Germany’s farmers’ protests: the power of fear (of change).

(Foto by TM)

Dear friends,
you may have heard that Germany is being shaken not only by new strikes in the rail sector, but also and primarily by massively powerful farmers' protests. Many progressives are now asking, whether these are a new type of “yellow vest”-protests, whether we on the left can hope for new alliances with socio-ecologically progressive small farmers, whether we can somehow draw on their massive societal legitimacy to reenergise the climate movement, which has been hemorrhaging precisely that legitimacy.

In order to answer these questions, I spent some time with the farmers' protests, particularly one demonstration by its more radical wing in Berlin this monday, and I am sorry to report: nope, dear comrades, these farmers won't be our allies. They are, in fact, the opening move in the right-wing assault on normality, because the emotional affect that they articulate is the one powering the right wing offensive across the rich world: “Fuck off with your rules and regulations, we don't want anything to change, no matter what the reality.”

Blocking power

The first thing that impresses when you take a look at the farmers' protest is the amazing amount of tactical, of blockading power they bring to the streets: if only 500-1000 of them bring their own vehicles to a protest, it looks more like a military parade in Moscow on the 1st of May than any regular protest in Berlin.

Basically, the radical farmers are saying to the government: "we'll carry on until all the cutbacks of subsidies that benefit us are off the table". Meanwhile, our current governing coalition, Die Ampel, a lame duck incapable of actual governing, says 'we've offered you some concessions, now take it or leave it', a position that on the one hand seems unlikely to stick, but on the other hand, let's take their word for it for the time being because these Ampel-compromises are now so difficult to negotiate that it is just as unlikely that the negotiations will be reopened.

In other words: a showdown is coming, and the farmers are strong: "In Saxony & Mecklenburg Vorpommern, farmers blocked motorway access roads almost across the board (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)." Seriously: what a blatant disruptive potential they have... "Cities like Cottbus or Brandenburg/Havel were essentially cut off from the outside world.”

And although the farmers' protests are currently popular, many are wondering: are they going to lose much of the sympathy they have had so far if they continue to escalate their protests and blockades? My answer: no, for the time being they won't, no matter how much they disrupt everyday life.

"But why”, you might ask, “wasn't it the same with Just Stop Oil et al: the more disruption, the more pushback?" Sure, but it's not about what the protests do, it's about what they articulate. It's not about this or that blockade of a one highway or another, it's about the "affect", the collective emotional state that is articulated by a practice or an actor, that gets taken up and politicised.

Affects as a political forces of production

This affect can be thought of as a political force of production (politische Produktivkraft). Something that drives political and social processes, and is shaped by political actors and steered in certain directions. Just Stop Oil and Letzte Generation articulated the "better angels" of our externalisation-and-sublimation-societies, the good conscience, and for that, they are hated and reviled. The farmers' protests tend to articulate the "id" of society: not only the asshole part (the one that wants more for himself and his own), but also the childish, defiant part that wants to hide from change, who believes that if the light green Ampel government were gone, there'd be no climate codswallop either.

This total rejection of any change, as a typical reaction of a repressing (verdränging) subject to the strengthening of that which is to be repressed, is currently one of the strongest political forces of production in the country - it drives the AfD. It opens up space in the party system for Lady Voldemort's Death Eater squad (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) and fever dreams of a Werteunion-party. It means that the Ampel is now 100% incapable of governing and transforming. And it completely neutralises the climate movement.

Do not disturb!

This affect is not only dominant among many (25-30% fascists + arseholes), it also exists among most of us who are not so right-wing. And precisely because it may not be dominant everywhere, but exists everywhere, protests that articulate it will remain legitimate. This is because the disruptive peasant protests articulate the desire not to be disrupted, and as such the disruption cannot become the causal mechanism that can trigger the delegitimisation of the protests. In fact, the opposite is true:

"Those who don't want to be disturbed will support the protests of those who disturb in order to stop being disturbed."

The farmers' protests articulate the desire of many to juxtapose oneself to the changing times like a defiant child and to say: "Fuck you changes and transformations, I don't give a fuck, I don't WANT to give a fuck!" This means that the force that drives and legitimises the peasant protests is a kind of perpetuum mobile, because it arises from the increasing friction between the reality of change and the growing desire for everything to remain the same.

The right wing engine that could

This affect as a driving force of the current societal shift to the right has been present through its history since, let's say, 2015/16 - when Pegida emerged & said: "too many foreigners are changing the country too much" - through Corona ("too many interventions..."), to the current farmers' protests. It also lies in the concept of freedom, which is used in a similar way at all these protests, and which Jan Skudlarek has analysed best: it is about defending the freedoms of the already privileged against those who restrict the privileges of others for their freedom.

When I was at the demo in Berlin yesterday, I was fascinated by how simple and direct the main speakers' demands were: simply abolish all regulations, all restrictions, all rules that would limit the absolute freedom of landowners.

Why? Because: the farmer (in this case: the white, male owner) knows best. Always.

Fertilisers? Away with all restrictions.

Animal welfare? Only the farmer can judge that, what do the eggheads in Brussels know about it?

Climate and environment stuff: DON'T GET ME STARTED!!!

The battle of normalities

So the farmers' protests are less about economic issues in the narrower sense, and more about whose "normality" is right: that of the already privileged, who have had to take such a back seat in the past 50 years of left-green hegemony? Or is it the transvegan, homoclimacommunist, transgender, soya-milky new normality of the new world order, of Bill Gates and George Soros, the EU Commission and the climate prophetess Greta, the new normality of climate collapse, biodiversity crisis and peak everything?

Since material reality will increasingly adapt to the latter, social reality will increasingly close itself off against these processes of change, and every time physics says: "this is the way it should go", it will say: we are going the other way. This is why, in my opinion, the farmers' protests have an almost inexhaustible potential to gain legitimacy on the streets (add to which the fact that, given that it's the deep of winter, they have no work to do on their farms).

We must prepare ourselves for the kind and intensity of disruption that would have suited the climate movement well, but which we would never have been capable of. We will see: nothing is as strong as the desire of the privileged to defend their privileges.

So much on that for today. Yours in solidarity,

Tadzio