Le blog de Berliner Gazette

As capital embarks on a new cycle of creative destruction in the face of “our common enemy” (the climate crisis), the time has come for new internationalist movements to arise, argues scholar-activist Boris Kagarlitsky in his contribution to BG’s “Allied Grounds” text series.

As global economic-ecological crises aggravate, the spread of racist nationalism accelerates. The reinforced divisions of the working class into white and non-white workers pose a great challenge to all of us, as scholar-activist Harsha Walia argues in her contribution to the BG’s “Allied Grounds” text series.

The means of production have become the means of climate production, so how can we – all kinds of exploited workers around the world – seize these very means and address both the eco-social and decolonial question of the climate crisis? “Allied Grounds,” the Berliner Gazette project 2023, will explore this bundle of issues, as Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki explain.

The tourism industry contributes a higher share to GDP in Croatia than in any other country of the EU. Here, the social and political conflicts that arise in the age of environmentalism unfold as if under a burning glass, and art can be a tool for investigation and mediation, argue Manca Bajec and Robertina Šebjanić in their contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

Indigenous perspectives from India and South Asia are missing from the discourses that influence economic, environmental, social, and political decision-making at COPs and UN meetings, as well as in government policy, but this must change, Shrishtee Bajpai argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

The mineral found in Serbia’s Jadar region is key to electric car batteries. The advocates of green capitalism, however, don’t have an easy time of it: they’re confronted by local farmers who claim they don’t need a green transition because they’re already green. After all, they say, the future is agriculture, as Mihajlo Vujasin notes in his contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism.”

The imperial strategy of territorial expansion and colonization of resources advanced by the Putin regime will accelerate the decline of Russia because behind its facade lie a large number of unknown, unexamined, and unaddressed systemic problems, Elena Batunova argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism,” exploring the case of the former mining town of Novoshakhtinsk.

Eco-initiatives have proliferated in former Yugoslavia, forming the most vibrant part of societies and thus giving hope after years of despair. In Slovenia the movement “Za pitno vodo” (For Drinking Water) can serve as a starting point for the politicization of this moment, Gal Kirn and Karla Tepež argue in their contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism”.

Time and again, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is being called a “fossil war.” But what does that actually mean? Oxana Timofeeva shows in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism” how the extractivist ecosystem of the oil industry is not only being maintained during the war, but also literally fuels it.