Radical movements are calling for changes in mobility and traffic. They urge car-centric societies to reconsider current mobility behaviors, car production, and car usage in light of the structural conditions of industrial-fossil capitalism. This includes making mobility needs, infrastructure design, production, and mobility services the subject of democratic negotiation. Collective democratization of car production, also known as socialization, lies at the heart of these claims. In her contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Lotte Herzberg focuses on efforts to socialize and convert Germany’s largest car producer, Volkswagen (VW).
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In August 2022, a handful of young people moved to Wolfsburg, home to Volkswagen’s headquarters and one of the power centers of the German automotive industry. With their the campaign they aimed to influence the conversation about the future of the factory and corporation, as well as explore how the mobility and traffic transition can be implemented in production. After all, the automotive industry in Germany has been in crisis for years, yet no progress has been made in implementing sustainable mobility. Why not transform the world’s second-largest car company to produce the means of transportation we’ll need in the future: buses, trains, and trams?
For two intense years, activists have shaken up the small-town atmosphere of Wolfsburg with creative actions. They distributed job offers for rail vehicle construction in the name of VW, renamed streets, printed a newspaper, and organized a climate camp. In March 2023, they stopped one of the company’s car trains in the middle of the Mittelland Canal. They covered the new cars with a banner displaying a life-size tram and the headline, “The first tram leaves the factory!” These types of actions have brought nationwide attention to the campaign.
Combining social and ecological considerations
A few years after the discursive successes of the climate justice movement around Fridays for Future, a broad field of political actors is working to regain its interpretive authority by pitting job preservation against any kind of ecological transformation. According to their argument, a more sustainable society with fewer cars on the roads would also mean fewer ‘German cars’ from ‘German factories’ and thus the loss of thousands of jobs in one of Germany’s most ideologically important key industries.
In contrast to that, the campaign emphasizes from the outset that, when negotiating the future of the automotive industry, we should consider social and ecological issues together instead of pitting them against each other. After all, good, long-term, secure jobs and the transition to innovative products depend on each other. With their demands ‘VW for all’ (VW für alle) and ‘VW = dare to socialize! (Vergesellschaftung wagen),’ the activists also raise the question of democratic ownership and socialization from the outset.
History of Volkswagen
At least on paper, socializing Volkswagen’s production facilities was at the core of the company’s history after World War II. In 1949, the British military government returned the facilities to German trusteeship on the condition that they establish democratic control over the factories.
The origins of the Volkswagen company lie in fascism, as do those of most ‘German success stories.’ From 1938 onward, Adolf Hitler and engineer Ferdinand Porsche had a gigantic factory built by over 20,000 forced laborers. To this day, it is one of the largest factory complexes in Europe. The factory was built to manufacture armaments for World War II, including military vehicles, aircraft parts, and the Vergeltungswaffe 1 cruise missile.
The budget for constructing the plant came from previously dismantled trade unions, which were to be compensated after the war. In 1960, the German federal government passed the VW Act, which granted unique co-determination rights to politicians and the works council for important corporate decisions. At the same time, the company was converted into a stock corporation. The federal and state governments each received 20% of the shares, and the remainder was sold as ‘people’s shares’ to small investors.
To this day, the state of Lower Saxony owns one-fifth of the common shares, holds two seats on the supervisory board, and has a blocking minority for important location decisions. Apart from that, large parts of the law have been repealed. The original idea of preventing renewed totalitarian appropriation through parliamentary control and socialized ownership hindered the higher goal of free movement of capital. The driving force behind this change was and still is the descendants of Ferdinand Porsche, a Nazi factory manager and war criminal.
VW – a family business
Today, the global automotive group is once again a true ‘family business,’ with the Porsche-Piech family holding the majority of ownership and decision-making positions. The family now holds 53.3% of the common stock, and direct descendants of staunch Nazis occupy seats on the executive and supervisory boards of various affiliated car brands. Wolfgang Porsche, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, is the head of the family. He is the chairman of the supervisory boards of Porsche AG (a sports car manufacturer) and Porsche Holding SE (which administers the family fortune). He is also a member of the supervisory board at VW and Audi. He is now one of Austria’s richest citizens and publicly boasts of his ‘Porsche gene.’
VW for everyone
“We can no longer afford Porsche,” the activists wrote on their website under a portrait of the patriarch. The expropriation of the Nazi heirs is not the only reason why socialization at VW seems obvious. In view of the ongoing crisis in the industry, this also applies to employees in terms of job security. Porsche continues to rake in billions of dollars in profits year after year, while tens of thousands of jobs within the global automotive group are being cut.
If the group’s existing production capacities are to be used in the future, financial resources will be needed for development and conversion of production. These resources would have to be obtained from the shareholders specifically. At the same time, a consistent conversion to forward-looking products and a decentralized decision-making structure (like in the former GKN factory in Italy) cannot be reconciled with a listed company’s primary interest: distributing profits to shareholders. This necessitates breaking up a global corporation and converting it into cooperative or newly developed forms of democratic-collective ownership.
The role of the trade union
According to its statutes, the IG Metall trade union supports the demand for socializing the corporation. Paragraph two of its current statutes states: “The tasks and objectives of IG Metall are […] the transfer of key industries and other enterprises that dominate the market and the economy into common ownership.”
Unfortunately, there is no evidence of this at Volkswagen’s sites. Over the last few decades, however, a self-image characterized by so-called co-management has become established in the works council. Although full-time union officials pay lip service to the workforce’s fighting spirit at public events, in their actual decisions, they are closer to the board than to the employees. For instance, at the 2023 VW family celebration, works council chair Daniela Cavallo posted numerous photos of herself with board representatives. Her predecessor, Bernd Osterloh, made negative headlines in 2021 when he transitioned from his position as works council chair to the Traton SE board.
In the summer of 2023, when activists invited IG Metall to a public exchange and a banner drop at the union building to take a clearer stance, the union distributed ‘argumentation aids’ throughout the plant against the campaign’s demands. IG Metall distanced itself from its own statutes, filed multiple criminal complaints, and had the sidewalk in front of its building cleared by the police. Even outside the leadership, much of the union would rather engage in folklore than combative debate. It is a regrettable shortcoming in the activists’ record that IG Metall has not yet been won over to the campaign’s demands.
Results of the campaign
After two years in Wolfsburg, other conclusions have emerged: With over a hundred actions in the city, the campaign succeeded in shaping the public discourse on the future of VW, both locally and nationally. In January 2023, the Braunschweiger Zeitung wrote, “Build more trams! Without protest, a pinch of radicalism, and civil disobedience, where would we be?” The Washington Post and the Guardian reported on disruptive actions at the VW shareholders’ meeting. Individual works council members have shown solidarity with the campaign. Meanwhile, the corporation continues to operate unperturbed.
New campaign at VW Osnabrück
Since spring of 2025, activists have set their sights on a much smaller Volkswagen plant in Osnabrück, the fourth largest city in Lower Saxony. To date, cabriolets for VW and Porsche have been produced in Osnabrück, where around 2,000 people are employed, compared to over 60,000 at the main plant in Wolfsburg. Taken over in 2010 from the insolvent sports car manufacturer Karmann, the plant has a large technical development department, among other things. However, production will end by mid-2027 at the latest, with closure weeks initially planned for late 2025. Despite the urgency of the situation, at the beginning of 2026, there is still no public prospect for the plant’s continued existence – neither the management group, the works council, nor the trade union can come up with any ideas for future production.
In March 2025, only the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall publicly announced, after visiting the factory, that it would be possible in principle to take over production of arms equipment. This is an ideological disaster for Osnabrück, the ‘city of peace,’ and the Volkswagen Group, given their histories. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether this would guarantee long-term job security. Since then, Rheinmetall has withdrawn its interest – probably also because it lost a major order for over 300 tanks in November 2025.
Future Factory Osnabrück
The ‘Future Factory Osnabrück’ (Zukunftswerk Osnabrück) campaign is an action-oriented network of local and national civil society actors and VW employees that addresses this general lack of imagination. The three joint demands are ‘prevent arms conversion,’ ‘preserve all jobs,’ and ‘develop prospects for conversion and socialization.’ Anyone who wants to support at least one of these demands can join.
Through a combination of informational events, speeches outside the factory gates, and the occasional provocative artistic action, the open group is attempting to raise awareness of the issue. At the end of January 2026, the network organized the first demonstration at the factory, as well as a small winter festival on site. Although persuading factory employees to publicly support the campaign has proven difficult, the campaign has resonated with the general urban population.
Ideally, the campaign will serve as a concrete counter-model to the social changes currently shaping domestic and international politics, such as the militarization of society, the dismantling of the welfare state, growing nationalism, and rising authoritarianism. Such concrete democratic counter-models will only become more urgent in the coming months, given the political shifts.
Note from the editors: In BG, Nora Räthzel wrote about workers as agents of a post-growth transition, zooming in on the historical case of worker mobilization at Lucas Aerospace in the 1970s. The goal was to explore how the production of arms could be transformed into sustainable production oriented toward the common good.