German anti-nuclear movement

From Anarchy In Action

A militant and libertarian anti-nuclear movement helped slow down the growth of Germany's nuclear industry, ultimately opening political space for a ban on nuclear power and arguably the most progressive renewable energy policies in the Global North. In the 1970s and 1980s, a wave of massive demonstrations and occupations delayed construction of nuclear industry projects. Finally in 2011, Germany announced it would phase out nuclear power by 2022.[1]

The autonomous Marxist group Midnight Notes credit the anti-nuclear victories of America and Europe in part to cultural shifts and a decline of workers' discipline in the 1960s and 1970s:

The high capital-intensity and the centralized existence of nuclear capital require stable, socially settled “family men”, “militarily” disciplined workers, truly “scientific” Stachanovites of the second-half of the century[...]The sixties and the seventies put this “new” worker in crisis. Wives, mothers and lovers no longer produced stability and discipline, the universities didn't produce reliability, while academic unemployment ruined the “pride” of these workers. As this disillusioned, cynical, unstable intellectual proletariat emerges, the future of such capital-intensive industries like the nuclear industry is endangered.[2]

In the first half of 2014, Germany generated 17 percent of its electricity from wind and solar power.[3] Naomi Klein writes that "it was the power of Germany's antinuclear movement that created the conditions for the renewables revolution in the first place (as was the case in Denmark in the 1980s)."[4]

Whyl occupation

In February 1975, hundreds occupied the construction site of a nuclear power plant in Wyhl the day after construction began. Police dispersed them the next day. A few days later, 28,000 people demonstrated against the facility. Hundreds built huts from felled trees and camped on the site. They occupied the space for eleven months and used it to organize anti-nuclear protests and establish a people's college. The college offered over fifty courses, including some taught by pro-nuclear scientists.[5]

In March 1977, an administrative court banned the Whyl reactor's construction, finding its design flawed.[6]

Free Republic of Wendland

In 1977, local farmers began protesting in Gorleben at a site where the nuclear industry had started building an underground nuclear waste disposal facility. On 31 March 1979, farmers drove hundreds of tractors and mobilized over 100,000 marchers against the project. Industry paused construction after the Three Mile Island meltdown in the US, but when construction began again, it was blocked for about a month by a libertarian communist encampment known as the Free Republic of Wendland.

From 3 May to 6 June 1980, five thousand people occupied the construction site. People built a city out of felled trees. Local farmers brought them food and materials. The Republic issued passports, broadcast radio shows, and printed newspapers. Goergy Katsiaficas recounts:

Gorleben was one of the few places I felt at home in German public life. Unlike in normal everyday life, I did not feel like an outsider. No one approached me as a Turk nor reproached me for being an American. Indeed, national identities were temporarily suspended, since we were all citizens of the Free Republic of Wendland and owed allegiance to no government. We became human beings in some essential meaning of the term, sharing food and living outside the system of monetary exchange. An erotic dimension was created that simply could not be found in normal interaction.[7]

On 3 June 1980, eight thousand police attacked sitting Wendlanders, who had decided to respond with nonviolent, passive resistance. Police cleared the site, and barbed-wire fences were put up. That same day, protests occurred in over 25 cities.[8]

Fort Brokdorf

At the site of a proposed nuclear plant in Brokdorf, protesters established "Fort Brokdorf" with a moat, fence, and barbed wire. Four days later, there was a rally with 30,000 to 45,000 people, and some 2,000 joined the occupation. The courts later delayed the Brokdorf construction on the grounds that the issue of waste had not been adequately resolved.[9]

Construction began in February 1981, and on 28 February, 100,000 protesters converged at the site and confronted 10,000 police. Unwilling to passively resist like the Wendland protesters evicted the prior year, protesters at Brkodorf fought police with sticks, rocks and Molotov cocktails. They pushed through police and arrived at the innermost fence around the site. Police came down from helicopters and cleared the site by using massive amounts of tear gas.[10]

  1. Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 136.
  2. Midnight Notes, Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe, 1979, https://libcom.org/library/strange-victories-midnight-notes.
  3. http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/7/10/renewable-energy/bye-bye-brown-coal-germanys-new-renewables-mark
  4. Klein, ibid, 138.
  5. Katsiaficas, Georgy, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 81-82.
  6. Katsiaficas, ibid, 83.
  7. Katsiaficas, ibid, 84.
  8. Katsiaficas, ibid, 85.
  9. Katsiaficas, ibid, 83.
  10. Katsiaficas, ibid, 85-86.