“Resource wars,” “energy wars,” and “climate wars” on the peripheries of empires are all expressions of the fact that economic and ecological crises are becoming increasingly devastatingly intertwined, fueling each other. Needless to say, diplomacy must be preferred to a “hot” war at any time in the face of this. But this is not enough for a true bottom-up peace movement.
As Rosa Luxemburg already knew in 1911, we must be able to do more than urge capitalist states to negotiate the terms of their business deals, because if we focus only on that, we undertake basically nothing more than the defense of capitalism and imperialism – that is, yesterday’s forms against today’s or tomorrow’s.
Hence, struggles for an internationalist politics of peace in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and all other forms of imperial military aggression across the globe should also, if not primarily, be conducted by challenging capitalism and imperialism. Some of the questions that we tried to tackle in this group were: How can we advance eco-socialist alternatives to the capitalist economy? How can we create commons-based caring economies as a peace strategy that disarms “resource wars” and the like?
Click here to visit the Miro Board that we created.
Credits
The ‘Disarming Resource Wars’ workshop consisted of: Sabrina Apitz, Max Haiven, Julio Linares, Mirko Nikolić, Andrea Vetter, and Gabriele Schliwa.
This project was conceived at the Berliner Gazette’s annual conference 2022 entitled AFTER EXTRACTIVISM.
All text and images: Creative Commons License 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).