Given that the website where they published their communique has "Solidarity with the RAF!" posts, for once the characterization seems correct. (RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion, was a Marxist terrorist group in the 70s responsible for multiple bombings and assassinations.)
Because the Americans weren’t the only country establishing stay behind network like Gladio, when the Berlin Wall fell, the unification of Germany had many people who continued to work with/for the former USSR, now Russia.
Russia, now fighting a war in Europe, is activating its underground networks to sow discord in Western societies and it uses far left (communist) activists.
There is a global war going on.
This isn’t a one axis thing, Russia complains about nazis in Azov.
They'll attack Tesla but not traditional automakers or other industrial instances more directly responsible for destroying the environment and contributing to climate change.
They care, but see "capitalism" as the root problem and revolution as the only solution. It is just, that their concepts of what comes next, are quite vague.
Excuse my ignorance of someone who grew up in an ex-commie country, but what were the merits of communism that I missed?
Sure, if you cherry pick you can always find merits in absolutely everything, including in catching Covid: you get sick leave and get to stay at home, or in the war in Ukraine: it boosts the defense industry spending.
Even though those are all net negatives, but who cares right? Let's look at the merits and not at the whole picture which is overall terrible.
Sure, here's an easy example: The GDR had childcare for everyone. And the reason for that was based in the system, namely that communism says everyone is equal, men and women both work. Western Germany said childcare is the work of the woman, who cares about public childcare?
The communist system was far better, which is why we - after having dismantled it in the 90s for Eastern Germany - are now back to providing childcare for all children. Though it will take decades until it works again.
The GDR is a highly biased example. The GDR was by far the wealthiest of the communist countries so that the USSR could flaunt how much better communism is to the western Germany.
The GDR was basically the Apple Store equivalent of the USSR/comunist block in Eastern Europe. Life in the GDR was nothing like life in Romania for example which was closer to North Korea in how its citizens had food and other necessities.
Romania is also a highly biased example based on Ceaușescus personal decisions on how a country should be run. Which shows my original point: Even within the communist countries you can find difference and things which worked better or worse. Just putting them in some big "it's communism, all was shit" bin is an oversimplification which doesn't help at all.
>Even within the communist countries you can find difference and things which worked better or worse.
That's true, but life in the GDR was still shit compared to the west, even if it was the least shit out of all the eastern block. You can powder a turd in sugar but it's still not gonna be edible, it will still be a turd.
That's why people from the est were risking to get shot/arrested to cross the border west. Better childcare wasn't enough to unshittify the life in the east.
Yes, but you are arguing against something I never stated. My point stands: The communist countries had aspects which worked better. And I haven't seen anyone (besides tankies) seriously stating "let's go back to the UDSSR and it's satellite states", but many people noting the same thing: Some things worked better. Let's learn from that. And those then get shouted down with "all communist countries were shit! you never lived in one, or you wouldn't say things like this!"
>My point stands: The communist countries had aspects which worked better.
A lot of things can be made better when the state can put their finger on the scale or use force to achieve that goal, while you actively choose to ignore the means and process through wich that is achieved, and only look at the end result.
For example, abundant housing for all workers was not a problem in communism, but ask yourself why? Because the state could commandeer any piece of land it wanted, bulldoze and relocate whoever lived there without their permission or compensation, then build cheaply using the crappiest materials that don't last, and using virtually unlimited free slave labor from prisons, military and schools/education institutions.
So now you can say "look, communism did affordable housing better, maybe we can learn something form that". Learn what exactly? That to get unlimited housing for everyone, you need to evict people off their land at whim and use slave labor instead of paying market rates for land and labor which leads to the supply shortages we have now?
Same with your "better childcare" example. Of course it's more difficult to get abundant childcare in a free market economy when you have to pay people what they want in order to convince them to come work in childcare, because those people now have much better paying and less stressful economic opportunities in the private sector, than working in childcare for the pay fixed by the state which was competitive in a centralized state economy but is not competitive anymore in the free market one, and you can't force people anymore into certain careers like before.
So yeah, communism did some things better only because there were some major compromises in the back-end that people with rose tinted glasses either forget about or ignore, i.e. you were not part of that underclass of people used as virtual slave labor to achieve those goals.
Yeah, GP's point is naive at best, and dishonest at worst, because from an engineering perspective, of course you can optimize for one variable at the expense of all the others - but everyone knows that that's always a bad decision, and that if you follow the same curve on the Pareto frontier, you'll never be able to achieve that extreme value with a reasonable engineering trade-space point.
Communist states, being authoritarian states, sometimes happen to choose an optimization trade-off that does one or two things better than a free-market state - but then uniformly do everything else worse (such as human rights).
It's not that free market systems are perfect - it's just that they at least have the ability to occupy the best spots of the Pareto frontier. Communism doesn't, and saying that we can "take things from it" is incorrect.
The funny part of people who have lived in ex-communist countries is that when they think capitalism they only think US and western Europe and not all that part of the rest of the world that has been fully integrated into global capitalism for quite a long time and is still very poor because they are in the _wrong_ side of capitalism, the part that is there only to function as providers of natural resources. The part that has been historically kept in that place (often violently) by the countries that people that come from ex-communist countries admire so much
>that part of the rest of the world that has been fully integrated into global capitalism for quite a long time and is still very poor because they are in the _wrong_ side of capitalism
Sorry mate, but capitalism and integration into the world economy has lifted million(billions?) out of poverty even from the countries on the wrong side of capitalism (the ones being exploited by the richer ones).
Look at present day South Korea vs North Korea. Post-WW2 South Korea was poorer than the North, but after the sixties the South economically skyrocketed while the North stil wallows in absolute poverty.
A lot of Asia post-WW2(Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, etc) became the sweatshop of the west/US, or "on the wrong side of capitalism" to quote you, and look at them now. Would they have been better off today without that phase? That's what you have to look at.
Science and technology has progresses thanks to cash injections from capitalists, not just from governments of broke countries.
The Taiwanese government paid to buy technology transfers on semiconductor manufacturing tech from the US in the sixties and seventies, but for that to happen, RCA in the US had to spend "hella' stacks" in R&D to invent that tech in the first place and iterate on it at scale until it got cheaper for mass production and affordable for other less wealthy countries to buy it too.
The semiconductor industry is an interesting example because even if the transistor was invented by Bell labs, it all comes from wartime technology, obviously very heavily publicly subsidized. And actually, it was only profitable for the first 10 years becuse they had military applications so they had the gouvernment as client…
Fine, then let's pick other industries not related to the defense industry.
Like industrial automation robots, those came way after WW2, by the desire of capitalists to speed up production and reduce costs of products to the point capitalist economies had much more successful exports, like steel, due to superior technology and automation despite the ultra low costs and wages in communist economies but which were behind on tech and mostly just produced low quality stuff for the local markets as they were uncompetitive abroad.
Or farming technology. Communist countries often struggled to feed their people, but that wasn't really an issue in the capitalist economies where the west had an abundant amount of calories thanks to the free market supply and demand pushing production and innovation in farming automation.
So despite the communist system being focused on the working class (on paper) and the capitalist system on greed and enriching the shareholders, ultimately the workers under capitalism had it better.
Do note that wealth is not a zero-sum pie [1]; even those on the "wrong side" can get lifted out of poverty. That's the beauty of economic growth. World poverty rates are dropping [2], and it's not something to be taken for granted.
Trying to force this in to a capitalism vs. communism false dilemma is so boring. No one mentioned communism until you.
There is not a single fully capitalist nation state on the planet. All have significant legislation and elements of socialism.
"Capitalism" can take many forms; some better than others. The (rather ranty) statement talks about "predatory capitalists" for example. "Crony capitalism" is also another commonly used term.
> It is just, that their concepts of what comes next, are quite vague
Oh, many have at-hand solutions alright! It's just that these heart-warming intuitive solutions break down when faced with realities of scale.
> Wind turbines deface! Solar panels pollute to produce! Batteries are full of metals you have to dig for! Screw industrial-scale food/production/distribution! Proof: I buy from the local shop/market/producer!
Yay, getting your Thanksgiving turkey from the local farm sure is nice, except... how much local producers have to produce to provide continuous daily sustenance to, say, a ~1M town? How much surface is needed to produce that amount? How are the logistics handled to move such local goods around? How much energy is expended in the whole process?
I'm not saying the ideas don't have merit, it's just that the revolution as envisioned falls apart with a bit of system thinking and a couple minutes of napkin math. That, or decimate the global human population and have survivors live in extreme scarcity.
No but you see, the media in Germany is definitely NOT government controlled, it's akshually only government funded via the Rundfunkbeitrag and must follow all government imposed restrictions, but other than that it's pinky promise 100% free from political influence and its management is totally NOT connected to people in power, similarly how former German chancellors have not been connected to Russian gas.
In this case, nope. They are also very much against coal and probably were involved with the occupation of the Hambacher Forst to stop more coal extraction(something I supported as well). And it is likely that they are so radical, that they don't fly. You are talking about a different group with the vacation in Bali after blocking streets in germany, eco groups are really not that homogenous.
It's up to the club. But if a club is fine with hypocrite posers, then it is a hypocrite posers club. Which is fine. Many people want to be hardcore, but their moms don't let them.
You missed the irony entirely: there's no club and no gatekeepers.
Stupid people and hypocrite will use the same banner you do and sometimes it will be false flags as well, such is life and that's why you should never judge a group on their most stupid members, because on the Internet there's no barrier to entry and anyone can claim to belong to the group, even if everyone else in the group thinks they are morons.
Climate-wise, those hypocrites is a good chunk of that demographic. I'll change my mind when I see those people calling out en-masse mass long distance tourism. Or Greta yachta BS which generated much more pollution than 2 passengers in a regular flight, let alone zoom call.
How many stupid members do you need to call a club stupid? 20%? 50%? 80%?
The club needs to exist as such in the first place… People saying things about climate are like people doing sport, there are hundreds of very distinct groups with wildly different ethos or behaviors.
It wouldn't make any sense to put you in the same club as coal runners right, would it?
It's not about eco at all, that's just a facade. They're part of the annoying trend that discriminates the world into good and bad and attack the "bad" by all means. Musk has been shifting to the "bad" side in public perception for a year or two. That's the only reason why Tesla is a target - this has nothing to do with Tesla at all.
This particular group ("Vulkangruppe") isn't about ecoactivism. They're an extremist, violent anarchist group that have previously attacked objects such as cable ducts or radio masts with the overall aim to disrupt public life.
Honestly, I expected bureaucracy, politics and unions to ruin Tesla's Germany adventure. I did not expect this. This level of self-destructiveness is quite unprecedented, even for Germany.
Not a problem at these levels of geopolitics and funding, Germans are the same bribable as anyone else. The problem is you are becoming a competition at someone's own territory.
Basically they fear, that green capitalism can work, so they attack the most prominent representant, so we all realize, we have to deindustrialize and live with very little.
I mean, there are some valid criticism of Teslas Gigafactory (and Musk in general), like that they pollute the groundwater already much more than allowed and the regulators are looking away.
But all in all, I am not that convinced, by such actions or manifests.
And Teslas or the Cybertruck are by themself surely not that ecologic - but they help make the transition much more, than continue to build combustion engines.
There's no such thing as bad publicity. We are talking about it, picking what is better and what is ridiculous, imagining alternatives and ways forward... would this discussion be here on HN otherwise? Same in other corners of the net, same in the real world. Soup attacks and road gluing keep the topic in the focus lights, the way the rallies of old, having fallen in "normalcy", have not.
"Soup attacks and road gluing keep the topic in the focus lights"
Those things tend to keep the focus on the soup. Or was there anything constructive to actually combat climate change, that has been done, because of those attention seeking actions?
You've just mentioned the topic yourself, giving it a little bit of attention and making others do so too, and you might well not have done that without these stunts, or even had this opportunity. One thing such stunts do very well is ensure that people don't have that topic driven out of their minds entirely, anchor it there, even if it doesn't take center stage. That makes it much easier to activate through other campaigns, channels or even uncoordinated word of mouth, and while that may not seem like much, big corp marketing departments spend fortunes to do the same for their brands. Is there a risk that soup stunts will foster resentment to a degree that harms their goal? Absolutely, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet. Most people appear to forget the stunts fairly quickly, whereas climate change as a topic is gaining traction, and while it's hard to attribute any of this directly to the various steps taken to foster awareness, it's well established that anchoring an idea in people's minds is a crucial basis for bottom-up action – just look at how the MAGA slogan has galvanized the US far right, to a large degree by firmly anchoring certain core tenets in people's minds, even those on the other side of the aisle. I'm wary of the downstream effects the current protests may wind up having, but I can't think of an alternative that's actually doable and that would have the same amount of impact.
And the focus here is on the violence, not climate change.
If you want to debate climate change, submit a scientific report.
Those people just want activism for the sake of it. So they have the feeling they did something and they did, but I do not see it as productive or constructive towards the goal, rather distracting and further dividing.
When was the last time you have read a scientific report? I for one have very rarely looked into them, shame on me. But I can testify that my entire family, while concerned with the climate change, never reads any scientific reports, so submitting yet another one will change absolutely zero on what they think. Exactly this is the problem those extremists try to address: to bring and keep the topic in people's minds, by any means. Do we like their means? No. Are they effective? Yes, as argued before already.
Well, I skim over them, if I see them here, which is what I was talking about. To reach the non tech people, I rather would create good visualisations explaining things, or a game about it (which is what I am doing). Those destructive actions here will make people ask the politics to spend more on police instead.
> Here is the link of the group, claiming and explaining the attack
No, thanks!
They chose violence in a country where democracy is working: as such, they only deserve to be closed behind solid bars and NO DIFFUSION of their opinions.
To be fair, it was violence against property, not people. That is quite a difference. (but I am not saying, that they would not also attack people)
And this is a hacker news forum, focusing on curiosity. I am curious about why people do weird things. Sometimes they have good reasons, often not so much. But I still like to judge myself at the source and not read what others concluded.
I really dislike how extremist eco activist groups keep trying to link any sort of badness to capitalism. "Nothing good will come unless we have a violent revolution." That's how dangerous radicalization happens.
In reality a ton of work is being done to reduce carbon usage within the current framework, importantly while still maintaining a good quality of life and not sending us back to the dark ages. Not enough, sure, but things are changing.
Because they don't want to help the environment, they want to feel recreationally outraged and like heroic revolutionaries ending evil. Environmentalism is just their latest wedge to insist that the solution to all problems in the world is their preferred revolution. They actively dislike and frustrate measures that would actually help address real problems, as it would take away their excuse, and they'd rather the problem continue (or hopefully get worse) than admit that they're not the solution. That last bit is often quite explicit - "We can't end $x until we end capitalism!" etc., and accusing more moderate groups of being bourgeois infiltrators or various -isms for daring to actually get something done instead of shouting about an ill-defined utopic revolution ad infinitum
And they majorly slow progress and tarnish public opinion of legitimate movements by forcing their way in. It's group narcissism
To state the obvious, Europe has far-left as well. And no they are not the ruling parties - who enable healthcare, kindergartens, pensions and other measures sometimes mistakenly referred as "far left".
I'm not up to date on French politics, but is this just a fascimile of the American playbook? In Australia at least, the parallels are pretty obvious and easily tracked back to Americanism.
No ofc he's not. But it's taught that he introduced social reforms (together with von Metternich) for keeping the (at that time) aspiring social democrats out of power.
I think the RAF (i.e. specifically the Bader-Meinhof group) were idiots at best and ruthless at worst but public perception of the RAF tends to be heavily biased by a lack of historical context.
The Federal Republic of Germany used to hide behind the irrefutable cruelty and oppression of the German Democratic Republic to get away with disgusting levels of state repression well into the 1960s. After the end of WW2 both German states also rehabilitated a lot of former NSDAP members and restored their positions in public offices often wiping their records clean in mock trials. The modern examples of police repression in Lüzerath (which in Germany were mostly framed in favor of the police while international media often highlighted the excessive police violence) or the Stuttgart 21 protests (which even in German media were described as shocking police violence because the protestors were seen to be "average people" rather than activists) pale in comparison to what was normal at the time. Also, after WW2 the German communist party KPD had been banned on the flimsiest of legal justifications (which to this day are generally agreed to be bogus although there is no political interest in revising the ban from either side) - a fate that to this day has otherwise been reserved for NSDAP-offshoots. Germany has also been extremely slow to account for its past with trials of Nazi officers still happening a few years ago - many supposed criminals getting to die of old age before ever going to trial. The formation of the RAF can also directly be traced back to the murder of a student protestor by a police officer.
The RAF - correctly - identified the US as the source of West Germany's anti-communism and it saw the West German state as a capitalist project largely operated by the same people that operated the fascist project of Nazi Germany before it. Their initial targets were primarily NATO, the West German police, West German politicians and former NSDAP members.
They also targeted Axel Springer, a right-wing media mogul whose tabloids still routinely run afoul of media ethics rules and border on violating laws against demagoguery. They bombed the Axel Springer offices but this was clearly intended to be more about sending a message and disrupting infrastructure as they called in advance and made an explicit bomb threat - twice. The building was not evacuated. The "most ethical military of the world" still insists that this practice washes its hands clean of any casualties of the bombing following the advance warning, so make of that what you will.
In the end, most of the original RAF members died in prison. The initial investigations were flimsy and there are credible allegations of their findings being motivated more by politics than evidence. Based on more recent examples of investigations into deaths in prisons or police custody, I find it difficult to trust either side on this.
I think it's accurate to describe the RAF as terrorists. I don't think they did any good no matter what their intentions were. Even if you somehow can come up with ideological justifications for their actions, that falls apart with the second or third generation at the latest. But that doesn't mean their victims were the Good Guys. The narrativization of RAF terrorism at worst just provided an excuse not to reflect on what motivated them - and to what extent those problems still linger today.
I didn't say the RAF weren't "far left". The exact ideology of the Bader-Meinhof group is not easy to pinpoint exactly, especially if you account for its evolution over time, but I think it's somewhat safe to say they broadly aligned with Maoism. They were at some point politically aligned with the East German government but that was clearly more for pragmatic reasons than deeply held convictions.
I'm merely saying that we whitewash a lot of that part of German history exactly because the RAF stood in opposition to it and if we all agree that the RAF were bad because they were terrorists then their victims must have been "good" and that is arguably closer to the opposite of the truth. "1960s Germany was full of NSDAP members in leadership positions and used excessive police violence to suppress civil unrest" is not a far left take, it's historical consensus.
The problem with the horse shoe and why although law enforcement likes it political scientists generally ridicule it is that politics are not one-dimensional and more often than not there actually isn't a middle ground. This actually has led to real world problems in Germany because just like how the East German government's ideological convictions made it incapable of acknowledging the existence of neo-nazis in East Germany because they saw fascism as an evolution of capitalism, German law enforcement can't adequately comprehend the German sovcit "Reichsbürger" movement because while being clearly far right it's actually in large parts a monarchist movement not a nazi one (although there are of course overlaps for pragmatic reasons).
As an outsider, I find that part of German history fascinating. It's a miracle that Germany was neutered relatively peacefully and it took just a generation or two. Especially when you compare it to post-war Japan (which was a success, but different, maybe better in the long run?) and post-cold-war Russia (which was a failure as we see nowadays).
Regarding horse shoe, I can share my personal anecdote. I'm born USSR & raised ex-USSR. Here far right was (and still is to a big extent) built on top of anti-soviet dissent. Pro-free-market, pro-nation-states, free speech and so on, basically reverse of whatever the soviet regime was. Even soviet punks and hippies were quite (far-)right especially compared to their west counterparts at the time :) I spent some time on UK university campus a good decade ago. It was very interesting how (far-)left at the time was quite similar to far-right back home. The goals were different, but the people, vector and modus operandi were very very similar. Punk kids, often from good stable background, were trying to find a way to solve eye sores of the society. While UK right-wing was completely different world to me with old-money and all that jazz. Which was very similar to our ex-USSR-establishment circles.
Germany hasn't had a left-wing extremist movement since the RAF, which was a GDR-affiliated group (or more accurately, a number of groups as the members of the initial Baader-Meinhof group were imprisoned) that performed political assassinations, bombings and abductions initially and then later bank robberies and other less ideologically motivated crimes.
We've been desperately trying to label groups as "left-wing extremist" ever since to avoid having to talk about right-wing terrorism without a comforting "all extremism is bad" caveat. The most recent example is the non-violent eco activist group Last Generation (Letzte Generation) which we've been trying to legally frame as a "criminal organization" (a legal device originally intended to help combat organized crime and terrorist cells) and which politicians and the media have at times referred to as "eco terrorists" and a "green RAF". Keep in mind their stunts mostly consisted of gluing themselves to intersection.
There was a broad "anti-COVID" movement (Querdenker/Querfront - "quer" in this case meaning "traversing (political lines)") founded in 2020 that drew from a broad political base including anti-vaxxers, new agers, "völkisch" nationalists, libertarians/ancaps and some groups self-identifying as leftist. The vast majority of leftist and anarchist movements however strongly opposed this movement, on the one hand because it was strongly affiliated with the political far-right (as a consequence of being a mix of people openly far-right, lying about not being far-right, being politically apathetic or being okay with aligning with the far-right) and on the other because while even anarchists disagreed with the implementation and choice of state anti-COVID measures they often did not disagree with their necessity in principle. These disagreements eventually contributed to Sarah Wagenknecht, a celebrity politician in the minor party Die Linke (The Left) parting ways with her party and founding her own party - although it's noteworthy that the party's official position of refusing to expel her for her publicly stated views led to many people breaking with the party prior to this.
With all that said, I wouldn't put too much trust on the German authorities' ability to correctly assess a terrorist group's ideological positions. According to some other news articles, the group does use left-wing language tho. Apparently it describes itself as being in a battle against "capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism" - which to me sounds more Third Worldist (i.e. Maoist) than anarchist. I can't imagine leftists in Germany broadly welcoming their actions tho as they're providing exactly the boogeyman politicians have been holding up as a justification for cracking down on non-violent "eco terrorists". Anarchists too tend to emphasize the importance of prefiguration before revolution (which is difficult because prefigurative projects also run risk of being labelled "criminal organizations" purely based on ideological stances) so I doubt they're too happy about the association either.
> With all that said, I wouldn't put too much trust on the German authorities' ability to correctly assess a terrorist group's ideological positions.
Yes.
Technically, the left as a political representation via vote is shrinking (fast)and theoretically Die Linke wouldn't be able to pass the 5% hurdle clause [1] plus with Sarah Wagenknecht et. al. leaving the space [2] it makes it harder to the government to classify something that they do not know for a while.
I like to joke that Germany doesn't have a political left because most of it was killed or killed each other in the period between the end of World War 1 and the end of World War 2 and what was left (heh) was then repressed in both German states (via capitalist anti-communism in the West and conservative vanguardism in the East).
There are some occasional flare-ups like the WASG splinter party that split off the SPD after accusing the SPD-Greens coalition Schroeder government of neoliberalism (which then went on to merge with the East German SED's successor party PSD to become Die Linke) but the most leftist forms of activism you see in practice is the ideologically very moderate trade unions like Ver.di and IG Metall and the ideologically incoherent anti-capitalist anti-state anti-whatever brick throwing troupes during the annual Labor Day riots.
I struggle to even describe the Wagenknecht party as left-wing despite her personal ideological origins.
> I struggle to even describe the Wagenknecht party as left-wing despite her personal ideological origins.
I am in the middle of her book [1] and I have the same issue as well.
From what I understood: Her views are more weighted to what we call in English as "Labor Party" +_Entwicklungspolitik_ + _Gewerkschaft_ where she saw that the left went too far on the identity politics and ideological battles and lost ground to a big chunk of demographics in Germany (median white person, with the income between 22-42K EUR/year, working for industry or adjacencies).
For the internal politics me makes sense what she is doing - and I think why she will be over the 5% hurdle next election as well - but the issue that I see is on the external policy where she doubles down on the duality/dubious Germany foreign policy to make friends with everyone and not having a clear path in terms of partnerships and alliances.
Compared with 2010-12 where FDP and AfD has clear paths and ideological and political directions, the issue that I see with the BSW is that for now, it's a blank check that the voters are giving to her and once they are on the Parlament no one knows how the BSW will swings.
As an aside: I love how the people complaining about "identity politics" are often the ones engaging in a blatant form of identity politics by painting a picture of a white median income working class person who doesn't care about social justice (which by the way is often an ahistorical caricature and is often used as a way to infantilize industrial workers, especially when the trope is invoked by politicians with academic backgrounds themselves).
That said, I'd say both the FDP and AfD heavily engage in hollow populism and that has benefited both to some extent so far and seems to be what BSW wants to copy. The AfD uses a veneer of middle-class conservativsm to transport far-right extremist ideas, the FDP uses progressivism and futurism to transport very narrow interest group politics (i.e. despite all its bold claims in practice it tends to mostly do exactly what its core donor demographic wants and will abandon its supposed ideals if they gain too much traction). I'm not sure what it is the BSW is trying to transport but they seem to have adopted a shell that is a loose amalgamation of an anti-progressive, anti-Green reactionary sentiment mixed with a vague pro-worker veneer that is at the same time offset by a lot of pro-business ("innovation", "future technologies", etc) language.
Just an example: in the party's programme they go to great lengths to explain that the Bundeswehr should not follow US interests (i.e. anti-NATO without committing to an explicit position of leaving NATO), should not maintain presences in foreign countries (i.e. no participation in joint operations), should not receive funding that is offset with cuts to social welfare (i.e. less funding?) but must also be "equipped appropriately" to defend Germany (i.e. more funding?). This reads more like a political Rorschach test than a political position: you can either interpret it as being anti-NATO, pro-Russia and asking for cuts to military spending or as being isolationist and asking for more accountability in military spending or as supporting the idea of a European military organization as a counter-balance to foreign interests or ... and so on.
I don't know what it is but I don't have the feeling I'd get a straight answer from her or her supporters either.
We sabotaged Tesla today. Because Tesla in Grünau eats up earth, resources, people, labor and spits out 6,000 SUVs, killing machines and monster trucks per week. Our gift for March 8th is to shut down Tesla.
Because the complete destruction of the Gigafactory and with it the sawing off of “technofascists” like Elon Musk are a step on the path to liberation from patriarchy. ...
Tesla is a symbol of “green capitalism” and a totalitarian technological attack on society. The myth of green growth is just a dirty ideological magic trick to close ranks against criticism domestically. One suggests a way out of the climate catastrophe. But “green capitalism” stands for colonialism, land grabbing and an exacerbation of the climate crisis! The lithium batteries come from toxic mines in Chile and devour other rare metals, causing misery and destruction for the people in the mining areas. The battery factory in Grünheide near Berlin requires the rare raw material lithium, which is also mined in Bolivia, for example. To enforce lithium mining in Bolivia, Musk puts his cards on the table: “We will stage a coup if we want,” commenting on the indigenous resistance to mining. Mineral resources are being ripped from the earth under brutal conditions. The “green deal” is just the expansion of economic growth without limits. In Portugal, too, the rural population is resisting the forced mining of lithium.
The biggest reason there's protests in Portugal is because the project was adjudicated to a company that was started 3 days before the proposal application period and is clear corruption which Portugal has loads of issues with. We also have green people complaining, but most of the complaints and media shenanigans are about the corruption part.
Small context for those who are not familiar with why Tesla setup the gigafactory in the most hostile place in Germany: Tesla had the idea to place a production plant in Germany to have access to some of the subsidies for electric cars since Germany has a plan to not have cars with fossil fuels in 2035.
The German government was a good deal because it would kill 2 birds with a single store: it would attract investments in a (debatable) lower cost via subsidies plus the site would be placed in East Germany in the 13th/16 poorest state is Brandenburg that converges to the big plan of the federal government to develop east Germany [2].
The whole process from the announcement until the end of gigafactory construction was "controversial" at least [3] but they made it.
I do not want to go to the avenue of the ideological antagonism of those groups with Elon Musk, using a bit of hindsight bias I think that Tesla right now should regret not opening this factory in Poland [4], the Czech Republic or Hungary are places where the production costs are lower from the working force perspective and energy perspective.
Considering energy prices, in Poland has 0.1769 EUR/kWh and Germany has 0.4125 EUR/kWh [5].
Even inside Germany they could have a way better pick in other states in the East as Thüringen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Sachsen. Those folks would have a way better reception than the population between the border between Brandenburg/Berlin (where the Gigafactory is located).
I would be surprised if the situation continues to deteriorate, Tesla will move to Poland in some point in future.
This current thread has a bit more insights into German politics, and the other thread has insights from the perspective of US folks about how unacceptable it is to think from their cultural framework.
There will never be a shortage of naïve young people thinking communism is something to aim for. It's incredible how easy it is for some people to not only refuse to learn from history but straight out deny it. People like this claim gulags were leisure re-education camps where people spent their time talking, painting pictures, playing games. I'm dead serious, just visit r/communism.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadhttps://kontrapolis.info/
https://kontrapolis.info/12465/
Russia, now fighting a war in Europe, is activating its underground networks to sow discord in Western societies and it uses far left (communist) activists.
There is a global war going on.
This isn’t a one axis thing, Russia complains about nazis in Azov.
I just can't with German eco-"activists".
Sure, if you cherry pick you can always find merits in absolutely everything, including in catching Covid: you get sick leave and get to stay at home, or in the war in Ukraine: it boosts the defense industry spending.
Even though those are all net negatives, but who cares right? Let's look at the merits and not at the whole picture which is overall terrible.
The communist system was far better, which is why we - after having dismantled it in the 90s for Eastern Germany - are now back to providing childcare for all children. Though it will take decades until it works again.
The GDR was basically the Apple Store equivalent of the USSR/comunist block in Eastern Europe. Life in the GDR was nothing like life in Romania for example which was closer to North Korea in how its citizens had food and other necessities.
That's true, but life in the GDR was still shit compared to the west, even if it was the least shit out of all the eastern block. You can powder a turd in sugar but it's still not gonna be edible, it will still be a turd.
That's why people from the est were risking to get shot/arrested to cross the border west. Better childcare wasn't enough to unshittify the life in the east.
A lot of things can be made better when the state can put their finger on the scale or use force to achieve that goal, while you actively choose to ignore the means and process through wich that is achieved, and only look at the end result.
For example, abundant housing for all workers was not a problem in communism, but ask yourself why? Because the state could commandeer any piece of land it wanted, bulldoze and relocate whoever lived there without their permission or compensation, then build cheaply using the crappiest materials that don't last, and using virtually unlimited free slave labor from prisons, military and schools/education institutions.
So now you can say "look, communism did affordable housing better, maybe we can learn something form that". Learn what exactly? That to get unlimited housing for everyone, you need to evict people off their land at whim and use slave labor instead of paying market rates for land and labor which leads to the supply shortages we have now?
Same with your "better childcare" example. Of course it's more difficult to get abundant childcare in a free market economy when you have to pay people what they want in order to convince them to come work in childcare, because those people now have much better paying and less stressful economic opportunities in the private sector, than working in childcare for the pay fixed by the state which was competitive in a centralized state economy but is not competitive anymore in the free market one, and you can't force people anymore into certain careers like before.
So yeah, communism did some things better only because there were some major compromises in the back-end that people with rose tinted glasses either forget about or ignore, i.e. you were not part of that underclass of people used as virtual slave labor to achieve those goals.
Communist states, being authoritarian states, sometimes happen to choose an optimization trade-off that does one or two things better than a free-market state - but then uniformly do everything else worse (such as human rights).
It's not that free market systems are perfect - it's just that they at least have the ability to occupy the best spots of the Pareto frontier. Communism doesn't, and saying that we can "take things from it" is incorrect.
Sorry mate, but capitalism and integration into the world economy has lifted million(billions?) out of poverty even from the countries on the wrong side of capitalism (the ones being exploited by the richer ones).
Look at present day South Korea vs North Korea. Post-WW2 South Korea was poorer than the North, but after the sixties the South economically skyrocketed while the North stil wallows in absolute poverty.
A lot of Asia post-WW2(Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, etc) became the sweatshop of the west/US, or "on the wrong side of capitalism" to quote you, and look at them now. Would they have been better off today without that phase? That's what you have to look at.
The Taiwanese government paid to buy technology transfers on semiconductor manufacturing tech from the US in the sixties and seventies, but for that to happen, RCA in the US had to spend "hella' stacks" in R&D to invent that tech in the first place and iterate on it at scale until it got cheaper for mass production and affordable for other less wealthy countries to buy it too.
Like industrial automation robots, those came way after WW2, by the desire of capitalists to speed up production and reduce costs of products to the point capitalist economies had much more successful exports, like steel, due to superior technology and automation despite the ultra low costs and wages in communist economies but which were behind on tech and mostly just produced low quality stuff for the local markets as they were uncompetitive abroad.
Or farming technology. Communist countries often struggled to feed their people, but that wasn't really an issue in the capitalist economies where the west had an abundant amount of calories thanks to the free market supply and demand pushing production and innovation in farming automation.
So despite the communist system being focused on the working class (on paper) and the capitalist system on greed and enriching the shareholders, ultimately the workers under capitalism had it better.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zero-sumgame.asp
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#%3A%7E%3Atext%...
There is not a single fully capitalist nation state on the planet. All have significant legislation and elements of socialism.
"Capitalism" can take many forms; some better than others. The (rather ranty) statement talks about "predatory capitalists" for example. "Crony capitalism" is also another commonly used term.
Oh, many have at-hand solutions alright! It's just that these heart-warming intuitive solutions break down when faced with realities of scale.
> Wind turbines deface! Solar panels pollute to produce! Batteries are full of metals you have to dig for! Screw industrial-scale food/production/distribution! Proof: I buy from the local shop/market/producer!
Yay, getting your Thanksgiving turkey from the local farm sure is nice, except... how much local producers have to produce to provide continuous daily sustenance to, say, a ~1M town? How much surface is needed to produce that amount? How are the logistics handled to move such local goods around? How much energy is expended in the whole process?
I'm not saying the ideas don't have merit, it's just that the revolution as envisioned falls apart with a bit of system thinking and a couple minutes of napkin math. That, or decimate the global human population and have survivors live in extreme scarcity.
Stupid people and hypocrite will use the same banner you do and sometimes it will be false flags as well, such is life and that's why you should never judge a group on their most stupid members, because on the Internet there's no barrier to entry and anyone can claim to belong to the group, even if everyone else in the group thinks they are morons.
How many stupid members do you need to call a club stupid? 20%? 50%? 80%?
It wouldn't make any sense to put you in the same club as coal runners right, would it?
When you start stretching coal runners definition, long-distance-flying-loving „greens“ will become coal runner colleagues than me :)
Not a problem at these levels of geopolitics and funding, Germans are the same bribable as anyone else. The problem is you are becoming a competition at someone's own territory.
https://de.indymedia.org/node/344525
Basically they fear, that green capitalism can work, so they attack the most prominent representant, so we all realize, we have to deindustrialize and live with very little.
I mean, there are some valid criticism of Teslas Gigafactory (and Musk in general), like that they pollute the groundwater already much more than allowed and the regulators are looking away.
But all in all, I am not that convinced, by such actions or manifests.
And Teslas or the Cybertruck are by themself surely not that ecologic - but they help make the transition much more, than continue to build combustion engines.
As usual with these kind of people I think they are counter productive to their own goals.
Those things tend to keep the focus on the soup. Or was there anything constructive to actually combat climate change, that has been done, because of those attention seeking actions?
If you want to debate climate change, submit a scientific report.
Those people just want activism for the sake of it. So they have the feeling they did something and they did, but I do not see it as productive or constructive towards the goal, rather distracting and further dividing.
No, thanks!
They chose violence in a country where democracy is working: as such, they only deserve to be closed behind solid bars and NO DIFFUSION of their opinions.
And this is a hacker news forum, focusing on curiosity. I am curious about why people do weird things. Sometimes they have good reasons, often not so much. But I still like to judge myself at the source and not read what others concluded.
In reality a ton of work is being done to reduce carbon usage within the current framework, importantly while still maintaining a good quality of life and not sending us back to the dark ages. Not enough, sure, but things are changing.
And they majorly slow progress and tarnish public opinion of legitimate movements by forcing their way in. It's group narcissism
Not “mistakingly”, deceptively.
Perhaps primitivists? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
The Federal Republic of Germany used to hide behind the irrefutable cruelty and oppression of the German Democratic Republic to get away with disgusting levels of state repression well into the 1960s. After the end of WW2 both German states also rehabilitated a lot of former NSDAP members and restored their positions in public offices often wiping their records clean in mock trials. The modern examples of police repression in Lüzerath (which in Germany were mostly framed in favor of the police while international media often highlighted the excessive police violence) or the Stuttgart 21 protests (which even in German media were described as shocking police violence because the protestors were seen to be "average people" rather than activists) pale in comparison to what was normal at the time. Also, after WW2 the German communist party KPD had been banned on the flimsiest of legal justifications (which to this day are generally agreed to be bogus although there is no political interest in revising the ban from either side) - a fate that to this day has otherwise been reserved for NSDAP-offshoots. Germany has also been extremely slow to account for its past with trials of Nazi officers still happening a few years ago - many supposed criminals getting to die of old age before ever going to trial. The formation of the RAF can also directly be traced back to the murder of a student protestor by a police officer.
The RAF - correctly - identified the US as the source of West Germany's anti-communism and it saw the West German state as a capitalist project largely operated by the same people that operated the fascist project of Nazi Germany before it. Their initial targets were primarily NATO, the West German police, West German politicians and former NSDAP members.
They also targeted Axel Springer, a right-wing media mogul whose tabloids still routinely run afoul of media ethics rules and border on violating laws against demagoguery. They bombed the Axel Springer offices but this was clearly intended to be more about sending a message and disrupting infrastructure as they called in advance and made an explicit bomb threat - twice. The building was not evacuated. The "most ethical military of the world" still insists that this practice washes its hands clean of any casualties of the bombing following the advance warning, so make of that what you will.
In the end, most of the original RAF members died in prison. The initial investigations were flimsy and there are credible allegations of their findings being motivated more by politics than evidence. Based on more recent examples of investigations into deaths in prisons or police custody, I find it difficult to trust either side on this.
I think it's accurate to describe the RAF as terrorists. I don't think they did any good no matter what their intentions were. Even if you somehow can come up with ideological justifications for their actions, that falls apart with the second or third generation at the latest. But that doesn't mean their victims were the Good Guys. The narrativization of RAF terrorism at worst just provided an excuse not to reflect on what motivated them - and to what extent those problems still linger today.
I'm merely saying that we whitewash a lot of that part of German history exactly because the RAF stood in opposition to it and if we all agree that the RAF were bad because they were terrorists then their victims must have been "good" and that is arguably closer to the opposite of the truth. "1960s Germany was full of NSDAP members in leadership positions and used excessive police violence to suppress civil unrest" is not a far left take, it's historical consensus.
The problem with the horse shoe and why although law enforcement likes it political scientists generally ridicule it is that politics are not one-dimensional and more often than not there actually isn't a middle ground. This actually has led to real world problems in Germany because just like how the East German government's ideological convictions made it incapable of acknowledging the existence of neo-nazis in East Germany because they saw fascism as an evolution of capitalism, German law enforcement can't adequately comprehend the German sovcit "Reichsbürger" movement because while being clearly far right it's actually in large parts a monarchist movement not a nazi one (although there are of course overlaps for pragmatic reasons).
As an outsider, I find that part of German history fascinating. It's a miracle that Germany was neutered relatively peacefully and it took just a generation or two. Especially when you compare it to post-war Japan (which was a success, but different, maybe better in the long run?) and post-cold-war Russia (which was a failure as we see nowadays).
Regarding horse shoe, I can share my personal anecdote. I'm born USSR & raised ex-USSR. Here far right was (and still is to a big extent) built on top of anti-soviet dissent. Pro-free-market, pro-nation-states, free speech and so on, basically reverse of whatever the soviet regime was. Even soviet punks and hippies were quite (far-)right especially compared to their west counterparts at the time :) I spent some time on UK university campus a good decade ago. It was very interesting how (far-)left at the time was quite similar to far-right back home. The goals were different, but the people, vector and modus operandi were very very similar. Punk kids, often from good stable background, were trying to find a way to solve eye sores of the society. While UK right-wing was completely different world to me with old-money and all that jazz. Which was very similar to our ex-USSR-establishment circles.
We've been desperately trying to label groups as "left-wing extremist" ever since to avoid having to talk about right-wing terrorism without a comforting "all extremism is bad" caveat. The most recent example is the non-violent eco activist group Last Generation (Letzte Generation) which we've been trying to legally frame as a "criminal organization" (a legal device originally intended to help combat organized crime and terrorist cells) and which politicians and the media have at times referred to as "eco terrorists" and a "green RAF". Keep in mind their stunts mostly consisted of gluing themselves to intersection.
There was a broad "anti-COVID" movement (Querdenker/Querfront - "quer" in this case meaning "traversing (political lines)") founded in 2020 that drew from a broad political base including anti-vaxxers, new agers, "völkisch" nationalists, libertarians/ancaps and some groups self-identifying as leftist. The vast majority of leftist and anarchist movements however strongly opposed this movement, on the one hand because it was strongly affiliated with the political far-right (as a consequence of being a mix of people openly far-right, lying about not being far-right, being politically apathetic or being okay with aligning with the far-right) and on the other because while even anarchists disagreed with the implementation and choice of state anti-COVID measures they often did not disagree with their necessity in principle. These disagreements eventually contributed to Sarah Wagenknecht, a celebrity politician in the minor party Die Linke (The Left) parting ways with her party and founding her own party - although it's noteworthy that the party's official position of refusing to expel her for her publicly stated views led to many people breaking with the party prior to this.
With all that said, I wouldn't put too much trust on the German authorities' ability to correctly assess a terrorist group's ideological positions. According to some other news articles, the group does use left-wing language tho. Apparently it describes itself as being in a battle against "capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism" - which to me sounds more Third Worldist (i.e. Maoist) than anarchist. I can't imagine leftists in Germany broadly welcoming their actions tho as they're providing exactly the boogeyman politicians have been holding up as a justification for cracking down on non-violent "eco terrorists". Anarchists too tend to emphasize the importance of prefiguration before revolution (which is difficult because prefigurative projects also run risk of being labelled "criminal organizations" purely based on ideological stances) so I doubt they're too happy about the association either.
Yes.
Technically, the left as a political representation via vote is shrinking (fast)and theoretically Die Linke wouldn't be able to pass the 5% hurdle clause [1] plus with Sarah Wagenknecht et. al. leaving the space [2] it makes it harder to the government to classify something that they do not know for a while.
[1] - https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/
[2] - https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/sahra-wagenknecht...
There are some occasional flare-ups like the WASG splinter party that split off the SPD after accusing the SPD-Greens coalition Schroeder government of neoliberalism (which then went on to merge with the East German SED's successor party PSD to become Die Linke) but the most leftist forms of activism you see in practice is the ideologically very moderate trade unions like Ver.di and IG Metall and the ideologically incoherent anti-capitalist anti-state anti-whatever brick throwing troupes during the annual Labor Day riots.
I struggle to even describe the Wagenknecht party as left-wing despite her personal ideological origins.
I am in the middle of her book [1] and I have the same issue as well.
From what I understood: Her views are more weighted to what we call in English as "Labor Party" +_Entwicklungspolitik_ + _Gewerkschaft_ where she saw that the left went too far on the identity politics and ideological battles and lost ground to a big chunk of demographics in Germany (median white person, with the income between 22-42K EUR/year, working for industry or adjacencies).
For the internal politics me makes sense what she is doing - and I think why she will be over the 5% hurdle next election as well - but the issue that I see is on the external policy where she doubles down on the duality/dubious Germany foreign policy to make friends with everyone and not having a clear path in terms of partnerships and alliances.
Compared with 2010-12 where FDP and AfD has clear paths and ideological and political directions, the issue that I see with the BSW is that for now, it's a blank check that the voters are giving to her and once they are on the Parlament no one knows how the BSW will swings.
[1] - https://www.amazon.de/Die-Selbstgerechten-Gegenprogramm-Geme...
That said, I'd say both the FDP and AfD heavily engage in hollow populism and that has benefited both to some extent so far and seems to be what BSW wants to copy. The AfD uses a veneer of middle-class conservativsm to transport far-right extremist ideas, the FDP uses progressivism and futurism to transport very narrow interest group politics (i.e. despite all its bold claims in practice it tends to mostly do exactly what its core donor demographic wants and will abandon its supposed ideals if they gain too much traction). I'm not sure what it is the BSW is trying to transport but they seem to have adopted a shell that is a loose amalgamation of an anti-progressive, anti-Green reactionary sentiment mixed with a vague pro-worker veneer that is at the same time offset by a lot of pro-business ("innovation", "future technologies", etc) language.
Just an example: in the party's programme they go to great lengths to explain that the Bundeswehr should not follow US interests (i.e. anti-NATO without committing to an explicit position of leaving NATO), should not maintain presences in foreign countries (i.e. no participation in joint operations), should not receive funding that is offset with cuts to social welfare (i.e. less funding?) but must also be "equipped appropriately" to defend Germany (i.e. more funding?). This reads more like a political Rorschach test than a political position: you can either interpret it as being anti-NATO, pro-Russia and asking for cuts to military spending or as being isolationist and asking for more accountability in military spending or as supporting the idea of a European military organization as a counter-balance to foreign interests or ... and so on.
I don't know what it is but I don't have the feeling I'd get a straight answer from her or her supporters either.
https://kontrapolis.info/12465/
Google Translate of the beginning:
We sabotaged Tesla today. Because Tesla in Grünau eats up earth, resources, people, labor and spits out 6,000 SUVs, killing machines and monster trucks per week. Our gift for March 8th is to shut down Tesla. Because the complete destruction of the Gigafactory and with it the sawing off of “technofascists” like Elon Musk are a step on the path to liberation from patriarchy. ...
Tesla is a symbol of “green capitalism” and a totalitarian technological attack on society. The myth of green growth is just a dirty ideological magic trick to close ranks against criticism domestically. One suggests a way out of the climate catastrophe. But “green capitalism” stands for colonialism, land grabbing and an exacerbation of the climate crisis! The lithium batteries come from toxic mines in Chile and devour other rare metals, causing misery and destruction for the people in the mining areas. The battery factory in Grünheide near Berlin requires the rare raw material lithium, which is also mined in Bolivia, for example. To enforce lithium mining in Bolivia, Musk puts his cards on the table: “We will stage a coup if we want,” commenting on the indigenous resistance to mining. Mineral resources are being ripped from the earth under brutal conditions. The “green deal” is just the expansion of economic growth without limits. In Portugal, too, the rural population is resisting the forced mining of lithium.
Female CEO, problem solved
Ruled by emotions and not thought, reason, logic.
Exactly what one should expect from these groups.
The German government was a good deal because it would kill 2 birds with a single store: it would attract investments in a (debatable) lower cost via subsidies plus the site would be placed in East Germany in the 13th/16 poorest state is Brandenburg that converges to the big plan of the federal government to develop east Germany [2].
The whole process from the announcement until the end of gigafactory construction was "controversial" at least [3] but they made it.
I do not want to go to the avenue of the ideological antagonism of those groups with Elon Musk, using a bit of hindsight bias I think that Tesla right now should regret not opening this factory in Poland [4], the Czech Republic or Hungary are places where the production costs are lower from the working force perspective and energy perspective.
Considering energy prices, in Poland has 0.1769 EUR/kWh and Germany has 0.4125 EUR/kWh [5].
Even inside Germany they could have a way better pick in other states in the East as Thüringen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Sachsen. Those folks would have a way better reception than the population between the border between Brandenburg/Berlin (where the Gigafactory is located).
I would be surprised if the situation continues to deteriorate, Tesla will move to Poland in some point in future.
[1] - https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-richest-and-poorest-...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/taiwan-chipmaker-tsmc-app...
[3] - https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/26/23372783/tesla-gigafactor...
[4] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/09/poland-vying...
[5] - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Some more discussion:
Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604320
This current thread has a bit more insights into German politics, and the other thread has insights from the perspective of US folks about how unacceptable it is to think from their cultural framework.