This conversation took place in the wake of the Non-Kongress 2024 in Berlin, where one of the pressing questions was the task of understanding the ongoing transformation of the ecological matrix in the general process of world objectification. The German collective Zeit der Ökologie earlier this year drafted an insightful mapping essay “Das neue Akkumulationsregime” of some of the elementary aspects of this new form of Green totalitarianism and its specific forms of social machination in the aftermath of the conditions of modern politics. Das neue Akkumulationsregime is an invitation for thought within the suspended time of extraction and total valorization; but, above all, it is also a pathway for us to construct strong and dense descriptions of the contemporary collapse of economic stagnation. One cannot emphasize it enough: the effective composition of temporal-historical organization of life entails the extraction of spatial conditions into the regime of total ecology. Hence, any new thinking of separation – from politics, from the modern subject, and from fictitious capital – departs from the optimizing processes of submission into a well functioning and energetic humanity. The conversation that follows is a minor contribution to the aforementioned task. One can only hope for its forthcoming proliferation.

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Gerardo Muñoz (GM): Let me first thank you for taking the time for this conversation, which for me is a continuation of recent exchanges, and this conversion is just a modest contribution to the intensity of the different exchanges that have taken place. Now, in the essay “Das neue Akkumulationsregime” there is a notion deployed – that of “Green totalitarianism” – which functions, as I read it, as both a normative descriptive framework as well as a sort of phenomenological reduction about the current direction in which the techno-administrative powers are moving in the wake of the exhaustion of high-modern liberal politics (constituent power, state legitimacy, autonomy of civil society, formal subsumption, etc). This points to the heart of the intervention of Zeit der Ökologie in terms of the ecological transformation at a planetary scale towards the maintenance of regulated catastrophism. To start us off I wonder if you could offer some coordinates about what “Green totalitarianism” means to you at the specific moment of our conjuncture.

Zeit der Ökologie (ZÖ): The old ideas of legitimizing capitalism have definitely exhausted themselves. A better future through progress, the pursuit of happiness for everyone – hardly anyone still believes in these phrases unbroken. The question is whether capitalism today is dependent on political legitimization, an idea of freedom through liberalism or social democracy, or whether – as Massimo Recalcati and Tove Soiland describe with the concept of “post-ideological totalitarianism” – it no longer needs it. In this “post-ideological totalitarianism”, there is no longer any notion of transcendence; capitalism appears as an inescapable and eternal reality, even if no one believes in it anymore. What remains is the administration of constantly threatened survival, the technocratic solution of problems by experts. Ecology can be linked to post-ideological totalitarianism because it is not an independent political idea that is necessarily tied to green movements and parties, but an empty vessel that is also addressed by liberal, conservative and social democratic forces. In a way, ecology is a form of organizing life and survival, a certain way of understanding and shaping life. This seems to fit very well with the current state of capitalism and thus the world. Anyone can exploit ecology, but no one can escape it. And at the same time, it works particularly well as the ultimate constraint. Everyone knows that the climate catastrophe is here, and there seems to be no alternative to fighting it in every area of life. Anyone who says otherwise is abandoning rational discourse and social consensus. This obviously has a very totalizing effect. It is of course fatal that the climate movement and the left reproduce these ideas to a certain extent. Think of the mantra “listen to the science”, as if science could be neutral within capitalist conditions. As if there were no continuity from the toxic association of science with ideas of progress, modernization, a supposed common good and a totalizing society. Perhaps the reconstruction of this continuity from the old critique of science of the 20th century can help us to understand where a green, technocratic totalitarianism could develop. The biopolitical grasp on our bodies and the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, the militaristic mobilization of society during the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the exclusion of all dissident voices, the demand for obedience, submission and denunciation through the abuse of the concept of solidarity, all this is a bitter foretaste. And it is no coincidence that, in Germany at least, the green milieus in particular have excelled in all this.

GM: The point of departure in ecological catastrophism, it seems to me after reading your analysis, is to bring to bear the transformation of the regime of accumulation in times of economic stagnation and the so-called crisis of productivity. If so, then the accumulation regime is not just limited to the classic totalizing elaboration of political economy, but also to the administration of the ever expanding polycrises that are separated from each other but productively intertwined through a series of apparatuses, functions, and mechanisms of cybernetic optimization proper to the post-state framework. Is the deployment of ecological absorption working as a mode of stabilization of these different zones of articulation within the fluid economy of contemporary domination?

ZÖ:We describe the ecological accumulation regime at the moment of its emergence and simply do not know whether it will prevail politically and economically. One point worth considering is that nowhere in sight is an absorption of the surplus population by ecological modernization that comes close to earlier capitalist projects of economic integration. They are most likely to be drawn into the digital economy, but it is not their physical workforce that is exploited, but their soul, their relationships, emotions and creativity. And unpaid at that. This means that, as Joshua Clover says, coloniality, the colonizing oppression through police and camp policies, tends to continue to dominate over the mode of absorption. And this produces the destabilizing potential of riots and uprisings against these policies. Capital is still bound by limits set by economic laws, nature and the resistance of our bodies and souls. That is why we only speak of stability in instability.

It is crucial that there is a serious attempt to question, expand and overstep these limits. Awareness of the limits to growth is being mobilized, but not to stop growth, but to shift the limits, because capital cannot accept stagnation or regression, it needs mobilization, extension, expansion. Ecological catastrophism legitimizes the destruction of nature without boundaries. We are told that we have to accept lithium mines because we need electric cars, that we have to push ahead with the digitalization of our entire lives because it saves paper and plastic cards. Anyone who objects to the earth and oceans being paved over with wind turbines and solar panels is presented as being partly responsible for the climate catastrophe. Ecology thus takes on the function of legitimizing a total disinhibition and removal of limits.

However, it is important to note that the impending end of the world proclaimed by catastrophism has nothing to do with the old religious idea of an apocalypse, which was about revelation, the radical criticism of the existing, the interruption, the suspension of time. The apocalypse we are talking about today is a vision from Hollywood, a backdrop that interrupts nothing, but is intended to extend the present into infinity. The immediacy of the catastrophe that is conveyed to us requires an immediate, system-immanent, technological solution to every problem. This harbors both economic potential and the possibility of subjugating subjects to the logic of the technological rationality of ecological catastrophism.

GM: Looking back now over the last five or ten year sequence of struggles and contestation, it does seem like movements and non-movements often reach a deadend, or are repeatedly faced with the “day after” question that brings about the translation of political representation and slowing temporality of institutional mediations. For instance, this has been the story of the hegemony-orientated Left experiences of the last twenty years in Latin America and Spain, which have resulted in catastrophic burn out or simply a management of a given pattern of accumulation thanks to the global boom of commodities (this is the position once defended by former Bolivian Vice-President Álvaro García Linera in his eye-opening Geopolítica de la Amazonía). And so, my question is the following: in a moment of the closure of this epochal sequence, is something like a straightforward or direct “ecological resistance” something viable, or rather, is this precisely the moment to stop, engage in thought and reflexive innovation, and come up with flourishing new paths?

ZÖ:I am not sure whether we are confronted with the closure of an epochal sequence or with an asynchronicity that produces contradictions from which no one has yet been able to break out. In the “new type of insurrection” that the Colectivo Situaciones analyzed in Argentina in 2001, the non-movements' criticism of political representation was already present at a time when Chavismo was just beginning and Morales was not yet in power. At the same time, it also contained the currents that demanded its further development in the direction of constituent power and a constituent assembly. This same “evolution” buried the uprising in Chile almost 20 years later, at a time when both the Bolivarian Revolution and the European municipalism that followed the “movement of the squares” were disenchanted. However, capitalist conditions will continue to constantly produce new uprisings and revolts, and they too will be faced with the question of the day after. Overthrow the government and wait for the next one? Militarize the uprising into a civil war with no end in sight? The constituent option will remain a false and attractive alternative at least for a while. The essay “The Kazakh Insurrection” expressed the hope that a regional whirlpool of uprisings could take certain hegemonic state actors out of the game and make it possible “to think through a sequence in which the unraveling of the geopolitical order may be possible, which might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for social revolution today.” If an uprising really only had to do with one’s own internal limits and not with external pressure, would a different ending be imaginable anywhere in the world? And would this other ending have the same global resonance as the revolts of recent years?

What is special is that we owe these strategic reflections to insurrections that in almost all cases have not been strategically planned. So yes, there is a simple and direct resistance, not least against ecological destruction and capitalist extractivism, whether in the territories of the Mapuche or the Wet'suwet'en nation, in Finland or Serbia. It is always right to engage in this direct resistance, if only to learn from its limitations and defeats. But what if this resistance is not right around the corner, in terms of time or place? We can bring oil where there is fire, but how can we light a fire? It was practical cluelessness that set us on the path of theory work. We have learned a lot, especially through our international friends and the treasures of their thoughts and experiences. We prefer to retreat into reflection rather than self-centered activism and practice for practice's sake. Perhaps this state will last for a long time, but it is precisely then that the moments of breaking out into resistance are all the more important, so that we can learn from new experiences and not constantly circle around the same thoughts.

GM: I am aware that “Das neue Akkumulationsregime” is not necessarily bounded by an exclusive regional inscription, and it is up for many to fill in the gaps and introduce nuances that are emerging in other contexts. However, and having said this, I wonder if you could speak to the current moment in Germany and Central Europe in relation to the framework of the new accumulation regime, the intensification of its geopolitical Atlantic nexus, and what has been called the “war regime” now opened in different fronts in the European zone. Almost exactly a century ago, the German metaphysical philosopher Erich Unger proposed an exodus from the politics of catastrophe – of course, the paradox is that today, as James Boggs would say, it has “nowhere to go”. How do you view this current and complex moment?

ZÖ:First of all, I would like to say that we have indeed developed our concept in the context of our own regional experiences, even if we believe that it is related to a tendency that is globally effective. In this respect, we hope for additions, criticism and contradiction from other regional contexts. For Germany and, to some extent, other European countries, we can state with regard to the war that the strength of the economy was based on the energy-intensive industry's access to cheap gas and oil from Russia. After the outbreak of the war, this connection was largely, although not completely, cut and a feverish search began for all kinds of alternatives, from liquid gas supplies from the USA to long-term projects such as an agreement on hydrogen production in Namibia, a former German colony. There are also very concrete post-war plans for European cooperation to promote renewable energies in Ukraine. All of this was organized by Robert Habeck, Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs, Energy and Climate Protection. The Green Party, of which he is chairman, is radically transatlantic in its orientation. It is predictable that the scenario will be repeated in the conflict over Taiwan. This is about the other side of the ecological accumulation regime, namely its digital organization, which requires semiconductors and raw materials. Here, too, there is a contradiction between the transatlantic orientation of politics and the multipolar ties of German industry, which is dependent not only on the USA but also on China. It seems, however, that the war regime will ultimately prevail and force an adjustment of the economy, which may go hand in hand with ecological modernization, albeit at a high price.

For the climate movement and large sections of the left in Germany, however, these connections play no role. They see China and, above all, Russia as fossil regimes that stand in the way of combating climate change. The Russian attack on Ukraine appears to be an opportunity to free ourselves from fossil fuel dependencies. They fail to see that it is precisely this freedom from dependency that is the goal of the strategic autonomy propagated by the military and economic policymakers of Germany, the EU and the USA. Ultimately, it is about the freedom to wage war. Anti-militarism has almost disappeared from the left as well; a friend-foe logic is spreading throughout society, a denunciation of all those who do not go along with militarization. For us, this has actually opened up the prospect of an exodus in order to desert these conditions, to escape the forced choice for an empire, to have nothing to do with capitalist war and capitalist peace, which only prepares the next war. We have no place to head for, but a wandering without a destination in mind. But isn't that what the exodus has always been about?

GM: Finally, towards the end of “Das neue Akkumulationsregime”, it is stated that there is something that escapes domination. In fact, you talk about a “human core…an urge for freedom, as well as soul, perception and life forms” that are punctuating the fabric of total extraction of global empire. In other words, there is something like an irreducible existence that does not coincide with a political subject, which means that the renewal, open to our current discussions, has an important point of inflection here. Does this condition presuppose that we abandon the general horizon of politics in favor of the gathering of a sensibility and an ethical working through among “those that seek” (the Hölderlin echoes here are very much evident)?

ZÖ:Yes, if we understand the “horizon of politics” as a collective perspective based on a strategic plan carried out by a historical subject. None of this could seriously stand up today to the practical critique that the non-movements have made of these old concepts of the left in recent years. What we should not forget here is that some of these movements were sparked by questions of ruling politics, legislative proposals, constitutional issues or the style of government. What was decisive was that they then overcame this horizon through their practical interventions of attack and collective reproduction, through their discussions that raised the possibility of a completely different life and rejected any idea of political representation. This means, however, that we should not hastily reject any field in which processes of destitution and desertion could develop from the horizon of politics, not even politics itself.

We are rejecting the old orientations of class, historical subject, revolutionary party, without having a clear new idea of who we actually are. So perhaps this sentence by Hölderlin actually fits our situation quite well: “We are nothing; what we seek is everything.” But is this search always something active and perceptible? What about those who have silently turned away in disgust from these conditions and the hypocrisy of this world, who find no place in the digital sphere that is offered as their substitute? How can we develop a sensitivity that recognizes the difference between their silent desertion and an equally widespread self-centered indifference to the suffering of others? And how can we enter into a conversation with silence?