Fight the Fire number 5

Our issue number five is out! With another amazing cover by Earth Liberation Studio. Read it here or download it to your browser or your phone at the end of the page!

Suicidal fossil capitalism has pulled all stops and told its repressive apparatus that it is time to shut the movement down. In most countries, center to far-right governments and parliaments, together with business elites, have decided that the climate justice movement needs to be repressed. Legislation has been shifted accordingly. No climate emergency except the emergency of getting climate activists off the streets and far away from effective action.

From Australia to the UK and US, draconian protest laws and trumped up charges mean to shut us up and jail us. In Germany and in France police use anti-terrorist laws to storm our militants’ homes – from Letzte Generation and Les Soulèvements de la Terre – and arrest them. In the Netherlands, 1500 arrested in one action. They mean to terrorise us.

They mean to guarantee that no one rises up against collapse. They are sorely mistaken. Calls for compromise and slow down of tactics are emptied. Capitalism will have only one response to any attempt to stop its fossil blood from pumping: repression. It may feel new, but this is as old as it gets. From peasant revolts to the first labour struggles, from the fight for the abolishment of slavery to independence movements, whenever the flow of wealth has been in the slightest disturbed or threatened, the upper classes have aligned to break the resistance. Now, we fight for all those fights. We face these developments with the tranquility of knowing that many have faced them and overcame them. We know the tasks we face today, the task ahead of stopping climate collapse and we will not falter.

In our 5th issue, we operate our first shift in the Editorial Board. We have been joined by Vanessa Dourado, from Brazil and Argentina, by Christian Zeller from Austria and Switzerland, by Noah Herfort and Jack Johnson, from the UK and USA. Their political work, social engagement and theoretical contributions to ecosocialism as a political force are most welcome! Their biographies can be read in our website.

In the current issue of Fight the Fire we have analysis of the current moment, with articles from Christian Zeller about the Fossil Fuel counter-offensive and from Jonathan Neale about the traps that are being laid for the movement, blocking parts of its in inaction. Alice Gato presents the mobilisations against cost of living and for climate action around Europe on the 30th of September, while Alex Foti introduces the World Congress for Climate Justice, which will take place in October in Milan, with the aim of creating a “climate Internationale”. Leonor Canadas reflects on the clear limits of institutional dialogue to reach a “Just Transition”, while I present a roadmap of financial crises directly linked to the climate crisis, which will aggravate in the future. Momentously, Noah Herfort and Jack Johnson present a first take on an Ecosocialist Political Program, with the tasks of uprooting capitalism, executing system change and avoid climate and ecological collapse. Its happening now. We need to move.

João Camargo