1

Draft translation for Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen (2019): Imperial Mode of Living. On the
Exploitation of Humans and Nature in Global Capitalism. London: Verso.

PLEASE, DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION

Chapter 6

Imperial Automobility

El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta.

José Antonio Viera-Gallo1

SUV-Driving as a Crisis Strategy

In 2014 around three million new passenger cars were registered in Germany. Of these new
registrations, 17.4 per cent of them fell into the category of all-terrain vehicles including
the so-called Sport Utility Vehicles or SUVs, a cross between an all-terrain vehicle and a
sedan, a car hardly used at all in the “all-terrain” countryside and driven almost exclusively
on city streets. After compact cars (26.4 per cent), all-terrain vehicles comprised the
second-highest share of new registrations in 2014. Superminis ranked third with 15.1 per
cent. In 2008 this picture looked quite different. Compact cars were still the frontrunner in
new registrations (28.5 per cent), followed by superminis with 24.2 per cent, while all-
terrain vehicles came in at only 6.4 per cent. Between 2008 and 2015, the proportion of all-
terrain vehicles in the total number of German personal cars increased from 3.2 to 7.2 per
cent, or more than doubled. In absolute numbers their count rose from 1.3 to 3.2 million
over this period.2 The demand for SUVs is either impressive or alarming when compared
to that of electric cars, depending on one’s point of view: “Statistically speaking, for every
German who bought an electric car last year [2014, U. B./M. W.], 36 others purchased an
SUV.”3
The boom in all-terrain vehicles is not only a German phenomenon. The total share
of pick-ups and SUVs in the US comprised 49 per cent of all new registrations in 2014,
 2

and in China 36.4 per cent more SUVs were registered than in the previous year, while the
total sales for personal vehicles only rose by 9.9 per cent. The development in China is also
interesting, as eight out of ten of the highest-selling SUV-types were produced by auto
companies in China, who were thus able to decrease the market share of their foreign
competitors. SUV sales made up a third of net sales among Chinese automakers.4
The imperial mode of living manifests itself in the all-terrain and SUV boom, and
here the trend toward its universalisation takes on particularly illustrative form. In their
production, SUVs consume an extremely high amount of resources; in their use, they
produce an extremely high amount of emissions. They “are heavier, have greater drag or
air resistance, usually are equipped with a more powerful engine – and thus require at least
25 per cent more fuel than conventional hatchback and notchback sedans. Take, for
example, a VW Tiguan with a 110 PS diesel engine, which emits approximately 139 grams
of CO2 per kilometre, while in the same vehicle class, a VW Golf with a 105 PS diesel
engine only emits 99 grams of CO2 per kilometre – a difference of 40 per cent.”5 Because
of their size, SUVs also take up more public space than other cars. And, finally, in a
collision involving an SUV, the risk of death or severe injury is considerably higher for
passengers in smaller cars than it is for the passengers in an SUV. For pedestrians, being
hit by an SUV is more likely to result in severe or fatal injury than accidents involving a
smaller car.6
It is striking that the rising demand for SUVs in the Global North comes parallel
with a general decline of motorised personal vehicles in traffic volume on the whole. This
trend has been observable in Germany since 2008, and, for that matter, “the traffic
performance of motorized personal vehicles (MIV) in other European countries has been
stagnating, while in the USA it has been clearly decreasing since the mid-2000s”.7 Along
with this it is striking that the boom in all-terrain vehicles and SUVs is concurrent with an
ever-greater public awareness of climate change. Due to their price, SUVs are driven
chiefly by people with higher incomes – the Volvo XC90, for example, starts at 50.000
Euro, while you have to shell out 89.000 Euro for an Audi SQ7, and the “most affordable”
Range Rover costs 97.000 Euro. SUV drivers thus also come from the social class whose
members have a comparatively higher environmental consciousness.8 How do these two
facts coexist? How can one explain the concomitance of the SUV boom and waning
 3

significance of the personal vehicle in the Global North? Why do people drive SUVs,
simultaneously aware that they are thereby endangering both the natural world and other
people?
At first glance these facts do not fit. This is also emphasised in a report on a study
from the “CAR-Center Automotive Research” at the University of Duisburg-Essen on the
subject of SUV use. There it states: “[W]hile for years, organic or regionally-grown
products have been finding their way into grocery bags at an ever-higher rate, the bags
themselves are more and more likely to wind up in the back of
an SUV. They do not stand for ecologically-friendly trade at all; they are considered ‘gas-
guzzlers’.” 9 This behaviour – one that is self-contradictory from a wider societal
perspective – can nevertheless be completely coherent to the SUV-driver. As already
described, driving an SUV is safer than driving a smaller car, as long as not everyone has
an SUV. SUV-drivers thus optimally protect themselves and their passengers from the
dangers of automobiles without having to deny themselves the use of a car. By purchasing
organic products they further contribute to the health of themselves and their loved ones.
This behaviour is patently unfit for universal adoption: It interferes with the safety and the
living conditions of others, and the more other people imitate this behaviour, the more it
undermines its own foundations (to the extent that it concerns a positional good – see
chapter 3). Naturally, SUV-driving shares this in common with automotive use in general,
but considerably heightens the imperial character of the latter.
A conflict manifests itself in the fact that SUV-driving is fundamentally incapable
of being taken up universally, a conflict which was only seemingly solved with the well-
known formula of “sustainable development”. According to the Brundtland Report from
the World Commission on Environment and Development [WCED], development is
sustainable or stable when it “meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.10 Wolfgang Sachs pointed out quite
early on that this definition ensures the maximisation “not of clarity, but of consensus-
finding”. “Should development be oriented towards the desire for water, for land, for
income security, or should it focus on the demand for plane trips and stock shares? The
requirements for survival or the conditions of prosperity? And furthermore: Is this a
question of the needs of the incalculable army of the have-nots, or those of the global, big-
 4

city middle classes?”11 What is “sustainable” has not at all been identified. All that has
been identified is the object of social conflicts and negotiation processes. And the
resolution of these conflicts follows rules of play that favour some perceptions of the
relevant problems and interests over others, or even produce certain perceptions of
problems and interests above all others and normalise them. These rules are deeply shaped
by social relations, in our case, particularly shaped by gender relations and the class
structure of capitalist societies. This applies both to capitalist society on the whole and to
the last decades of a growing neoliberal attitude towards competition, and to the intimate
connection between automobility, social status, freedom, security and manliness.
The SUV is a means of steeling oneself against an impenetrable and frequently
threatening world. “In the SUV”, as the CAR-Center study characterises the view of female
drivers, “nothing can happen to me, I will make it through safely.” 12 This applies, one
might add, also to the increasing frequency of heavy rainfall, storms and floods in recent
years. As an individual strategy, driving an SUV not only reduces the chances of accident
for its passengers – it is also an adaptation to climate change, and thus a strategy that, just
as it adapts, also compounds the very problem it pretends to solve. Finally, it also provides
a peripheral view into class conflict: SUVs transport their owners into an inaccessible
position, and through this become a means for the middle class to mediate its “latent fear
of social demotion”.13

The Subjectivity of the Automobile

Automobility and the kind of subject formed through class and gender relations are tightly
woven together. Many things speak to the fact that automobile driving produces certain
kinds of subjectivity – and vice versa. 14 As to the question of which specific kinds of
subjectivity it creates: these are not fixed, as they shift according to the period-specific
forms of structures moulded by society.
The SUV driver should be understood as the automotive subjectivity of neoliberal
capitalism. The polarisation between security and insecurity as well as between superiority
and subalternity, a contrast heightened by SUV street driving, corresponds to a growing
social polarisation, as well as to the neoliberal diffusion of market- and competition-based
 5

mechanisms in all social areas. Moreover, instead of a simple correspondence, we find, in

the car and the subjectivity of its driver, that they constitute each other: The SUV, thanks
to its material qualities, intensifies every aspect of the increasingly competitive and
thoughtless social behaviour of which it is itself a product. It is able to do this by producing
the form of subjectivity that corresponds to it.
Jan Stremmel, writing for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, demonstrated this in an
impressive self-experiment undertaken with an SUV. He described its results as follows:
“After two days the car won. I’m racing down the A9, in the left-hand lane, when a silver
station wagon moves into my lane ahead of me. At this point I haven’t looked in my rear
view mirror for quite a long time. One doesn’t have to worry about too many surprises
from behind while driving at 225 km per hour. But moving into the fast lane ahead of me
at 150 km per hour? I grunt, although I never grunt. I flick on my high beams, although I
never use my high beams. I am a reckless prick. The car has won.”15
Even in the early epoch of the automobile, the ruling classes used this new mode
of locomotion to indulge their own needs, needs they themselves saw in terms of freedom,
at costs born by others. The financially powerful urban middle class experienced the car as
a liberation from the alien rule of the timetable, the fixed rail network and the forced
company of others, all imposed on them as riders in train transport. 16 Automobility
corresponded to the political economy of industrial capitalism, in which competition
appeared to be the natural form of human interaction.17 The first car drivers conducted
themselves in a correspondingly reckless way and sometimes even took pleasure in the
shock this inspired in those who did not have an automobile themselves.18 “No wonder,”
writes Wolfgang Sachs, “given this self-righteous arrogance, that people's tempers flared,
the more so since the village inhabitants themselves had to pay for damage to the streets
and commons. Little wonder, too, that the rage blended with class hatred, for those who
raced along the country and village streets, who drove speedily off leaving the peasants
with the mess, were indeed those nouveaux riches from the cities.”19
Today, as is generally known, drivers have to observe certain rules. But the
fundamental problem – the “increasing monopolization of streets and surfaces, to the
exclusion of non-motorized travel and the public sociability that went with it”20 –
persists. What makes this problem different from the earlier period is the fact that it is no
 6

longer perceived as a problem. Public outrage and class hatred have subsided and the
imprint of the automobile upon the urban and rural landscape has become unquestioned
and normal. The automotive subjectivity finds it natural that children cannot play on the
street, where moving cars endanger their lives and parked ones take up their space for
play; that cyclists are forced onto nearly impassable strips of lanes on footpaths and
sidewalks, where they come into conflict with pedestrians and where they must careen
from side to side to avoid advertising pillars, trees and parking meters; and that must
pedestrians line up in droves at streetlights to let the next wave of cars go by, enduring
their noise and exhaust fumes without complaint.
The lack of public discussion of the imperial character of automobility in everyday
life continues in the silent acceptance of the “external effects” which it produces on a global
scale. To be sure, the intensity of automotive emissions – not least as a result of scandals
in emissions-tampering – has been a repeated subject of public debate. The social and
ecological prerequisites of the use of fossil energy sources in combustion engines,
however, are tacitly accepted.
But compared to this, everything else is trivial: wars are waged for the sake of oil,
authoritarian regimes control access to it and the conditions of its global distribution, and
these regimes are in their turn supported economically and militarily by the governments
of the Global North. Extracting oil, as well as refining it, produce enormous human costs:
“Workers and community residents are contaminated, injured and killed in the processes
of extracting and refining fossil fuels. In fact, more workers die in oil, gas and coal
extraction than in all other industries combined. Low-income, people of color and
Indigenous Peoples are affected even more than other populations by fossil fuel use.”21
Oil is the fuel of fossil-based automobility, but it is nevertheless not its only
prerequisite by far. In order for a combustion engine to be used, it has to be built first. The
same goes for the chassis, the undercarriage, the transmission, the vehicle’s electronic
system, and the interior. Raw materials are used in all these automobile components,
materials which follow complex and destructive paths along their way to the final product
whose use they make possible. The most important raw materials are metals like iron ore,
aluminium and copper. In order to illustrate the dangers connected to their extraction, let
us take a look at an environmental catastrophe that took place on November 5, 2015. On
 7

this day, the dams of two retention reservoirs broke in Mariana, a mining town in the
Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. These reservoirs held the wastewater from a mine owned
by a company called Samarco Mineração. Several million cubic meters of sludge
containing heavy metals (the estimates fluctuate between 30 and 60 million – this equals
the volume of 12,000 to 24,000 Olympic swimming pools) flooded into the valley below,
burying the village of Bento Rodriguez under it, pushing onward into the Rio Doce (Sweet
River) and polluted not only the river but the Atlantic coast around the river’s mouth as
well. Sixteen people died immediately in this environmental disaster, considered the worst
in Brazil’s history. Hundreds lost their houses and hundreds of thousands were cut off from
the water supply. The area effected is as large as Switzerland, and consequences for public
health and the environment are disastrous: The 800-kilometer long Rio Doce, which was
once abundant with fish, is practically dead, the heavy metals passed through the sludge
and into the food chain. A large part of the biological variety of the river was destroyed,
the natural course of the river was disturbed, and the sludge, as it dried, became as hard as
cement, leading to fast and uncontrolled water run-off.
Brazil is, after China and Australia, the third-largest producer of iron ore. None has
been mined in Germany since the closing of the last site in 1987. All demand for iron ore
is covered by imports. In 2014, Germany imported 43 million tons of it. Around 56 per
cent of this amount comes Brazil, which, after Sweden (approximately 16 per cent) and
Canada (around 15 per cent), is Germany’s largest source of iron ore. 22 The German auto
industry is one of the largest industrial consumers of metallic resources. Iron ore is the
most important raw material in regard to the mass of resources for car production, as a
motor vehicle consists of roughly 56 per cent iron and steel. In 2014 the global market
price for iron ore sank by 28 per cent.23 Exporters of raw materials tried to compensate for
the decline in price by expanding production. This applied to the managers of the mine in
Mariana: The strain on the dams was massively increased just shortly before the accident
and the output of the Samarco Mine “was raised by 40 per cent above the level of the
previous year – a market saturation strategy which, in Mariana, led to a sharp increase in
the mine’s production of waste materials and whose effect was the flooding of the
surrounding area.”24
 8

The catastrophe in Mariana revealed the sordid flipside to the glossy chassis. These
metallic forms do not only dominate our own public space in a most astonishingly
unquestioned way, they also destroy the living conditions of people elsewhere and produce
unspeakable suffering.25 Just as noteworthy as the catastrophe itself is the speed with which
it exited the collective memory of the Global North. The subjectivity of the automobile
appeared only for a brief moment on the horizon of perception. In any case it was hardly
able to present a lasting irritation to this subjectivity, such that all reflection over the links
between the mode of living here and the suffering there ceased. Stephen Lessenich calls
this a “generalised desire to know nothing”.26
This also should be understood against the background of a development in which
automobility, over the course of the 20th century, metamorphosed in the Global North from
a class-specific phenomenon to a mass-phenomenon. “Motor vehicle drivers do not
constitute a class unto itself; they already represent, thanks to progressing motorization,
the mass of the people”, as the German Automobile Club ADAC claimed in a manifesto
from 1965.27
In the USA, Henry Ford paved the way for automobility as a phenomenon spanning
all social classes with his Model T, which he put into mass production on the using new
factory methods. These methods substantially increased productivity (most of all the
standardisation of individual parts, the limitation of the range of products, and, later,
conveyer belt production as well). In the first half of the 20th century, the US automobile
and steel industry developed into key economic sectors, where the working class
commanded a high level of organisational power. It used this power after the Great
Depression to establish political and social rights which had previously been withheld. In
this effort it was also to the working class’s benefit that political power in the USA – also
in the wake of the Depression – shifted in favour of reform. The economic and social
reforms passed in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt under the New Deal, as well
as the expansive fiscal policy of the American government in the Second World War,
created the foundation for an economic boom that gave the working class a share of the
national wealth unlike any before. The prolonged phase of capitalism that began in the
USA in the 1930s (after the Second World War in Western Europe) and lasted into the
1970s was called “Fordism” for good reason, as it was based on the spread of the
 9

automobile as a symbol for this economic flourishing and the new methods of production
that were first applied in the auto industry.28
Or rather, this was its title in Germany: Ferdinand Porsche appropriated Ford’s
production methods in the 1930s in Wolfsburg. On Hitler’s authority, and using looted
trade union assets and forced labour, he built up the VW plant and designed the “KdF-
Wagen”, (named after the organisation “Kraft durch Freude” or “Strength through Joy”,
which the Nazis used to try to bring German’s leisure activities into general conformity).
Admittedly, from 1940 on, only its “military brother” was produced under National
Socialism – the Kübelwagen or “Bucket car”. After the Second World War, however, it
went into mass production as the Volkswagen and became a symbol for the economic
development of the German Federal Republic. The name of the car went to the heart of the
idea of an automobility for all social classes. The statistics confirm this: From 1960 to 2016
the number of personal vehicles in Germany increased tenfold from around 4.5 to around
45 million cars.29
The paradox of this development lies in the fact that being able to cross distances
more quickly does not at all mean an increase in available free time or a higher quality of
life. As Ivan Illich already noted in 1975, it works in precisely the opposite way: “The
typical American man [...] spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or on
earning the means to keep his car running. This number does not even include the time
taken up by other activities implied by the use of a car: time spent in the hospital, in traffic
court or at the mechanic’s; the time required to study car advertising or getting advice in
order to negotiate a better “deal” next time. The total costs of auto accidents and
universities in Germany are almost exactly the same and increase along with gross
domestic product. But it is even more instructive to look at time-wasting in traffic: The
typical American puts in 1,600 hours to cover 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour.
In countries where there is no automobile industry, people manage the same speed and
while going wherever they want – and they spend not 28 per cent of their society’s total
“time budget” in traffic, as is the case in the USA, but only 3 to 8 per cent.30
The development of ever-faster and ever more high-performance vehicles can be
understood as an attempt to minimize the loss of time through technological and
competitive means: Whoever can afford the most horsepower gets ahead in the rat race.
 10

Since everyone else is also upgrading their cars, the contest simply repeats itself at an ever
higher level of the technological ladder. At a certain point, time-wasting speed can only be
raised by exponentially increasing the risk of an accident. The competition then takes on
other forms: taller, tank-like cars satisfy their passengers’ demands for security to the same
degree that they endanger the lives of children, pedestrians, cyclists and passengers in
smaller cars. And alongside the car’s high-speed capabilities, the technical amenities of the
car’s interior become a question of status. It determines who, sitting in traffic jams caused
by car crashes, can spend their lost time in the most comfortable manner.
At this point an important feature of mass automobility comes into view: The
capitalist principles of competition and maximizing utility trickle down into the pores of
everyday life. The automotive “liberation” of the individual becomes a means of creating
a capitalist subjectivity: “Mass automobility is the reification of bourgeois ideology’s total
victory over the practice of everyday life: it establishes and maintains the illusory idea that
every individual can get rich and become more important at the cost of everyone else.”31
At the same time, the mobility made available in the Global North by Fordism has
something egalitarian about it. Specifically, the fact that it provided a previously unheard-
of share of social progress to the working class in the form of a personal vehicle. Abundant
work opportunities sprung up in the auto industry, which, in many developed capitalist
economies during the period of Fordism, developed into a key sector of the economy. 32
Thanks to the rising income generated in this and other sectors of the economy, as well as
the development of methods which increased productivity, workers experienced growing
prosperity and were able to enjoy spatial mobility with the purchase of their own car.
It is likely that the Fordist proliferation of the automobile substantially contributed
to the emergence of an automotive subjectivity, as did the growth of prosperity and spread
of car ownership that it facilitated and symbolised. Even as it increases under
neoliberalism, social polarisation has been so far unable to cast doubt on this mode of
subjectivity. Consider, for example, the symbolic superiority associated with SUV driving.
Indeed, the competitive aspect of mass automobility, which is always already present
alongside its egalitarian aspect, makes this polarisation appear normal. This condition
seems to carry over into the ecological crisis: The decades-long practice of suppressing the
imperial character of automobility has made it into a non-problem, even in light of the
 11

social and ecological disruptions which, recently, are its ever more visible by-products. If
anything, automobility even seems to be part of the solution, specifically: the more solid
the car, the better the driver’s ability to adapt to a crisis situation.

Mobility, Class and Gender

Even if motorised personal transport is highly compatible with the individualist mode of
capitalist production, which tends to structure the entire social realm according to the
principle of competition, it is still not an inevitable result of these forces. It is, rather, the
result of clashes in society, clashes which factions of capital were able to decide for
themselves in favour of oil and the combustion engine, while alternative transport systems
– whether electric or generally public – were in many places marginalised.
John Urry describes these conflicts in the USA, where non-automotive transport
systems have been especially marginalised:

In the USA between 1927 and 1955, General Motors, Mack Manufacturing (trucks),
Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, Firestone Tire & Rubber, and Greyhound
Lines, came together to share information, investments and ‘activities’. Their objective
was to eliminate streetcars (what are called trams in Europe). These companies
established various front companies, one of which was National City Lines (NCL).
During especially the 1930s, NCL together with various subsidiaries bought up many
electrified streetcar lines. They then tore them up. At least forty-five cities lost their
streetcars. The strategy was to shift to motorized petroleum-based transport. Local
citizens were left without alternatives to oil-based cars and buses. This carbon conspiracy
was in strict violation of US anti-trust laws. It was only discovered in 1955, whereupon
the companies were found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act but then
subjected to tiny fines.33

The domination of the automobile over other forms of movement, as Urry notes on the
result of these struggles, “came to be viewed as natural and inevitable”.34
This did not, in any case, mean the fight had come to an end. The automobile’s
ecological effects, and its effects on public health, were politicised with the emergence of
 12

the environmental movement in the USA in the late 1960s. They were also brought to the
public’s attention by spectacular scientific descriptions of problems related to the
environment and resource depletion, for example by the report, “The Limits of Growth”
commissioned by the Club of Rome. And, as oil prices lurched upwards in the 1970s in the
wake of the Six Day War and then the Iranian Revolution, and the US went through peak
oil production, it seemed an opportunity had appeared for reducing the intense carbon
footprint in economic and social development. One of then-president Jimmy Carter’s plans
was to do precisely that. The plan fell through, however, when he was replaced by Ronald
Reagan in the beginning of the 1980s and oil prices sank again.35
Governments played a key role in establishing and normalising automobility. Nazi
Germany was a pioneer in this, as the state created an infrastructure exclusively for the use
of automobiles: the autobahn. After the Second World War, road systems were massively
expanded in the USA, Japan and Europe. The European highway system was quadrupled
just in the years between 1970 and 2006. Rail transport, in contrast, has been systematically
reduced or eliminated.36 Meanwhile in Germany, the auto industry has so ensconced itself
in the state apparatus and infrastructure system that the German government vehemently
opposes any attempt by the European Commission to impose stricter exhaust standards on
car manufacturers.37 The Volkswagen emissions scandal did not change anything in this
equation, although it was precisely this company that was supposed to lead the way into
the socio-economic transformation of society’s key industries, due to company co-
determination (worker representation on the board of directors) and the blocking stake
(veto power in all important decisions) in the state of Lower Saxony guaranteed by the
Volkswagen Act of 1960.38
Automobility’s infrastructural, institutional and subjective entrenchment is not only
due to the power of the auto industry. It also stems from the interests of the workers,
employees and trade unions in the industry, who perceive any fundamental restructuring
as a threat to their organisational power. 39 One could call this deep entrenchment the
“automotive consensus”: Those employed in the auto industry seem to strongly identify
themselves today, as before, with their employers and their products. As the example of
VW shows, this even holds true in times of crisis, when appeals to businesses to act for the
community and make sacrifices would seem to fall on fertile ground.40 The case of VW
 13

obviously combines, on the one hand, a long tradition of corporate industrial relationships,
ensuring the prosperity of their workforce and entire regions over the course of decades,
with, on the other hand, a readiness to adapt induced by competition and intensified by the
emissions scandal. The consequence of this is that the short-term preoccupation with
retaining jobs completely inhibits the emergence of much-needed debate on the
fundamental social and ecological transformation of the auto industry.41
We can observe the class character of automobility all the more clearly when we
look beyond production: mass-motorisation in the Global North seemed to hide class in the
background, at least in the post-war period. One aspect of this, as we have already seen,
relates to types of cars – the SUV vs. the supermini. But class relations also manifest
themselves in the question of who actually owns and uses a car. In 2008, for example, 64
per cent of German households with a monthly income of less than 900 Euro had no car,
while 93 per cent of households with an income of 5.000-18.000 Euro per month owned
two or more vehicles.42 The Motor Club of Austria (Verkehrsclub von Österreich, VCÖ)
has shown, moreover, that demands on automobile performance also increase with income.
What is interesting here is that auto use rises disproportionately to income. Thus every
state-financed expansion and improvement to automobile infrastructure is always a policy
that benefits the already privileged and amplifies social inequality.43
The auto-imperial mode of living is not only entrenched in class relations, which
are, as we have just seen, complex and fluid in the specific forms they take. It is also based
in gender relations, relations which it also produces: Cars are advertised according to sexist
tropes; their design serves the purposes of sexual stereotypes; they encourage the
development of a hegemonic masculinity rooted in qualities like aggression, violence and
technology; 44 and in a time when physical strength is losing its significance in the
workplace, cars help “to reproduce the concept of masculinity as one of technical
competence”.45
This has led to a situation in which the universal spread of the automotive mode of
living in the Global North has been accompanied by a form of urban development that has
inscribed unequal gender relations in the city’s landscape, as it is based on the principle on
a separation of functions. The middle class is concentrated largely in suburban spaces with
poor access to social infrastructure, while employment is located in the city or in
 14

commercial centres. This has abolished the mixing of various work and life functions long
characteristic of city life: wage labour and care work are very difficult to bring together
under these conditions. This form of urban development requires the universal spread of
automobility, perpetuates an everyday life organized around the car, and encourages a
gender-specific separation of labour at the expense of care work. “Systems of transport
were conceptualised by men with full-time positions and serve the transport needs of the
gainfully employed above all others”. That is, above the transport needs of other, mostly
unpaid, forms of work – accompanying children and the elderly, grocery shopping or
participation in social and cultural activities. The infrastructural requirements for
reconciling the needs of both “gainful” and unpaid, but socially necessary work, as well as
the needs of non-working users of transport, e.g. children and the elderly – have been
neglected.46
Adelheid Biesecker, Sabine Hofmeister and Uta von Winterfeld have emphasised
that the capitalist mode of production depends on a double form of externalisation (cf.
chapter 3): it appropriates both nature and care work in such a way that does not depend,
or depends only in a very limited way, on the principal of equivalent exchange operating
in the circulation of goods. Additionally, it tends to impose its social and ecological costs
on the natural world and the realm of care work.47 In the culture of the automobile, in its
resource needs, in the immense damage it causes to both people and nature world wide,
and in the inequality of gender relations that is inscribed into automotive infrastructure, or
to put it briefly: in its imperial character, the two forms of externalisation come together in
an exemplary way.

The Ecological Modernisation of Automobility

Recently, there seem to be signs of an emerging ecological modernisation of automobility.

Car manufacturers have been unveiling models with ever more efficient combustion
engines, making increasing use of electric and hybrid motors, developing ecologically
efficient self-driving cars and have been attempting to establish themselves as service
providers in mobility by maintaining their own car-sharing fleets and investing in taxi-app
services.48 In doing this they are reacting to changing habits in transport use, especially
 15

among young people, who increasingly forgo possession of their own car in favour of a
more “multimodal” use of transportation.49 At the same time, manufacturers are trying to
shape the development of these habits.
In order to appreciate this shift, it is worthwhile to differentiate between innovations
which increase eco-efficiency and those that increase eco-effectiveness.50 An increase in
eco-efficiency exists when, thanks to innovation, the same product or the same service can
be produced or provided while consuming less resources and producing less emissions than
before. This is the case in transport when, for example, improved motor power makes it
possible to travel the same distance by using less fuel. Increases in eco-efficiency are often
sensible. It becomes a problem, however, when the products and services are
simultaneously reduced in price, creating additional demand, so that higher efficiency is
compensated by increased consumption. When cars are driven more often because
improved efficiency has lowered driving costs, or when money saved on auto expenses is
spent on plane travel, then what results from this is not less environmental pollution but
more – the so-called “rebound effect”.51 Moreover, these increases in eco-efficiency can
be the focus of “progress toward the wrong goal”, contributing to a situation in which
“efforts to open up ecologically innovative alternatives remain deprived of necessary
resources.”52 This is especially true for combustion engines: More eco-efficient propulsion
can hardly compensate for the negative social and ecological effects that result from the
vehement world-wide expansion of private transport, despite the progressive exhaustion of
fossil fuels and the strain on CO2 reservoirs.
Against this background, eco-effectiveness becomes more significant. To increase
this means not merely “decreasing the amount of environmental pollution”, but striving
towards a “qualitative restructuring of the use of resources, energy and natural
reservoirs”.53 Here, for example, the discussion concerns the replacement of combustion-
engine automobile use with that of electric-powered vehicles with the help of state
financing, currently underway in many places. According to the German “National
Platform for Electro-Mobility” – an advisory board of the federal government, consisting
of representatives from industry, science, government ministries, associations and unions
– this plan represents a “key to the sustainable transformation of mobility: climate- and
 16

environmentally friendly, resource-conserving and efficient”.54 The federal government’s

goal is to have one million electric cars on German roads by 2020.
Aside from the fact that this plan is still quite far from being realised – there were
only around 20.000 electric cars in Germany at the beginning of 2016 – the question
presents itself of what a transformation towards a fleet of electric cars would mean, socially
and ecologically. 55 What is initially striking is that the debate about elecro-mobility
includes two important slippages. First, electro-mobility is reduced to electro-auto-
mobility, while the scaling down of private car ownership in favour of collective forms of
electro-mobility like trams or busses plays only a minor role, if at all.56 Second, the only
ecological advantages to be emphasised are those offered by the operation of electric cars
in contrast to cars with combustion engines. The ecological costs of their production
remain, however, unexamined. This imbalance is characteristic of the scrappage program
implemented in the recent economic crisis by the German federal government as an attempt
to support the auto industry. The objective was to exchange old cars for new ones that
consume less fuel and that are thus more efficient in operation. Ecology and economy, it
was suggested, would both profit equally from this scheme. No one concerned themselves
with the question of the material and energy to be expended on the production of these
vehicles, vehicles which no one in fact needed, as the ones to be replaced were presumably
still for the most part functional (see chapter 2).
Electro-automobility’s focus on the operation of vehicles and the suppression of
their production seems to repeat under the banner of eco-effectiveness. It is simply assumed
that, because they do not emit any CO2 while running, electric-powered cars are per se
more environmentally friendly than those with combustion engines. But the unstated
presupposition that all electric vehicles be supplied with electricity from renewable energy
sources is not taken into account. And even if this transformation were realised, there is
still the open and important question of the materials and energy used in the production of
electric cars, and their effect on the ecological balance.
In addition, the availability of some metals necessary for electric motors could
become a problem. Ernst Schriefl and Martin Bruckner, for example, estimate that the
supply of platinum will not be able to keep pace with rising demand. There are also signs
of a copper shortage. In contrast, the currently known lithium reserves should be
 17

sufficient to cover “explosively growing demand”. The problem here, however, is that an
expansion of lithium mining, corresponding to the growth in demand, would be
associated with “serious negative ecological consequences” in the regions concerned.57
Recycling hardly solves the problems of availability and extraction, as, according to the
study of the UN’s Environmental Program (UNEP), Recycling Rates of Metals: A Status
Report, “CITE IN ENGLISH” so lange die globale Metallnutzung steigt und Metalle in
Produkten...58
The “energy requirements of a revolution in materials” would have to be taken
into account alongside the “material requirements of an energy revolution”: It is non-
renewable, fossil-based energy that is utilised “on a mass scale in the extraction of metals
used in electric motors and wind turbines”; and the energy expenditure grows as the
metal content in the extracted ore decreases and the mines are made more accessible.59
Finally, the criterion of resource justice is significant. The calculations for the
discrepancy between the supply and the demand for resources are one question. It is quite
another question to ask whether the products, in which the resources are expended or
which are produced through the consumption of fossil fuels, can in any way be seen to
benefit all people equally: rather the opposite is the case. Those who benefit from electro-
automobility will be for the most part the inhabitants sof the cities and regions in the
Global North. In contrast, the people who are likely to lose out in this exchange will be
found in the mining regions of the Global South. They will hardly experience electro-
automobility at all, but will be effected all the more by the damages to the ecosystem and
their own health caused by the extraction of these metals for the production of electric
power. The supposed revolution in mobility mainly aims to lower CO2 emissions while
not simultaneously problematising the material dimension of electro-automobility and
thus challenging the magnitude of the transport of goods and people. It thus also implies a
disproportional utilisation of materials and energy by less beneficiaries. This will not
result in overcoming the imperial mode of living. Instead, it will perpetuate it by
changing its basis of material and energy consumption.
We must agree with Kingsley Dennis and John Urry when they state: “The
environmental impacts of the car stem from its entire life cycle and related infrastructure
systems, including extraction of raw materials, vehicle production, operation and
 18

maintenance, as well as maintenance of the road infrastructure, hospital costs, emotional

costs of the many deaths and injuries and so on. The car user does not pay the full cost,
since many of these environmental and public health costs are not embedded in car
charges.”60
Essentially, the “ecologisation” of automobility through the market-based and
technologically fixed strategies described above is therefore an attempt to make the
imperial mode of living permanent through the selective ecological modernisation of one
of its central domains. The decisive questions are hardly being asked in the prevaling
debate over a “revolution in mobility”: how can we avoid or shorten traffic routes, and
how can we organise truly necessary traffic routes in the most socially and
environmentally sound way possible? The fact that these questions are not being asked is
not particularly surprising, as they can neither be answered by eco-efficiency nor by eco-
effectiveness. To answer them would require debating questions of mobility in a wider
social context and under a consideration of sufficiency (cf. chapter 8). This, however,
would be to go straight to the heart of the imperial mode of living, and the forms of social
relations and subjectivity at its foundations.
 19

1
“Socialism can only arrive by bicycle.” José Antonio Viera-Gallo is a Chilean
politician. He was Secretary of Justice under the government of socialist President
Salvador Allende (1970-1973). As cited in Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, New York,
Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. xxxi.
2
Bundesministerium für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur (Federal Ministry of
Transport and Digital Infrastructure, DMVI), Verkehr in Zahlen 2015/2016, Hamburg:
Bundesministerium für Verkehr und Infrastruktur, 2015, pp. 135-137.
3
Jan Stremmel, “Das wird man wohl noch fahren dürfen!”, in Süddeutsche Zeitung,
21.09.2015.
4
[Translator note: citation unclear if author is Dudenhöffer 2013 as listed in
bibliography from ZEIT 2013, or Trefis Team in Forbes 2015, or both] Ferdinand
Dudenhöffer 2013. “There is much to gain in China’s SUV market – but for whom?”, in
Forbes (forbes.com), 21.05.2015.
5
[Translator note: are these two separate citations from Dudenhöffer/ZEIT 2013
and Forbes 2015?] Ibid.
6
Unfallforschung der Versicherer, “Sport Utility Vehicles im Unfallgeschehen, Berlin”,
in Unfallforschung kompakt, 34, 2012.
7
Hedwig Verron, “Ändert sich die Mobilitätskultur – Zwei Experteninterviews”, in
Zeitschrift für Umweltpsychologie, 19(1), 2015, (pp. 12-26), p. 12.
8
[Translator note: Wuppertalinstitut publication is from 2008, not 2009?] On the
relationship between income, education, resource use and emissions, see
Wuppertalinstitut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie, Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland in einer
globalisierten Welt. Ein Anstoß zur gesellschaftlichen Debatte, Frankfurt am Main:
Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie GmbH, 2009, pp. 152-3, as well as Silke
Kleinhückelkotten et al., Repräsentative Erhebung von Pro-Kopf-Verbräuchen
natürlicher Ressourcen in Deutschland (nach Bevölkerungsgruppen), Texte 39/2016,
Dessau-Roßlau: Umweltbundesamt, 2016.
9
Johannes Steger, “…werden so viele SUV verkauft?”, in Absatzwirtschaft
(Absatzwirtschaft.de), 11.12.2015.
10
The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, (un-
documents.net) 1990, p. 16.
11
Wolfgang Sachs, “Sustainable Development. Zur politischen Anatomie eines
internationalen Leitbilds”, in Karl-Werner Brand et al., Soziologie und Ökologie:
Nachhaltige Entwicklung. Eine Herausforderung an die Soziologie, Vol. 1, 1997 (pp. 93-
110), p. 99-100.
12
Steger, “…werden so viele SUV verkauft?”; cf. Kingsley Dennis and John Urry, After
the Car, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, pp. 41-43.
13
Steger, “…werden so viele SUV verkauft?”.
14
Cf. Hermann Knoflacher, “Das Auto im Kopf. Fetisch motorisierter
Individualverkehr”, in Politische Ökologie, 32(127), 2014, pp. 25-31.
15
Stremmel, “Das wird man wohl noch fahren dürfen!”.
16
Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our
Desires, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 93-95; cf. Oliver
 20

Schwedes, “Vom Homo Civis Mobiis. Mobilität im Wandel der Geschichte”, in

Politische Ökologie, 137, 2014, (pp. 18-24), p. 21.
17
Cf. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the Nineteenth Century, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014
[1986] p. 83.
18
See the illustrative descriptions in Sachs, For Love of the Automobile, pp. 12-13.
19
Ibid., p. 14.
20
Ibid., p. 22.
21
[Translator note: citation unclear if author is Brie/Candeias 2016, there is no
Brie/Candeias 2012 in bibliography. An unlisted Brie/Candeias 2012 with this
citation is ANALYSEN: Just Mobility. Postfossil Conversion and Free Public
Transport, Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2012, at
www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Analysen/Analyse_Just_Mobility.pdf]
Just Transition Alliance, cited in Michael Brie and Mario Candeias, Rückkehr der
Hoffnung. Für eine offensive Doppelstrategie, 2016, p. 13. (zeitschrift-luxemburg.de),
November 2016.
22
Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (German Federal Institute for
Geosciences and Natural Resources, BGR), Deutschland – Rohstoffsituation 2014,
Hanover: Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe, 2015, p. 79.
23
Data on iron and steel: Uwe Kerkow et al., Vom Erz zum Auto. Abbaubedingungen und
Lieferketten im Rohstoffsektor und die Verantwortung der deutschen Automobilindustrie,
Aachen, Bonn, Stuttgart: MISEREOR, Brot für die Welt, Global Policy Forum Europe,
2012; data on iron ore: BGR, Deutschland – Rohstoffsituation 2014, p. 7. [Translator
note: replace with English sources?]
24
Stephan Lessenich, Neben uns die Sintflut. Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr
Preis, Berlin: Hanser, 2016, p.12.
25
A systematic examination of the human rights violations and the ecological destruction
occuring at various stages of the chain of automobile production can be found in the
study by Uwe Kerkow, Jens Martens and Axel Müller (Kerkow et al., Vom Erz zum
Auto).
26
Lessenich, Neben uns die Sintflut, pp. 111-12.
27
As cited in Sachs, For Love of the Automobile, p. 77.
28
Cf. Dorothea Schmidt, “Fordismus: Glanz und Elend eines. Produktionsmodells”, in
PROKLA, 43(3), 2013, pp. 401-420.
29
[Translator note: citation is not in bibliography] Figures according to the survey,
“Bestand in den Jahren 1960 to 2018 nach Fahrzeugklassen” from the Kraftfahrt-
Bundesamt (Federal Motor Transport Authority). See kba.de.
30
Illich, Energy and Equity, pp. 18-19.
31
[Translator note: citation says Cambridge MA in bibliography] André Gorz,
Auswege aus dem Kapitalismus. Beiträge zur politischen Ökologie, Zurich:
Rotpunktverlag, 2009, pp. 53-4, cf. Matthew Paterson, Automobile Politics, Ecology and
Cultural Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, ch. 5.
32
Kaufmann, “Globale Ökonomie des Autos. Krisen und Strategien”, in Mario Candeias
et al., Globale Ökonomie des Autos. Mobilität, Arbeit, Konversion, Hamburg: VSA
Verlag, 2011, (pp. 14-122), pp. 16-8.
33 John Urry, Societies beyond Oil. Oil Dregs and Social Futures, London: ZED Books,
 21

2013, p. 77, also see Winfried Wolf, Verkehr. Umwelt. Klima: Die Globalisierung des
Tempowahns, Vienna: Promedia Verlag, 2007, pp. 123-5.
34
Urry, Societies beyond Oil, p. 78.
35
Urry, Societies beyond Oil, pp. 79-96.
36
Wolf, Verkehr. Umwelt. Klima, ch. 11.
37
On this see the informative chronology of the collaboration between the auto industry
and the German Ministry of the Economy in Ott 2016.
38
[Translator note: title of citation is incomplete in original] Cf. Stephan Krull,
“#Dieselgate. Mit Volks- und Betriebsgemeinschaft in die Barbarei?”, in SoZ –
Sozialistische Zeitung, 11/2015 (sozonline.de).
39
[Translator note: citation unclear if author is Brie/Candeias 2016, there is no
Brie/Candeias 2012 in bibliography. An unlisted Brie/Candeias 2012 with this
citation is ANALYSEN: Just Mobility. Postfossil Conversion and Free Public
Transport, Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2012, at
www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Analysen/Analyse_Just_Mobility.pdf]
Michael Brie and Mario Candeias, Rückkehr der Hoffnung, p. 17. [replace as above]
40
Krull, “#Dieselgate”.
41
There is also a corresponding tradition of opposition in the auto industry that could be
connected to the current moment: In the 1970s and early 1980s, the “Plakat-Gruppe”
(“Poster Group”) of Daimler-Benz saw the social and ecological transformation of the
auto industry not as a threat but as a necessity for preserving jobs (Willi Hoss, Komm ins
Offene, Freund. Autobiographie, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, 2004, Part
II). A member of the group, Dieter Marcello, writes in an essay: “If we don’t only
demand jobs but also think about the meaning and the purpose of this work, and exert
pressure on employees along these lines, and on IG Metall too, then we might be able to
avoid having to set up severance packages in the 90s, and instead build alternative
products for an alternative transport system” (Dieter Marcello, “Das Produkt Auto”, in
Wechselwirkung, 2. Jg, 1980, (pp. 52-53) p. 53, also see IG Metall/Deutscher
Naturschutzring, Auto, Umwelt, Verkehr: Umsteuern, bevor es zu spat ist:
Verkehrspolitische Konferenz der IG Metall und des Deutschen Naturschutzrings,
Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1992).
42
Immanuel Stieß et al., Analyse bestehender Maßnahmen und Entwurf innovativer
Strategien zur verbesserten Nutzung von Synergien zwischen Umwelt- und Sozialpolitik,
Texte 46/2012, Dessau-Roßlau: Umweltbundesamt, p. 26.
43
Verkehrsclub Österreich (Austrian Motor Club, VCÖ), Soziale Texte von Mobilität,
Vienna: Verkehrsclub von Österreich, 2009, pp. 9-10. We would like to thank Bettina
Urbanek for this observation.
44
Paterson, Automobile Politics, pp. 47-8.
45
Ibid, p. 134.
46
Christine Bauhardt, “Feministische Verkehrs- und Raumplanung”, in Oliver Schöller et
al., Handbuch Verkehrspolitik, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007,
(pp. 301 – 319), p. 308.
47
Adelheid Biesecker and Sabine Hofmeister, “Focus: (Re)productivity: Sustainable
relations both between society and nature and between the genders”, in Ecological
Economics, 69(8), 2010, pp. 1703-1711; Adelheid Biesecker and Uta von Winterfeld,
Extern? Weshalb und inwiefern moderne Gesellschaften Externalisierung brauchen und
 22

erzeugen, Working Paper 2/2014, Jena: DFG-KollegforscherInnengruppe

Postwachstumsgesellschaften, 2014.
48
[Translator note: title of citation varies as “Deutschlands Autobauer fürchten die
digitalen Newcomer”] Caspar Busse et al., “Ans rettende Ufer”, in Süddeutsche Zeitung,
11./12.2016.
49
[Translator note: author name varies from bibliography citation] Maike Gossen et
al., Umweltbewusstsein in Deutschland 2014 – Vertiefungsstudie: Umweltbewusstsein
und Umweltverhalten junger Menschen, Texte 77/2015, Dessau-Roßlau:
Umweltbundesamt, pp. 41-2, Verron 2015, p. 12. We are not going to expand here on the
issue of biofuel, that is, the attempt to partially substitute fossil fuels in combustion
engines by using bioethanol and biodiesel. The socially and ecologically devastating
effects of this idea, as well as the opposition to it, are well documented. See for example
Kristina Dietz et al., The Political Ecology of Agrofuels, London/New York: Routledge,
2015; Melanie Pichler, “Umkämpfte Natur: Politische Ökologie der Palmöl- und
Agrarstreibstoffproduktion in Südostasien”, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag,
2014; Alina Brad et al., “Contested territorialization and biophysical expansion of oil
palm plantations in Indonesia”, in Geoforum, 64, pp. 100-111, 2015.
50
Joseph Huber, “Ökologische Modernisierung und Umweltinnovation”, in Matthias
Groß, Handbuch Umweltsoziologie, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften,
2011, cf. Weert Canzler, “Nachhaltige Mobilität”, in Jahrbuch Nachhaltige Ökonomie
2014/2015, pp. 339-358.
51
Cf. Tilman Santarius, Der Rebound-Effekt. Ökonomische, psychische und soziale
Herausforderungen für die Entkopplung von Wirtschaftswachstum und
Energieverbrauch, Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 2015.
52
Huber, “Ökologische Modernisierung und Umweltinnovation”, p. 287.
53
Ibid.
54
See their homepage, nationale-plattform-elektro-mobilitaet.de.
55
Even the buyer’s premium introduced in July 2016 and retroactively effective since
May 18 of that year are hardly being utilised.
56
Cf. Verkehrsclub von Deutschland (German Motor Club, VCD), Position
Elektromobilität, Berlin: Verkehrsclub von Deutschland, 2010. It remains to be seen
whether the digitalisation of automobility will transform this, in a similarly slippery way,
into a stronger collective form of locomotion. That, at least, is the thesis proposed by Jörg
Häntzschel (2016). According to this view, it will allow for new technical, insurance-
related opportunities to reduce the power of the driver, place them under control and
finally transform the automotive subjectivity. The establishment of navigation devices,
will then “make a collective out of a wild heap, against its will, driven by a choir of
digital women’s voices who will give the same instructions to all”. This development will
be helped along by telematics: the car insurer will constantly have the driving behaviour
of its customers on video, be able to sanction this behaviour monitarily and train the “the
driver to be a disciplined, cooperative member of society”. Eventually electronic “driving
assistants” will, contrary to their name, be able to take over as drivers. In Germany,
however, these opportunities could be missed. Local automakers continue to focus on
speed and horsepower, and state policy, according to Häntzschel, continues to encourage
the “old, ecstatic-suicidal James Dean model of car driving” with various carrots and
sticks.
 23

57
Ernst Schriefl and Martin Bruckner, “Bedarf an Metallen für eine globale
Energiewende bis 2050 – Diskussion möglicher Versorgungsgrenzen”, in Andreas Exner
et al., Kritische Metalle in der Großen Transformation, Berlin, Heidelberg: 2016, (pp.
217-233), pp. 229-31.
58
As cited in Schriefl and Bruckner “Bedarf an Metallen für eine globale Energiewende
bis 2050”, p. 231.
59
Exner et al., Einführung. Kritische Metalle in der Großen Transformation, Berlin,
Heidelberg: 2016, (pp. 1-16), pp. 12-3.
60
Dennis and Urry, After the Car, p. 50.