The English translation of the first Convivialist Manifesto came out in 2014, and the German edition of this book in 2018. As I write this chapter in early 2022, we continue to face many of the same social and political problems. Other developments, however, are new and were not really foreseeable then. Currently, we are experiencing an unprecedented polarization of certain tendencies.

To begin with, Donald Trump’s election as US President brought with it a deterioration of American democratic culture and a disruption of erstwhile continuities in foreign policy around the globe; one thinks of his readiness to engage in economic warfare, his relativization of human rights, and the withdrawal of the US from multilateral accords like the Paris Climate Agreement. Bruno Latour (2018) has argued that Trump’s presidency marked the first genuinely “climatic regime”: his determination to carry on fossil policies and flatly ignore climate change was tantamount to forsaking the shared, confined sphere of planet Earth, the “safe operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al, 2009). Then again, the boundless use of resources is nothing new, but rather a continuity of Western hubris and capitalist accumulation, which has been exploiting the free availability and inexpensiveness of nature for centuries. In juxtaposition to Trump and what he stands for, another, by now iconic, figure has emerged: Greta Thunberg, the initiator of the global Fridays for Future protests, who has made the public aware of climate change like no other individual has been able to. Whereas Trump’s planet knows no boundaries, Thunberg’s planet trembles under the weight of humanity.

Such polarizations have become ubiquitous. In Germany, while there had been a welcoming atmosphere and much solidarity with refugees in the summer of 2015, the mood soon changed. The profiteer was the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD), a new party with nationalist and racist positions which entered all of the country’s regional parliaments as well as the Bundestag, and thus made Germany move to the right. Now, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are joining forces via social networks to rebel against the government’s measures and spread outlandish theories and misinformation.