About
WCCJ 2023
Dear Sisters, Brothers, Comrades, Supported by the Transnational Social Strike, Milano’s climate collectives (FFF, XR, Ecologia Politica, Ultima Generazione, Piano Terra, and many others) are inviting activists, intellectuals and movements from the north and south of the planet, to participate in a 3-day congress which aims to constitute the radical, anticapitalist, ecotransfeminist, postcolonial faction of the global climate movement.
We ask climate justice movements to send delegates to Milano to the World Congress for Climate Justice (WCCJ), which will open on Thursday, October 12 (Anti-Colonial Day) and end on Sunday, October 15. Supported by the city’s social centers (centri sociali), we’ll provide food and accommodation to all delegates, and subsidize travel for climate activists coming from the Southern Hemisphere. We look forward to being in touch in the forthcoming months in all major struggles against fossil capitalism.
Love, Revolution and Happy Climate Strike
Environment and background
movements backing the WCCJ
Since 2019, Milano has been one of the epicenters of the European climate movement. In a country now ruled by former fascists, Milano stands out for voting to the left and defending its antifa and queer identity against the Meloni government, heavily biased in favor of the fossil lobby and against environmental causes. It is here that from the city’s autonomist movement (centri sociali) the idea was born to hold a world congress of climate justice activists and intellectuals to plot the end of fossil capitalism.
In conjunction with activists from Liège and Berlin, as well as Bologna and Turin, an international call was launched to invite radical climate movements to Milano from October 12 to October 15, for four days of workshops, discussions and deliberations on the best ideas and strategies for climate justice movements in the North and South of the planet. Climate activists from Bologna, Rome, Frankfurt, London, Kampala, New York, Stockholm, Lisbon, and many other cities have already endorsed the call, while preparations are ongoing in the city under the Duomo to finish the program of the Congress and get all the political and logistical support to bring the world of anticapitalist ecology to Milano.
Ultima Generazione, Ecologia Politica, XR Milano, Piano Terra/Off Topic, ARI – Associazione Rurale Italiana, Comitato Acqua Milano, Institute of Radical Imagination, and many other collectives sit on the organizing committee that is periodically meeting to advance preparation works. Thursday October 12 will open with artivist workshops and a decolonial aperitivo. Friday 13 will be devoted to climate protest and specialized seminars on crucial issues for global warming, from the latest IPCC synthesis report to loss and damage at COP, from migrations to pipeline projects like EACOP, food sovereignty and agroecology, the sixth extinction and antispeciesism, etc.
Saturday October 14 will be entirely devoted to thematic and plenary assemblies on direct action movements vs fossil capitalism, ecotransfeminism and intersectional strategy, eco-marxism and green anarchy, petrofeudalism and war, green unionism and the energy transition, and more. Sunday October 15 the plenary assembly at Leoncavallo, Italy’s first centro sociale.
he organization will provide free food and accommodation to all delegates, most of whom will be lodged in social centers and private homes, and will subsidize travel for activists coming to the Congress from Africa and the Americas.
The call we've launched
movements backing the WCCJ
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.
