In the night 25th to 26th of may 2021 we attacked the electricity supply at the construction site of Tesla’s Giga-Factory in Berlin-Grünheide by setting six main high voltage cables on fire.
Tesla is neither green, ecological nor social. Tesla is a company exploiting land and peoples’ lives on a global scale, it relies on and produces colonial conditions. Our fire stands against the lies about green cars. Target was the sabotage of the construction site of Tesla’s Giga-Factory. Putting an end to the ideology of unlimited technological progress and the global destruction of the planet will not happen just by nice words.
Against the progress of destruction – we put sabotage
Climate strike for a different world!
“(…) we behold and hear a world whose social life is sick, fragmented into millions of individuals who are strangers to each other, convulsively striving for individual survival, but united under the oppression of a system that is ready to do anything to quench its thirst for profit, although it is clear that this path is contrary to the existence of the planet Earth. (…) The aberration of the system and its stupid defense of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ shatters on a criminal reality: the femicides. The murder of women has neither a color nor a nationality, it is worldwide. (…) And it seems that ‘civilization’ says to us original peoples: “the proof of your underdevelopment lies in the low rate of femicides. Make your mega-projects, your trains, your thermoelectric plants, your mines, your dams, your shopping centers, your appliance stores – including TV channels – and finally learn to consume. Be like us. To pay the debt of this progressive aid, your lands, your waters, your cultures and your dignity are not enough. You will have to pay the rest with the lives of women.” (…) We see and hear nature wounded to death, which in its agony warns humanity that the worst is yet to come. Each ‘natural catastrophe’ announces the next one and makes us forget that it is caused by the action of a human system. (…) Yes, the roads must be reclaimed, but to fight. Because as we said earlier, life, the struggle for life is not an individual matter, but a collective one. Now we see that it’s not a matter of nationalities either, but encompasses the whole world.”
– From a greeting from Zapatista indigenous people in Latin America to us in the Global North
We successfully interrupted the power supply to the construction site of the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide by fire during the night of May 25-26, 2021. To do this, we set fire to the power feed via six high-voltage cables (110,000 volts) within a construction fence corridor 250 meters from the Tesla factory in the immediate vicinity of the A10 motorway at the level of the Freienbrink exit. Since an interruption of the cables, which were temporarily laid above ground exclusively for the factory, cannot be carried out in isolation from the regional power grid, we could not completely rule out power outages in the surrounding area either. It was our intention to hit the construction site of Tesla, to complicate the work at the site for a day, to interrupt the construction of the manufacturing facilities. Since the local population cannot succeed so easily in stopping the construction because of the unequal balance of power (capital, politics and authorities versus interests of residents, climate protectors and ecologists), we hereby contribute our sabotage in solidarity. Should our action have been successful, the richest man in the world will compensate the interruption of the construction work financially – but the political damage is certain.
Why are we sabotaging Tesla?
A car factory is being built in Grünheide near Berlin. Tesla is building a “gigafactory” there. As grandiose as the name and the project are, so is the actor: Elon Musk. His patriarchal fantasies of omnipotence are supposed to save the world? We could laugh about this if it weren’t so serious: the production of supposedly “clean, climate-friendly” battery-powered vehicles is just a new contribution to the further destruction of the planet.
Our action shows the vulnerability of this project, it undermines the supposed “omnipotence” with which Musk haunts Brandenburg. There he sets building-law conditions like a feudal lord and ignores, for example, all objections due to the threatening water shortage in the region. On the one hand, he wants to strategically position his factory close to the Polish workers, and on the other hand, close to Berlin, which may soon be governed by the Green Party, and the buyers located there. Politicians, the administration and individual press agencies, which are bowing to Musk because of new jobs and the anticipated economic location advantage, will strongly condemn our action and defame us as terrorists. This is a distortion of facts – our attack destroys property, sabotages work processes and destroys money, but not livelihoods. We have ruled out the danger to human life in the action. But we understand the action as a flaming statement against the lie of green capitalism. We oppose the further destruction of our livelihoods locally and globally and the exploitation of people through expansive technological madness. Our attack is a call to attack the Green Deal. In support of social struggles worldwide. For ecological reasons. For anti-colonial reasons. For feminist reasons. For class struggle reasons. For ultimately revolutionary and anti-domination reasons.
Propagandistic lies as a sales strategy with simultaneous soothing of conscience.
Ecological illusion here, colonial reality elsewhere.
The Green Deal is based on theft, exploitation and predation
Talk of green capitalism, the New Green Deal, is nothing but propaganda. The Green Deal means establishing climate protection as the green continuation of neoliberalism. It too makes the rich richer at the expense of others. Individual electric mobility does not stop the ecological devastation, it continues and expands it. We are witnessing a technological offensive that also continues the economic colonialism of the imperial age in the form of the unabated mass exploitation of millions for luxury in the global North. In addition to material goods, it is now the luxury of clean air. Yet we know that this is an illusion: we all live on the same planet, breathe the same air.
The switch from cars with internal combustion engines to smart electric cars will not have a single positive effect globally. The air will be better where e-cars are driven, but non-renewable raw materials will be consumed in huge quantities to generate this renewable energy and to build the cars. Copper, in particular, is needed to build the new power lines, charging stations and electric motors. Much of it comes from South America. There, people work hard for little money to get the metal out of the ground. Landscapes are destroyed. Large amounts of electricity are consumed to operate the mines and process the copper. The power plants are almost exclusively powered by coal, which is transported from China by ships across the Pacific. The ships are powered by dirty marine diesel. In Chile, for example, people are getting sick in large numbers from the exhaust fumes from the coal-fired power plants, and ecosystems are being degraded. What is ecological about coal mining in China or Australia? How ecological is the shipping of copper out into the clean world of the electric car good guys? How small can the “ecological fingerprint” be of a dirty heavy industry producing clean cars?
A lot of lithium is needed to build car batteries. In the next 9 years, the consumption of lithium is expected to increase 20 to 30 times. This means a corresponding increase in energy consumption for extraction, transport and processing. In the extraction areas, expulsion and land theft from the indigenous population are commonplace, for example in Argentina. There, the land is sacrificed to the eco-conscience of those who want to continue to live as expansively as before; there, livelihoods are destroyed so that financially well-padded parents here can continue to take their children to kindergarten or private school in their SUVs with a good eco-conscience.
Even without cobalt, no battery installed in e-cars works at present. But cobalt is rare. To illustrate: if Audi were to build one of its production models, the A4, purely electrically, the car factory managers would have to buy half the world market’s supply of cobalt. VW has calculated that it would need 130,000 tons of cobalt for e-car production. World production currently stands at 123,000 tons. That doesn’t include Tesla or any other car company. The battery in a Tesla Roadster alone consists of 6831 cells. There is a reason that Tesla is working on the cobalt-free battery: it couldn’t even build the intended quantities of e-cars because there aren’t enough raw materials. But that also means that the available resources will be scraped out of the earth without regard for people or ecosystems. We can be sure of that.
Rare metals and minerals are also needed, consumed, mined, processed, shipped, etc. for what is called “sustainable” energy production. This applies to the wind turbine as well as the tidal power plant. All efficient electric motors need these metals and minerals. They come mainly from China and Africa and are mined and processed there under the same bad conditions as in South America.
The resource consumption, the social exploitation conditions and the ecological damage are enormous. In addition, most batteries are ready for the scrap heap after a few years. As scrap-worthy as the ideological idea of progress, which is linked to expansion and creation of surplus value – and not to social and solidarity conditions for all people.
The patriarch and his (nightmarish)dream
Elon Musk, owner and patriarch of Tesla, is for us only a representative of a caste of men who are united in their aggressive capitalist-technological will to modernize and their delusion of world domination. As egomaniacs, they see themselves as the center of a world they believe they own. They are characterized by extreme irresponsibility and antisocial behavior.
But Elon Musk is also the richest person in the world and the founder of many companies, the prototype of the economic patriarch. In his companies, everything is strictly prescribed. Anyone who doesn’t work efficiently is fired. Musk believes in limitless technical-capitalist progress – he also believes that we are very likely living in a simulation. Someone like that could not care less how many corpses he walks over. It’s not for nothing that he plans the colonization of Mars. That is only logical, if life on the earth will become the hell for most people, if it goes on as before. And he will know it.
It is well known that his company, SpaceX, is the world’s leading commercial provider of rocket flights. His SpaceX Dragon spacecraft powers the International Space Station (ISS), and another spacecraft called Crew-Dragon takes people there, too. Musk is currently working with “success” to make space flight the tourist norm for the rich. He is putting the money he makes from the supposedly clean electric cars into expanding his fleet of rockets. Thus, every purchase of an electric car from Tesla is nothing more than a contribution to the further ecological destruction of the biosphere – there is probably no need to say anything about the ecological balance of rockets. As a symbol of his potency, years ago he had a Tesla convertible, complete with a mannequin in a spaceman’s outfit at the wheel, launched into space on one of his rockets. Since then, the thing has been circling the earth, empty of meaning.
The fairy tale of the ecologically and politically correct big investor is a neoliberal lie spread by those who want to believe it. Tesla builds mainly top-of-the-line models and SUVs; now also a passenger car that can go over 300 km/h. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, under the control of the crown prince, holds Tesla shares worth up to $3 billion. The dictator is building and making money in Brandenburg.
Musk is also a patriarchal visionary. He wants to network the human brain with machines and founded the company Neuralink for this purpose in 2016. Elon Musk’s earthly dream is automated driving based on artificial intelligence. Many functions in Tesla cars are already controlled by app. The new models film the interior of the car non-stop and also the external environment. This data is sent directly to the Tesla cloud. Anyone who buys a Tesla makes themselves part of a dystopian surveillance apparatus. In 2020, Tesla received the Big Brother Award, which is given for particularly drastic technical control. The reason given was that data is permanently evaluated and stored. It was said that Tesla cars are “surveillance systems on four wheels.”
This resource-wasting surveillance mobility is supposed to secure the future of individual transportation and integrate it into the social context of exploitation and surveillance. This has also been the case in the car industry so far: assembly line work was enforced by Ford on the automobile so that it could be produced more cost-efficiently. But above all, to isolate the workers through the fragmentation of the work steps and to undermine their unionization. One only has to read what Mr. Ford wrote about this. Just as seriously, we see how Musk wants to shape the world. He unabashedly dreams the patriarchal dream of domination over earth and space. With such men enough experiences were made in the last 5000 years. Let’s make sure that time has run out for him and his kind.
Grünheide
Grünheide is to become Elon Musk’s second large factory producing electric cars. He calls it the “Giga-factory” for a reason. Its dimensions are monstrous, like those of the other giga-factories. The first one builds batteries in Nevada (USA). In order for it to be built, laws were changed at Musk’s request and 1.3 billion in taxes were waived. Giga-factory 2 builds photovoltaic systems. Giga-factory 3, Shanghai (China), builds cars. Number 4 in Grünheide will be the same. Starting in the summer of 2021, around 12,000 workers will build 500,000 cars per year there. Later, 40,000 people are to build 2 million cars per year there. That would be about 5500 cars per day.
Land prices in the area are already rising. The gentrification known from Berlin will take hold of the area around Erkner with an expected 35,000 newcomers. This will be at the expense of financially weak households and will lead to major displacement of the population from the region. The uncertainty and anger is correspondingly great.
Tesla is also a disaster on the ground. In addition to the clearing of forest land for the construction of the factory and the massive increase in local and interregional traffic, the high water consumption will be the most ecologically serious consequence for the region. The board of the Strausberg-Erkner water board even warned of drinking water shortages. For the initial operation, Tesla predicted the consumption of 3.3 million m³ of water per year. Only after heavy criticism did Tesla change its estimate to 1.4 million m³ for the beginning. Later, it will be 2.15 million m³ of drinking water. In the long term, there is already talk of more than 15 million m³ of water required per year. According to ecologists, this will have a negative impact on the water balance of the region and the nearby landscape and nature conservation areas. From 2022, with the estimated water consumption of the factory, there will no longer be sufficient water pumping reserves to develop the region. In addition, pumping large amounts of water exacerbates the problem of falling groundwater levels, which is a consequence of the climate disaster. None of this concerns the head of the Potsdam State Environmental Office. Hearings of Tesla opponents leave him cold and he approves one environmental mess after the next. Now even undeveloped drinking water reservoirs are to be exploited.
In Brandenburg’s politics, Daimler’s investment of 50 million euros for the production of E-Sprinters in Ludwigsfelde celebrates the region as a “mobility location”.
And Tesla brazenly advertises that it is the “most advanced factory in the world.” But Tesla has so far used technology in its factories (e.g., in the paint shop) that is older and more regressive in terms of environmental protection than that used by conventional carmakers in Europe. Water consumption and emissions are significantly higher. It’s like building a chemical plant in a drinking water protection area.
Tesla’s payment record is poor, despite favoritism from local licensing authorities. One can just afford it. Tesla did not pay the water bill for the construction site. Only when the water was turned off in October 2020 did the money come. People are used to laws being changed and structures being adapted for them. The Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences is setting up an “electromobility” course of study so that the necessary next generation of engineers can also be bred, the nearby highway is being renovated especially for factory operations, and the L38 is being expanded.
This is the continued normality of the destructive industrialization of the 19th century, which is now riding the wave of green capitalism into the 21st century. In which, without regard for people and natural resources, vast landscapes, almost the entire continent, almost the entire world, are being subordinated to industrial, marketized production.
Consumption and individual traffic – or: another world
For what is motorized individual transport, raised to a fetish, used? To get people to their jobs in a totally flexible and totally monitored way, to let them consume all the time, to be able to transport people as fast as possible – so that they work more and consume more.
Is an electric SUV an improvement for anything?
In order to be able to lead a life with which we do not destroy vital foundations of the earth, electric mobility is not needed. What is needed is less mobility overall, less individual transportation, and above all less consumption, the benefits of which and the associated promises of happiness are hammered into us every day. We need free public transportation. We need progress in social coexistence, a future without exploitation of our labor. Only the maintenance of colonial relations of exploitation makes it possible to produce electric motors that make people here believe that the cars are ecologically clean.
And asked about the social aspects: do the wealthy Tesla buyers with eco-conscience want the mines for their “eco” car next to their “cottage garden”? Do they want to see the power plants that supply them with electricity from their condo roof terrace? Do they want to see the huts of the maltreated workers next to the eco-kindergarten where they send their children?
No. These people and their working conditions should stay outside the EU. They don’t want to see the misery. Because they probably simply don’t care that others have to pay the blood toll for their “privileges”. There is no lack of knowledge about the global context. One can decide which side one is on. One can buy an SUV or resist. We recommend the latter – without getting caught, of course.
There is enough experience with the promises of capitalist-technological progress. 200 years ago, there were hardly any forests left in Central Europe because they were consumed for mining, industry, warships, heating and building. The clearings were replaced by the industrial extraction of coal. We all know what the subsequent burning of coal has done.
We know that the digitization of the world has led, and will continue to lead, primarily to new forms of domination. Tesla will always know who else is in the car, what is being said, and where the journey is going. The data does not belong to us, it is sold and forms another basis for the possibilities of totalitarian surveillance.
Climate catastrophe and the sense of revolutionary sabotage actions
Among other things, the unbroken belief and adherence of all prior market-dominated social forms to technical progress has undoubtedly caused the climate catastrophe that can no longer be prevented. Sabotage cannot replace great social struggles, but it can support them or set courageous accents to force space for reflection and perspectives.
Why then do we still engage in sabotage actions if we believe that climate destruction can no longer be stopped? Because we want to minimize the extent of the coming catastrophes. Because protest and resistance against the destruction of the climate through profit-oriented exploitation of the earth’s resources can have as its goal a revolutionary future outlook. Because with the destruction of expansive free-market economic policies, there is a chance to establish a fundamental solidarity-based and social way of life that will show us paths to a different society. When the devastation of ecosystems is well advanced, a new society can better deal with the consequences of these legacies when the relations of domination are fundamentally destroyed. It is only in resisting the existing destructive relations that the possibilities of change become apparent.
The rich men who drive these processes of ecological devastation are also only results of social processes, and thus to a certain extent interchangeable, but it is precisely these men, not by chance, who represent a politics of modernization through destruction. Let us destroy everything that is called Tesla!
People all over the world are fighting against their destructive belief in progress. For us, many of these struggles belong together. They are united by the resistance against an aggressive push for modernization. When in Argentina indigenous women shout that one should stop conquering their bodies and their lands, then we also place ourselves with this action at the side of these struggles.
The struggles in the Hambacher Forest, in the Dannenröder Forest and other forests of resistance were and are points of hope for us, as well as the radical sabotage actions of others in the coal mines, who no longer fall for the lies of the proclaimers of progress.
By the way, the insanity of individual transport and electromobility can easily be further attacked: in September, the International Motor Show (IAA) will take place in Munich. We hope that there will be enough resistance locally, decentrally and also subversively on the power grid to make this a fiasco.
Volcano Group: Against the Progress of Destruction
