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Are There Any Leftist Candidates in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg?

The once rebellious district was long represented by the legendary Hans-Christian Ströbele. He died in 2022, and his replacement is retiring. Who can lefty Kreuzbergers and Friedrichshainers vote for?


07/02/2025

Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain don’t fit together at all, but each neighborhood has a long history of rebelliousness. In Kreuzberg, people started squatting buildings in the late 1970s. Friedrichshain, in turn, became the center of Berlin’s counterculture in the 1990s, with numerous squats of its own. The two districts on opposite sides of the Spree were put into an uneasy marriage in 2001. For 15 years, from 2002 to 2017, Fhain-Xberg was represented in the Bundestag by the silver-haired, soft-spoken rebel Christian Ströbele.

Ströbele won his legendary status back in 1969 when he founded the Socialist Lawyers Collective to defend left-wing activists, including members of the Red Army Fraction (RAF). In the late 1970s, he helped found the alternative daily paper taz and West Berlin’s Alternative List, which eventually folded into Die Grüne. Until just a few years ago, Ströbele could be seen at just about every demonstration on his signature red bicycle. 

Over the decades, Die Grüne got closer to power and abandoned every single one of their principles. Within one generation, they went from protesting against NATO missiles to being the most pro-NATO party in Germany today. In the late 1990s, die Grüne launched Germany’s first war of aggression since 1945, and carried out the biggest social cuts program in the history of the Federal Republic.

Thousands of old-school greens turned their backs on the party. Ströbele stuck around, though he consistently voted against his party. He retired in 2017, and died in 2022. His replacement, Canan Bayram, was Kreuzberg’s Die Grüne representative for two terms. Last year, however, Bayram declared that she “didn’t want to be a fig leaf” for such a right-wing party — she’s not even campaigning for Die Grüne this time around.

So who can leftists in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain vote for?

Katrin Schmidberger (Die Grüne)

The person the Die Grüne picked to replace Ströbele and Bayram is not really known for anything. According to Wikipedia, Katrin Schmidberger was once a parliamentary assistant to Ströbele, and has been a member of the Berlin parliament since 2011. Personally, I have yet to meet anyone who knows her name or what she stands for. Does she go to demonstrations? Hard to say. Her main topic — really her only topic — appears to be housing policy. 

To be fair, she doesn’t seem terrible on housing policy. In contrast to her party, which gets donations from realty speculators, Schmidberger supported the referendum to expropriate Berlin’s big corporate landlords, which 59% of voters approved back in 2021. At the same time, though, she was part of Franziska Giffey’s government coalition that actively sabotaged this democratic decision. 

Looking through parliamentary records and social media posts, Schmidberger has impressive message discipline: she talks about housing policy and nothing else. She wants more public housing, and any leftist would agree. But how does she feel about her party spending 100 billion extra on the military instead? What does she think about Annalena Baerbock’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza? What does she think about Robert Habeck’s plan to radically increase deportations?

In contrast to the antimilitarist Ströbele, it’s almost as if Schmidberger has never heard of the multiple wars getting active support from German imperialism and its Grüne administrators. But Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg have changed due to gentrification, maybe this is just the kind of Grüne that new residents wants.

Pascal Meiser (Die Linke)

For people who miss Kreuzberg’s old school Grünen, Pascal Meiser of Die Linke is presenting himself as an alternative. He is also particularly focussed on housing policy, but can be seen outside of parliamentary committees — you run into him at demonstrations fairly often, in fact. Meiser is doing a cool campaign where he puts posters on buildings: “Why are there empty apartments here?” In the middle of a housing crisis, speculators are keeping an estimated 40,000 apartments empty. You also see him when workers at publicly owned companies like Vivantes and BVG go on strike for better wages.

But there’s a big contradiction here. Berlin’s housing crisis was caused by the privatization of several hundreds of thousands of housing units in the early 2000s — a policy carried out by Meiser’s party, Die Linke. The same party was responsible for drastic cuts in wages for public-sector employees. So while it’s nice for a “left” party to show support at a strike, workers can’t forget that they are on strike against the very same party. As far as I’m aware, Meiser has never once protested against his comrade ministers carrying out neoliberal policies. Die Linke has also deported thousands of people from Berlin — without any objections from Meiser.

Meiser has the same discipline as Schmidberger when it comes to avoiding questions of imperialism. Over 15 months of genocide, the only reference I could find was a link to an Israeli propaganda page. By the standards of Die Linke, this is relatively good — at least Meiser is not aggressively supporting genocide, like Dietmar Bartsch, Petra Pau, Gesine Lötzsch, and numerous other “left” politicians. Yet this is an awfully low bar. Imagine a “left-wing” politician anywhere else who carefully refuses to say a word about their own government supplying weapons to be used in a genocide.

I asked his office if he voted for the resolution in Solidarity with Israel from October 12, 2023, but got no response. He was no longer in parliament for subsequent resolutions in support of genocide, but Die Linke abstained both times, and Meiser hasn’t said anything at all.

Inés Heider

Statistically, it is quite likely the Die Grüne will get the seat. They won 38% four years ago (compared to 18% for Die Linke). Eight years ago, though, they won by less than two points. With Bayram’s retirement, Meiser might have a chance. 

This time, there is a new candidate: the social worker Inés Heider is running on an anticapitalist program. She is also in favor of expropriating corporate landlords, like Schmidberger and Meiser say they are. Crucially, though, Heider is in favor of mobilization and self-organization. She doesn’t think progressive change can come around by getting elected to parliament and forming a government together with the SPD — as a communist, she calls for a workers’ government.

Heider is the only candidate to oppose all deportations — she openly calls for open borders, while Die Grüne want more deportations, and Die Linke are happy to keep deportations at their current rate. As an internationalist and anti-imperialist, Heider calls for blocking all weapons shipments to Israel, and for kicking both Putin and NATO out of Ukraine.

Generations of workers and leftists in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, even 150 years ago, voted for radical change instead of choosing the “lesser evil.” They were told they were “wasting their vote” — in reality, though, their support for independent, working-class candidates was preparing the future. This time, Friedrichshainers and Kreuzbergers can register their fundamental opposition to a rotten system.

German Anti-Palestinian Racism Besmirched The Commemoration of the Liberation of Auschwitz

A litany of abuses by the German state and its enablers in civil society lays bare their disrespect for the memory of the Shoah


05/02/2025

In Germany, politicians, public figures and ordinary citizens have been insisting for years that the Palestinians don’t fight Israel because of the occupation and apartheid, but rather because they are rabid antisemites. They are labelled as the new Nazis, and it is claimed that antisemitism has been imported into this country by the migrants who have arrived in recent decades. On Holocaust Memorial Day, they made this clear in the worst possible way on social media, in the courts, and on the streets.

On 27 January 2025, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, once again a Jewish person sat before a Berlin court accused of inciting hatred for opposing genocide in Palestine.

The Israeli-Jewish filmmaker Dror Dayan sat on the bench accused of using symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations (Section 86a of the German Criminal Code), for denouncing on his social networks the state’s intention to criminalise the use of the slogan “From the River to the Sea” and its attempt to link it to the prosecution of the use of Nazi symbols. In Dror’s own words:

In 2023 I read a newspaper article stating that the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” will be treated in Germany in the same way as swastikas and SS-Slogans. I saw this as a further, dangerous step not only in the criminalisation of the Palestinian struggle and solidarity with it but, more hypocritically, as a clear attempt at equating the legitimate Palestinian resistance with the genocidal Nazi past of today’s German Federal Republic. Since October 2023 we have seen many voices in German media and politics not only equating Palestinian organisations with the Nazis but at times even claiming that they are worse. This serves a double purpose – it allows to further dehumanize Palestinians and present any support of them as criminal, but also to minimize and relativize the German Nazi crimes. If SS-Slogans are the same as Palestinian slogans for liberation from occupation and genocide, the logical conclusion is that the Nazis were only fighting for their freedom and equality. This is sickening but in the current climate in Germany in no way surprising. For this reason I published a post using the slogan and explaining that Palestine solidarity cannot be the sacrificial lamb on the altar of German historical revisionism and that the German crimes will always remain German and cannot be pushed unto the backs of Palestinians and their supporters.”

 “Several months later I’ve received a letter telling me I’m charged with usage of propaganda of terrorist and anti-constitutional organisations. This is due to the fact that in the wording of its ban of Hamas, Germany has included the words “from the river to the sea” as a Hamas slogan, without any evidence. This was clearly done in order to ban as large parts as possible of the solidarity movement together with the organisation, even if they are not related. My hearing was scheduled for January 27th, the holocaust remembrance day. This date is very fitting, as it marks one German genocide and today we are dealing with active German support for another genocide. This is another German attempt at rewriting history and changing the meaning of the term antisemitism from hatred of Jews – which would make many current German politicians antisemitic – to opposition to Zionism and Israel’s crimes, which would clear those same public figures from antisemitism, as they might hate Jews, but love Zionism.”

This is all part and parcel not only of Germany’s active role in the genocide in Gaza – through arms deals, support in the ICC, and repression at home – but also the ongoing attempt to mililtarize Germany and re-invent its past. While Germany has never broken away from its Nazi past, it is now equating all its enemies – be it Palestinian freedom fighters or Russia – with its own Nazis. While Germany is propping up its own neo-Nazis in the AfD and CDU, it attempts to sell the world an image of itself as fighting Nazis. It simply lies about who those Nazis are.”

The trial, which was due to start at 11am, was finally delayed for several months because an expert who was to give a statement on the history and use of the slogan failed to attend the trial due to illness. The judge had had this information for a few days and decided to disclose it minutes before the trial. However, the expert’s testimony had already been submitted to the court in writing and could have been read out, as is customary in the instance of an expert’s non-appearance, so it seems that the judge’s decision was based on other factors.

It is possible that the judge has decided to postpone the trial and await the decision of other judges in one of the many cases pending in this city over this slogan. Including one of the two cases that have already been lost in Berlin, which is now in the second instance.This will set a bad precedent, because in this case the person used the controversial slogan together with pictures of the Qassam Brigades. This puts on a golden platter for the prosecution the argument that it is a slogan used by an organisation that is considered a terrorist organisation in this country. Undoubtedly, the judicial establishment has an interest in this trial, which is clearly in its favour, to set precedent.

But this decision must also have been influenced by the demonstration outside the court, which clearly denounced that the German Staatsräson, i.e. its unconditional support for Israel, takes precedence over the lives of the anti-Zionist Jewish people in this country. And which highlighted the lack of historical memory by holding this trial on the very day when the victims of the Holocaust are commemorated. At a subsequent rally called in the same place for another anti-genocide comarade, the police seemed to be trying to make up for this little antisemitic slip-up on Holocaust Day. They arrested half of the people present on various pretexts, including the new ban on slogans such as “Zionists are fascists” or “Israel is killing children“.

The day before, on Sunday 26 February 2025, the left-wing anti-Zionist organisation Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East called for a rally to commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust, explicitly calling for all the victims, including those of the current genocides, to be mentioned.

The place chosen for the tribute was highly symbolic, as it was the square where the Nazis famously burned books on 10 May 1933, now known as Bebelplatz.

This moving tribute, at which relatives of Holocaust survivors, Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as communists, anarchists and socialists spoke, was hyper-policed by officers in riot gear.

In response to this national Zionist, German, white and non-Jewish groups, including groups that consider themselves to be anti-fascist, counter-mobilised. In what appears to be a deliberate move, these groups, who had applied for permits after seeing the call by Jewish Voice for Peace, were given the first line of the square facing the main avenue. Meanwhile, the groups of Jews, Roma and Sinti, migrants, anti-fascists, communists, anarchists and other allies were relegated and fenced in at the back of the square, as far as possible out of sight of potential tourists and passers-by. The police force surrounding them did not lift a finger when some of these Zionist “anti-fascists” broke into the event to break it up, shouting “Free Gaza from Hamas” in the middle of a speech, after having interrupted the minute of silence for the victims of past and present genocides with loud music. Paradoxically, with the song “The Sound of Silence”.

These unpleasant incidents and details show the institutionalised and widespread historical blindness of a segment of the German population which, in its flight from its genocidal Nazi past, is beginning to want to move on and make others pay the price: Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews or any migrant who does not fit the twisted narrative of its neo-historical remembrance.

The far-right has latched on to this trick, fed up with this phoney sense of guilt, which wants not only to turn the page on this chapter but to reawaken the worst of its patriotic pride. The day before these incidents, the AfD party held a campaign rally with Elon Musk, who declared that Germany had had enough of historical guilt and claimed that Germany should be great again. The question is: which great Germany do they want to return to? Their rhetoric and iconography suggest the 1930s.

Anyone who has read anything about the Holocaust knows that it began decades, if not centuries, before the so-called Final Solution was implemented. It began on the streets with the harassment of Jews. It moved into the courts and institutions with trumped-up charges, preventing Jews from practising their professions, gradually stripping them of all their possessions and citizenship before finally taking their lives. Many of those who managed to escape saved their lives by arriving in Palestine, as has been shown, despite the opinion of some in German society, even the Stolpersteine.

And anyone who has read history knows that the other victims of the Nazis and their allies were also those groups that the German government today criminally ignores or blames: minorities such as the Sinti and Roma, those who are still considered foreigners no matter how many generations they have been here, anti-fascists, communists, anarchists and, in general, anyone who does not put Israel and its right to commit genocide above all else.

We Honour Our Dead: Never Again for Anyone Anywhere

Speeches from Anarchists 4 Palestine in Holocaust Memorial Day organised by Jewish Voices for Just Peace in the Middle East. 26 January 2025


03/02/2025

We have been taught that the Holocaust was a singular act of evil. So evil, in fact, that it could only have been carried out by monsters.

Caricature nazis have plagued popular media for decades, depicted as uniquely evil, almost like machines. But we all know in reality, they were mostly regular people. Your neighbor, teacher or accountant. They were more like the non-prisoner extras in The Zone of Interest.

Popular Western culture portrays as unique heroes those that stood up and did the right thing in the 1930s, from the Scholl siblings to Schindler. The movie Schindler’s List is, however, as much the story of one businessman who helped those in need as it is the story of thousands of companies and individuals that could have helped but did not, of those who chose profit and quiet instead. Capitalism kills.

We have been taught that the Nazi regime’s power was held by few individuals and groups, and that once they were gone, the problem was largely solved. In reality, the power resided in structures rather than individuals—power structures fueled by the fortunes of capitalists who themselves, in turn, profited from tyranny and war. The moguls and enterprises from back then were allowed to largely retain their ill-gotten war profits and are today some of the richest and most powerful companies and families in this country.

Today we see again the richest people on earth backing up authoritarian regimes and profiting from war and genocide, from Palestine to Congo to Sudan to Western Sahara.

These power structures of the last century were based in racist, white supremacist ideology that dehumanized Jews, Sinti and Roma and Slavic people.

Today, the West dehumanises the majority of the world’s peoples. We expel the ones undesirable to our regimes, close down borders and pay other countries to do our dirty work.

This dehumanization is broadcasted daily in our mainstream media. It is painfully patent in the covering of the genocide in Gaza. Palestinians are rarely worth talking about and are mainly referred to as terrorists. Articles, comments and tweets referring to them as human animals are common and still today remain unpunished. At the same time we are criminalized for shouting ‘Free Palestine’. 

We have been taught nazism came from almost nowhere and that as soon as the most prominent nazis were gone, Germany was denazified. We could not have been more lied to. They are back and as racist and fearmongering as ever. In fact, they never left. 

Conditions for revolutions and dictatorships develop first slowly, and then there they are all at once. We can see this in the last century’s Germany, how it descended day by day into nazism, culminating in war and the Holocaust. Today, we see it in the devastating genocide being perpetrated in Palestine. 76 years of occupation, apartheid and slow genocidal practices are now manifesting all at once in one of the worst atrocities of this century. 

And again, we have the perpetrators and cheerleaders among us. We have them in our university presidiums, our media, our clubs and in the parliament. Germany is once again rotten with genocidal, racist and fascist mania, while most look the other way and criticize those who dare to break their peace of mind. 

Back then they used print media to push their genocidal views, now they have both the media and the algorithms. Back then they had Henry Ford, today they have Musk. Back then people didn’t know, today “it´s complicated”. Shame shit almost a 100 years later.

Being in this square is extremely symbolic, not only because of Heinrich Heine’s words, “those who burn books will at the end burn people” written here, with which he tried to warn of the insidiously growing 19th century antisemitism. He ended up summarizing what was to come—both 80 years ago in Europe and the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza today.

It is also symbolic for its empty monument, both literally empty and devoid of meaning.

As HP Loveshaft said in a beautiful speech back in 2023, some of the first books to burn here were the works of Magnus Hirschfeld, a German-Jewish physician, sexologist, multidisciplinary scholar and women’s and LGTBQ rights advocate, whose German citizenship was promptly revoked by the nazis (eerily familiar). Along with his personal work, the nazis burned the books in Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Science library. As HP suggested, this monument would have been a lot more meaningful if instead of void space they would have erected a library with all the books from the Institute’s Library that had been burned. 

Maybe, had we read more, instead of having pretended to atone from the past with empty words, gestures and monuments, we would not have to be here again having to assert that never again means never again for anyone, anywhere.

Free Palestine.


When I think of Germany at night, / Then I am deprived of sleep”

These words by Heinrich Heine from 1844 seemed like an evil premonition, because incredible horrors and atrocities were to follow from this Germany:

The colonial campaign of annihilation against the Maji Maji of 1905-1907 in present-day Tanzania, with up to 300,000 dead. The genocide of the Herero and Nama 1904-1908 in present-day Namibia. As an ally of Turkey the genocide of the Armenians 1915-1923. And then towards the middle of the 20th century, the genocide of 500,000 Sinti and Roma, whom they themselves call Samudaripen, and the Holocaust of 6 million European Jews, who met their end in the concentration and extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo, Maidanek and Auschwitz. Not to forget all the others persecuted and murdered by the fascist criminal regime: Communists, anarchists, Christians, queers, homeless people, people with disabilities, Black people, dissidents and many more.

On 19 April 1945, 21,000 surviving prisoners of Buchenwald concentration camp took the Oath of Buchenwald on the roll call square:

We shall only stop fighting when the last culprit stands before the judges of the nations. The destruction of Nazism with its roots is our slogan. Building a new world of peace and freedom is our goal.’

From this oath, the much-cited Never Again was born. Intervene, don’t look away, take responsibility should actually be the conclusion today.

But humanity has learned nothing from history after 1945, its memory of endured suffering is astonishingly short: countless wars, crimes and genocides committed by human hands: from the massacre by the French military on 8 May 1945 in the Algerian towns of Setif and Guelma, to the US-American napalm bombing of Vietnam, to the genocides in Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995), the Yazidis in Iraq or the Rohingya in Myanmar (to name just a few examples), and now – the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

And those who remain silent consent. This applies as much today as it did yesterday.

Germany has also learned nothing from its own history, because it sends its weapons to Israel, which then kills people in Gaza. If Auschwitz is to be a warning and a lesson for the future and if indifference to suffering and misery is not to become the norm, then we are raising our voices now to no longer tolerate these injustices and indignities, of which no one can claim to have known nothing.

And we support those who fight for their liberation – in Kurdistan, Western Sahara, Sudan, Palestine and everywhere.

It is up to us, the still living, to end the atrocities of humanity and to stand up for a society and world in which all people can live in dignity and freedom.

Never Again for us means Never Again for everyone, everywhere.

No Power to Nobody

Thank you

Generative AI: At What Cost?

The expropriation, exploitation and environmental costs behind AI


02/02/2025

Tech corporations like to sell a utopian version of their products. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot promise us a personal assistant, ready to write our emails for us, plan our daily activities or even advise us on social relationships. Meanwhile, image generators like Midjourney or Adobe’s Firefly allow us to generate images of the pope wearing a funny jacket. Suno can generate something that is supposed to pass for music, while OpenAI’s Sora can conjure up videos of anything we desire. Soon we won’t ever have to think or create again!

It’s not just Big Tech, and the usual tech enthusiasts, that push this narrative. More impactfully, liberal governments like Starmer’s in the UK have fully embraced the ‘AI revolution’, with Scholz following closely behind.

But some on the left also have illusions. Some believe Artificial Intelligence (AI) will ‘democratize art’, making the bold claim that being unable to draw is undemocratic. Others go as far as claiming ‘fully automated luxury space communism’ is right around the corner, thanks to AI. Arguably these opinions are fringe and rarely leave the internet. But some leftwing social movements and political parties have happily turned to image generators, to create pictures of Marx as Santa, to promote demonstrations and events as well as the viral ‘all eyes on Rafah’ image. 

Proponents of AI also point out advances in fields like medicine and material science. It is important to note that the AI models used for this are specifically trained for that very purpose, and are not the same as the mass deployed models we are seeing today. 

What are the downsides to all of this? Shouldn’t we embrace technology that promises to make our lives easier? Some tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Sam Altman like to talk about the dangers of AI. Others desperately plead for governments to regulate them, others almost messianically claim that only theycan safeguard humanity from the inevitable super intelligence that they seek to create. These narratives are a convenient distraction away from the actual, current impact the technology is having.

It’s time to critically look at these technologies. The are a lot of reasons to criticize AI for its broader effects on civil society: such asjob losses, mass surveillance, privacy concerns, military use, disinformation, loss of culture, decline of cognitive skills, and the beautifully phrased ‘enshittification of the internet’. All important.  But i  will discuss what makes these systems turn. That is expropriation of vast amounts of data, without compensation for those who did the work in the first place; the often invisible labour behind it, often in the global South; and the immense energy cost associated with AI.

Data Theft

Let’s start with the basics: Generative AI needs data, and lots of it. These technologies do not write text or conjure up images because they are intelligent creations , but because they are fed with enough human-created data (written text, video, audio, images etc) that they can predict what word, or pixel, comes next. Feed it enough pictures of cats, and it will be able to predict what a cat looks like (but maybe with some added paws). 

This data comes from somewhere. To get it, tech corporations scrape the entire internet. All of Wikipedia, Reddit posts, any image that was ever uploaded to Instagram – you name it, and it probably trained an AI model, without the creator’s  consent. 

Arguably X (Twitter) posts are not hard labour. But it is more complicated when larger work are affected: books, academic publications, music, visual art, all expropriated by Big Tech, without the creators consent, and fed into a machine to swoon investors and boost stock valuations. his uncompensated labor is used to make a few CEOs and shareholders incredibly rich. It is also being used to automate away means of income for many creators. A graphic designer promoting their work on Instagram to find clients, finds  their work being used without consent by a corporation that explicitly states its desire to remove the need for graphic designers in the future. 

This is theft, plain and simple. 

Copyright & Resistance

In theory, this is where copyright comes in. An author owning the rights to their book, theoretically has a say over what happens to it: including whether to allow AI models to be trained on their work. However, AI companies argue that anything is fair game. After all, if they respected copyright law they would never get the amounts of data needed to train their models.

Does this mean that stronger regulations enforcing copyright law can protect creators from having their work stolen? Not necessarily. Aside from concerns with copyright itself, which includes corporations hoarding large amounts of intellectual property (which they are often happily selling off to AI companies), western governments are happy to go along with the argument that tech companies are making. According to them, Generative AI will benefit society as a whole. At most, the EU forces companies to include an ‘opt out’ option, where individuals can refuse tot have their work be trained on, but they must specifically state this. Generally, artists and activists have been calling for opt-in, where explicit permission is required for a work to be used as training data.

Various organizations and artists have filed lawsuits against tech corporations over copyright violations. Several major cases are in court, mostly in the US. Examples include, frm the New York Times suing OpenAI over training on its entire archive; to a series of lawsuits filed by digital artists, to high profile authors like George RR Martin suing over having his entire Game of Thrones series trained upon. Perhaps these cases can set a precedent and reign in AI companies a little.

Another way that  especially artists, have protected their work, was  ‘data poisoning’. Researchers at the University of Chicago created two tools where  an invisible filter is applied to work, rendering it  useless to AI companies. While Glaze protects against style mimicry, Nightshade is more aggressive as it tricks the AI model that it is looking at something else than is actually depicted. Feed enough of these poisoned images to an AI model, and it risks collapse.

Increasing pressure on governments to regulate AI training, is a ‘Statement on AI training’, with the following core demand: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training Generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”

So far, this statement has been signed by over 40.000 people, including major artists like Kate Bush, Robert Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Julianne Moore. ignatorys to the statement also contain many cultural organizations, including the SAG-AFTRA union, who’s 2023 strike listed protection from AI as a core demand.

Neocolonialism

The theft of data by Big Tech has been widely scandalized. Much less attention is given to workers in the global South tasked with the ‘labelling’ of data.  For an AI model to work, it needs to know what it is looking at, which means a human has to label it first. Humans also  sort out all of the bad, offensive and harmful content included in the indiscriminate scraping of the internet.

To do this, AI companies employs subcontractors. An investigation by TIME in 2023 revealed that OpenAI relied on a self declared ‘ethical AI company’ called Sama. It paid workers in Kenya between 1.32 and 2 dollars an hour to sift through endless amounts of content, working 9 hour days at a grueling pace. This content contained large amounts of harmful material, like images of sexual abuse (including of minors), which workers had to textually label. Of the four workers interviewed by TIME, all reported being traumatized by the experience, with one experiencing recurring visions as the result of the abuse witnessed. In May 2024, Kenyan data workers wrote an open letter to Joe Biden, calling on the US to hold its companies accountable for the labor violations they are committing abroad.

Kenya is just one example. Similar reports have come out of Venezuela, where data labellers on average earn just 90 cents an hour. Meanwhile in Lebanon, Syrian refugees are often the ones doing this work as  strict work permit laws exclude them from the regular job market. They too report harsh conditions and low pay, with one worker detailing  14 days work to afford just 10 days of food. This is not limited to just data labelling. Generative AI models require large amounts of computing power, with Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) especially sought after to train ever larger models. These computer chips require rare earth minerals, often dug up in war-torn areas where both corporations and rebel groups commit grave human rights violations at mining sites. Just recently, the Democratic Republic of Congo filed a criminal complaint against Apple over the use of blood minerals in its supply chain.

Climate Breakdown

Finally the data centers required to run AI models consume growing amounts of energy in a time of accelerating climate breakdown. A single ChatGPT query consumes 10 times the energy of a Google search, equivalent to running a light bulb for 20 minutes. Microsoft’s energy usage is currently 29% higher than in 2020, with the company officially dropping its (already dubious) claim of being carbon neutral. Google’s energy usage has increased by 48% since 2019, something it attributes to its investment into Generative AI. However, research by The Guardian has shown that emissions by data centers might be 662% higher than official figures fromy tech companies. 

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2022, at the start of the current AI boom, data centers ( used for more than just AI), accounted for around 2% of all global emissions. It expects that by 2026, data centers emissions will increase from 35% to 128% — equivalent to the annual energy consumption of Germany. Wells Fargo estimated energy usage for AI use will increase to a staggering 550% by 2026.

The estimates of energy usage of these data centers in specific countries, are that in technology hub Ireland they will use 35% of electricity (up from a current 21%) by 2026. Fear of rolling blackouts led the Irish energy grid operator to forbid construction of new data centers near Dublin until 2028. Already, Ireland’s data centers use more energy than all its urban homes combined, energy that for 50% comes from fossil fuel sources. For the US, data center power usage could account for 9% to 25% of national energy usage by 2030 (currently at 4%). This not only drives up local energy prices, but also puts immense pressure on existing energy infrastructure.

It’s not just energy either — water usage also increased dramaticallyto cool servers. By 2027, AI-related water use might be 6 times the water use of Denmark. But a quarter of the world’s population lacks access to clean water and sanitation, and global water demand is expected to be 40% greater than available supply by 2030. Moreover many data centers are located, or are being built,  in water scarce areas i, like Latin America and the southern US. While Uruguay was experiencing a drought in 2023 causing its capital Montevideo to run out of drinking water, Google announced plans for t a new data center  consuming 7.6 million liters of fresh water per day, sparking mass protests. Google adjusted its plans and promised to rely on air conditioning instead But activists and academics continue to criticize the project over carbon emissions and hazardous waste disposal. 

Is it worth it?

Large scale AI models are fundamentally unnecessary.  While they might occasionally allow us to perform tasks faster, albeit with huge drawbacks – they rarely allow us to do anything new. We can already write books, draw pictures, or make movies. Is speeding up that process when it’s built on even more suffering truly worth it? Our planet is literally on fire and we’ve hit 1.5° C of global warming. Maybe we shouldn’t waste large amounts of resources on something we don’t need.

It is obvious that Big Tech doesn’t have the best interest of people and planet at heart. That is increasingly clearer as their involvement with far right figures like Donald Trump and Alice Weidel grows. Instead of buying into their products and promises, let’s stand in solidarity with those negatively affected by the tech. Although a unified mass movement is still lacking – public sentiment is rapidly turning against AI. We can start by supporting labour struggles and uplifting artists and creators who reject Generative AI. 

Imagine what good we could do with the hundreds of billions being poured into Generative AI instead!

So, next time you are tempted to ask ChatGPT a question or want a picture of a cat with too many paws, realize that it, like all large scale AI models, is built on the logic of capitalist accumulation — expropriation, exploitation, and the relentless extraction of the natural resource base.

The new Irish Government’s dubious beginnings on Palestine: a history and explainer

The new government is in, and it is sending signals that it will abandon Ireland’s recent progress on Palestine. How did we get here, and what can be done about it?


01/02/2025

Dáil Éireann—Ireland’s House of Representatives—recently had its exceedingly short moment in the spotlight in European media,owing not to a pivotal political moment or proceeding, but rather to some bickering and rowdiness as the new Ceann Comhairle, or Speaker, was repeatedly demanded to reassess the presence of several pro-government Independents having been given speaking rights and allotted speaking time within the Opposition.

The tumultuousness within the Dáil comes, in ways, alongside a palpable uneasiness within Ireland’s political climate, in spite of what’s on the surface: incredible stability, with the election in November 2024 having had a perfectly predictable outcome.

The new government is a merger of two historically rivalled parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The latter, Fianna Fáil, headed today by Micheál Martin, has dominated Irish politics for most of the party’s existence, with only occasional interruptions to its chain of governments by coalitions led by Fine Gael — often with its ally the Labour party.

So, how did we get here?

History was made in 2020 when a new political behemoth was formed. For the first time in both parties’ histories, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil entered together into a coalition government (alongside the Greens).

To give context to this change, the formula for politics in the Republic of Ireland is relatively straightforward: will Fianna Fáil form a majority or minority government this time? Or will Fine Gael and Labour create a coalition majority instead? Or, to overcome these coalitions, will Fianna Fáil form its own coalition with a junior party partner?

But 2020 disrupted this, and added a new step to the formula.

The Fianna Fáil–Fine Gael alliance

In reality, the parties have never represented a significant degree of difference; even less-so today. Once Fianna Fáil stood for economic isolationism, but it pivoted on this line as far back as in 1959. Fianna Fáil is today also vaguely more associated with its staunchly catholic past, but this is not unique in Irish politics. In material terms, both parties are socially adaptive, and economically liberal. Both emphasise foreign direct investment, and both came to be associated with the austerity politics of Europe’s post-eurocrisis environment.

So, when Sinn Féin — Ireland’s oldest party, often culturally associated with its nationalist republican past, and representing a theoretically centre-left position (although we have not seen their politics in practice) — won the popular vote in 2020, suddenly becoming Ireland’s largest party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had to face a new reality. Both parties had long-since dismissed the possibility of a coalition with Sinn Féin. Both were now too small to lead their own coalitions… Except with one another.

This new political reality created a bloc which is difficult to imagine being outnumbered in any future elections. The 2025 government, the 34th Dáil, is, predictably, another Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition, this time with various Independents taking part in the government rather than the Green party.

The November 2024 election: the result of growing unpopularity

The snap election in November 2024 that led us to this point was called when the previous Taoiseach (the equivalent role to a Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, spontaneously resigned, citing his personal life and family priorities as the grounds. It doesn’t take an astute observer — indeed, it was more or less ubiquitously speculated within Irish media — to conclude the real reason for the resignation had something more to do with Varadkar’s exceeding unpopularity within the electorate. 

A watershed moment revealed the pent-up frustration with the political establishment: Varadkar and his coalition government held two referendums simultaneously in March 2024 to make symbolic amendments to the Irish constitution — one to rephrase and to make broader the constitution’s definition of family, and the other redrafting a line of the constitution which refers to ‘women’s life within the home’. Every single major political party supported the changes, with only minor Opposition parties opposing them. Yet, in what is widely considered to have been a protest vote of historic proportions the public voted No 67.69 and 73.93 per cent, respectively, against the two amendments. A mere twelve days later, Varadkar resigned.

A surprising, shining light: the government’s heel turn on its approach to Palestine

But the resignation would unleash a new and sudden rhetoric from Varadkar and others. To set the stage for this shift, let’s look back to January 2024, when Varadkar was famously asked in a radio interview about the possibility of supporting South Africa’s ICJ case on the genocide in Gaza. Varadkar’s response: to emphatically insist ‘this is an area where we need to be very careful’. Ireland actively decided against supporting South African in their ICJ case, and the government sat by in silence as European governments, most notably that of Germany, intervened to obstruct South Africa’s case.

Yet, around the time of his resignation, there was Varadkar, in the annual March visit to the White House, telling ex-President Biden ‘The people of Gaza desperately need food, medicine and shelter. Most especially they need the bombs to stop. This has to stop.’

Simon Harris was Varadkar’s successor as Taoiseach, and with regards to Palestine, he arrived on the scene with rhetorical vigour. A move that was long-awaited in Ireland was finally achieved: Palestine was formally recognised as a state, allowing Ireland to catch up in Europe on what had already been achieved by Sweden and Iceland, and earlier by former Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland, Hungary, and others. Furthermore, in October 2024, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin affirmed that the government would be positively looking further into a much-debated piece of legislation, the Occupied Territories Bill, which would see a ban on imports to Ireland from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Most telling of all for the extent of this pivot: the Irish government submitted a declaration to join South Africa’s case in the ICJ — reversing the same government’s positioning on the subject from early in 2024.

One step forward, two steps back?

Now, only three months later, Micheál Martin is head of the new government coalition, and already the Occupied Territories Bill has been ‘shelved’. The retirement of the legislation does come alongside the promise that it would be ‘replaced’ by new legislation fulfilling the same purpose, but public details on this are concerningly thin, and there’s no available timeline as to when such a new legislation would be made material.

Similarly, the new government has quite shockingly, seemingly out of nowhere, officially endorsed the much-controversial IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, over alternative definitions such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. The IHRA definition has been noted by human rights groups as dangerously tethering the definition of antisemitism to criticism of Israel.

The decision to join the ICJ case remains unchanged, but the sudden rhetorical shift has nevertheless been apparent.

A kind reading would be that once Varadkar was freed from the responsibility of his position, he used his platform to make his voice heard on Palestine. Yet, the political figures responsible for progress on the topic are the same ones responsible for the recent backsteps — most notably, it was Micheál Martin who confirmed progress on the Occupied Territories Bill, and who shelved it not long thereafter.

I suggest, then, another reading of events: when the major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, are at their weakest, they are strikingly willing to take decisive action on Palestine. The election-relevant rewards for such opportunism would be obvious: the Palestine movement is overwhelmingly supported by the Irish population, with a November 2023 Ireland Thinks poll suggesting 71% of the Irish population believe Palestinians live under an apartheid reality.

Conversely, while the two parties are strong — as they are now, with the November 2024 election having proven that their coalition is sufficient to form a government even in spite of the individual parties’ waning popularity — then the government is free to ignore the electorate, by benching the Occupied Territories Bill and by returning to silence on Palestine.

What can be done? Here is something everyone can do, Irish citizen or not:

Ireland has a unique role — or a unique potential for a role — within Europe. The public overwhelmingly calls for peace, decolonisation, and an end to apartheid. Whether the Irish government, therefore, amplifies the people’s voice, or represses those same voices in favour of ‘fitting in’ within Europe, will not depend on intrinsic properties of governance, but rather on the extent to which democratic rights are exercised and whether voices are raised. The current government shows a worrying direction, but in its moment of weakness before the election it revealed a window into its — cynical or not — responsiveness to pressure.

I therefore conclude this article with an invitation: no matter where you are from, let us prove to the Irish government that, in times where moral voices in political leadership are so sorely needed, the world is watching its leaders. I invite readers to engage with this moment of opportunity by directly contacting the new taoiseach Micheál Martin, which can be done by clicking on the following link (remember to sign off at the end of the email), urging the Taoiseach to take immediate action on the Occupied Territories Bill. The link will open your device’s email application with a pre-drafted email. Feel free to add your own flavour to the text — let’s make our voices heard!