Cut the Pentagon, Save the Planet: The $1.5 Trillion Climate Solution We Can’t Ignore

What could we do with that money instead?


An anti-war demonstrator is removed from the hearing room after interrupting testimony from U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on April 30, 2026 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Graeme Sloan/Getty Images)

Aaron Kirshenbaum
Jul 09, 2026

Common Dreams

Last week, millions of people around the world were subjected to record-breaking heatwaves. At least 25 deaths in the U.S. from this heat dome were reported. The French government also counted over 2,000 excess deaths during the June heatwaves. At the same time, this past weekend, a devastating super typhoon hit the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, leaving islands like Rota, where 2,000 people live, without running water and most buildings impacted.

In both cases, the people least responsible for the climate crisis are the most vulnerable to its effects. And in both cases, people’s ability to withstand crises has been made dramatically worse by militarization. Those most threatened by heatwaves are too often in neighborhoods subjected to militarized policing, economic abandonment, and the exploitation of their communities. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are occupied by the U.S. military and subjected to environmentally destructive bases and training exercises.

These climate disasters are not new, but they are coming at a moment when we have an opportunity to do something about them. Congress will soon vote on the Pentagon budget. This year’s proposed budget is an obscene $1.5 trillion, and the cumulative amount of military spending would be even higher. For the first time in years, there will likely be a notable number of Democratic Party votes against it. Senator Ed Markey has also introduced a bill to cut it in half. Cutting this budget could be one of the only pieces of climate policy that can meet the speed and scale of the climate crisis. Fighting it could open up new organizing terrains and break down movement silos that have prevented traction for so long.

Even without redistributing that $1.5 trillion, cutting the Pentagon’s budget could do wonders for the planet. The Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional polluter. It has over 800 bases worldwide. Each base acts as part of the permanent enforcement mechanism for the fossil fuel industry, driving ecocidal resource wars and entrenching U.S. corporate dominance in oil- and mineral-rich regions. This budget also opens a direct line of funding for more data centers that poison communities and drive further resource wars to power them. At least $30 billion is requested for direct Department of War-owned data centers, over $58 billion is requested for AI capabilities more broadly, and over half of the proposed budget is going to private weapons contractors whose AI programs are directly supported by the data centers being developed around the country. Companies building these centers, like OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon Web Services, have all passed their own multi-billion-dollar deals with the Pentagon.

What could we do with that money instead? The scale of the Pentagon’s environmental destruction and its financial power is unfathomable; each of those 800 bases has generations of stories of destruction, displacement, and long-term illness. Each transaction covers multiple continents. And so the scale of possibility — what we could do alternatively with these resources — is equally immense.

According to the National Priorities Project, the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget could fund a year’s solar electricity for 1.92 billion homes, for instance. And according to the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), the proposed $500 billion increase alone could cover 60% of U.S. homes. $500 billion could also end the wildfire crisis in California and restore 100 million acres of forest. Of course, the current oil-motivated wars, like the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, are quite costly. The CCI report estimates that as of early April 2026, the $37 billion that the U.S. had spent on the assault on Iran could have paid for pre-k for every four-year-old in the country, green retrofits for 2,000 public schools, and over double the cost of restoring Trump’s cuts to SNAP benefits.

We can also point to other pathways for addressing the climate crisis: Instead of funding missile development, we could fund clean technology development. The land taken up by massive, sprawling, and toxic bases could be cleaned up and devoted to cultural sites, schools, agro-ecological farms, regenerative production, and the return of land to indigenous sovereignty and stewardship. New jobs and training programs could be created in all of these areas while, of course, avoiding false solutions such as carbon credits, carbon capture technology, and nuclear energy.

Without more money to new bases increasingly encircling China, we could collaborate on green technology instead of starting a new ecocidal cold war, and we could stop trampling on the sovereignty of countries throughout the Asia-Pacific like the Northern Mariana Islands. We could move toward a fossil fuel treaty and work with extremely vulnerable countries being occupied and sanctioned, like Cuba, to move their own holistic climate adaptation plans forward.

Fossil fuel supply chains are global, as is the impact of the U.S. military. Many states in the Global South continue to be dominant producers of fossil fuels due to debt traps and sanctions. Global climate finance could help alleviate that debt and fund a transition to truly renewable energy, free from the reproduction of violent extraction often enacted through the mining of so-called “critical” minerals (often deemed “critical” for the sake of military usage), also carried out in states like New Mexico and on indigenous territory.

This is, of course, just a sliver of what is possible, based on projects, blueprints, and visions already developed by those on the front lines of the climate crisis for decades. In recent years, these visions have been defined and revised in the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, The Red Deal, and A People’s Green New Deal. This year’s People’s Declaration for a Rapid, Just, and Equitable Transition was developed from a global summit made up of 900 civil society organizations in Santa Marta, Colombia. Notably, its 12th principle emphasizes the irreplaceable and central role of dismantling U.S. imperialism and militarism globally within the much larger framework for confronting the climate crisis — we can and should be just as clear-eyed in our organizing.

When we cut the Pentagon budget, we can be imaginative. We can see a world where the iron claw of extraction is weakened, and we can begin building something new in its place. The Pentagon budget is a clear target, with the potential to address rising environmental, economic, and public health crises globally. At a time when most environmental policy is almost impossible to pass at the federal level, we can fight against this Pentagon budget and choose to breathe new life into our movements and our world.



Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Aaron Kirshenbaum
Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK's War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based in, and originally from, Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also hold a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark. During their time in school, Aaron worked on internationalist climate justice organizing and educational program development, as well as Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing.
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No Country on Earth Fully Respects Workers’ Rights, and It’s Getting Worse

By Pete Dolack

July 9, 2026

Source: Systemic Disorder

“Union Unity,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2024.

Class warfare continues to be waged incessantly. And that war’s offensives continue to be more intense. In just the past year, the world’s working people have seen more attacks on the rights of free speech and assembly, more attacks on civil liberties, more arrests and imprisonments, more refusals to engage in collective bargaining with unions and more technology used to monitor, discipline and silence workers.

None of this new, but it is getting worse. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has issued its 2026 Global Rights Index report, and has been the case in past years, the annual report makes for grim reading. Once again, no country on Earth fully protects workers’ rights.

In past years, there were only nine countries that met the qualifications for the best category, “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” That was the case for the 2023 and 2022 reports. This year? Only eight countries were found to be merely “sporadic violations of rights.” Those countries are Austria, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Uruguay, with Uruguay newly promoted to this level from a year ago.

Before we dip into the details, the larger picture is alarming. And the advanced capitalist countries, you won’t be surprised to know, are no exceptions. “In Europe and the Americas, workers’ rights are suffering an alarming decline. Both regions registered their worst average country rating since the Index began in 2014, and the increasing influence of the far right is putting workers and unions at risk in countries such as Argentina and France – two out of four countries to be downgraded in 2026,” the ITUC said in its report. Nor are the reasons behind these developments a mystery. “This year’s results reinforce the ITUC’s view that we are witnessing a global erosion of democratic principles – a ‘billionaire coup against democracy’ – funded by the rich and delivered by far-right and authoritarian leaders,” the report said. “As a snapshot of the violations of workers’ rights, the 2026 Index exposes a pattern that the powerful would rather keep hidden: the systematic weakening of democracy through attacks on workers, unions and collective bargaining. From repression of strikes to the erosion of legal protections and the criminalisation of unions, these are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy to silence dissent and entrench inequality.”

Fully half of the world’s national governments launched attacks on the rights to free speech and assembly, and half also arrested or detained workers, the highest total yet. Workers in three-quarters of the world’s countries had their right to union organizing impeded, also a record high, and 80 percent of countries restricted the right to collectively bargain. Worse still, 87 percent of countries violated the right to strike.

For the past decade, the number of countries that exclude workers from the right to establish or join a union, that violate the right to collective bargaining, that violate the right to strike, that arbitrarily arrest and detain trade union members, and that deny or constrain freedom of speech and assembly have all risen.

The global rise of hard right governments has gone hand-in-hand with the deterioration of workers’ rights. Argentina, where President Javier Milei has carried out his promise to impose the harshest variety of austerity that he can get away with, achieved the unprecedented “accomplishment” of falling in the ratings for two consecutive years. Argentina is now classified in the ITUC survey as a 5 rating, the worst category, representing the worst offenders where workers “have effectively no access to rights.” The ITUC lists Argentina has one of the world’s ten worst. “Milei has led a staunchly anti-union agenda since coming to power in 2023, undermining basic workers’ rights, civil liberties and union activity,” the Confederation reports. “Workers and unionists face systematic abuse and the shrinking of civic space. … Union offices, including the headquarters of the glassworkers’ union, were infiltrated and vandalised.” High union officials have fled the country after a police roundup. “Employers in Argentina engage in union busting and exploitative practices with impunity,” the report concludes.

In France, which also saw its rating decline, there is a “sustained deterioration of workers’ rights, an increasingly hostile political atmosphere, and incrementally regressive government policy since nationwide protests against pension reform deeply shook the political landscape in 2023.” Furthermore, in an atmosphere of the government attempting to impose regressive labor policies, “more than 1,000 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) activists have fallen foul of state and employer crackdowns and a spate of violent attacks by far-right groups.”

And what of the two countries that love to claim their defense of democracy is unwavering and endlessly point fingers at other countries? The United Kingdom was rated as a “regular violator of rights,” a ranking of 3, the middle of the five categories. That was actually an improvement from a year earlier, with the ITUC crediting the outgoing Starmer administration for “repeal[ing] excessive restrictions to industrial action introduced in the previous Conservative government’s 2016 Trade Union Act.” And the United States? Once again given a rating of 4, the category for countries that have “systematic violations of rights,” the second worst ranking.

“In 2025, Trump stripped collective bargaining rights from more than a million federal workers across more than 30 agencies — perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history,” the report said. “The move, reserved in the past for emergencies, was portrayed by the Republican administration as being in the interest of national security. It means entire departments, such as the Departments of State and Justice, and even the Food and Drug Administration, are excluded from this basic right.” The ITUC also cited Trump leaving the federal labor arbitration body, the National Labor Relations Board, without a quorum so that no cases brought by unions can be heard, as well as imposing an intimidating environment for immigrant workers, the excessive force used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and arbitrary arrests of union leaders. “The harm caused by these militarised enforcement practices extends well beyond these high-profile cases, as hundreds of other workers and trade unionists have been arrested and deported or detained in life-threatening conditions without charges or due process,” the report said.

The Global Rights Index ranks the world’s countries from 1 to 5, with 1 the best category, denoting “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” Those are the aforementioned eight countries. (These are green on the report’s maps.)

Rating 2 countries are those with “repeated violations of rights,” defined as where “Certain rights have come under repeated attacks by governments and/or companies and have undermined the struggle for better working conditions.” Countries with this rating include Australia, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. (These are yellow on the report’s maps.)

Rating 3 countries are those with “regular violations of rights,” defined as where “Governments and/or companies are regularly interfering in collective labour rights or are failing to fully guarantee important aspects of these rights” due to legal deficiencies “which make frequent violations possible.” Countries with this rating include Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Mexico, South Africa and Switzerland. (These are light orange on the report’s maps.)

Rating 4 countries are those with “systematic violations of rights,” defined as where “The government and/or companies are engaged in serious efforts to crush the collective voice of workers, putting fundamental rights under threat.” Countries with this rating include Brazil, Greece, Israel, Peru, the United States and Vietnam. (These are dark orange on the report’s maps.)

Rating 5 countries are those with “no guarantees of rights,” defined as where “workers have effectively no access to these rights [spelled out in legislation] and are therefore exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices.” Countries with this rating include Argentina, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. (These are red on the report’s maps.) In addition, there are countries with a 5+ rating, those with “No guarantee of rights due to the breakdown of the rule of law.” The dozen countries listed here include Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen.

The ITUC determines its ratings by checking adherence to a list of 97 standards derived from International Labour Organization conventions. Those 97 standards pertain to civil liberties, the right to establish or join unions, trade union activities, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike. As a self-described confederation of national trade union centers, it says it represents 191 million workers in 169 countries and has 340 national affiliates.

Outside the scope of the International Trade Union Confederation’s report is the ability of workers to even have a job. Unemployment statistics notoriously greatly understate the number of people out of work and ignore altogether those with part-time work who need a full-time job. Even those lesser known statistics, such as such as the U-6 in the United States and R8 in Canada, that reveal higher numbers because of a more expansive definition of counting unemployment than the standard measures, undercount. One estimate of the true rate of un- and under-employment is 24.3 percent, calculated by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity. The International Labour Organization estimates that 2.1 billion workers are employed informally, far fewer than those with regular work. The ILO notes that “Informality is typically associated with lower job quality due to limited access to social protection, rights at work, workplace safety and job security.” And all this at a time when the gigantic sums of money shoveled into the pockets of billionaires and other capitalists is so high that there is not enough outlet for investment or other productive use, and instead the money is shoveled into financial speculation — the volume of trading in currency (foreign exchange), stocks, bonds and their derivatives exceeds the size of the global economy in 10 business days.

As we yet again have cause to note, class warfare is intensifying and remains decisively one-sided. For how long?

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This article was originally published by Systemic Disorder; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Pete Dolack

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet, and photographer. He has been involved in various activist organizations, including Trade Justice New York Metro, National People’s Campaign, and New York Workers Against Fascism, among others. He has authored the books "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future and "What Do We Need Bosses For: Toward Economic Democracy," which analyzes past and present efforts to establish systems of economic democracy on a national or society-wide basis. He authored the book "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future.

How Unions Pave the Way to the American Dream

By Roxanne D. Brown

July 9, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

The vote was a key test of whether the UAW could springboard the Stand-Up Strike gains into new organizing. The union narrowly lost previous drives here in 2014 and 2019. Photo: Central Labor Council of Tennessee

Marcelo Assis recalled how his family arrived in the United States about 35 years ago, “poor as hell”—yet certain that America offered the path forward that they’d never find in their native Brazil or anywhere else.

The following years brought ups and downs, with Marcelo serving as a combat medic in the Army and then falling disillusioned with low-paying nonunion work that held him back instead of helping him move ahead.

But Marcelo ultimately landed back-to-back union jobs that catapulted him into the middle class and firmly anchored him there. Just as he clearly recalls his arrival in this country, Marcelo vividly remembers the moment years later when he looked around his newly purchased home, thought about the good life he provided to his family, and realized for the first time that he’d made it.

“This is the American dream,” he said to himself.

Marcelo’s experience shows how unions pave the way to a brighter future. That’s true even now—a time when the majority of working people feel as though the American dream has slipped out of reach because of rampant economic inequality, skyrocketing costs, and the callous indifference of the greedy rich.

In all, nearly 70 percent of Americans no longer see the country promising mobility or financial security to those who work hard and strive to get ahead, according to a January 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll.

A separate survey, conducted in conjunction with the nation’s 250th birthday by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that half of respondents lost faith in the American dream. Many see America working for the wealthy, not people like them.

But Marcelo, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 12000 and a mechanic at Southern Connecticut Gas, will be the first to say it doesn’t have to be this way. After helping him fulfill the American dream, the union now enables him to hold on to it.

A USW contract provides Marcelo with the good wages he needs to ride out Donald Trump’s inflationary economy, including the runaway costs of groceries, utilities, and house insurance. It affords him retirement security even as Republicans threaten to cut lifelines for the elderly.

The contract delivers quality, employer-sponsored health care, while more and more Americans today have no choice but to put off doctor’s visits or treatments because of the spiraling costs.

“There’s the stability of knowing you have benefits,” Marcelo said of the contract, which he and his coworkers negotiated. “You don’t have to worry.”

This is all fabulous. But it isn’t unique.

Union members across the country make significantly more money than their non-union peers. They’re also more likely to have family leave, paid time off, and work-life balance. This all adds up to cars in the garage, summer vacations, and sports leagues for the kids, along with all of the other pluses that make life worth living.

This is what independence looks like. Marcelo simply calls it the “union life.”

There’s more.

Because unions provide a voice on wages, safety, and other issues, they empower workers at a moment when a depressing sense of helplessness haunts many other Americans.

Union members also forge a bond that transcends the shop floor. Everyone looks out for everybody else, and that’s a formidable counterweight to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation also plaguing the country right now.

Even better, this shared identity galvanizes union members to fight together for the greater good and to assert an ownership stake in their communities, often through the kind of volunteer work and political advocacy that Local 12000 members do.

“Doing it together makes it a much easier climb than doing it by myself,” Marcelo said of the solidarity uniting hundreds of his coworkers.

It’s a message that’s resonating with the growing number of workers weary of working their tails off, only to fall further behind while the rich get richer.

Polls show record levels of support for unions, and workers in every part of the country are joining them to take the future into their own hands.

The American dream endures. We just have to stand together to claim it.Email

Roxanne D. Brown

Roxanne D. Brown is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Ecosocialism

Many Fronts, One Struggle: A Report on the 7th International Ecosocialist Encounters

Tuesday 7 July 2026, by William van den Heuvel

In May 2026, more than 250 activists from some forty countries gathered in Brussels Université libre for the 7th International Ecosocialist Encounters. William van den Heuvel reports on the key thematic threads that ran through an ambitious programme: the role of trade unions in the ecological transition; the growing convergence between ecosocialism and degrowth; the centrality of feminist and ecofeminist perspectives; Latin America as the front line of extractivist resistance; anti-campist solidarity with Ukraine and Palestine; and the rise of what speakers termed "fossil fascism." Van den Heuvel argues that the apparent diversity of themes pointed toward a single strategic insight: that these separate struggles share one crisis, and can only be turned around together. [AN]

In the buildings of the Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), more than two hundred and fifty people from some forty countries gathered in mid-May for the seventh International Ecosocialist Encounters. For three days, discussions ranged across trade union struggle and degrowth, care work and the defence of indigenous land, debt, artificial intelligence, Ukraine, and Palestine. A glance at the programme might give the impression of a loosely assembled sequence of disconnected themes. The opposite proved true. It was precisely the breadth that made visible what the organisers were after: demonstrating that all these apparently separate fronts flow from the same crisis, and that this crisis can only be reversed collectively, across borders.

The International Ecosocialist Encounters have been held since 2014 — the initiative arose around a German-language book on an ecosocialist international — and have grown into a recurring gathering of activists, trade unionists, academics, and social movements from several continents. [1] Ecosocialism holds that the ecological crisis cannot be separated from capitalism. An economy driven by profit maximisation and unceasing growth inevitably collides with planetary limits; only a society that produces to meet human needs rather than to generate profit can sustain a good life within those limits. That premise was the common denominator running beneath all the conversations in Brussels.

A sombre backdrop

The gathering took place against a sombre backdrop, and participants made no secret of it. Climate disruption is accelerating, while the European Green Deal — once heralded as the definitive response to warming — is being systematically hollowed out in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. At the same time, wars, rearmament, and the far-right bloc are all growing. An opening debate on geopolitics drew the connection sharply: the Green Deal had been left largely to capital and had offered working people, and the poorest layers in particular, very little. It is precisely into that gap that the far right thrusts. It frames environmental policy as an assault on ordinary people and wins terrain the left has long vacated.

The labour movement at the centre

That is also the first reason why the labour movement occupied such a central place in Brussels. Trade union engagement has been part of these encounters from the start, and the opening session made clear why. A trade union member from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hervé Kambiniam of the CDT (Confédération Démocratique du Travail — Democratic Confederation of Labour), [2] described how the war in the east of his country has produced a war economy in which money flows to weapons rather than education or healthcare, while foreign companies and armed groups plunder raw materials and drive the population from its land. From Colombia came the account of trade unionists who, against opposition from part of their own base, have turned against fracking and allied themselves with environmental and rural movements.

From the Basque Country, Ainhara Plazaola of the ELA (Euskal Langileen Alkartasuna — Basque Workers’ Solidarity) confederation showed how things can be done differently: she described how her confederation has brought demands on emissions, energy and water use, and sustainable business plans directly into collective bargaining, and how it secures commitments that workers affected by the closure or downsizing of polluting enterprises can move into other employment or receive a decent income and retraining. [3] The thread running through these discussions was that the opposition between labour and the environment — on which the far right plays so deftly — is not a law of nature but a political choice. Winning the trust of workers requires connecting the ecological transition to the fight for their jobs and income.

Degrowth and ecosocialism

A second thread ran through the debate on degrowth. Ten years ago, that concept would scarcely have been placed alongside socialism; degrowth and socialism were treated as alternatives between which one had to choose. Increasingly, degrowth is now seen as a component of the socialist programme. Daniel Tanuro, one of the driving forces behind the Ecosocialist Manifesto of the Fourth International (IVe Internationale — Fourth International), set out the necessity soberly. [4] Of the nine planetary boundaries identified by science, seven have already been breached. A reduction in energy and raw material consumption is therefore no longer a choice but a given; the only question is whether that reduction happens in a planned and humane way, or as a catastrophic collapse.

In this understanding, degrowth does not mean poverty or austerity, but the abolition of useless production and the restoration of what genuinely matters: time, care, and community. It was telling that a representative of the academic degrowth current and the Marxist ecosocialists explicitly sought each other out in Brussels. There are multiple paths to the same destination, and the willingness to bring those paths together was one of the gains of the conference.

Not without feminism

That degrowth cannot proceed without feminism was a third insight that recurred throughout. Reducing production alone, without redistributing care work, simply shifts the bill on to women, who already perform the largest share of that unpaid labour. Speakers from the ecofeminist tradition argued that care — for people, but also for land, water, and communities — belongs at the heart of an ecosocialist project, not at its margins. In Brazil, as several interventions noted, landless and indigenous women have long put this principle into practice, in their resistance to agribusiness, mining, and dam construction. The idea of radical abundance that emerges from the degrowth movement breaks both with the artificial scarcity of capitalism and with the capitalist image of abundance as endless possession.

Latin America at the front line

Nowhere did the coherence of all these struggles come together as concretely as in Latin America, which commanded a large share of the attention. Michael Löwy, the French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist who was present at all previous encounters and received a personal tribute in Brussels, identified indigenous peoples and peasant movements there as the vanguard of the ecological struggle: they are in the front line of the defence of nature and life, and at the same time the first victims of capitalism. [5] From Ecuador, Leonidas Iza, president of Ecuarunari (Confederación Kichwa del Ecuador — Kichwa Confederation of Ecuador), described how his communities have lived with the land for thousands of years and are now resisting oil extraction in the Amazon region. [6]

From Brazil came a victory from which to draw courage: following a 33-day occupation of the terminals of the US multinational Cargill and a series of actions during the COP30 climate summit, a largely indigenous movement forced the Lula government to reverse the privatisation of three Amazonian rivers — the Madeira, Tocantins, and Tapajós. [7] Mariana Riscalli, a member of the national executive of Brazil’s PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade — Socialism and Freedom Party), held up that struggle as evidence that social movements must remain independent from the government, even from a progressive government. At the same time, a warning was sounded against what participants called green colonialism: an energy transition that replaces fossil fuels but perpetuates the same plunder of raw materials, the same dispossession and repression, now in the name of clean energy.

Internationalism, not campism

The wars also received their place, and it was precisely here that the political maturity of the gathering asserted itself. Over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and over European rearmament, a deep dividing line runs through the left, and the Ecosocialist Encounters did not avoid it. Ukrainian ecosocialists from Sotsialnyi Rukh (Соціальний рух — Social Movement), [8] including the trade unionist Artem Tidva and the degrowth specialist Vitaliia Kilinkarova, described the enormous ecological devastation that Putin’s war has wreaked on the country and called for international solidarity from below, on the model of Swedish dock workers who refused to unload Russian ships.

The Syrian researcher Joseph Daher extended the analysis to Gaza and southern Lebanon. What connected the speakers was their rejection of campism — the tendency to stand uncritically behind every adversary of the West, out of opposition to Western imperialism. Solidarity, as the repeated formulation had it, is owed to the attacked peoples and to working people, not to the repressive regimes that oppress their own populations. Rearmament itself was assessed not only as a war threat but as a massive shift of resources away from the ecological transition and social services.

The danger of the far right

What ultimately connects all these fronts is the rise of the far right. Löwy preferred the term neo-fascism: it shares much with classical fascism but is radically neoliberal rather than corporatist, and it uses religion without itself being religious. At the conference the phenomenon was also given a new name: fossil fascism. The far right is less and less openly denying climate change; instead it turns against climate policy, as an ally of the fossil industry, and sometimes even presents immigration as an ecological threat. A workshop on artificial intelligence gave this reaction a further technological face. The power of a handful of tech companies over information, communication, and surveillance, and the quasi-religious visions of the future held by figures such as Elon Musk, constitute a distinct front in the same struggle — one on which resistance, from tech workers to people living near data centres, is only just beginning.

A convergence of movements

Here lies the core of what the encounters sought to convey. The women’s movement, the indigenous struggle, the struggle of working people, the fight against debt and extractivism, resistance to war and to the far right: these are not separate campaigns but expressions of a single crisis of capitalism. Tanuro named this a convergence of movements — of women, indigenous peoples, LGBTQI+ people, peasants, and workers — and Löwy described ecology not as a chapter but as a red thread. Breaking with productivism does not mean abandoning the class struggle; it means broadening it. The gathering itself, with its forty countries and its difficult but real conversations between academics and activists, between North and South, was an exercise in precisely that broadening.

That raises the question of what ultimately matters: how to give that convergence a form capable of compelling concrete change. The answer that was most concretely formulated in Brussels was organisational. Alongside the encounters themselves, the Global Ecosocialist Network presented itself — a worldwide collaboration with a small secretariat, a low threshold for participation, and online debates in which organisations from several continents exchange experiences and strategies. The network and the encounters are complementary and will seek closer collaboration in future.

From the Netherlands, activists from LinksBoven (the ecosocialist member movement within PRO — Progressief Nederland, the recently formed merger of GroenLinks and PvdA) and from the new initiative Democratisch Ecosocialisten (Democratic Ecosocialists) [9] were present. The next edition of the Encounters, the 3rd Latin American and Caribbean Ecosocialist Encounter, will take place next year in Colombia, possibly followed a year later by the 8th International Ecosocialist Encounters in Ecuador — a telling shift towards the continent where the struggle is waged most fiercely and most boldly.

Whether that will be enough, no one knows. An Argentine speaker reminded the gathering that debates must remain rooted in concrete struggle and independent of governments, including supposedly progressive ones. Löwy cited Brecht: those who fight can lose, but those who do not fight have already lost. That is not reassurance, and it was not intended as such. What the 7th Ecosocialist Encounters showed is that the individual movements are each too weak for the task on their own, and that coordination among them — across sectors, movements, and borders — is no longer a luxury but the precondition for achieving anything. The building blocks are there. They only need to be stacked.

3 July 2026

Translated and annotated by Adam Novak for ESSF from Grenzeloos.

Attached documents

• many-fronts-one-struggle-a-report-on-the-7th-international_a9632.pdf (PDF - 920.4 KiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article9632]

Footnotes

[1] The previous (sixth) International Ecosocialist Conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in May 2024. See: Germán Bernasconi, "Ecosocialism to change everything – the Sixth International Ecosocialist Conference", Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, 20 May 2024. Available at: https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article70858

[2] The CDT (Confédération Démocratique du Travail) is one of the major trade union confederations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kambiniam’s affiliation and the confederation’s full name are given in the conference programme; further details were not available at time of publication.

[3] ELA (Euskal Langileen Alkartasuna — Basque Workers’ Solidarity) is the largest trade union confederation in the Basque Country, representing more than 100,000 workers. It defines itself as independent of both employers and the state, and critical of institutionalised social dialogue. See: https://www.ela.eus/en/about-ela

[4] Daniel Tanuro is a Belgian ecosocialist activist and agronomist, author of L’impossible capitalisme vert (2010, translated as The Impossibility of Green Capitalism) and coordinator of the drafting committee for the Manifesto for an Ecosocialist Revolution adopted by the Fourth International at its 18th World Congress in 2025. For his foundational statement of ecosocialist strategy, see: Daniel Tanuro, "Foundations of an ecosocialist strategy", Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, 4 April 2011. Available at: https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article22770

[5] Michael Löwy is Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique — National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris. He is co-author, with Joel Kovel, of An Ecosocialist Manifesto (2001) and author of Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe (Haymarket, 2015). His concept of "fossil fascism" as a description of the far right’s relationship to climate denial and the fossil industry has been developed in recent years alongside his broader ecosocialist and anti-neofascist analysis.

[6] Leonidas Iza is a Kichwa leader and president of Ecuarunari (Confederación Kichwa del Ecuador), the Andean regional branch of the indigenous movement representing Kichwa peoples of the highlands, and a former president of CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador — Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador). He was the only candidate in Ecuador’s 2025 presidential election to oppose expansion of extractive industries. Iza faces multiple legal proceedings and surveillance by the Noboa government.

[7] The occupation was centred on Cargill’s port terminal in Santarém, in the state of Pará. Several thousand people from fourteen ethnic groups, primarily from the Munduruku, Arapiun, and Apiaká peoples, blocked road access to Santarém airport on 4 February 2026 and occupied Cargill’s terminal on 21 February. The Lula government revoked the privatisation decree on 24 February 2026. COP30 took place in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025. Sources: Green Left, 27 February 2026; Amazon Watch, 27 February 2026.

[8] Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) is a Ukrainian democratic socialist organisation founded in 2015. It stands for democratic anti-capitalism, feminism, and ecosocialism. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, it has campaigned internationally for support for Ukrainian resistance, debt cancellation, and reconstruction under citizen control. See: Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), "Ukraine: Introducing Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement)", Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, 12 March 2019. Available at: https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article61539

[9] Members of SAP–Grenzeloos (Socialist Alternative Politics — Grenzeloos), the Dutch section of the Fourth International, are active in Democratisch Ecosocialisten.

Ecosocialism

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• The contribution of the Fourth International to ecosocialism
• Ecosocialism or barbarism
• Ruptures: The New Manifesto of the Fourth International

• William van den Heuvel

  William van den Heuvel is active in the anti-nuclear, climate, and peace movements in the Netherlands, and is a member of SAP–Grenzeloos (Socialist Alternative Politics — Grenzeloos).