Arson attack on power supply of Tesla factory in Berlin-Brandenburg.

Against the progress of destruction - let’s put our sabotage

Climate strike for a different world!

“(…) we behold and hear a world where social life is sick, fragmented into millions of people, strangers to each other, spasmodically striving for individual survival, but united under the oppression of a system that is willing to do anything to quench its thirst for profit, even though it is clear that this path runs counter to the existence of planet Earth. (…) The aberration of the system and its stupid defence of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ is shattered by a criminal reality: femicides. The murder of women has neither a colour nor a nationality, it is worldwide. (…) And it seems as if ‘civilisation’ is saying 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 centres, your appliance shops - television channel included - 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 must 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’ heralds the next and makes us carelessly forget that it is caused by the action of a human system. (…) Yes, the roads must be reclaimed, but to do battle. Because as we said earlier, life, the struggle for life is not an individual matter, but a collective one. It is now becoming apparent that it is not a matter of nationalities either, but encompasses the whole world."

From a greeting by Zapatista indigenous peoples in Latin America to us in the Global North We successfully cut the power supply to the construction site of the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide by fire on the night of 25-26 May 2021. To do this, we set fire to the power supply via six high-voltage cables (110,000 volts) within a construction fence corridor 250 metres from the Tesla factory in the immediate vicinity of the A10 motorway at the level of the Freienbrink exit. Since an interruption of the cable harnesses, which were temporarily laid above ground exclusively for the factory, cannot be carried out in its effect isolated 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 Tesla construction site, to make work at the site difficult for one day, to interrupt the construction of the manufacturing facilities. Since the local population will not be able to stop the construction so easily due to the imbalance of power (capital, politics and authorities versus the interests of residents, climate protectors and ecologists), we hereby contribute our sabotage in solidarity. Should our action be successful, the richest man in the world will financially compensate for the interruption of the construction work - but the political damage to him 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 equally grandiose is the actor: Elon Musk. His patriarchal fantasies of omnipotence are supposed to save the world? We could laugh about this if it wasn’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 is haunting Brandenburg. There, he imposes building codes like a feudal lord and ignores, for example, all objections against the threatening water shortage in the region. He wants to strategically position his factory close to the Polish labourers on the one hand, and on the other hand close to Berlin, which may soon be governed by the Green Party, and its local customers. Politicians, the municipality and individual press organs, who are grovelling before Musk because of new jobs and the hoped-for economic regional benefits, 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 with our 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 fight the " Green Deal". In support of social struggles worldwide. For ecological reasons. For anti-colonial reasons. For feminist reasons. For reasons of class struggle. Ultimately for revolutionary and anti-supremacist reasons.

Propagandist lies as a sales strategy while soothing the conscience.

Ecological illusion here, colonial reality elsewhere.

The Green Deal is based on theft, exploitation and pillaging of natural resources The 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 further perpetuates 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 a car with a combustion engine to a smart electric car will not have a single positive effect globally. The air will be better where electric cars are driven, but non-renewable raw materials will be consumed in huge quantities to produce this renewable energy and to build the cars. Copper is the main raw material needed to build the new power lines, charging stations and electric motors. Much of it comes from South America. People there work hard for little money to get the metal out of the ground. Landscapes are destroyed. Large amounts of electricity are used to operate the mines and process the copper. Almost everywhere, the power plants are powered by coal, which is transported from China across the Pacific by ships. The ships are powered by dirty marine diesel. In Chile, for example, people are getting sick in large numbers from the exhaust fumes of the coal-fired power plants, ecosystems are degrading. 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 do-gooders? How small can the " ecological fingerprint" of a dirty heavy industry producing clean cars be?

A lot of lithium is needed to build car batteries. In the next 9 years, the amount of lithium used is expected to increase by a factor of 20 to 30. This means a corresponding increase in energy consumption for extraction, transport and processing. In the extraction areas, displacement and land theft from the indigenous population are commonplace, for example in Argentina. There, the land is sacrificed to the ecological conscience of those who want to continue to live as expansively as before; there, livelihoods are destroyed so that financially well-padded parents can continue to take their children to kindergarten or public school in their SUVs with a clean eco-conscience.

No battery currently installed in electric cars works without cobalt either. But cobalt is rare. To illustrate: If Audi were to build one of its production models, the A4, strictly as an electric car, 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 tonnes of cobalt for e-car production. World production is currently 123,000 tonnes. That doesn’t include Tesla or any other car company. The battery of a Tesla Roadster alone consists of 6831 cells. There is a reason that Tesla is working on the cobalt-free battery: Not enough raw materials are available to build the planned quantities of e-cars. But that also means that the available resources will be scraped out of the earth without regard for people and ecosystems. We can be sure of that. Rare metals and earths 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 earths. They come mainly from China and Africa and are mined and processed there under the same appalling conditions as in South America.

The consumption of resources, the social conditions of exploitation and the ecological damage are enormous. In addition, most rechargeable batteries are ready for the scrap heap after a few years. Just as scrappy as the ideological idea of progress, which is linked to expansion and the exploitation of surplus value - and not to social conditions and solidarity for all people.

The patriarch and his nightmare dream

Elon Musk, owner and patriarch of Tesla, is for us only a single representative of a caste of men who are united in their aggressive capitalist-technological will to modernise and their delusion of world domination. As egomaniacs, they see themselves as the centre of a world they believe to own. They are characterised by extreme irresponsibility and anti-social activity.

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