 And welcome to School of Resistance, a discourse platform that invites experts on change around the world to discourse a blueprint for a politics of resistance. Tonight's conversation is called Blow the System So Change, Destruction as a Tool for Survival, and we'll consider an ideology of destruction. What if self-destruction and destruction of property are the only tools left for survival in a hyper-capitalized world? What if destruction is an act of loss but an act of love? This particular episode has been produced in the context of the Gantian Belmundo Festival, a locally city-based festival thinking about international solidarity. This year's festival is devoted to the question how to change the system. My name is Elin Banken, and I'm very happy to contribute to this question together with these two interesting speakers who will join me in tonight's conversation. Our first guest speaker is the associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, Andreas Mann. In May, Versa will release white-skinned black fuel on the danger of fossil-fascism, a book he co-authored together with the Z-kin Connective. My second guest is the psychologist and author Marianne Domer. In her Self-Roosting's book, Warum Me Meeren Moetestinke, Trinke, Blüte, Belmde en Danse, translated, it's a manual to self-destruction, why we should smell, drink, bleed, burn, and dance more often. She accuses the self-help industry of keeping us in line by imposing yoga leggings, pedometers, and positive thoughts. In the meantime, the book has also been published in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, and France will follow next this month. Before I open up the conversation, I want to remind the audience of the possibility to enter the discussion, and you can do so by posting your questions on the live stream on Facebook, or by sending them to the e-mail address schoolofresistanceofentigence.be. So I would like to start this discussion by quoting a book of Andreas. It's called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In that book, Andreas, you give an overview of several historic revolutions, such as the abolitionist movement, or the suffragettes, and illustrate the part of violence played in bringing about effective change. Connecting it to the climate crisis, you ask yourself, and I quote, when do we start physically attacking things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason why we have waited this long? What are your thoughts on the role of nonviolent protest place in the current climate movement? Where do you think, does it come from, and what do you think, and do you think that the current climate strategy could be redefined to encompass a notion of destruction? Yeah, thanks, Liam, for having me on the School of Resistance, I should say first. I'm honored to be part of this. So, as you quoted from my book, I'm sort of posing the question of when, if ever, do we escalate in the climate movement and go beyond what we've done so far? And I'm talking about the climate movement in the global north, more specifically. And so far, we have been very firmly committed to absolute nonviolent civil disobedience. And this has been a productive, fruitful strategy that has achieved a lot because the movement has made an impact, has rallied a lot of people to the streets, notably in 2019, when we saw an unprecedented wave of climate mobilization, and can demonstrate a number of local victories, often on a fairly small scale, but still one terminal or pipeline project defeated here, a coal-fired power plant there, and so on and so forth. So, I am by no means against this kind of nonviolent direct action to the contrary. I try to participate it as often as I can, and I describe just a few actions that I've been part of in Northern Europe recently in the book. And I'm not arguing that we should desist from this kind of action and cancel that kind of tactic. But I do think that we need to diversify it and add more confrontational and militant tactics because I don't think, and that's where the historical cases come in, I don't think there is any useful analogy to the climate struggle that hasn't involved a component of proper destruction and other types of more radical confrontation with the ruling order. And we don't need to go very far back into history to see this. I mean, just look at the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, the people there stormed the police station in the third precinct and burnt it down, and that was the act that catalyzed the wave of protests that then engulfed the country and turned into the largest social movement in U.S. history if you count the number of people participating in demonstrations. And there is this idea that I refer to in the book as strategic pacifism that as soon as you engage in anything like property destruction or what counts as violent tactic, you immediately lose mass support and alienate your base. But here, in this case with BLM in the U.S., it was exactly the other way around that the targeting of police property immediately after the murder of George Floyd broke the paralysis around the structural and systematic violence perpetrated by the U.S. police against African-Americans and demonstrated very concretely that this is not an inexorable force. It's not beyond our influence. It's something that we can go in and physically put an end to by damaging or destroying the property from which these racist cops operate. And it drew in unprecedented numbers of people into that movement. And I think that's just one of many cases of the climate movement could learn from. And I should say that I'm far from the only one posing this question. I'm recommending to everyone right now the marvelous novel, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stiley Robinson, which deals quite a lot with a scenario of organized sabotage and destruction of the property that destroys the planet as a central component of the transition as he imagines it might play out, even in the best case, because that's how he conceives in the book that it's a sort of best case scenario for what might happen in the coming decades. And then a key element of that best case is concerted effort by people, particularly from the global south and more particularly from India to put out of business fossil fuel infrastructure around the world. And let me just finish by saying that what triggers that movement of sabotage in that novel is a hyper-lethal heat wave that takes place in Uttar Pradesh and India in the year 2034, so that will be 13 years from now that kills 20 million people in one week because the temperatures reach a level that cannot be endured by human bodies. And it's after this event of an almost genocidal scale that young people in India start fighting back by destroying fossil fuel property around the world. And just the other week, a paper was published in Nature Geoscience, one of the leading climate science journals that demonstrated that this kind of heat wave is on the way it's coming, particularly in tropical zones of the world that are pushed towards the limits of human habitability and adaptation because temperatures of this kind are in the pipeline almost literally. And the question that he asks with this novel is as I take it in the beginning of the novel of these, at what point do we start the fight back in these more concrete terms and do we have to wait for a heat wave that kills 20 million people or should we start earlier? Yeah, that's the question can be posed. Yeah, I'm wondering because in the book you're mainly talking about destruction, constructing the fossil fuel properties or the infrastructure that produces that transports fossil fuels such as pipelines, mining areas, machines. But at one point you also turn to the destruction of private property, namely you refer to a group of Swedish activists that deflated the tires of SUVs in their cities in order to raise awareness to the polluted effect they have. But I'm wondering these sorts of actions, do they turn the action, do they turn responsibility? I'm sorry, no, let me repeat it. These sorts of actions, I feel that they turn the attention to the responsibility of the consumer. But how do you think do these two sort of actions, destruction of private property and destruction of the property producing fossil fuels, how do they relate to each other? Do you agree that pointing to consumption is diverting the attention from the role that the system plays in this? Yeah, that's a good question. Let me just say first that what these activists did in Sweden was not actually to destroy property and not even to damage it, but just very temporarily neutralizing those SUVs by deflating the tires. So you could just refill the tires with air and the SUV would be ready to go again. But I personally wouldn't be necessarily against more hands-on destruction of SUVs because SUVs are an incredibly important source in our current predicament. Believe it or not, but figures from the International Energy Agency suggest that the rising share in SUV sales on the world car market has been the second largest driver of the increase in CO2 emissions in the past decade. I mean, and these are machines that no one really need. It's not like there is a basic human need for SUVs that cannot be fulfilled by other cars that emit less. And generally what we have here is a problem of elite consumption that is extremely destructive to the climate and thereby, I mean, in the end, contributing to the death of people. Sorry, this is my son who's knocking on the door here. I'm on parent leave. So we have a little bit of a symbiosis going on right now. And this kind of consumption just goes on day after day. And there is no stigma attached to it. To the contrary, people often regarded as the ideal, the model to strive for, to reach that kind of pinnacle of high consumption. And it just can continue that way. Another report that came out, and these reports are, you know, they come out all the time. But there was one that was published in last autumn from Oxfam and Stockholm Environment Institutes that showed that the richest 1% of humanity has, through its consumption, caused more than twice as large CO2 emissions as the half, the poorest half of humanity since the 1990s. So the richest 1%, by driving SUVs and being hyper-frequent flyers and having the largest homes and living these kind of lifestyles with SuperYaks and everything, they have contributed more than twice as much to global heating as the poorest half of humanity. And when you think of it, it's absolutely mind-boggling, dizzying that the world can be operating in this fashion. And I think that it's legitimate to try to, to try to attach a question mark to that kind of consumption. Although I would still, I mean, I wouldn't much prefer that climate movement that escalates and moves into forms of sabotage, target fossil fuel production, extraction and the companies that produce and distribute things like SUVs or SuperYaks or private jets rather than personal consumers or the goods that they have in their parking lots or whatever. But I don't see necessarily that it would have to be a distraction and a diversion to target the luxury emissions of the ultra-rich. I think the ultra-rich do not have any kind of sacred right to combust this planet to death, although they now go about their lives as if they had that kind of right. But I think the time has come to puncture and deflate that right in handsome manner. Yes. That's also something that we find in your book, Marianne, like the individualization of the crime crisis by focusing on consumption behavior that we divert the attention from what indeed the super-rich or the system and the system that is making these choices for us. Another tendency I feel that is closely related to this is the issue of shaming. People are often shamed for eating meat, they feel guilty for taking the plane, et cetera. I am wondering also because you're a psychologist, how productive do you think shame is in the climate movement? What effect do you think do these sorts of feelings have when it comes to, yeah, right in the climate crisis? Yeah, well, yeah, there has been done a lot of research about this and shame is a really, really corrosive emotion. It makes you feel really small. It involves self-hatred. And for millennia in history, it's been a form of punishment. Also, shaming, the public shaming of people. But it works. But again, it diverts the attention. And I really see it as a tactic. In the 60s, you had this slogan, the personal is political, which means how your life is lived. That's a political question. And nowadays, under neoliberal ideology, it has been changed. So now the political has been made personal. So we constantly make things personal. If people get a burnout, it's not because of a constant stress of being under a flex contract or not being able to pay your insanely high rent. But you need to yoga more and you need to learn to say, no, it's your problem. If you are unhappy or depressed or anxious, it's not because the world is really depressive or that our communities have been broken, but it's something wrong in your brain. You need to take a pill. If your son or daughter cannot sit still in class, it's not because the classes are way too full. The teachers are way too busy. There's not enough time to play no. It's because of their brain. They need to take written in. So in this way, everything is constantly made personal. And in a way, it's like saying, well, the system we live in, that is good. It's working. And if it's not working for you, then it is your fault and you need to change yourself. And you see the same in the climate debate or debate in the struggle for climate justice. It's changing a little bit now, but it used to be for a very long time. You need to use less plastic and you need to eat better and less meat. And it's sort of a lie because it's not going to change a lot. If everybody does it, it will, but it won't because we have a problem in the production of things. It's more of a, yeah. You have always had a supply and demand market and we think that demand is what the supply is based on, but it's again the other way around. There's a lot of supply and so demand is created and that it needs to change. And while I agree with Andreas that the 1% have a lifestyle that is outrageous, still I think that it is not useful. Shaming is not a useful tactic because it makes things personal and individualized and I kind of feel sorry for people when they are ashamed because it really is a really bad emotion of guilt. The church, it rested on it by playing the guilt and shame cards. It's a religious thing almost and I would rather see it go. Yeah, in a way it also reminds me a bit like you say where you refer to this Ritalin or this yoga. In a way, you could also see it as a form of self-deception because I also think that people make themselves believe that they need it in order to function in this world. In a sort of way, people want to know what they can do and it's sort of a way it seems like it's easier to change yourself than to change the whole world. So yeah, but in the end it's a form of self-discipline. Last year there was a sort of strike by workers from Starbucks in the United States and the workers demanded more better working hours and a better salary and more stability and they didn't even go on strike but they filled in a petition and so the heads, they took in this petition and after a few weeks they came back to the workers and they said, yeah, we listened to you very well and this is what we are going to do. You all get a subscription to Headspace from now on and Headspace is a mindfulness app. So this is literally how it works. People are like, how do you say this? They adapt to the system by mindfulness yoga so they can take more, more of the stress that the world and society is putting on them and they don't look what the workers did but in general they look less at what's wrong with the system and try to fit in with all these tools. Yeah, in a way this also beautifully connects to the subtitle of the book like why we should smell, drink, bleed, burn and dance more often that it's a clear call to indeed step out of this neoliberal logic of self-optimization of a constant adaptation to a system that might not be healthy. Could you elaborate on this story and express your viewpoints on how self-destruction could have like an emancipatory tool or an emancipatory result? Yeah, well I meant the word self-destruction of course is an antidote to the self-help industry which is constantly saying optimize yourself, be better, adapt better to the world as it is. And in my book I keep saying well you are not the problem here the problem is the world we live in but it's also kind of the self-destruction of your neoliberal self, your neoliberal super ego Freud would say. So this self that wants to adapt and I see it as like people are more and more by this optimization which strangely enough is always the same for everyone. So it is said we live in a hyper individualized times but somehow the best version for everyone is the same. So it's fit and tight and very productive and if you're a woman you have pumped up lips and you are eternally young and so if you look on Instagram or social media everybody starts looking more and more the same and it's like robots who come out of how do you call that, forgot the word but it's reducing us to hard working robots to be as productive as possible not waste any time but always work, work, work and go in this grind thing culture and my things, the sub title and the titles of the chapters is making you human again. To be human is to stink and sweat and it is to drink that is waste time and that's how I wrote it. Some is taken literally others not but it's to waste time and not be productive and be in a different kind of aesthetic mood. So it's all about a very dehumanizing culture and the resistance against that and the destruction of the robots that come out of this culture and to be human again. Yeah, I remember that in a column you wrote that you referred to the NAP Ministry which is an initiative by Tricia Hersey and it's an attempt to dismantle capitalism and white supremacy by napping and by daydreaming and by really stepping out of the system so to say. How do you think that considering this form of inactivism if I could say that is this compatible with a form of progress? Because of course progress is associated with this idea of neoliberal self-optimization and bettering yourself, bettering the world but if we take initiatives such as Tricia Hersey's NAP Ministry which clearly advocates a form of inactivism if I can say that would that mean that that is incompatible with progress or how do you feel towards that? Yeah, in that case everything depends on what you call progress how you define progress and nowadays progress is defined as growth so economically growth or personal growth and of course money-wise so we need to pursue more, earn more, be more everything has to be more but obviously this is not progress because it's destroying people and animals and the earth itself so that is not a sustainable way of living that is a very destructive way of living so this system with the ideology that belongs with it that needs to be destroyed and I think that's why I wrote my book I think it's really hard to destroy a system where you do not attack the ideology that goes with it because this ideology of growth and self-optimization and robotization it's in commercials, it's in movies, it's in social media it's in books so you also need to attack that to get hopefully this mental system because I wanted to say that and that connects Andreas also with me because what this does if everything is made personal it turns the energy inwards people start looking at themselves what is wrong with me how can I be better but that energy needs to go outwards and Andreas has a whole plan for that what you do once the energy goes outwards but what I would like to do is first change that within a person do not look at yourself what is wrong with you go outwards and all this energy and self-hatred and guilt and shame needs to go there and then you can act I'm wondering Andreas because of course in how to blow up a pipeline you call for quite another form of activism you question how the revolution could be optimized possibly by considering a form of activism that goes beyond or that goes together with peaceful protest but next to that also has a form of a more militant approach what do you think of this form of this sort of inactivism do you think it works or well I'm not sure I think that the I mean if we look at it very concretely the combustion of fossil fuels is ongoing and growing and the accumulation of capital by means of extracting and selling fossil fuels is as rampant as ever and there was just a report that some of you might have seen saying that since 2015 when the Paris Agreement was negotiated the 60 largest banks in the world have pumped something like 4 trillion dollars into projects for extracting more fossil fuels so the capitalist class to speak frankly is still enriching itself more and more by taking out even more fuels to pour on the planetary fire and how do we deal with this do we deal with it by being inactive or do we deal with it by targeting it more effectively than we've done so far straight forward and aggressively if you like and I think obviously I'm leaning towards the latter I agree that shame is not the productive emotion here the one emotion that needs to be fanned is anger and research suggests that if there is one emotion that drives social movement mobilization it is anger it is rage and there is a lot to be angry about and upset about in this sphere of climate change the fact that something like Total the single largest private company in France is about to go into the Arctic to drill for even more fossil gas to take out and sell on the market or the fact that solar engineering is coming closer and closer as as an alternative option for addressing this this problem which will just throw us down the lane of another kind of disaster in the climate system most likely so for me it's not about so much optimizing the I mean that's not a term that I would use but yes we do need to look for strategies and tactics that work I mean we have no other option really than to look for forms of mobilization that work and this is not about cultivating a lifestyle an activist lifestyle but about using different means to draw in as many people as possible into the climate movement and the mobilization that it is engaged in with its allies and to refer again to the wonderful novel that I mentioned the Ministry for the Future if there will be a transition away from fossil fuels it will be a very turbulent process it will be messy it will be filled with contradictions it will involve a lot of people in many different roles including everything from sabotage to negative emissions to regenerative agricultural cooperatives and the whole spectrum of activity and this is not about you know furnishing a particular agenda of activism not about shaming people and I agree that shame is not the best emotion to this and people into mobilization on the other hand I'd like to point out that a lot of social progress is about that certain acceptable so many other people absolutely illegal once slavery was finally abolished and the same with child labor and other forms of exploitation and I think the task here is to lay down in as concrete terms as possible that it is not acceptable to burn profligate amounts of fossil fuels that is a form of crime and it needs to be dealt with as such and because our states are still not capable of laying down that principle that we need to step forth and do it from outside of the states to obviously with the aim of eventually pushing the states to enact the necessary legislation and set full transition in motion go ahead because I think they are totally complimentary so the inaction is within the machine the inaction is to not be a radar in this machine if you rest like the net ministry says which is healthier than my drinking but if you rest she says that because you take yourself out of this mindset and this grind culture this keeps us within the inactive is not on things where you need to be active I totally agree but as Andrea says you have to get mad and you have to get angry but as I said this energy goes inwards nowadays people get mad and angry at themselves because they feel like a loser because they stand outside of the system and to get mad that energy has to go outwards not to yourself but outwards and then you can act I totally agree with that so these two things are complimentary they are just different things but I think they align I'm not just wondering as well because I also get why the feeling of anger would be a much more fruitful breeding ground than the feeling of shame but of course anger is also very likely or can have this effect indeed of destruction and violence and looting and how aren't you afraid as soon as a climate movement might consider a more militant approach an approach of destruction that it gets easily stigmatized as being a terrorist grouping because the logic of violence has been often associated with not that valid revolutions that happen so to speak of course there is that risk I think every kind of climate activism mobilization runs the risk of demonization, I mean even Extinction Rebellion although it observed absolutely perfect non-violent civil disobedience at least until very late in the day in 2019 where the infamous Tube action was accused of being terrorists or Nigel Farage of the UK he used the term economic terrorism for the XR and if you step up and actually destroy things of course some people will call you terrorists and the far right will hate you and maybe even more than they've done so far this is inherent to the problem just as the BLM wave in 2020 in the US elicited enormous rage and hate from the white supremacists convinced that BLM was guilty of terrorism that doesn't mean that it was in any way wrong or unwise to do what BLM did and when you are facing an enemy that is extremely powerful in society there is no way around polarization and antagonism you cannot win over that enemy by being kind and nice and gentle this is what we've tried in the climate movement for some time and we fundamentally believe that fossil capital most primarily the corporations that profit from production of fossil fuels that's a force that needs to be vanquished and that needs to be put out of business we cannot have a habitable climate and these kind of corporations at the same time we have to choose that means that if we are going to win this fight of course we are going to suffer backlash and varying forms of demonization the important thing for the climate movement is to not actually go down the route of terrorism which means do not kill people do not more particularly kill innocent civilians to create fear because that is what terrorism is all about as long as you are intelligent and precise in targeting the material sources of destruction you have at least a fair chance of convincing people that what you are doing is not terrorism because it isn't what you are doing is you are taking out the machines that are destroying the planet and actually at the end of the day taking the lives of multitudes which is an activity that comes to the definition of terrorism and what it would be to take those machines offline but I really can't stress enough first of all we shouldn't do at this stage any harm to people from the climate movement that would be disastrous and it would be wrong and we need to be cautious and careful and smart about any kind of escalation and diversification of tactics that comes close to destroying property or anything like that you need to be able to explain to people why you are doing it and you need to be able to gain some level of mass support for it and it needs to be part of a mass movement just like the property destruction that ran through the BLM mobilization of last year was part of the mass movement in the US I mean all through from Minneapolis to Portland in the BLM movement that targeted properties of cops what you did not have thankfully were BLM activists who assassinated police chiefs or sent suicide bombers into police headquarters something like that that would have been terrorism that would have done damage to the movement but the radical flank that you had as the cutting edge of the mobilization actually I do think contributed to pushing the BLM struggle to another level last year and that's what we need to see in the climate struggle when the next wave of mobilization comes I think again I want to say something I think which is in these days that property of course is something holy there is no nothing holier than property and a man is his property so audiences are really not very open I think to destroying property and that's why because I agree with Andreas but that's what you've done with it is a discussion about ownership and about whose property is this so we have to discuss who owns the Amazon for instance and now it's not the people who live there it's not the Brazilians it's not the animals who live there but it's Unilever or the big companies who make soy plantages there so along we need to discuss who owns the planet but also personally who owns our time our attention our work so the way we structure structured businesses is with ownership of a few how do you call them andale holders shareholders who take the profit and if you work for 40 years somewhere you own nothing you see that is coming up with businesses who try to think differently about this and think about ownership and I think this should be like a discussion that we should have on all grounds about the planet and also about our lives and as I said who owns our time is my time because I have a smart phone is it in my boss time he can call me anytime he likes who owns my attention we have this social media which we are made to be addictive to so along with Andreas destruction this is a topic we should talk about I did in my questioning yourself about these questions who owns our time we could maybe consider more about what it is we are actually devoting on to really make the best use of it so to say and in this way I am again using this terminology of the best use and then I am falling into the trap of this and again but it is an interesting question I do want to say because we received some questions from the audience I am happy to read them to you the first one is to Andreas I think so it is a behalf when as Marianne says we should resist a hyper individualized world we live in what are your thoughts on this well we live in a hyper individualized world and much of what goes for activism these days is fairly atomized and largely due to social media it is quite evanescent and transient and it is about individuals coming together on a very temporary basis often responding to calls for demonstrations and disappearing and everyone goes home and that is the end of that wave of demonstration and then the news cycle moves on I think we need to find ways of building more solid forms of organization that lasts longer than more or less spontaneous wave of demonstrations and I think any kind of action of the sort I have been considering here and to some extent advocating is a question of acting collectively together groups of people it can be enormously large groups of people or it can also be smaller groups of people but it has to be collective action and it has to be part of some kind of mass mobilization and do we have the agency to do that well we are not exercising that agency at least not very successfully and certainly now under the pandemic the climate movement has canceled all activities and just retreated very obediently to everyone's individual home and screen which is disastrous in a sense I think the movement in Belarus or the abortion rights movement in Poland and other cases have shown now in Myanmar that it is actually possible to have social mobilization even revolve under the conditions of the pandemic so the climate movement needs to get off its ass again and get back on the streets I do think that there are not technically or physically or even psychologically impossible for us to act as collectives and do it in a more sustained and effective fashion than what we have seen in recent years we just need to learn and perhaps relearn how to do that maybe you want to respond as well Mariano this idea of learning these collective sorts of action again I agree with Andreas the word learning is a good one we need to learn collective action again because of course again this individualization is also a tactic as I said before communities have been broken there are still libraries but a lot less and more I don't know all the English words for this but community centers and where elderly people met younger and they have all disappeared because people should be take care of themselves and it was all too expensive so communities have been broken I don't know if we're that individualized but we have been optimized, made atoms so it's difficult to find each other again in a collective goal also because of this ideology that you need to take care of yourself and altruism doesn't exist we're all in competition with each other but I think we're learning again you see that as with Black Lives Matter and with the climate movement because people find each other again so I'm really hopeful in that way that we're on a good trend there is one more it's a question to both of you what are your thoughts on expropriation and socialization how can we reinvent these ideas without repeating the course of the 20th century if anybody of you wants to take the lead go ahead I'm very happy to talk about this I'm all for reviving notions of socialization and expropriation and I think a key demand for people in countries where private fossil fuel corporations exist or where they are headquartered is to demand their immediate nationalization so in the Netherlands an obvious demand should be that Shell be nationalized and instantly it will terminate all fossil fuel production and the entity should be transformed into something else for instance an organization for taking CO2 out of the air instead of adding to it and the same for BP, Total, ExxonMobil and all the others and of course there is a whole massive section of these kind of companies that are already state owned and compel the state to do what's necessary with these companies, namely to order them to stop doing what they're doing and turning them into something different but in countries where the property is private the struggle begins by making it national and taking over those companies and we really need to understand that human survival is not compatible we can't end the century with continued private property in fossil fuels as in the right for private property owners to take up coal or oil or gas and sell them on the market or for private owners to take those fuels and burn them it's just a question of time if we want to have a biosphere in which we can live that these resources will have to be put under public control and the ownership of them, the private ownership of them terminated. The task for the climate movement is to make that happen sooner rather than later how to avoid the mistakes of the 20th century? Well that's a question of understanding the causes of the mistakes and the horrors that ensued in the Soviet bloc so that's a question of our understanding of the reasons for why we had something like Stalinism and I for one don't think that the reason that we got Stalinism in the Soviet Union and in the satellite states was that there was something inherently oppressive with socializing the means of production I think we had completely different reasons notably the isolation of the Russian Revolution the very impoverished part of the world and its failure to spread into Germany and other parts of the country that condemned the Russian Revolution to degeneration but that's a historical discussion that we should take another time but I think that a transition away from fossil fuels in this century will have to be global just as socialism in one country was an impossibility in the 20th century to de-generate it and became Stalinism and then eventually it became capitalism again this century a transition away from fossil fuels in one country doesn't make sense at all it has to be global and that means that the dynamic will be very different from what we saw in Russia and what came up from that country Thank you I keep thinking about I'm reading a book about Quantum Mechanica Helgoland it's called and somehow it is discussed in this book about Quantum Mechanica the Russian Revolution is also discussed and what went wrong there from a Quantum Mechanic perspective but I'm thinking about this because he says sort of the mistake Lenin made was that they had this ideal that they knew exactly what kind of world they wanted to build and I think for me everything starts with a no so this is not good no and then after you say no people always say yes what kind of world do you envision you have to have a vision of this new world but I don't think so and I think in the book you mentioned Andreas the ministry of I read an interview with Reider and he also says that it's like little steps that we figure out with each other what kind of world we want to build afterwards or going to that point instead of having this one vision and everything has to move it's really about baby steps coming together and of course I don't know exactly nobody knows how this should be done but it's a yes we have to figure out after we have said no so that is my really vague answer to this that's of course no problem I do want to address it's one more tendency that I experience when I'm watching the climate movement it seems for me and you could always correct me if you think I'm wrong that the activism has some sort of being appropriated by the capitalist system because I feel especially also because of the advertising we already touched upon it like social media has become like a very specific and concrete image of what an activist lifestyle what it should look like and it's similar logic I feel that we now see with the current pandemic and how with the care crisis and how big industries are now capitalizing on care by care so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this idea of activism being appropriated by capitalism and I am wondering also because the overall team of the festival this discussion is part of has been devoted to system change I'm wondering how can we take down a system that takes benefit of all the actions that we carry out in order to take it down it's a question to the both of you so anybody who feels over if you want to respond Mahel yeah yeah yeah no it's but this might be the biggest power of capitalism the way it always takes in resistance to it so I believe it is in a book I forgot his name in capitalist realism Mark Fisher Mark Fisher he quotes Kurt Cobain one said nothing plays better on MTV than a protest against MTV so somehow the system is always capable of taking it in and then Shell makes starts telling you how you could lower your footprint and everything so that is a danger it takes the radicalism out of it and yeah how there's nothing you can do to stop that but it's sort of you have to be more radical than to still attack the system so yeah that's what we're doing right now being more radical and I think one of the I don't know if you said this or if you emailed this earlier but one of the problems is also that it's not really a lot of fun to be an activist it's really of course because the world is really depressing and I think because we've been learned so much to punish yourself and self-hatred that we're not doing enough that we're not I can't find words anymore that has taken the energy also out of us and out of the struggle and the fun but again my opinion is as soon as we stop doing all this energy in words and blaming ourselves and pushing it outwards nothing is impossible anymore and the fun can go back and the energy also yeah I mean this is something that the left and anti-capitalist social movements have had to struggle with for a long time the ability of capitalism to co-opt forms of protests and not believe their aesthetics but when it comes to the climate movement there are certain forms of action that so far haven't been amenable for co-optation and that's the more radical kind of mass action that we've I mean Fridays for Future is one thing and you can have politicians and even businessmen posting with Greta Thunberg or something like that but I haven't yet seen that kind of co-optation of something like the climate camps which is the form of climate movement that I praise the most lavishly in my book How to Blow Up a Pipeline and that I have identified with most closely in recent years particularly in the Gelände the climate movement in Germany but it has its Dutch off-shoot in Kolder Road and other similar climate camps across Europe by Standing Rock and other indigenous protest camps in North America and in those camps people certainly have a lot of fun there is a lot of dancing happening in those camps and people certainly stink and I think they bleed too and smoke and have a lot of fun so you can certainly I mean in that kind of collective communal space I release a lot of these emotions because it's a lot about finding community and collective solidarity in living differently while at the same time targeting the property that is at the root of the problem and this is one of the most promising forms of action that I know for the climate movement now unfortunately it's all on hold because of the pandemic I hope it can kick off again very soon Yes, but that is the point because a collective action it's so much more difficult to appropriate that or to co-op that and to individualize it and sell it on a t-shirt that is really difficult so that is the way to go indeed and come together Yes, thank you and also actually thank you for initiating my last question to the both of you which was exactly on this notion of joy because it seems sometimes there is a tendency towards a rigid sort of a skeptic lifestyle where there is little room left for pleasure and joy when it comes to fighting a crisis so my final question to the both of you even though you already touched upon it would be how much joy is there allowed or you think is necessary in fighting for a better world Yeah, necessary everything that one of the interesting things nowadays is if you look at the elite so the 1% and always used to be a lot of eating, a lot of partying letting it all hang out but if you now look at the CEOs at Silicon Valley especially the one from Twitter who I forgot his name they are so self-controlled they fast they take cold ice baths they live a really joyless stoic existence and say to people do just like me and then you will be successful too and people say okay I will live a joyless existence too so but that was on a side note but no I think it all starts with with the joy and also with feeling how do you say that feeling good enough for the joy so I think now you are back there was a slide was I lost yes you were lost we lost you a bit okay focusing that in energy outwards yeah I mean my own experience of collective action is not that it's well at least not since the 1990s and I think I think of asceticism and renunciation and things like that I mean certain things will have to be renounced no for certain fuels and that it is perceived that way by people who don't see the necessary to fight climate change they feel that the people on the left are really joyless and yeah I mean even something like a riot or a big square occupation or some other kind of carnival of revolt tends to involve quite a lot of fun I have to say so I'm all for combating rage and that's what revolutionary politics has been about for a long time yes alright I think it's indeed might be indeed a good idea to invite some of the more skeptics to one of the climate camps one of the riots that could be a very fruitful start alright both of you thank you very much for joining me tonight in this conversation which discussed how discourse might enable taking down the system several possible strategies in building up a world once more thank you for for this and I'm very happy to continue and redefine protests and resistance in the near future before I say goodbye to the audience I have the pleasure of announcing something namely the worldwide release of the new gospel it's the newest movie after its premiere in Venice the movie is now widely released and can be watched from April 1st till April 4th via the website tickets cost 8 euros and subtitles are available in Dutch French, Italian and English since we believe this movie is an exemplary illustration of how art and activism managed to take down the system I very much want to encourage you all to watch it so I'm wishing you all a good night for now thank you once more and hope to see you soon thank you it was a pleasure, a joy thank you bye