Contribution short abstract:

The paper discusses direct actions in, with, and against oil and gas companies in Central Europe and Eastern Africa. Activists worked with various Marxian theories and constantly struggled for theoretical and tactical understandings of revolutionary aims, as they became shareholders.

Contribution long abstract:

The paper focuses on a recent practice of different Marxian groups that combine direct action against financial capitalist corporations with struggling against climate collapse. The material comes from fieldwork with activists from Austria, Italy, Romania, and Kenya who blocked the European Gas Conference in Vienna in 2023 and started organising tactical actions as shareholders of oil and gas companies. As shareholders of the very companies they sought to dismantle, they intervened in decision-making procedures, risk management strategies, and insurance cost calculations to decelerate or stop fossil fuel explorations by playing “their games” in what they called the “heart of the beast”, the annual general assemblies of shareholders.

These groups were part of more extensive campaigns that brought together different political networks and organizations. Via the social movement concept of “theories of change”, they sought to create temporary alliances despite divergent aims and understandings of political purity. Their debates are instructive in analyzing knowledge production and attempts at “ethical” reconciliations between political purity and dirty tactics among empirical Marxists attempting to change, nudge, or tilt capitalist accumulation strategies.

In the paper, I want to discuss their attempts at finding a) a common language between world systems theories, ecological Marxisms and eco-feminism, accelerationism, and social reproduction theories and b) how to reconcile the ever-lacking interventions with their revolutionary aims.

Finally, the paper discusses modalities of relationship and collaboration between Marxian anthropologies and empirical Marxism from various forms of critique and being “critical friends”.