![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/6.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the flier.
\nIn the following narrative, a bus driver describes how the cuts that Elon Musk is carrying out in the federal government are affecting ordinary public transit workers.
\n\nThere is a poetic opposition between the figure of the anonymous bus driver and Elon Musk, the billionaire car mogul. The bus driver and the automobile profiteer represent different modes of transportation—public and private—that imply different models for society. On the one hand, a vision of collectivity emerging from common resources and public service; on the other, an unbridled profit motive justifying privatization, isolation, and immiseration. Everyone riding together—or the lone plutocrat speeding away from a betrayed community. Why else market the “Cybertruck” as bulletproof?
\n\nElon Musk made much of his fortune from taxpayer-funded subsidies; now he is trying to delete all of the functions of the government except the ones that benefit him personally. The irony of a man who made his fortune selling cars implying that impoverished bus drivers are parasites on the public should not be lost on anyone. As much as Elon Musk pretends to be an enemy of big government, billionaires like him need the state more than anyone else does. It is easy enough to imagine public transit without the state—all it would take would be to abolish the mechanisms (such as property rights) that impose artificial scarcity, so that those who enjoy doing things for others’ benefit could do so without fear of going hungry. But it is not possible to imagine Elon Musk without a government forcefully extracting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes with which to protect him from those he exploits and oppresses.
\n\nPeople around the country have begun expressing their displeasure against Elon Musk by demonstrating at Tesla dealerships. Another round of demonstrations is scheduled for March 1, this Saturday. Without further ado, the bus driver’s story.
\n\n Click on the image to download the flier.
\n“Did you see that Facebook post about the budget cuts?” my co-worker asks. “What the fuck, no,” I reply. She hands me her phone. I see a headline announcing that, due to the push to slash basic services coming from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, 20% of our funding for local public transportation is now threatened. Lawyers are fighting it out in the courts, but if these cuts go through, it will mean less service, possible layoffs, and lots of people not having access to a system that is one of the few lifelines for poor people in our area. People depend on these buses to get to their jobs, to medical appointments, to programs for special needs adults, to court dates.
\n\nI sit back down, staring out the window at the cold, grey parking lot. I am waiting for a member of the morning shift to come in with a bus so I can take it out. A few buses dot the bus yard. They’re sitting idle because the parts on order haven’t come in for months—even years, in some cases—and because the city refuses to hire enough mechanics to keep up with daily maintenance. This means that drivers on night shift, like me, sometimes have to wait hours for a bus to arrive. Our transit agency, which contracts out to a huge multi-national corporation, is already dramatically underfunded. The new cuts will only compound our existing problems.
\n\n“Fucking Musk, man,” I say with a sigh. Another co-worker on the night shift agrees with me. He’s in his mid-70s, but he’s still working full time because he recently burned through all his savings burying his parents. I launch into a long rant about how both Musk and Trump hate labor unions and workers and want to replace us all with artificial intelligence. A third co-worker, presumably a Trump supporter, grumbles about how “they” just want to blame the cuts threatening our jobs on the “administration.”
\n\nWho else would you blame it on?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/2.jpg\")
\nIt’s pitch-dark when I enter the trailer park, passing a metal gate, I drive slowly through the ever-growing rows of manufactured homes. Some of them have signs reading “For sale.”
\n\n“Lots of people moving out?” I ask my only passenger.
\n\n“Yeah, no one can afford to live here anymore,” she replies. As I turn the corner, she launches into a long tirade about the corporation who owns the trailer park and how they keep raising the cost of “space rent,” the monthly fee that mobile home owners pay to trailer park owners. “Every year the rent here goes up. New people move in from out of town and they can pay more, and that’s pushing us out,” she says, as I unhook her walker inside the cold, dark bus cab. “I don’t know why the landlords are so greedy. Do they just want everything?” I lower her and her walker down onto the pavement outside her trailer.
\n\nAs the electronic ramp whirls its gears, I turn to my left. In her front window, there is a strange collage of images of Donald Trump. It is faded and worn from the sun. I shake my head and chuckle, resisting the temptation to point out the obvious. How can you complain about a corporate landlord ruining your life, but place all of your hopes in another landlord who is trying to become a dictator?
\n\nPerhaps she senses my disdain. “Trump is gonna fix it, you’ll see. Prices are going to go down once he starts drilling.”
\n\nMy eyes narrow. “Biden was drilling more oil than any president before him,” I reply.
\n\n“He needs to get his head drilled,” she retorts, making me laugh. Then she launches into another rant about DEI and how it ruined the schools she apparently taught at before she retired. As she hobbles inside, I cast one more glance over my shoulder. Trump’s smiling face leers back at me, ominous. The machine moans as the wheelchair lift cycles back into place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/1.jpg\")
\nI meet all sorts of people like this at my job. One guy smells like piss so bad while I strap in his wheelchair that I have to turn my head so I don’t gag. The car in front of the house where I pick him up has a bumper sticker on it reading, “I Don’t Trust the Liberal Media.” I wonder if the conservative media is telling him his healthcare is about to be nuked from orbit.
\n\nAnother guy, as I load and unload his wheelchair, takes out his Trump hat, puts it on, and asks me what I think of it. I tell him Trump and Musk want to use the military to shoot protesters, destroy unions, and fire workers like me, so why would I give a fuck about them. He looks away, says, “Alright then,” and jets off on his electronic scooter. I wonder if he is looking forward to ICE deporting half of his neighbors.
\n\nOn election day, I lost it and got into a heated back and forth with a pro-Trump guy. He rested his case by proclaiming that we need to make it easier on rich people so that the wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. I want to grab these people and shake them.
\n\nTrump represents the triumph of the nihilism of our age. The foreclosure of the idea that the working-class can take and shape its own destiny. Instead, apparently, we should throw ourselves at the mercy of a reality TV star who shits in a gold toilet, eats breakfast with billionaire pedophiles, and has dinner with neo-Nazis between rounds of golf. In the absence of the kind of social movements that could connect people and enable them to grow and change, Trump has built a mass parasocial spectacle that makes these isolated people feel like they are part of something greater than themselves even as all of our lives become smaller and smaller, more and more impoverished and alienated.
\n\nThere’s an old saying that society get the villains it deserves. Perhaps our age is getting the fascists it deserves, too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/3.jpg\")
\nI shuffle into the union hall, past the placards reading “ON STRIKE” and faded signs several decades old. Almost fifteen years ago, during Occupy, I attended a meeting in this same room. I wonder what’s changed since then. I find a seat and one of our union shop stewards slides a packet across the table to me. I open it up and start paging through it, looking at the spreadsheets and graphs.
\n\nWe start to discuss the ins and outs of the proposed contract that our elected union representatives and corporate lawyers have been going over during recent meetings. One of the much-hated top corporate bosses was recently fired for corruption, much to the delight of the entire workforce. As one of my co-workers said, “Really tells you a lot about a place when motherfuckers are walking around singing, ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead!’ and morale has never been higher!”
\n\nWe go through the contract. Despite a few small improvements, things are mostly the same. “What about the pay?” I ask, fingers crossed. The shop steward cocks her head to the side and turns a page, pointing with her pen to a graph showing a dollar increase. She explains that the contract will be for five years, during which time we’ll only be getting a few cents more each year. “This is literally what I was making ten years ago,” I sigh, “and this contract will be valid for five years?”
\n\nI already can’t save money. Imagine what things will be like in five years.
\n\nShe shrugs. “We’re encouraging you to vote “Yes,”’ she says, and hands me a piece of paper on which to mark an “X” signifying yes or no.
\n\nIf enough workers vote the contract through, the company will ratify it and it will govern my life for the next five years—presuming that I don’t get downsized. Any strike or protest activity will be illegal, as per our “No Strike” agreement. If enough people vote no, it goes back to the union bargaining team, and they will continue to bargain for more changes in closed door meetings.
\n\nI head into another room, mark an X by “NO,” and drop the piece of paper into a wooden box. I wave to a few co-workers on my way out. As I leave, I pass a portrait of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union. You smug bastard, I say to myself. I remember his glasses and bald head on stage of the Republican National Convention last year, when he called Donald Trump a “Tough son of a bitch.” What a dipshit.
\n\nI used to have a poster in my room many years ago, proclaiming, “The past doesn’t pass.” Next to the slogan was a photo of striking Teamster bus drivers—bus drivers, just like me—beating police officers with baseball bats during the general strike of 1934 in Minneapolis. That was one of the decisive labor battles that forced the ruling class to accept the New Deal in order to cool down the class war that was brewing on the streets.
\n\nThe past doesn’t pass, but the future can leave you behind.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/02/23/4.jpg\")
\nAt home, I look over a letter announcing that people in my neighborhood shouldn’t drink the tap water because the levels of uranium in the river are too high. Sometimes I wonder what I would say to my children about this moment in history—if I could afford to have children. Probably the same things my parents say to me now: they’re sorry we are inheriting this world. Sorry they didn’t fix it. Sorry they didn’t build strong enough movements to turn the tide against these monsters.
\n\nAt work, as I drive, I begin to notice that there are fewer Trump flags and signs out. Resentment is rising. A joke by a cashier here about being replaced by AI, a comment there about Trump cutting programs. I walk into the break room and someone is shaking their head angrily while watching a video of Musk on their phone. They mutter something about tariffs and rising prices.
\n\nThe tension in the air is palpable. It is similar to how things felt at the start of the economic crisis in 2008, when many of the homes in my neighborhood were foreclosed on and many people lost their jobs. It also reminds me of the start of the pandemic—how at first, I thought it wouldn’t be so bad, only to watch in horror as our family members and friends succumbed to the virus.
\n\nIn 2008, many people thought that crowds would flood the streets immediately when the administration bailed out the banks while leaving the rest of us high and dry. That didn’t happen. It took years for resistance to grow. In Chicago, workers occupied their factory when they were terminated without pay. In Wisconsin, workers occupied the capitol building against government attacks on collective bargaining. In California, students occupied universities to protest budget cuts. The Occupy movement began in the fall of 2011 and rapidly built to massive occupations of city squares across the US, coordinated port shut downs, and a general strike in Oakland, California. With Joe Biden as vice president, the federal government helped to coordinate violent raids targeting the movement in order to break it apart.
\n\nIn 2020, on the other hand, things didn’t fester—they exploded like a bomb. Millions of people across the country mobilized in response to the pandemic, providing mutual aid in the face of government inaction and right-wing disinformation, and then hit the streets in the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nWho knows how things will evolve this time. It will probably be different from both of those scenarios, but it could be similar in some ways. What is clear is that things are not as people expected them to be. Many people on the left thought—or at least hoped—that Trump would govern the way he did the first time, constrained by mass protest, the courts, and his own party. Many who voted for him honestly did not expect him to follow through on many of the policies he explicitly promised to carry out. Those who were not paying attention are surprised that suddenly, jobs are disappearing and services are being cut while prices only continue to rise.
\n\nThe material conditions are forcing people to reckon with the fact that the state is attempting to reshape our lives for the sake of an authoritarian project. As we speak, thousands of people are flooding town halls across the United States, screaming at their so-called representatives about the plan to gut programs like Medicaid—only to hear the bureaucrats repeat a slew of MAGA talking points. Anger is brewing. Hopefully the MAGA strategy of “flooding the zone” with shit will produce diminishing returns as people turn towards their neighbors and co-workers and away from their phones and YouTube.
\n\nThis is an opportunity for us to call out the authoritarian project of the Trump administration, the techno-dystopian fantasies of billionaires like Musk, and the complicity of the Democrats who helped make all of this possible. Beyond naming the systems that we are up against, we also need to be clear about our position as workers and how the billionaires running the country want both to hurt us and to weaponize our anger, turning us against each other through propaganda and fearmongering. This is why it’s important to stand in solidarity with everyone attacked by the Trump administration, whether trans folks, migrants, prisoners, or beyond. We can’t leave anyone behind. The only immigrant trying to steal my job is Elon Musk. It’s time to be clear that our interests are not theirs; we must develop and promote our own vision of a better world in total opposition to the ruling class, the billionaires, and their fascist puppets.
\n\nMoreover, it’s time for action. We need to give expression to these antagonisms while revealing the poverty of the institutional forms currently at our disposal—the Democratic party, the ever-shrinking union bureaucracy, the non-profits. We can show examples of past struggles and resistance from the mass wildcat strikes by teachers in West Virginia and the fierce anti-fascist mobilizations against the alt-right to the airport shutdowns following the Muslim Ban. We can support and expand the existing fronts that are already breaking out around us: protests against Musk outside of Tesla, rallies to demand that hospitals continue to treat trans people, community defense and rapid response networks to address ICE attacks, bashing back against the violence of the far right. We can demonstrate the utility of tactics and strategies that others can take up and expand on as all of us figure out how to fight in the new reality.
\n\nIt’s hard to look at the news without imagining tanks on the streets or scenes out of V for Vendetta. But the scenario I worry about most is that this will simply become the new normal. That we will accept this just as we accepted the last round of attacks. As we accepted the genocide in Gaza. As we accepted the ecological gun to our heads that is climate change.
\n\nWhile people are angry and energized, we have a chance to push in a new direction. Let’s use this moment to foster broad and popular networks of resistance that improve our lives, strengthen our communities, and enable us to meet our needs directly. At this point, we don’t have much of a choice.
\n\nLike it or not, this is life now—and it is coming for all of us.
\n\n\nFor several years now, locals, anarchists, environmentalists, and others have been engaged in a struggle against a Tesla “gigafactory” in the small town of Grünheide, only five kilometers southeast of Berlin. This is the biggest factory producing electric cars for Tesla in all of Europe. Many important issues converge in this conflict: the struggle between global capitalism and local ecosystems, the question of what counts as “sustainable” and who gets to define it, the power that billionaires like Elon Musk have acquired and are using to reshape our society in line with their authoritarian vision.
\n\nFour years ago, the government of Brandenburg overruled popular opposition to permit Tesla to destroy a forest in order to build the factory. Now, Tesla is seeking to expand the facility at further cost to local forest and groundwater. Two weeks ago, a majority of residents of Grünheide voted against Tesla’s proposed expansion.1 According to the law, however, the final decision is up to politicians, not the locals.
\n\nShortly after the vote, activists established an occupation in the forest that is to be destroyed to make way for the factory expansion. A hundred people are now occupying the trees with a variety of structures. Thus far, the police have observed them but have yet to undertake an eviction.
\n\nOn the morning of March 5, 2024, a power pylon caught fire near Steinfurt, directly south of the Tesla gigafactory in Brandenburg. The act of sabotage temporarily cut off electricity to thousands of households in various parts of Berlin. It also halted work at the Tesla factory for at least a week, likely costing the company hundreds of millions of euros.
\n\nA communiqué appeared claiming responsibility in the name of Vulkangruppe—“Volcano Group”—a clandestine anarchist group said to have been active since 2011. The group has claimed credit for burning a power cable in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 2018 and cutting the power supply to the Tesla factory construction site in Grünheide in 2021, among other actions.
\n\nHere, we present an interview with a participant in the forest occupation alongside a translation of the communiqué by Vulkangruppe, in order to offer multiple perspectives from the movement against the Tesla gigafactory.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/12.jpg\")
The forest occupation.
\nWe conducted the following hasty interview on Friday, March 8, with a participant in the forest occupation Tesla Stoppen.
\n\nExplain who is involved and what you are trying to do.
\n\nThere is a lot to say about what we are doing, but to make it short, Tesla wants to expand their gigafactory, which is the biggest factory for electric cars for Tesla in all of Europe, with about a thousand people working there. For this purpose, they want to cut down more forest, because the whole factory is in a forest—or is in what used to be a forest. They cut down a big part of the forest before, to build the first part of the factory, and now Tesla wants to get bigger. That is why we occupied the forest.
\n\nA lot of different people are involved here. The occupation itself is called Tesla Stoppen, or “Stop Tesla” in English, but some other groups are also involved, including a bigger group called Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen [“turning off the tap for Tesla”], which involves a lot of other left groups and also some locals. They are organizing demonstrations and court efforts.
\n\nAlso, there was a vote here and they voted against expanding the gigafactory, so the locals are also against this expansion.
\n\nIt’s important to mention that we are not just a forest occupation, we also call ourselves a water occupation, because there is a water protection area where Tesla’s gigafactory is. They are using a lot of water for the factory, and there have been a lot of problems and accidents in the factory, which is harming the groundwater for hundreds of thousands of people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/5.jpg\")
\nIn a bigger view, this is a protest against the framing of “green” capitalist growth systems. We are saying “Clean cars are a dirty lie”—it’s not true that they will solve the problems of the climate crisis. Electric cars are an international problem because the batteries of the Tesla cars use materials like lithium and kobalt that come from extractive projects. That is a problem for us because it involves exploitation, it is a neo-colonial way of exploiting the earth and human beings.
\n\nDescribe what tactics are involved in this forest occupation.
\n\nWe are occupying the trees by building tree houses, building pathways in the trees. We are living in these tree houses and building to prepare for the state’s attempts to evict us, so that when the police come we can be secure in the tree houses and defend the occupation.
\n\nWhen we climb up more than 1.5 meters, German law requires that they need to employ special forces to get us down—and there are not so many special forces or climbing police to do this, which makes it harder for them. We are preparing the tree houses, so that when the police come, we can climb up into them—so that we will have the infrastructure up there, a kitchen, water, everything—so we can stay there for a week.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/10.jpg\")
A house in the trees.
\nAs we do press and social media work, we are trying to be very open and friendly. This is a big campaign with a cooperative design: we are trying to bring people in, to help people to get involved, we are working a lot with locals. There are a lot of things we are trying to do that we learned from occupations and protests at other places, like Lützerath.
\n\nThe occupation here began at the beginning of last week. As far as tactics go, it might be interesting to know that we came here with 80-100 people, we immediately brought eight platforms and tree houses into the forest at night. That involved a lot of logistics—raising them into the trees and so on. We started our occupation in one night, with eight tree houses—that was a statement, aimed at establishing enough power that we could not be evicted over the following days, because it is not easy to evict eight tree houses with 80-100 people involved.
\n\nRegarding how we live together, we are trying to organize ourselves in an anarchistic way. So there is a lot of self-organization, we have different groups that organize plenaries and smaller meetings. There is a lot to say about how we live together, how we are trying to get rid of hierarchies, racism, sexism, and so on. It’s about organizing ourselves, being open to new people, and reflecting on the tendencies that we bring with us from society at large.
\n\nAt the moment, things are going well: we have a lot of support, a lot of people are coming here, there is a lot of media attention, a lot of press. We are trying to frame the issue about water as an international climate problem, as a question about who is getting access to water and who is not. So for now, everything is going fine, but a lot of people think that they will try to evict us next week, because we had police come to the forest occupation over the last few days and they filmed everything, took photos—it was special forces who did that.
\n\nSo… we do not think that we are safe yet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/3.jpg\")
\nHow has the arson attack affected the occupation?
\n\nAbout the attack, we just heard about it from the news. For us in the forest, it didn’t change very much. Of course, it changed the framing of some press, some media people, who say “Oh, you are all terrorists,” and of course, there is even more media attention about it… It also changed our press and social media work, because they are trying to say “You are the same, or doing the same, as the people who burned the electrical pylons.” So it’s harder to do the press work, now, but for us in the forest, not so much has changed.
\n\nHow does this particular struggle relate to other ecological and anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggles in Germany right now?
\n\nIn relation to other struggles in Germany, with this occupation, we want to take the next step in the fight for climate justice, because we are trying to bring in water as an issue, and we are trying to debunk the narrative of “green growth,” the idea that electric cars are solving the problem. At the same time, this occupation is related to the anti-fascist movement, because Elon Musk is also part of the fascist problem.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/8.jpg\")
\nThe point is to get new ideas and take steps towards ending capitalism. Another project that is involved is Disrupt, which is a new idea to organize the radical left. Disrupt, the campaign, is now part of this occupation, so there are a lot of new things to come in Germany and in Europe.
\n\nAnd we are getting support from other countries. There will be some people here from Les Soulèvements de la Terre [“Earth Uprisings”] from France visiting us this weekend. We are also trying to support the workers at Tesla, because they have really bad work conditions there and low pay, there are lots of problems when they work there. We are trying to support them, to talk with them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/4.jpg\")
\nThis statement appeared on the morning of March 5, shortly after the burning of the electical pylon, though it describes the action as taking place “on the eve” of March 8, International Women’s Day. In German, the name “Elon” sounds similar to the word Elend, which means “misery.” To German readers, the authors’ pun “Elend Musk” throughout the text reads as “Misery Musk.”
\n\nWe sabotaged Tesla today. Because Tesla in Grünau gobbles up earth, resources, people, and labor and spits out 6000 SUVs, killer machines, and monster trucks per week. Our gift for March 8 [International Women’s Day] is to shut down Tesla.
\n\nBecause the complete destruction of the Gigafactory and with it the cutting off of “techno-fascists” like Elend Musk is a step on the path to liberation from the patriarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/7.jpg\")
The base of the targeted pylon.
\nThe Gigafactory has become known for its extreme conditions of exploitation. The factory contaminates the groundwater and consumes huge amounts of already scarce drinking water2 to make its products. The state of Brandenburg-Berlin is being dug up for Tesla without any scruples. Critics at the waterworks, local residents, and eco-activists are all being silenced. Figures are being embellished. Laws are being bent. People are being deceived. Nonetheless, a large part of the population around Grünheide rejects the Gigafactory because of water theft and gentrification. Protest and resistance continue unabated. And they are growing, because there is more than one reason for them. In addition to the dirty battery factory, Tesla now wants to expand its factory site by a further 100 hectares, including a freight station.
\n\nAn expansion of the storage and logistics areas directly at the plant (including the possibility of intensive rail logistics) is intended to stabilize the supply chains and production. This is currently impaired because deliveries from the forced labor camps in China cannot take the direct route through the Red Sea. The Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs is eating out of Tesla’s hand, despite many reasons for refusing any approval. Apparently, the only important thing is that Brandenburg flourishes as a thriving business location.
\n\nTesla is a symbol of “green” capitalism and a totalitarian technological attack on society. The myth of green growth is just a dirty ideological magic trick to close ranks against domestic criticism. It suggests a way out of the climate catastrophe. But “green capitalism” stands for colonialism, land theft, and an exacerbation of the climate crisis! Lithium batteries come from toxic mines in Chile and use up other rare metals, which means misery and destruction for those who live where the mines are. The battery factory in Grünheide near Berlin, for example, requires the rare raw material lithium, which is also mined in Bolivia. Musk puts his cards on the table when it comes to pushing through lithium mining in Bolivia: “We will coup whoever we want,”3 he says, commenting on Indigenous resistance to mining. Mineral resources are being ripped from the earth under brutal conditions. The “green deal” is merely the expansion of economic growth without limits. In Portugal, too, the rural population is resisting the forced extraction of lithium.4
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/15.jpg\")
The burned electrical pylon.
\nJust as the earth is used and abused on a daily basis, Tesla does the same to people. It has forced laborers all over the world, such as Uyghur people in China, working (to death) for it (just like Volkswagen does5), whom the racist Chinese regime serves up to the company for its production. Even in Grünheide, the working conditions are considered disastrous. Only recently, a works council member of [the German metalworkers’ union] IG Metall in Grünheide was dismissed. Despite a yellow works council installed by Tesla,6 the truth about the conditions in the factory is leaking out. In order to improve accident statistics, people are taken to hospital by cab instead of by calling an ambulance. Internal critics are fired and if they take legal action, they are forced into a legal settlement. The financial compensation is then used as a muzzle to stifle public discussion about racist dismissals, for example by threatening contractual penalties. The terminated employee has to shut up in return for the money—that’s the calculation.
\n\nThis is what the totalitarian technological attack looks like. A Tesla vehicle is a surveillance device for public spaces. It is equipped all around with high-resolution cameras from Samsung. Samsung is a company that is a leader in weapons technology, among other things. According to the manufacturer, the cameras record up to 250 meters. In “guard mode,” they film everything in the vicinity of the vehicle and guarantee that the driver is also monitored while driving. The driver is already a cost-free component of the Telsa universe and a guinea pig. Artificial intelligence will register every movement and every mistake the driver makes, monetizing these by using the data to train the software for autonomous driving.
\n\nTesla is militarizing the road. Its moving tanks are weapons of war. The car as a weapon. The road is the battlefield. Instead of 9mm, Tesla has now introduced 856 hp to the world: “If you’re ever in an argument with another car, you will win,” says Elend Musk.7 A Tesla is a status symbol, at once statement and propaganda: for contempt of humanity, boundless destruction through “progress,” and an imperial, patriarchal way of life.
\n\nAnyone who buys an SUV is most likely a supporter of an imperial way of life who wants to profit from this madness to the bitter end. Every activist’s secret poetry album should include a wrecked Tesla. No Tesla in the world should be safe from our flaming rage. Every burning Tesla sabotages the imperial way of life and effectively disrupts the ever-tightening network of seamless smart surveillance targeting every expression of human life.
\n\nArmies use Tesla’s Starlink satellite system in their wars. For example, in Ukraine. Russia’s army also accesses Starlink satellite terminals from other countries to carry out attacks. Likewise, Israel uses the Starlink satellite system to murder people in Gaza. Tesla’s Starlink infrastructure is a military actor. Rolled up like a string of pearls made of garbage, they plow through the sky to make surveillance total.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/11.jpg\")
A banner in the forest reading “Ceasefire now!”
\nLet’s talk about a man who will crumble to dust, even if he would rather be immortal: Elend Musk.\nFor men like him, the right swear word has not yet been invented to properly describe their arrogance, their contempt for humanity, their antisocial greed for power and recognition.
\n\nHe makes no secret of his chauvinism. His propaganda platform X is the means to an end. This is where he gathers supporters of an imperial way of life. This is where the anti-Semites, anti-feminists, authoritarians, chauvinists, fascists, and supporters of hatred against “foreigners” reassure themselves. This is where they organize themselves with their elitist view of the world and of themselves as a master race. This is where the Aryans of the AfD meet their peers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/2.jpg\")
A tree house in the forest occupation.
\nWhen Elend Musk cheers the anti-feminist and neoliberal president of Argentina8 on X, it is because they are united. They are not bashful about this: they have decided to stand on the side of a deadly masculinism and leave a trail of blood behind them like a man-eating monster.
\n\nElend Musk is the new model of neoliberal and patriarchal, neocolonial predatory capitalist for this century, who uses different means than the exploiters before him in the previous century. It is an invasive zeitgeist that uses the self-fabricated economic crises of valorization to tackle the next destruction. He is only following in the prepared brown footsteps of other patriarchal pioneers. In the same way, the “car manufacturer” Henry Ford was an admirer of the Nazis with their “Volkswagen” and their efficient organization of industry. The Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg was run on the backs of forced laborers. The idea was that every German should be able to get a Volkswagen so they could drive either a car or a tank on the new autobahn. Ford, inspired by the efficiency of German labor organization, transferred the ideas to his empire in the USA. The assault on workers and the economization of exploitation became known as “Fordism.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/1.jpg\")
A recent protest action against Volkswagen in Wolfsburg.
\nThis included the organization of labor and assembly line work—mass production with simultaneous mass consumption of the car. This model, also known as Taylorism, can be understood as a form of class struggle from above. Today, Elend Musk combines the invasive technological possibilities of our time with his misogynistic world view, patriarchal extremism, and the totalitarian attitude typical of his caste. As a “car manufacturer,” he stands as a revenant [a person who has returned from the dead] in historical tradition. In keeping with the times, he acts as a “techno-fascist.”
\n\nInstead of scrapping the car on the garbage heap of history and expanding free public transportation, only the driving technology is being changed, from combustion engines to electric motors, in order to preserve individualized transport. The imperial way of life is more economically lucrative.
\n\nThe positions of power allow patriarchal “visionaries” such as Elend Musk to experiment—in the most horrific sense of the word—with the most “advanced” forms of exploitation and with the available resource of “human beings.” To conquer new realms, to advance, uninvited, and to penetrate the earth. Into space, into the sky, into public space, into our heads—the rapist leaves nothing untouched. The neurotechnology company Neuralink aims to link human brains with machines. They are testing on animals in order to learn how to read streams of thought. Just like SpaceX and Tesla, Neuralink is also aiming for a long-term vision in which different people are considered to have different amounts of inherent value. In which certain people are entitled to a better life inside the ecological catastrophe that is already underway.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/9.jpg\")
A scene from the forest occupation.
\nEven if you are not on X, formerly Twitter, if you are just walking through the public streets, you will still be impacted by this miserable man and his cameras and propaganda. The positions of power enable a permanent encroachment, an invasive relationship towards all life, that can only be stopped by resolute resistance. The “technological progress” of our time provides them, the “techno-fascists,” with a tool of possibilities with which to continue increasing the exploitation and indescribable destruction of our planet.
\n\nIn its abundance of power, this type can sometimes act like a head of state without having been elected. He has the necessary means of production and the “human” resource to make political decisions. This type can buy heads of state or bring parties and politicians to power, even one named Hitler. This type is the mastermind behind the alleged decision-makers of governments. He can impose conditions on states or reduce heads of state to supplicants. The patriarchal system churns out tons of people like this; they strive for the top position because that corresponds to the patriarchal model. They stage coups when things don’t go their way. They are replaceable. Only their power gives them these opportunities—without power, they are just pompous, ridiculous egomaniacs. They have been driving millions of people to their deaths for centuries, destroying nature as if it belonged to them. If we do not destroy the system that produces such egomaniacs, new examples of their kind will emerge. So this is not (only) about Elend Musk—it is also about an imperial way of life that these men are imposing on us. It’s about a showdown between this imperial way of life and freedom for all people.
\n\nDespite all their concepts about economics, this type of person represents a minority on this planet, a minority that believes that this imperial way of life is the only right one. What is new is that we have passed many of the tipping points that show us the finite nature of this destructive way of life. We are approaching other tipping points at breathtaking speed. Year by year, month by month, day by day.
\n\n(If all else fails, Elend Musk and a handful of underlings will flee the consequences of this imperial way of life and insult Mars with their presence. But our strong extra-planetary allies are already waiting for him; solar storms will crash his rocket, as they have already done to 30% of the satellites he has put in space before. So we will win.)
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/14.jpg\")
A poster against Elon Musk and the power of billionaires in general, wheatpasted on a street in Pittsburgh in 2022.
\nMany people still consider this way of life and the supposed wealth associated with it to be natural and desirable. Many people, mistaken and misguided, confuse possessions and material wealth with freedom and happiness. Ignorance, manipulation, and fear have shaped generations of people. We are reduced to work and consumption and degraded to an imperial way of life. This material wealth at the expense of other people is an indictment of “civilization.” This way of life does not make its beneficiaries happy either. The alternatives are made invisible or destroyed as they emerge. Approaches that could benefit humanity without generating money or power are delegitimized. Indigenous ways of life that relate to nature and its protection are being wiped out. Emancipatory approaches that address the roots of the problem have been drowned in blood in all eras. Or revolutionary movements are corrupted, infiltrated, their “leaders” bought in order to secure domination and the progress of destruction for decades more.
\n\nConsequently, on the eve of March 8th, we lit a beacon against capital, patriarchy, colonialism, and Tesla. We counter the ongoing abuse of the earth with sabotage. The ideology of limitless economic growth and belief in progress based on destruction have reached their end. All obstacles are being rolled aside for giants like Tesla in order to make Europe a “first-class investment location with a strong industrial ecosystem.” But something is slipping. We, a broad and colorful resistance, are rolling the obstacles back into place. We are the heaps of rubble and grains of sand in the gears of a machine that is stamping forward inflexibly. We are the disruptive factors in the engine room. We are the desperate and the outcasts. We are middle-class people in Germany or migrants on the run. We can be many people in the forest and in the tree houses and on the street; we can be covert sabotage groups like our own. There could also be people in the gigafactory who will take revenge on their foreman’s machines for the working conditions he forces on them. We can be caught, beaten, humiliated, assaulted, or murdered—but we are in the right. Only violence can keep us down. But we will get up again. And others will come after us.
\n\nShare this statement. Translate it and send it to other people in the global struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/13.jpg\")
A house in the forest occupation.
\nWith our sabotage, we have set ourselves the goal of inflicting the largest possible blackout at the Gigafactory. We have ruled out endangering our lives and the lives of other people. The shutdown of production in the automotive industry is the beginning of the end of a world of destruction. Our bonfire of liberation was aimed at the system that supplies Tesla with electricity. We wanted to hit the overhead line of a high-voltage pylon in the connection to the underground cables at the waterproof cable sleeves and short-circuit the six 110 kV cables inside it. To do this, we opened the shaft to the cable joints, which were partly under water. We still flambéed the exposed power cables and, in combination with the water, this may have caused a short circuit. Damage to cable joints is often time-consuming and expensive to repair. At the same time, we made the fire large and high, with lots of car tires to weaken the steel structure and cause the mast to become unstable.
\n\nA steel mast only melts at around 1300 -1500 degrees. As we were working with a heat generation of around 900 degrees, the aim was to change the mechanical properties of the mast. In a load-bearing steel structure, a rapid, large fire that burns at 500 degrees or hotter can cause loss of strength and alter the metal’s stiffness, tensile strength, and elasticity. This can lead to buckling effects, twisting, or deflection. That was our intention.
\n\nWe feel connected to all the people who are fighting around the world and who our words reach.
\n\nWe feel connected to all the people who won’t let Tesla shut them down. If we want to win against giants like Tesla, we need many forms of resistance. Ours is one of many. Unpredictable and diverse, only together can we force the Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs to respect the will of the population.
\n\nMinister for Economic Affairs Jörg Steinbach (SPD) sees the result of the vote by the residents of Grünheide (71% against the expansion of the Tesla factory site) as nothing more than an important vote. He sees the vote above all as a “healing opportunity,” which means that Tesla has not succeeded in convincing people and the company still has to do its homework in order to divide, buy, cajole, and persuade the population. He does not accept the public’s “no” and is calling on Tesla to soften its stance by May.
\n\nEveryone is free to be openly or secretly happy about our action. Anyone who feels compelled to distance themselves should ask themselves why? And who stands to gain from that?
\n\nTogether we will bring Tesla to its knees. Switch off for Tesla.
\n\nGreetings to everyone on the run, in the underground, in prisons, and in the resistance!
\n\nLove and strength to all Antif@s!
\n\nShut down Tesla Volcano Group!
\n\n\n\nWe have been inspired by a number of actions:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/08/6.jpg\")
\nOver 70 percent of approximately 9200 residents cast votes, 65 percent of them to oppose the expansion plan. ↩
\nFor years, nature conservation groups have objected to the factory on account of its water consumption and the fact that it continually exceeds the legal maximums for releasing nitrogen and phosphorous into the water. ↩
\nAccording to el País, “In July 2020, a Twitter user confronted Elon Musk, head of leading electric vehicles manufacturer Tesla, claiming that the ‘US organized a coup in Bolivia’ just so that Musk could have access to the country’s lithium. ‘We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it!’ replied the entrepreneur in a tweet that soon disappeared; the only remaining record of it are screenshots in newspaper reports.” ↩
\nIn November 2023, the prime minister of Portugal was forced to resign by an investigation into corruption in his administration’s handling of supposedly “green” energy deals. Despite the damage that lithium mining has already wrought in Portugal, new open-pit lithium mines are now planned in the north. ↩
\nVolswagen has provoked several accusations of using forced Uyghur labor in its joint venture with China’s state-owned SAIC Motor company. ↩
\nA “yellow” union is a labor organization that is dominated by an employer and is therefore not an independent trade union. ↩
\nLast week, Elon Musk personally banned us from Twitter at the request of a far-right troll. Musk is not introducing “free speech” onto Twitter; he is systematically suppressing the voices of those who oppose fascism while welcoming the most notorious Nazis back onto the platform. In response, we invite you to make the streets of your community speak out with a new poster about capitalists like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. If there’s one medium that billionaires will never control, it’s wheatpaste.
\n\nBut first—why has the world’s richest man thrown his lot in with fascists?
\n\nThe best theory we can come up with is that fascism in general and anti-Semitism in particular offer the most convenient means to redirect anger that would otherwise be directed against the capitalist ruling class. Over the past three decades, the amount of wealth controlled by the world’s richest man has increased by almost ten times. As the billionaires get richer, the rest of us get poorer and more desperate. If not for conspiracy theories about the “wrong” people having all that power, the obvious fact that it is unjust for anyone to hold so much power would be inescapable.
\n\nMusk didn’t set $44 billion on fire because he thought he was going to make money on one of the world’s notoriously unprofitable platforms. It was worth it for him to spend billions buying Twitter in order to shape public discourse according to his personal interests. As for what those interests are, we can deduce them from the voices he has removed from the platform and the voices he has added back to it. Billionaires like him and Donald Trump would prefer the rest of us have to fight brainwashed fascists than have our hands free to take on the system that creates such imbalances in wealth and power in the first place.
\n\nTo address this situation, we’ve dusted off a classic motif of ours and designed a new poster. We invite you to plaster the walls of your community with it—in a strictly legal way, of course.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/02/3.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\nIn addition, in case you prefer to paste up posters the old-fashioned DIY way rather than just buying wallpaper paste or spray adhesive, we have made a zine version of our Field Guide to Wheatpasting—please print these out and distribute them to anyone who might be interested in communicating on a platform that isn’t run by a pro-fascist billionaire!
\n\nYou can read the contents of the zine in full online here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/02/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the zine.
\nThe text of the poster follows.
\n\nFor every billionaire, millions go hungry. That’s what creates billionaires: the concentration of wealth in a few hands. When you hear about a billionaire running for president or a billionaire buying Twitter as you pass homeless encampments on the way to your second job, make no mistake—it’s all connected.
\n\nThey’ll tell you anything to make you believe that your problems are your own fault, to pit you against each other, to get you to work a double shift so you can make more money for them. But however hard you work, they take home more than you do. That’s the nature of capitalism.
\n\nThey tell us they want to preserve free speech, that they offer us “opportunities,” that they’re here to protect us. Then they buy up the ways we communicate, fix the algorithms, determine what we see and hear. They sponsor fascists who attack anyone who criticizes them, spread lies to foment ethnic and religious strife. They want money to be the only thing that has value so we can’t dream of anything else.
\n\nWe deserve a world in which people are respected for what they share, not what they take for themselves. The real problem is the system that creates these inequalities in the first place. Rather than competing to be the ones who exploit and oppress, let’s abolish the means by which they do.
\n\nFor a world without tyrants or tycoons!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/02/5.jpg\")
Another version of the poster. Click on the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/02/4.jpg\")
\nOn November 25, at the urging of a far-right troll, Elon Musk banned the @crimethinc Twitter account. Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with “free speech”—it was a partisan move intended to silence opposition while opening up space for the far right. This underscores the hazards of depending on corporate social media platforms.
\n\nUpdate: Two months after this article appeared, leaked documents confirmed that it was Musk himself who personally ordered the purging of anti-fascist accounts as soon as he took control of the platform.
\n\nPlease follow us on Mastodon and Telegram and subscribe to our RSS feed. You can even find us on YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit—and we’ve just signed up for Bluesky (look for @crimethinc.bsky.social). If you want to help us continue to reach people offline, order stickers and others materials to distribute here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/25/1.jpg\")
\nOn November 24, a white nationalist1 who speaks at conferences alongside Richard Spencer posted a tweet approving of a wave of bans on Twitter. Elon Musk responded favorably to him, and far-right troll Andy Ngo answered Musk, specifically requesting that the @crimethinc account be banned from Twitter. Within a couple hours, Musk had fulfilled Ngo’s request.2
\n\nThe @crimethinc account on Twitter dates from May 2008. The account has never been suspended or received a warning throughout fourteen years of Twitter administrations. Ngo was not bringing any new material to Musk’s attention, but reposting years-old screenshots. Other Twitter users were banned under similar circumstances today, as well.
\n\nMusk’s rhetoric about making Twitter a venue for “free speech” was a lie. Musk bought Twitter in order to impose his agenda on what he saw as the most influential social media platform remaining outside the control of people like himself. Like Donald Trump, Musk brazenly says the opposite of what he means, and his supporters interpret this as a show of strength.
\n\nAt the same time that he welcomes Donald Trump, white nationalists, and fascists back to Twitter, Musk is purging those who stand in the way of their authoritarian aspirations. Make no mistake, the point of silencing our voices is to prepare the way for other kinds of violence.
\n\nA part of the ruling class has always aligned with the far right and fascists. In this regard, Elon Musk is treading a path already worn by Henry Ford, promoting reactionaries who explicitly aim to attack broad sections of the population and popular movements. As in Ford’s day, the rest of the ruling class, including centrists and liberals, hope to benefit from the forcible removal of radical voices from public discourse without having to get their hands dirty.
\n\nThis is possible, in part, because the majority of employees at Twitter have resigned or been fired. The remaining employees are disproportionately dependent on their employment at Twitter for visas to remain in the United States—a grim example of how borders serve to impose the agenda of the ruling class on workers, even relatively wealthy workers.
\n\nWhen Musk says he’s building Twitter 2.0, he is referencing the transition from the original iteration of the internet—message boards, indymedia, a more or less open and participatory model—to Web 2.0, in which all interactions are shaped by the algorithms of a few tech overlords. They aim to determine what we are able to imagine as well as what we are able to say and do. What has already happened on Facebook and Instagram and is now occurring on Twitter is the inevitable consequence of increasingly widespread dependence on corporate media platforms.
\n\nIn response, we encourage you to diminish your dependence on Twitter and other corporate media platforms, to explore other sources of information and means of communication. We urge you to mobilize against the far right on every terrain they attempt to seize and to continue organizing against capitalism, state violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. We invite you to talk with your friends and neighbors about what it would take to create a world in which a single billionaire would not be able to control how everyone else can communicate.
\n\nLet’s meet in a space where no algorithms or autocrats can determine what we are able to dream and create together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/25/2.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nI can confirm my account was suspended after Elon Musk was told about me by far-right extremists who have tried to get me murdered numerous times. I was also placed on the Nazi-made “antifa” list that is being used by bots to mass report accounts that oppose fascism. My last tweets highlighted the plot to remove my account by abusing the report system as well as certified evidence that Andy Ngo was knowingly friends with famous pedophile Amos Yee. I also highlighted the Nazi past of Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Michell. I will not stop my work of exposing fascists despite the organized campaigns to silence and assassinate me.
\n\n \n
\n\n\n“When we say abolish Twitter, we don’t mean beg politicians to regulate them. We mean take grassroots action to prevent them from continuing to do harm—until flowers grow in the wreckage of their social media system.”
\n\n“Abolishing Twitter means developing ways to communicate and address audiences that do not depend on concentrating all coercive and communicative force into unaccountable institutions. It is a project that extends from our interpersonal and digital relationships to mass action against state and corporate violence.”
\n\n-anonymous renouncer of social media
\n
Paul Ray Ramsey (also known as ramzpaul and RamZPaul, born 1963) is a well-known white supremacist. He spoke at the 2013 conference held by the white supremacist online magazine American Renaissance and has made numerous similar appearances in other events organized by explicitly racist groups. Media Matters for America, The Forward, and the Southern Poverty Law Center have all identified Ramsey as a white nationalist. ↩
\nThe same morning, at 9:21 am, we received an email from notify@twitter.com establishing that our account was not in violation of Twitter policy, reading “Twitter is required by German law to provide notice to users who are reported by people from Germany via the Network Enforcement Act reporting flow. We have received a complaint regarding your account, @crimethinc […] We have investigated the reported content and have found that it is not subject to removal under the Twitter Rules (https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311) or German law.” We did not receive any other such emails. This suggests that the decision to ban our account shortly thereafter was dictated by Musk himself. ↩
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