Ende Gelände Concepts

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm · 4 Jan 2021 · 156pp · 49,653 words

. Despondently, they realised that the action would not go ahead. In Berlin, where I write these words, the coalition at the centre of the movement, Ende Gelände, which had similarly grand plans for 2020, has had to call off its assemblies; the two-week-long camp in the centre of the city

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struggles against pipelines, the German movement reinvented the climate camp formula and brought it to a higher level of mass defiance: Ende Gelände, meaning roughly ‘here and no further’, was born. At Ende Gelände, activists pitch their tents around a central area of circus tents and kitchens. They undergo trainings in affinity groups, dress

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fuel can be dug up and burnt when the activists hold the premises. Arguably constituting the most advanced stage of the climate struggle in Europe, Ende Gelände spanned the cycles and grew year on year; in the summer of 2019, 6,000 people closed the largest point source of emissions in Germany

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, backed up by several thousands more in the camp and some 40,000 in a Fridays for Future demonstration. By that time, Ende Gelände had forced the issue of brown coal to the top of the agenda and prompted a national commission to set a date for phasing it

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out – the date eventually announced as 2038. That’s another two decades of churning out coal. Hence Ende Gelände promised to march on and swell further and spawn more copycats around Europe; in 2019, dozens of climate camps were organised from Poland to Portugal

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consensus’ every participant had to abide by solemnly pledged that ‘we will not damage machines or infrastructure’. A year later, the first Swedish imitation of Ende Gelände took place in Gothenburg against the construction of a gas terminal, one node in a fresh new infrastructure for fossil fuel combustion rolled out over

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means of ever bigger, bolder mass actions of precisely this kind cannot be called into question: this is the main way forward. Let a hundred Ende Gelände camps bloom and fossil capital might find itself under some real pressure. What can be questioned, however, is something else. Will absolute non-violence be

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the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk’, runs a slogan from Ende Gelände, but the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days of interrupted production per year. ‘If we can’t get a serious

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. Auto producers constantly roll out new models and spend lavish amounts advertising them. But the movement is on their track. In September 2019, activists from Ende Gelände and other German outfits mobilised 20,000 people in demonstrations and direct actions against the Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung, the world’s largest motor show, in

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to XR after the London ‘spring uprising’ in 2019, written by the Wretched of the Earth, a network of climate activists of colour, together with Ende Gelände, the Hambach forest occupation and a plethora of other allies, throwing oneself into the arms of the police is a sign of privilege. People from

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related – climate camps are planned long in advance, with fixed dates for erection and dismantling; neither spontaneous nor reactive, they feed into a plotted escalation. Ende Gelände has now raised the ante against German fossil capital for half a decade, while forming cadres that go home to other countries and organise their

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own camps, and so on. We have yet to see diminishing returns from activist investment; Ende Gelände has continued to draw in larger numbers and outmanoeuvre the police. But such success can be hard to replicate elsewhere. Fewer than the five to

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reaction to that episode (another young demonstrator was so enraptured that it stayed in his vision as he became one of the key organisers of Ende Gelände). ‘I was done with ecowarriors, tree huggers, and anarchists; I wanted nothing to do at all with the politics of our fallen world.’ And so

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it is happening, that too much damage has already been done already – as expressed in the very names of the groups: 350.org, Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände – and that no efforts should now be spared in preventing even more of it. The movement knows that it faces a giant salvaging operation: safeguarding

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only minor parts of societywide reorganisation. How could that happen? This cannot be known beforehand. It can be found out only through immersion in practice. Ende Gelände in 2016 targeted the mine and railway tracks around Schwarze Pumpe, ‘the black pump’, an enormous power plant in the eastern region of Lusatia running

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forces arrived and chased us away with their batons and spray. We returned to the encircling belt of blockades. The morning after, Vattenfall declared that Ende Gelände had enforced the suspension of all electricity production, something that had never before happened at a fossil-fuelled power plant in Europe. The corporation, media

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than a year later, the new Czech owners shelved their plans for expanding the mine serving Schwarze Pumpe and another pit, citing adverse political developments; Ende Gelände claimed partial victory.) Civil disobedience comes to an end ‘when things are destroyed’, one public broadcaster denounced the action. Gustav Fridolin branded it ‘illegal’. The

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incident of the stormed compound took on a life of its own, as a sign of the purportedly violent nature of Ende Gelände in eastern Germany. It brought home more absurdities of the situation: the breaking of fences could be officially framed as massiven kriminellen Gewalttaten, devastation, unimaginable

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more incensed about the incursion than the AfD. In the hours after it, a mob of far-right activists and locals assaulted several of the Ende Gelände blockades, shooting fire-crackers into them and chasing activists in cars. More violence of that kind should perhaps be anticipated, as the task of defending

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Sweden, one of them … Maria G. Francke, ‘En ny Greta är född’, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, sydsvenskan.se, 23 September 2019. p. 20. At Ende Gelände, activists pitch … Despite its weight, Ende Gelände has, at the moment of this writing, been conspicuous by its absence in anglophone scholarship on the movement. One exception is Leah Temper

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, ‘Radical Climate Politics: From Ogoniland to Ende Gelände’, in Ruth Kinna and Uri Gordon (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 97–106. p. 26. In May 2019, just

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