World Congress for Climate Justice: ideas, strategies, large-scale experiments

Milano, October 12-15, 2023

The aim of this call is to bring together movements from all continents to Milan to strategize intersectionally against fossil capitalism. The drought that has scorched Europe, China, North America and the flood that has submerged Pakistan have made all too apparent the mortal threat we are collectively facing in this climate emergency.

Never has the threat posed to human societies by unconstrained growth been greater than today. However, at the moment systemic alternatives to fossil capitalism are struggling to emerge in the battle against neoliberal doctrine, suprematist clericalism and authoritarian ethnonationalism, all nefarious ideological forms united by climate denialism.

Since 2018 climate justice movements have entered a new mass phase, surviving the freeze on social mobilization imposed in many regions of the world by the pandemic, and have crossed the paths of racial justice movements against police violence in 2020, feminist and queer movements against patriarchal reaction, and today are joining protests for social justice and against high energy prices in several countries.

Starting from the dramatic urgency and from this trajectory of conflicts, we want to open a space for discussion between explicitly anti-capitalist climate movements, activists and intellectuals from all over the planet, with the ambition to define a common agenda and ideological horizon in the shared transnational space of the ecosocial struggles of the present.

The war unleashed by Putin by invading Ukraine has split the world into two opposing camps: the Euro-American one (with Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand) and a Sino-Russian sphere on the other. We belong to the third camp, that of anti-authoritarian, postcolonial, solidarity movements that fight for a world where capitalist extraction and nationalist competition will become obsolete. We side with anarcho-autonomists and antifas in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia. We side with the victims of war, especially Ukrainian women and children, and hope Putin’s neo-czarism will be defeated.

However, let us desert the race for militarism in the west. A race useful only for the merchants of death in the service of the overlords of fossil capitalism. There is nothing moral about this horizon. Faced with the climatic apocalypse, Europe and the United States are arming themselves to defend their primacy as global consumers of the biosphere. And to do so, they increase oppressive police powers at home, and abroad give legitimacy to reactionary gangsters like Erdogan, and assist political systems based on slave labor, apartheid and deportation like in the Middle East and North Africa, or tolerate genocidal wars like those occurring against Rojava and Tigray.

The World Congress for Climate Justice wants to respond to the urgency of the current struggle against fossil capitalism and open a space for transnational exchange and debate with the aim of reaching deliberations on resolutions and proposals for action for international alliances and mobilizations. Our goal is to re-instill a sense of hope and a horizon of liberation in the manifold movements across the planet that defend ecosystems, the right to cities, and act against the fossil installations and infrastructures of global capitalism. And to do this, we consider it essential and a priority to reconnect the struggles for climate justice with those for social justice and labor unionization against oligopolists and oligarchs, increasingly obscenely rich. Transnational ties and intersectional alliances to build a present of climate justice and liberation, starting from the practices of feminist and queer movements, radical labor campaigns and anti-racist fronts, building on new practices of organization and conflict, oppositional lifestyles, modes of energy and food production and consumption, universal access to income, health, and housing, to information and knowledge: a culture for the precarious many, not for the wealthy few.

We foresee a three-day weekend in Milan in October 2023, where delegates from movements, collectives, unions, territories and social spaces in struggle, from neighborhoods and fields, classrooms and offices, of all genders and from all over the world, can discuss these issues and arrive at common strategies, drawing on the experience of large-scale environmental protests and autonomous zones. We are thinking about many parallel sessions around a large array of topics from climate science to essential workers, and few common deliberative moments, but we leave to you to suggest the subjects of discussion in Milano.

Let’s fight for the liberation of Earth from capitalist greed and fascist predation.

Love ‘n’ Revolution!