2010-01-17

Esclusiva: Tadzio Müller di CJA

For me, coming from the anticapitalist wing of the alterglobalisation movement, it was two trends that got me interested in the climate. First, the fact that around 2005/2006, our (fundamentally antineoliberal) movement seemed to me to have run out of a good, contemporarily relevant story to tell about the world - we seemed old news, not just in the media, also to ourselves. Second, when in 2007, at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, I realised that governance institutions and capitalists were more and more using the climate change issue in order to relegitimise themselves, to kick off a new round of capitalist growth - this time painted green - without any of the fundamental problems being solved. It was only after that that I came to realise that climate change is such an enormously important social issue as well.

b) Why were you arrested after the CJA press conference in Cph? What does it say about freedom of protest in the EU?

I was arrested for conspiracy to commit and incite people to rioting, property destruction and violence against police. To be honest, I don't think that it mattered so much that I had just been at a press conference, they just wanted to take me before the Reclaim Power! action, because they mistakenly thought that because I was a press spokesperson, I was one of the 'leaders' of the action. But the police trying to find 'leaders' where there are none is not really news. What I think is real news are the more than 1900 arrests that were essentially preemptive. In other words: nearly 2000 people were arrested for having done nothing! I think that in a time of increasing social conflicts (whether as a result of climate change, low wages, high government debt, or whatever), the movements need to have a strategy to counter this emerging mode of political, preventive policing. I met a guy in jail who was there for 3 weeks because he was arrested for standing next to a stone that the police said he was going to throw - in the future! If we don't respond to this, the narrow window of civil liberties that people have fought for in the past might just close soon...

c) What's next for the climate justice movement after Copenhagen, both in the world and in Europe?
After what I think we can call the qualified success of Copenhagen, where, in spite of the excessively repressive preventive policing by the Danish state, we managed to pull off some very exciting actions that contrasted nicely with the utter and complete failure of the official COP-process, there's probably a danger that the climate justice movement falls into the same 'trap' as the alterglobalist movement: that of overrating the importance of these international summits. Sure, they are extremely exciting (we recognise that we are part of a global movement, and meet others in that movement), they're politically important, and they're simply fun, they are not where climate change is produced. A radical climate justice politics ultimately needs to target the (fossilistic) capitalist energy sector, and here I see a need for a three-pronged strategy (if what follows is a somewhat European perspective, I apologise for that - it is so far in Europe where I have been most active, but I wait to be inspired by the movements' climate change conference in Bolivia in April): first, we need to shut down coal-fired power plants, old ones, and the many new ones governments are planning to build. In the current situation, building coal-fired power plants is a criminal act and should be exposed as such. Second, we need to prevent the so-called 'renaissance of nuclear power'. Not only because none of the problems originally associated with nuclear power have been or can be solved, but also because there is enormous mobilisation potential (at least in Germany, but also, I believe, beyond) around this question. Thirdly, we need to fight for a just - that means, socialised, decentralised and fair - renewable energy sector. It is here where we can get the trade unions on board: for example, the German metalworkers' union IG Metall is trying to unionise the renewables sector, and we should be part of those discussions.
So again: summits are important, and we should surely mobilise people for COP16 in Mexico. But our substantive strategic future must lie, I think, in an integrated energy sector strategy. That's where cilmate change is caused, and that's where climate justice must start.

d) Please sketch out your vision for a common ground able to constitute an alternative to either zombie neoliberalism or faltering green capitalism.

With the rest of the Turbulence collective, I see this common ground as beind constituted around commons and climate justice. What the struggle for climate justice might look like in the near future I tried to sketch above. As for commons, here in fact I defer to some of our Italian comrades who have been working on this question more than I have: from a guaranteed basic income to global social rights, we need to turn the emerging fight against cutbacks driven by bailout-incurred government deficits into a progressive struggle for the creation of open, non-exclusionary commons in health, education and social policy. Capital and its servants have carved up and destroyed the planet. The only way to save it, and us, is to really make it common again.

Source: http://www.milanox.eu/content/esclusiva-tadzio-m%C3%BCller-di-cja