As I write these lines, tens of thousands of Berlin households are without electricity. In the early hours of Saturday, a power cable over the Teltow canal—leading from the combined heat and power plant Lichterfelde to the small garden colony Zukunft—was blown up. The attack didn’t just knock out lights and communications for people in Zehlendorf, Dahlem, and other neighborhoods. Without electricity, most heating systems don’t work—during the coldest week of the year. Nursing homes are running with emergency generators, while many residents have been put in school gymnasiums.
The first thing we should ask: Why will it take until Thursday to repair basic infrastructure? Why couldn’t people without power be moved into hotels? The Senate announced a cumbersome program for residents to book hotel rooms for 70 euros a night—and after criticism, announced that this will be reimbursed at some point. Obviously, it is the people most in need of help who don’t benefit from this kind of expensive bureaucratic nightmare.
The real story here is German austerity: as they spend hundreds of billions on new weapons, the ruling class is letting infrastructure decay. Across the country, all kinds of pipes and cables are decades past their lifespans, and exposed to vandalism—look at these fiberglass cables next to train tracks, for example. Personnel for repairs has been cut to the bone for efficiency. If anyone is responsible for the power outage, it is the government.
Obviously left-wing extremists?
On Sunday at noon, Berlin’s far-right mayor Kai Wegner proclaimed that this was “obviously left-wing extremists”—the next day at a press conference he added: “this must be called terrorism.”
At 14:01 on Sunday, a “Volcano Group” published a letter claiming responsibility on the left-wing portal Indymedia: “Shutting down fossil fuel power plants is manual work,” they wrote, describing the sabotage, primarily directed at “owners of villas in these neighborhoods,” as an “act of self-defense” against fossil fuel companies and the “imperial mode of living.”
Was this a left-wing group? As of yet, Berlin police have presented zero evidence. Berlin has seen numerous sabotage actions claimed by a Vulkangruppe going all the way back to 2011—the name was originally in reference to Icelandic volcanoes whose eruptions suspended European air travel. As recently as 2024, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on an electricity pylon leading to the Tesla factory.
While the statement uses phrases from the German autonomist scene, we know that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has written and published texts just like this: officers signed articles as “the two from the Muppet Show” in underground left-wing magazines in their pursuit of the “militant group” in the mid-2000s. Looking at the enormous resources the state mobilized to pursue the old mg, it is astounding that we have no information about the Volcano Group after almost 15 years. If it is indeed a left-wing group, it is just as astounding that they have no periphery at all—not a single left-wing sympathizer defending their actions.
Some people have pointed to perplexing spelling and syntax in the German text. Why is the U.S. vice president’s name spelled “Vans” (instead of Vance), while Berlin’s vice mayor is “Giffay” (instead of Giffey)? If the Volcano Group is unsurpassed in precision strikes, such misspellings pose a conundrum. Could this be a product of transliterating to Russian and back? There are numerous strange formulations that ring of AI—no German speaker refers to wealthy countries as “Metropolenländer,” for example. An SPD politician has also wondered about the “insider information” that the attackers have used—these are not anarchists setting random transformers on fire.
It’s certainly possible that a conspiracy is afoot. There have been attempts by Russian intelligence services to organize vandalism in the name of environmental activists. People on social media are pointing to parliamentary inquiries by the AfD about the electricity network in south-west Berlin. Finally, someone claiming to be the Volcano Group of 2011 published a statement on Indymedia condemning the attack in Lichterfelde.
Nonsensical
But it’s also possible that the Volcano Group is a genuine left-wing group. There is a section of the climate movement that calls for sabotaging the infrastructure of fossil capital: Andreas Malm made a very popular book and a motion picture about how to blow up pipelines.
Tadzio Müller, Berlin’s most eccentric climate activist, did not condone this attack, but told the taz newspaper that similar actions “could be necessary and legitimate under certain circumstances” as long as they did not endanger human lives.
Yet even the most successful sabotage—an ideal job that somehow manages to be extremely disruptive without endangering or even inconveniencing normal people—is never politically useful for the Left. Our project is one of universal human self-emancipation: billions of people will have to struggle to break the power of the capitalists and reorganize the planet.
Such a mass struggle cannot be replaced by clandestine groups. From the Russian Narodniks to the West German RAF, guerrilleros might believe that armed actions will electrify and inspire the otherwise passive masses. But after several centuries of attempts, we can say that this “propaganda of the deed” has failed.
It is workers—the billions of people who keep all of society running—who have the power to shut down fossil capital. Even mass sabotage events like those of Ende Gelände, where thousands of activists occupied coal mines and power plants, were not able to replace the potential of just a handful of workers going on strike.
At the moment, we don’t have enough information to say who is responsible for the power outage—it could be state agents but also extremely confused lefties. Back in 2017, I described attacks against train infrastructure, in protest against the G20 summit, as “the most nonsensical action of the year.” If we want direct action to stop the direction of our planet, there is no other way than organizing workers.
Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.
