Thursday, October 12

10:30 WCCJ Press Conference (Casa della Cultura – Caterina Orsenigo)

14:30-18:30 ARTIVIST CLIMATE THURSDAY Creative Artivist and Subvertising Workshops (Campaigns, Music, Dance) by Institute of Radical Imagination (Emanuele Braga, SALE) with Lab of Insurrectionary Imagination of Jay Jordan (videolink)
in Chiostri of Statale

The Milano World Congress for Climate Justice is the opportunity to bring together art and performing arts workers to continue a discussion that will lead to the collective writing of a manifesto on the role of art in the struggle for climate justice and in the creation of new ecologies (which take into account the intersection of environmental and social facts). If the pandemic had already dramatically underlined the consequences of extractivist anthropization, the war in Ukraine (in addition to its immediate death toll) is a manifestation of what Andreas Malm has called ‘fossil fascism’, a mix of authoritarianism and fossil fuels that weakens the already insufficient measures to combat global warming. The scarcity of Russian gas has brought coal back into vogue and, in Italy, the construction of new re-gasifiers is on the agenda. The decision to organize the workshop at the World Congress for Climate Justice 2023 reflects our belief in the importance of freeing art from the capture of institutional circuits. We want to experience, as participants in social movements, aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity. The participants also share the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version (actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation). The workshop will involve discussion and co-creation starting from the practices of the invited guests around certain central themes: the use of art as a method of inquiry and visualization in the climate crisis; the production of activist art forms that look at the performativity of direct action; art as a ground for radical imagination in designing new ecologies that reshape the relationship between human and non-human; art as an archive of movement practices, and so on.

19:00 FUCK COLUMBUS, GIVE US APERITIVO DECOLONIALE at Piano Terra: Activist Milano Welcomes Delegates to 1st World Congress for Climate Justice (curated by Gianluca Cangini)

(Delegate guests accompanied to Olinda Hostel in Via Ippocrate 45 – M3 Affori FN, inside the ex Paolo Pini Park, fully booked for the duration of Congress – all non-Italian delegates get free accommodation)

Friday, October 13

Milano State University Cloisters (hosted by Ecologia Politica and Ecolab)

9:30-12:30 CORTEO KLIMATTIVO in conjunction with FFF Milano ending in collective anticapitalist action with Ultima (mass demo protects direct action)

*Sandwich Lunch in the Statale cloisters*

14:30-18:30 PARALLEL SEMINARS of 1 hour each (4X4 public attendance and participation)

14:30-15:30

• Patriarchy, Gender Discrimination and Climate Violence in the North and South of the Planet

• Climate Science, the UN COP process, the Marrakesh Countersummit and Climate Justice Movements: gas, oil, coal campaigns in synergy with CADTM in Marrakech

• Environmental Justice Movements in East Africa: EACOP and Deforestation by RiseUp Uganda

• Environmental Justice Movements in Mexico, Brazil and Latin America

• Special Colloquium ECOMAFIA: how organized crime controls the environmental industry and kills environmental activists by Our Voice (2 hours – from 14:30 to 16:30)

15:30-16:30

• Acqua come bene comune e diritto umano fra privatizzazione, siccità e crisi: by Comitato Milanese Acqua Pubblica, con Erica Rodari, attiviste, Silvana Galassi, ecologa, et al.

• Antispeciesism and the Sixth Extinction: the destruction of the biosphere and ecoradical responses from veganism to animal liberation by Marco Reggio

• Bike Liberation Front: Electrification of Transportation and the Right to the City by Zeo and Critical Mass Milano

• Carbon Universities? How the fossil lobby funds and biases academic education and research by Studenti Indipendenti Bicocca and Ecologia Politica Milano

16:30-17:30

• Hand Brake to Stop Climate Collapse by Climaximo (Sinan and Joao)

• AI image generation and ecopolitical subversion by Comitato (Davide Frigoli)

• Oligo-Tech, Carbo-Oil and the Dictatorship of Finance: Defunding the Death of the Planet (to be discussed with ARI)

• Ultima Generazione e forme di lotta climatica: laboratorio pratiche e tattiche di disobbedienza civile (Leonardo et al.)

17:30-18:30

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(4 MORE can be added until the summer)

*Collective Dinner Lambretta or ZAM*

**Free Night**

Saturday, October 14:

BIG DAY

Statale classrooms and halls

9:30-17:00 THEMATIC ASSEMBLIES

(only delegates, public can watch in presence and online)

9:30-11:30

• FFF, XR, Ultima Generazione, Ende Gelaende, Soulèvements de la Terre, Defend Atlanta Forest: templates for climate revolt and the challenges and opportunities for constituting an anticapitalist environmental front (curated by Meri, OffTopic – Panel: Tadzio Mueller, Federico Scirchio, Ecologia Politica, Leonardo, Ultima Generazione, Sinan, Climáximo)

A post-pandemic wave of climate activism has engulfed the planet: from Just Stop Oil to Scientist Rebellion, from paintings to jets a new generation has imposed the climate discussion on mainstream media and sowed panic among élites, while Exinction Rebellion is about to lay siege to the English Parliament. The message of Greta Thunberg five years later is louder and louder, and convergence with Ende Gelaende in Luetzerath signaled a new mass phase in civil disobedience and the radicalization of the Fridays generation. In France, the conflict over water basins in Poitou-Charentes at Sainte-Soline and the murderous police of Darmanin is as important for political polarization as the one counterposing Macron and the whole of French society over pensions. In the United States, the murder of Tortuguita, a forest defender, has propelled Defend Atlanta Forest to the national attention becoming a rallying point for the whole North American environmental movement. What strategy can multiply the power of each instance and catalyze a revolutionary situation?

• Climate Refugees and Institutional Racism: No Border Networks and Transnational Solidarity (curated by John Sinha – Panel: TBA)

We present here the assembly and seminars on the question of climate migration, refugees, borders/no borders and climate justice. Within the climate justice movement the notion of climate refugee is gaining increasing purchase. But this is a contested term. Some argue it privileges one category of refugees over another. We will explore these issues to arrive at a common understanding, and a common set of principles. Climate chaos is already a major factor in population displacement. As the climate crisis deepens the IPCC predicts one of the major impacts will be increasing population displacement due to climate destabilisation. Climate justice recognises those least responsible for the climate and ecological crisis are those most impacted by it. Namely, the poorest people living in the poorest parts of the world; places still suffering the effects of centuries of colonialism and the neoliberal policies which have perpetuated debt and resource extraction. It is not a coincidence the political forces of climate denialism are the same as those driving the persecution of refugees and migrants in the global north. This is entirely consistent with an ideology which seeks to rank human life by race, class and nationality.

11:30-13:30

• Social Ecology, Eco-Marxism, Green Anarchism Compared: Towards an Anticapitalist Synthesis (curated by Alex Foti – Panel: Bue Ruebner, Common Ecologies, Yo, Ums Ganze)

Capitalism is burning the planet like anti-globalization movements have been warning for decades. In the 21st century, the contradiction between capital and nature is recomprising the conflict between labor and capital which defined the 20th century. Thus the ecological question is determining the social question and the collective survival of the human species in a fast-collapsing biosphere, marked by the large extinctions of the Anthropocene. Radical ideology on the environment arguably comes in three major strands that have emerged since the 1980s and 1990s. The first is defined by Murray Bookchin and the confederalist, bioregionalist, and ecofeminist experiment of Rojava. In can also be defined as libertarian socialist and eco-municipalist. It has a strong influence on Ecologia Politica and other similar networks of European climate collectives. The second is eco-marxism as it emerges most strongly in the widely read works of Andreas Malm and Kohei Saito. Their roots are in the journals Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and especially the Monthly Review and the work of Bellamy Foster and others on the metabolic rift in Das Kapital. A different, world-systems Wallersteinian strand is that of Jason Moore and his concept of the Capitalocene (which Saito opposes in in his Japanese bestseller, Capital/Marx in the Anthropocene). The work of Malm, who also argues in favor of the capitalocene in his treatment of fossil capital, is inspired by and inspires Ende Gelaende and other autonomist climate movements. The third strand is arguably the oldest because it goes back to Edward Abbey and monkeywrenching (1975) and the origins of Earth First! (1980), as well as the actions of the Earth Liberation Front after Seattle. In North America it is anarchist in inspiration and outlook (and transfeminist and deep-ecologist, e.g. Defend Atlanta Forest), while in Europe it is antagonist and autonomist in nature, in a powerful syncretic synthesis of radical ecology and queer ideology that we can term Zadism, after its most relevant and symbolic manifestation, la ZAD, an ecological autonomous zone defended by black blocs and intersectional alliances with farmers and environmental groups, such those seen in Soulèvements de la Terre at Sainte-Soline. What are the intellectual and historical elements that can be employed to arrive at a synthesis on revolutionary ideological strategy for ecological anticapitalism? The objective is coin ideas and slogans, and debate forms of organization and communication that can push forward the world’s climate justice movements until destruction and overthrow of fossil capitalism and its stranglehold on human societies and natural environments.

• Ecotransfeminism and Intersectional Climate Strategy (chaired by Connessioni Precarie – Panel: Aidah Nakku of RiseUp Uganda who will open with brief intro)

The climate struggle and the feminist and transfeminist struggle in recent years have placed among their strengths the tool of the strike and the search for transnational organization of struggles, recognizing the need to join different movements and intersect different oppressions. Seeing social reproduction’s crisis as a common terrain of struggle this year, for the first time, feminists, transfeminists and climate activists have joined their voices, giving rise to the “Global Transfeminist Climate and Social Strike, of March 3 and March 8

The intersection of these struggles unveils responsibilities and political choices of green capitalism, allowing for a cross-connection that intersects climate exploitation with racist, patriarchal and anthropocentric politics. The intersection of these struggles radicalizes the climate struggle itself: discussing feminism, transfeminism and climate struggle today cannot elude the need to start from the material conditions in which this struggle is given. Thus, one cannot speak of an ecotransfeminist struggle without considering the transformations that the war in Ukraine imposes today, without considering the movement of migrants who in their claim to freedom disrupt European plans and borders, without discussing the merits of green transaction policies and the effect they impose.

*LUNCH*

14:00-15:30

• Ecological Transition, Green Capitalism, Degrowth Communism: Building Social Power for Climate Justice (curated by Lele Leonardi and Ecologia Politica, Panel: Andrea Pia, Meret, Climate Strike Switzerland, João, Climaximo and Fight the Fire, Giovanni Ludovico Montagnani)

There are two ways of looking at the so-called ‘ecological transition’: from ‘above’ – what is known as green capitalism – and from ‘below’ – call it ‘degrowth communism’. Green capitalism is a growth strategy that perceives environmental boundaries not as an absolute limit to accumulation but as a new frontier of value production. It is green capitalism that has inspired climate policy since the 1992 Earth Summit, and it is these very policies for sustainable growth and decoupling that – the IPCC warns us – have factually fallen short of their own targets and promises. Degrowth communism takes stoke of these failures. It proposes a revolutionary horizon for the political convergence of different social and economic struggles under one banner, climate justice. How to build a coalition of diverse and oft-times conflicting constituencies? How to align their revolt, refusal, and resistance toward a collective goal? How to bring together queer and racialised subjectivities, indigenous communities, and the caring and working classes? How to fight back against financial capital and subvert the existing social and economic hierarchy that subordinates the ecology to the economy? 

• War and Climate Crisis (to be curated by Transnational Social Strike Platform)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upset the world as we knew it. War, today, redefines at the transnational level the priorities of capital and governments around the world, so it also forces us to rethink our struggles and the connections between them. Since February last year, ecological transition policies have become a weapon with which the European Union fights its own war to revive its industries and respond to the changing geographies of the energy market. Thus, under the banners of ecological transition has been cleared as much the ‘necessary’ return to hydrocarbons and fossil fuels as an acceleration toward renewables that has more to do with financial accumulation dynamics than with our claims to climate justice. From the earliest months, with the disruption of exports of wheat and other agricultural products, the conflict has highlighted how interconnected the energy crisis and the “cost of living crisis” are. Within this setting, we think it is necessary to build the conditions so that ecological struggles can unite with other social demands to effectively open the space for a climate class conflict capable of making possible not only our opposition to war but also laying the groundwork for attacking the current capitalist restructuring of the global order.

15:30-17:00

• The Role of the Youth in the Ruptural Movement for Climate Justice (curated by Matilda, FFF Lisbon, panel: End Fossil Barcelona, Climate Vanguard, OccupyEUR)

According to the climate science deadlines, the world must cut at least 50% of emissions by 2030 if we want to avoid the worse impacts of the climate crisis. And we need to do it using the political framework of climate justice, to ensure a just process for all peoples. So we need system change, and we need it fast. System change in time with the climate science deadlines will only be possible by means of a ruptural revolution that confronts capitalism’s power and transforms everything. We, the movement, need to end the fossil economy at international level and ensure that 2023-2024 is Europe’s last winter of gas, and grow the seeds of justice in the ashes of capitalism. We must be brave and take into our own hands the responsibility of emission cuts and system change.

In the building of the ruptural movement that will execute system change, what is the role of the organized youth? Over the past years, the youth movement has drawn millions into the streets. Yet, little has changed. What’s more, the institutional and reformist line of thought continues to be the predominant one amongst the mainstream climate justice movement – youth included – which pushes us to believe someone else that not us, the movement, will solve this crisis. We must change that and organize the youth and the student’s class towards a ruptural movement that can change the system. Radicalization is our task, and revolution our duty. In this assembly, we aim at answering together through an internationalist perspective: as youth, what is our role in the ruptural movement for climate justice?

• Agroecology and Food Sovereignty vs. Agribusiness and Deforestation: Farm Workers, Indigenous Peoples and Reactionary Backlash (curated by ARI – Associazione Rurale Italiana/Via Campesina: Panel: Giacomo Terraviva, Alessandro Di Donna and others)

(description forthcoming)

• Essential/Precarious Labor, Strike Wave, Great Resignation, Energy Inflation: The New Capital-Labor Force Field and Ecological Unionism (tcurated by Alessio, Don’t Pay UK; panel: Daniel Gutierrez, Common Ecologies and Ver.di, Alex Foti, precarity activist, Francesca Coin, employment sociologist (invited)

The pandemic has revealed for all the essential role of precarious labor in social production and reproduction: nurses, cleaners, drivers, riders, cashiers, shoppers allowed society to continue to function thanks to people of meager wages, many of whom are being fired for union organizing. Also, Covid has uncovered the mass refusal of salaried employment on neoliberal terms: people are not returning to offices, as work from home has become a new labor rights, and millions have left the labor force altogether in the phenomenon knowns the Great Resignation. This has overturned the tables on thirty years of capitalist blackmailing and given power to labor in collective bargaining: employers cannot find workers for low wages and labor insurgence is on the rise. The Amazon Labor Union and Starbucks Workers United in North America, the huge and protracted mobilization in France in defense of pensions, the great railway and nurse strike in the UK are heralding a new era in industrial relations, where workers are empowered by powerful unions. But how should labor organizing and union demands work in the context of the climate crisis? What are the green jobs unions should fight for and the industry lobbies they should oppose? The discussion is introduced by union intellectuals and labor activists, including the highly oppositional and successful Don’t Pay UK campaign against high energy prices and skyrocketing bills.

*TEA/COFFEE BREAK*

17:30-19:30

1st PLENARY ASSEMBLY

(only delegates, public can watch online and offline)

THE PLAN TO OVERTHROW FOSSIL CAPITALISM: Organization, media, disobedience, ideology, agroecology, ecotransfeminism, postcolonialism, unionism, syndicalism, antifascism, and..

*APERICENA Camera del Non Lavoro, Giardini Baiamonti, Giardini Lea Garofalo*

**NIGHT RAVE by Macao Collective**

Sunday, October 15

Leoncavallo Social Center + Cucina Pop

10:00-13:00

2nd PLENARY ASSEMBLY

(only delegates deliberate, public can watch online and offline)

CONSTITUTING THE RADICAL FACTION OF THE WORLD CLIMATE FRONT: drafting of documents, positions and deliberations on common strategies and joint campaigns

13:30-15:00

***Communal Lunch (Cucina Pop)
..and farewell to the next World Congress in another city of Planet Earth!***

World Congress for Climate Justice

Milano, October 12-15, 20234

https://sites.google.com/view/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 (it will be released on April 15) 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.
The organization will provide free food and accommodation to all delegates, most of whom will be lodged in the Olinda Hostel in the Ex Paolo Pini park (M3 Affori FN), and will subsidize travel for activists coming to the Congress from Africa and the Americas.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Alex Foti alex.foti@gmail.com
Caterina Orsenigo caterina_89@yahoo.it
Davide Frigoli davide.frigoli@gmail.com

THE CALL (in EN, ES, FR, IT, DE)

https://sites.google.com/view/wccj/call?authuser=0

INVITATION TO MOVEMENTS

https://sites.google.com/view/wccj/call/invitation-to-movements?authuser=0

SOCIAL MEDIA

https://www.facebook.com/klimattiva

https://instagram.com/wccj2023/

https://twitter.com/WCCJ23

https://t.me/+t57dA04zrp9jMDRi (int'l chat)

https://t.me/WCCJnews (broadcast channel)

FFF Milano, XR Milano, Ultima Generazione, Ecologia Politica, Piano Terra, Scientist Rebellion Italia, Associazione Rurale Italiana (ARI), OffTopic, Libreria Leoncavallo, Comitato Acqua Pubblica, Our Voice, Terraviva gathered yesterday to discuss the early steps of the World Congress for Climate Justice (WCCJ), to be held in the city on October 12-15, 2023. 

Full article here

Today at Milano State University, hosted by Ecologia Politica in its Ecolab - climate justice activists from Piano Terra, Extinction Rebellion, Ultima Generazione and many of the city's social spaces will discuss the political process that will get us to the congress in October.

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