do we develop agency and how do we make the world less shit? And my my very short argument is the point of leverage is going to be the moment of catastrophe. Folks have probably read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. I mean, really an amazing book. And she explains in detail how the right uses moments of catastrophe, which she translates as shock, to further their agenda. And in that sense, we're just developing disaster communism or disaster anarchism or whatever you might call it, next to or against their project of disaster capitalism and very much also disaster fascism. Disaster is going to be the new normality. And we're the first, I think, left-wing and climate actors that say, let's look at this, let's not push it away, let's not deny it, let's not tell ourselves comforting stories about how the next windmill is really going to change it. We're saying let's look at this realistically and let's do what we've always done. Identify points of intervention and of leverage to create a better
How can we build a collapse movement BEFORE collapse happens?
SPEAKER_01world.
SPEAKER_00So you're talking about building a collapse movement. I think the German word is kollapsbewegung. Exactly, yes, well that. And that's before catastrophe strikes. Doesn't it normally work the other way around? So if we if we think about Occupy Sandy, which came into existence, 50,000 people mobilized in New York after the hurricane, or we think about the the Greek solidarity clinics in the austerity crisis, literally doctors and nurses, thousands of them providing free healthcare for people. And many very inspiring examples about this sort of thing. People are really good at jumping up and helping each other when a catastrophe strikes, but you're really talking about doing something proactively on the front end. Isn't that an enormous challenge?
SPEAKER_01First of all, yes, that is a challenge. But if you look at something like Occupy Sandy, which is by the way a spectacular example of how these types of solidarity networks can work, usually people respond by saying, but isn't that all really kind of small scale that's just micro stuff? Not at all. Occupy Sandy, which was an essentially anarchist led relief network that emerged in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey and New York. Occupy Sandy organized more people and had A sort of larger financial throughput than the American Red Cross and FEMA. So we're talking, this is not just small scale. Okay. The people who organized Occupy Sandy were very much inspired by people who organized the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck. Now that was also organized after the catastrophe. But the people who organized Katrina had before that organized the protests in Seattle in late 1999 against the WTO. So in that sense, there is always a pre-organized core of people. And in a moment of catastrophe, those pre-organized cores of people, even if they're small numerically, can develop an outsized level of agency and efficacy precisely because so few other agents and actors are able to fill that political space. So yes, it is difficult. But honestly, it was also very difficult to create a climate movement in Germany. I mean, we had to work for years and years. Our initial climate camps were like 50 people, 100 people. And we were like in the sticks with no attention from anyone at all for five years. But then kind of Paris happened, and we had this great idea with Endigeländer and these disobedience actions. And then we exploded from there. Imagine that we get sort of small nuclei of folks organized who are capable of intervening in floods, in heat waves, in I also, by the way, have a notion of catastrophe that is both political and ecological. So for me, a Nazi attack on a Pride March is just as much, or an electoral victory by a fascist party in a part of Germany, which just happened. I mean the whole world has heard about the AFD victory in Sachsen-Anhalt with 44%, right? These are all for me catastrophes. Now, if you create small nuclei of people who can intervene into different types of catastrophes, imagine there's a catastrophe where those people are seen by the entire country actually helping folks. What you then get is a sort of projection. Folks will want to be like those activists who have agency. Because what happens, and there's some there's a lot of experiences from the past that I could reference, but basically the experience of having agency in a moment of catastrophe can be quite transformative. Because catastrophes can be deeply traumatizing. I don't know if you have trauma experiences. I have unfortunately have two or three. One is a I was tortured by police in a Prague jail cell. I was just beaten and kicked. And the thing I remember from that is not the pain, it's that I had no agency. I remember thinking, fuck, there's nothing I can do. Okay, it was one thing I can do. It's like, should I scream? Does that does that energize them or does it make them feel pity? But the point is if you see people having agency, being like knowing what they're doing, who they are in a moment of catastrophe, that's quite inspiring. So you have to imagine that I sort of we're talking about pre-organizing these nuclei, and then catastrophes will come. And if the right nucleus of people meets the right catastrophe, we can have a sort of expansive dynamic beyond that. People saying, wow, that looks really cool, let's do that. Now it's a certain bet, but I think it's a better bet than keep organizing than to keep organizing the type of demonstrations that we know don't nobody cares about anymore. And people are sort of bored by.
What kinds of campaigns should the collapse movement engage in now?
SPEAKER_00So got your idea about a loose network of motivated people that are ready to step in in the face of various catastrophes, including rise of the far right and so forth, floods and disasters of various kinds. What are they doing in between the cracks? Uh that we don't want them sitting around. So, what are the kinds of projects that such a movement could be doing? I mean, does this connect with issues of food sovereignty? Does it connect with building local resilience? Can you speak to that issue?
SPEAKER_01So we've got this term um prepping together, which we got from some folks in Sweden where it's preppati sammans, prepping together. In in German we call it solidaristic prepping. Let's call it solidarity prepping right now. Solidarity prepping is different from individualistic prepping in that it focuses on social relations. It says the most important thing, and this is by the way, not just a bunch of anarchists saying that. I have an interview with a guy from the Swedish military, which integrates military preparedness and civil preparedness, which you can think about, but basically whether you like that idea or not. But basically, that's what the Swedish military does. And there was a Swedish general who said exactly the same thing. In a catastrophe, the most important thing is having people around you and not being on your own and having other folks who can help you and whom you can help. So anything that builds resilient social relations is a step towards having agency in a catastrophe. Now, so for me, I'll I'll stick with my example of being HIV positive. Now, right now I don't have a problem, my medication gets delivered on time and when I need it. But there are parts of the US, for example, where people like the Republicans are already attacking people's access to HIV medication in half of all US federal half of all US states. So intensifying connections, for example, between, in my case, folks with a like German passport and folks who don't have a German passport, refugees, migrants, would be a super important step towards having agency when the enemy or when some type of supply disruption strikes. Anything that intensifies connections within a community is a good way to prepare. So one thing that, and this is actually difficult for me, I'm very much not a neighborhood activist guy. I'm not a community activist guy. I think I'm too, I'm somewhat too abrasive and impatient for community activism. Um, also too much of a snob, I think. But I understand that that's I mean, I do have to make some changes. Like I want to get to know the people whom I live with in this house. Now in Berlin, it's like I think, like in many sort of rich cities, I mostly meet my neighbors when they pick up parcels or I pick up parcels from them. That's how I most hey, the the mailman brought this hi. But that's not enough. Like, I want to know who needs what and who can do what in a crisis. Like, that's not the case, but if you have an old lady living a few floors above from you and it's 35 degrees Celsius, by the way. I I um I don't know how to translate that into Fahrenheit, but hi. Um if it's like 35, 38 degrees Celsius, maybe that old lady can't walk to the store to do her shopping. Like figure out what she needs, talk to her, and create the type of dynamic where she is fine saying, Hey, would you mind, are you okay with just going shopping for me? Like intensifying relations is in some for like an activist who knows who comes from event activism, like big demos, big actions, it can seem a bit of a downer, but unfortunately it's the absolute core of this type of prepping together. Beyond that, there are also political moves that you can make. Anything that increases community autonomy, whether it's around food or sovereignty, or food around energy, is a good step towards that future. I think it is important like these struggles for, say, communalization of energy or for food sovereignty, they've been going on for a long time. And they should definitely continue, but it's important to also recognize the context and have sort of a story about collapse in those struggles so that we don't just keep on doing the same thing as before.
SPEAKER_00So I'm involved in a struggle here in Southern California to take the electric grid away from an investor-owned utility and put it under not-for-profit public ownership. And so that makes total sense in terms of what you're talking about, but that it should be coupled with uh a cognizance that you're doing this also for resilience reasons, right? That that shit is going to get worse. You don't want to build power lines over wildfire territory, you don't want a centralized system that gets hacked by cyber attacks. Um, and it so this leads me to another question. Um, it may gladden your heart, Tadio, to know, and I'm I think you do know if you just look at the battle for Minneapolis or other examples around the country, that there is a quite lively on the ground coming together of all sorts of people out of a sense of defense so that our black and brown neighbors are not snatched off the streets, or they are being snatched off the streets, but that we can try and do the best we can. There's a lot of that, and it actually fits some of your criteria here. But I have to say the challenge I see right now is most of those spaces have no climate or ecological consciousness, I would say. I don't mean that patronizingly. I just think people are focused on other everyday issues, and it seems like making people cognizant of what collapse means in this wider sense, maybe that's the function of your book, or it's a function of educational, or how does one approach this issue?
SPEAKER_01One of the elements I talked less about is that one of the catastrophes I'm very focused on is the way fascists are more and more closing spaces for queers and trans people. And when I look at when I sort of I've been calling for organizing queer self-defense, and it's very much inspired by how folks acted in in LA and then later in Minneapolis in face of the ice attacks. Now, how do you add the story about ecological collapse to that? I mean, on some level you probably won't really have a major opening until the next heat wave strikes. But then you have to use that opening. Like this is political organization. Like sometimes there are windows of opportunity and sometimes there aren't. So right now, I mean basically Germany and Europe has experienced a huge heat wave this summer, like not one, but five. And between 30 and 40,000 people uh die prematurely. And that right now is still kind of rocking around social common sense and in in public discussions. So this is now where you can say, guys, if we want to defend our community, there are various types of dangers that we have to defend it against. One might be ice, like state thugs, another might be street fascists, another might be um a heat wave, and another might be cutbacks enacted by uh local or or federal governments. So, yes, like I think we need to reframe like there used to be environmental struggles and then there's social struggles, but in either case, whether it's a political or a social or an ecological catastrophe, one fact is always the same. Those who are most marginalized will suffer most in those catastrophes. So going from this fact of in that sense, sort of disaster injustice, I think can bring together these structures. This is all sort of in German we say music for the future. This is I don't know if the story that we're telling about this collapse movement will resonate. I I I hope it will. I think it's the important next step for many progressive movements to to have to sort of a major focus on collapse and catastrophe preparedness. I don't know if that's gonna work, but I think that a sort of intensification of catastrophes will create a sense of being in a permanent catastrophe and then organize a movement that says, but we're gonna have agency in catastrophe seems to make sense. My comparison in the book is like when when Marx in the 1850s was looking at factories in in England and saying they are gonna shape life in a really powerful way. Do you know how many factories there were in the world at that time? Like a vanishingly small number in which a vanishingly small proportion of global labor power was employed. But Marx said that's where the future is gonna be made. And my argument is I look at the moment of catastrophe, which we've traditionally ignored as political movements, said, well, that's you call FEMA, you call the cops, and then you keep doing your political work as soon as normality is restored. And I'm saying no. We have to turn this around. Catastrophe is gonna be the new normality. We have to understand the space of catastrophe as a political space with pitfalls, with stakes, with allies, with enemies, with levers. And once we've done that, we can create a new type of progressive movement that starts out in catastrophe and says this is our new normality. Is it gonna happen in two years? No. Am I going to remain unpopular for the next two to five years? Almost certainly. But maybe a few years down the line, this is this sort of impulse is going to resonate just like when we started building the climate movement. It literally took seven years to have a first action that really resonated with people.
Do he still believe we can "erode capitalism" from within? (and reflections on fascism now)
SPEAKER_00So I want to go back to the bigger picture. Um, as we've discussed earlier, the constant need for more energy makes it incredibly difficult to get off fossil fuels. Um, the addition of renewable energy is accelerating, is impressive in some ways. Obviously, it depends whose energy under whose control and for whose purpose. But uh it is accelerating, but it's still not in 2026 even substituting the new energy that needs to be added this year. Now that may change, but ultimately it'll take a very long time to displace fossil fuels if the whole thing has to keep growing at 2 or 3% per annum, which doubles the world economy in 24 to 35 years. So we're up against the expansionary compulsion of capitalism, which is pushing us deeper into ecological overshoot, of which carbon pollution is just one aspect, and it's also helping to fuel neofascism, as Naomi Klein said very well. She said uh fascism is a protection racket for capital, which is, I think, quite a good way of putting putting the predicament, right? So we're up against capitalism, and we're probably not going to have the revolution tomorrow storming anything, and we're not excited about that, uh, depending, of course, how that would unfold. But I'm interested in your PhD work or your thoughts about you know what you did before, which talked about trying to erode capitalism from within by building alternatives in its cracks. And this is something, of course, akin to Eric Olin Wright's interstitial strategy. Do you still believe in this kind of approach? Does it connect with what you're talking about?
SPEAKER_01I really enjoyed working on my dissertation. Essentially, the question was: how do we fight capital in a way that's effective? And because I came from sort of the radical anti-capitalist movements, and the first thing I understood was that you can't imagine some sort of revolution happening. As you said, there is no winter palace to storm, where would you even go? Do you storm the office of Goldman Sachs? Do you storm the White House? Where do you go? And if you were there, do you control global capitalism? No, you don't. So then my analysis in my PhD was that we there's no switch-off point for capitalism. There's no one point we can occupy to turn it off. Now, that then leads to the next possibility, which is to kind of slowly build alternative modes of living in the cracks left by capitalism. And then when a sort of external crisis comes together with a big powerful movement, that then we might essentially topple capitalism and live in those expanded interstitial spaces. That was all nice and good, well and good, as long as we had infinite time. Right? Again, Martin Luther King, the moral arc of the universe is belonging at Benzworth Justice. Chambawamba, I get knocked down, but I get up again. Um, a German punk band, we will win the final battle will be won by us, by us. Now, I could give you many examples from left theory and popular culture that show how we rely on time being infinite to justify and sort of make sense of our own defeats. Now, this is fine, it really works, it also helps psychologically. You are defeated today, but you know that you're gonna win tomorrow. Even if you don't win tomorrow, the knowledge, quote unquote, that you're gonna win tomorrow helps. But once you start looking at ecological collapse, the timeline changes. Things are gonna get worse very quickly. And you pointed to Naomi Klein, I said and her line about the protection racket. I would go a step further. Fascism is a movement, is a liberation movement. And what does it liberate you from? From ethics, from reality, and from other people. Now, in a world that's going to shit, ignoring reality is quite a powerful suggestion. You can ignore the plight of other people, you can ignore reality, and you can just do whatever the fuck you want, because whatever you're a white cis dude and you've always been allowed to do whatever you want. So I think that the world is gonna the more privileged part of the world you live in, the more likely that is to become fascist soon. Because essentially fascism is a defense of the privileged, not just of capitalists. This is, I think, where Naomi is a little bit unclear. It's a defense of the privileged, and you and I, and and most of our friends, are part of that privileged set. So that being said, is I don't expect any majority to come our way in our struggle against capital. And secondly, I expect the world to basically become dumber and dumber as it gets crazy. As the world gets uglier and uglier, we're going to turn away from it more and more and become essentially dumber societies. And we've been seeing that in the past few years, the US is obviously an outlier and leader in that project of sort of the self-dummification of society. But Germany is always hard on its heels, and let's not call that race yet, we still might catch the crown for biggest assholes on the planet again. Now, that means that we don't have the time and leisure to build these types of spaces of alternatives, etc. And also, we've been running that strategy for 25 years, like or or for 450 years, since the late 60s. So basically, if somebody's gonna suggest to me strategies that we've been pushing for for decades, I'm gonna say, well, maybe that strategy hasn't worked. So at that point, the interstitial spaces discourse becomes just another way, type of hopium, another type of magical thinking that is ultimately no different than emissions trading thinking that says, let's create like a weird little market and it's gonna solve the problem of fossil capitalism. Let's create some interstitial little like playground spaces. And like, no, neither of these things are gonna solve the problem. They're gonna be great spaces to be in, no doubt. But we don't have the time and we don't have the leisure.
SPEAKER_00Now, what were interstitial spaces, which are things like workers' cooperatives and common spaces and eco-villages, those are very good projects still in your overall scheme now, provided they are retooled or repositioned or reframed now as kind of preparatory to the catastrophes that are unfolding, building the social solidarity that will be needed, correct?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. These spaces are still what it's about. I mean, there's also Hakim Bei, an anarchist strategist, wrote a text called Temporary Autonomous Zones. It was very popular in the 90s. That's still what we're talking about. It's just that I'm not assuming that they will come together in like an archipelago that will grow to a continent that will then displace capitalism. I'm imagining, at best, a type of archipelago of solidaristic spaces, which you can hop sort of between. And like basically you don't have your foot doesn't have to touch fascist ground. You can just hop between these spaces and you create the sort of archipelago of spaces where life can still be lived the way it should be lived, in solidarity and freely, etc. And that is simply it's the same strategy, but with a different goal. And that I think that has to do with adjusting our sort of expectations to the new reality.
SPEAKER_00Talking about an archipelago of spaces where your feet don't touch the fascist ground, I know of an old lady in the Midwest who has retooled her basement in retirement to have transgender refugees from the south, and they're there right now. It's just amazing. Holy mother of God!
SPEAKER_01Exactly, like a type of underground railroad. Amazing. Amazing. I was speaking to uh people in Sweden. Like Sweden, I know everybody thinks it's this beautiful social democracy, but they have this really hard-right government right now. And Swedish healthcare is providing less and less gender-affirming care to trans youth. And they were actually starting to develop a project of like essentially creating hormone treatment, like having a sort of autonomous production of hormones for gender-affirming care. Now, knowing that that space exists and learning from them, creating these spaces, for example, here in Germany, like this is exactly what we need to do. Like the fundamental idea of creating spaces in which life is different from outside is still right. It's just that we need to readjust our expectations of what these spaces will
What are the prospects for social democracy - the example of Sweden
SPEAKER_01achieve.
SPEAKER_00Your comment on Sweden is interesting, Tajio, because I think there's a tendency here in the US to kind of romanticize social democracy and Scandinavia as something you know that works and we just need to get back there, but it's not quite going that way, is it?
SPEAKER_01No, social democracy is historically the deal between national working classes and national capital fractions to basically say, how about we don't fight each other to the death in the class struggle? But how about we steal from other people elsewhere, and we capitalists get most of that, and you workers get some of that, so we're all better off, except those who live outside of this country. Now, so this dynamic is very important. The more evolved your welfare state, the less interested you're going to be in letting people into the country. So that's why the Scandinavian countries have actually developed much more hardcore anti-immigrant policies than other European social democracies. Like, I am a huge fan of many welfare state policies. But we also have to acknowledge that they rely on exploiting the rest of the world, which in the left in the 70s remembered. Like, we used to know that the welfare state isn't just this perfect thing, but it's actually something that creates mass loyalty to a fucked up system. But then neoliberalism started attacking the welfare state, and the left essentially became the agent defending the welfare state. Basically, the welfare state is a deal between national capital and national workers. It is as such a nationalist deal. And we cannot just assume that going back to a welfare state is going to save us. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway prove
What he means by the idea "our organizing needs to fit the society we live in"
SPEAKER_01that point.
SPEAKER_00So I want to get to a comment you've made that is that the way we organize has to The society we actually live in, the way we organize has to fit the society we actually live in. What do you mean by that, Tajio, and how does that apply today?
SPEAKER_01So left social movements have always organized in a way that almost mirrors the organization of our opponent. Like, for example, when capitalism started organizing itself in big factories with like huge production lines, only then did the mass union become a possibility and the large-scale Social Democratic Party. Later on, when neoliberalism started to come around, we and neoliberalism's mode of sort of like in Jeremy Sebegung's form, it's its mode of progression is enclose more and more parts of the world and sort of submit more and more of the world to dictates of capital. At which point, social movements shifted focus from the point of production to defending those spaces against enclosure by capital. So, in that sense, we need to understand that our tactics and strategies have to match social processes around us, or they'll simply be irrelevant. And in this case, I'm saying that the new central dynamic in the world is collapse. And I define collapse centrally as the end of the world of more. And that means, which brings me to the point I made, many of us in left social movements still believe that we can say we don't have to take decisions between political priorities. We can have uh good jobs for the workers in industry, in dirty industries, and we can have climate action, and we can have everything we want. We need to start triage, right? Progressive social movements have limited resources. This is traditionally a fact. More and more huge fucking problems are gonna come down the line. You know, fascism is gonna become more powerful, environmental problems are gonna become more, they're gonna escalate, etc. And we will we will need to start developing modes of organization in which we can actually talk to each other, say, hey, we've got these resources to fight the fascists, you've got those resources to prepare for catastrophe. Which catastrophe is gonna be more likely in the near future? Which catastrophe is gonna cause more injustice? So let's focus and put our resources there. In that sense, like I I grew up politically in the alter-globalization, you know, or anti-globalization, what it's sometimes called. And one thing we said there was one no, many yeses. Like we said, you don't have to coordinate between struggles, everybody just fights where they are, and that way we sort of have an effect, an anti-neoliberal effect, an anti-capitalist effect. At this point, I think we need to adjust to a new reality in which we don't have that luxury anymore of not coordinating and of not taking decisions. I don't know what type of organization will emerge in the near future. I do know that the modes of organization we've worked with for the last decades were appropriate to another age, to an age that has ended. I don't know what's going
How does he respond to the accusation that he's defeatist on fossil fuels?
SPEAKER_01to come.
SPEAKER_00I could see there's probably a sector of the mainstream climate movement that might see you as defeatist possibly, with your language of the climate ship has sailed, and that would be a great affront to their efforts to, you know, we just need to have renewable energy already. Just build it. Build it everywhere all the time. Point a pane of glass at the sun, as Bill McKibben says, of course, it's not a pane of glass. But you don't sound like a defeatist at all, Tajio. You sound like a massive fighter, and I think you're redirecting, you're trying to redirect the thinking, the framing of left and progressive, and I guess across the spectrum, people who care about the world into a new frame, correct? And that's to fight for something new. And I suppose there might be a way for the person who's still very attached, as I think we should be, to doing all we can to try and you know force fossil fuels to be left on the ground, difficult as that is, can find a place in those two, correct?
SPEAKER_01Well, basically, I personally think that we don't really have any points of leverage to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and that's the last few decades have shown that. Let me start differently. Yes, I have been called the defeatist many times, and I use a sports metaphor to answer that challenge. And have to translate it from European soccer to American football. Let me think it's the fourth quarter. Uh there's only a minute left. The score is three to let's say 77. And the opponent the other team has the ball. Now, my comrades are saying to call this game as a defeat is defeatist. And I'm saying, no, it's just realistic. It's the fourth quarter, there's a minute left to play, they're 60 points up. Like, how the fuck is that gonna work? I could also do this in basketball or baseball, but the point is clear. The match against Fossil Capital, which is sort of the most the best and most powerful team ever, to go back to soccer, it's a mixture of Manu, Barcelona, and Bayern München. They have beaten us. So my friends who say, Don't be such a defeatist, they are standing there, fourth quarter, one minute to go, say, Well, well, we're gonna put in a new running back and a new quarterback, and we're gonna turn this whole game around. It's like, it's one minute to go, there's 60 minutes, points up. That's the fact. Now, as you said, I'm not a defeatist as such. In fact, I tried for a while to get away from activism because, well, we're we've defeated and I've we've lost, and I'm just gonna take drugs and have sex in Berlin, which is a fun city to do that. I realized that I couldn't actually live a life without activism or struggle in it. I really mean that. Like I tried, and I was so lost, and I nearly killed myself in the Berlin party scene until I found meaning in the struggle again. And that's exactly the story I tell in the book. This is not about giving up. This is in fact about continuing the struggle. And the less adjusted your strategies are to reality, the more they are based on magical thinking, the the less useful you are in the struggle. And the more bullshit you're gonna do, and the more frustrated you're gonna become with those people who are doing the real hard work. If you think that you just need to put a you know, point a pane of glass at the sun and everything will be fine, then you might not be my ally. But if you believe that the most important thing we can do right now is to create powerful, resilient communities that are not in hockey the fossil fuel industry, then let's talk. But there's a difference here between a sort of massively unrealistic magical thinking discourse and one that says let's have community struggles against fossil fuels. Like that's not the same story, and I differentiate between those two.
He talks about his feelings
SPEAKER_00Talk about your feelings and how coming to terms with your feelings was critical to arrive at these new insights and to move forward with your new plan.
SPEAKER_01Um, so the I think that the most important thing that I can say there is that the first time I've realized the things I've just now said, we were defeated, the climate movement is defeated, the climate catastrophe is coming, I fell into a deep, deep, deep depression. And in that sense, it's a bit of a warning to people. Like the path I'm suggesting is not it's not without like it has its pitfalls. And one of them is that to really confront the reality of how shit things are in the world can really bowl you over. And one important point there is do that with other people. If you're sort of embarking on a journey of saying, yeah, let's accept this world, do it in a group of people. Like don't do it as I'm sort of stumbling through the darkness on your own. That actually was quite dangerous for me. And I'm I'm very happy that I didn't end up totally crashing. And since then, though, finding this meaning in catastrophe, and I'll tell you what where the turning point was. It's in the autumn of 2000, when at a Pride March, a steward was attacked and beaten to death by sort of a right-wing assailant. And that was a deeply shocking moment. And out of that came this idea that, okay, no matter how catastrophic things are, if the fascists are attacking my community, I want to organize the self-defense of my community. And and in in Harry Potter, in the third world, there's a there's a moment when when Sirius is talking about escaping from Ascaban, I'm sorry, I always use the pop culture thing, and he says, I was not, it was not a happy thought that I wanted to take revenge, but it was a thought that motivated me. Sorry, that Harry Potter thing was random. But the thing is that this was not a happy thought. I'm not prone to physical violence, I'm not good at it. I'm very much I engage in bourgeois violence, you know, structural and emotional and discursive. But the idea of fighting Nazis to defend my community is not an idea that gives me happiness or joy, but it gives me meaning and a function and a role. It tells me who am I gonna be when that shit happens. And this is honestly, I think, the thing that pulled me out of my depression. It was not the sense that we're gonna win all these struggles, but it was the sense that in these struggles I know who I will be, or who I want to be, and with whom I will be there.
SPEAKER_00You said it so beautifully, you could just end there, really. Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode of Holding Ground, and that you'll listen next time too. Goodbye for now.
