Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

“We are not proposing superficial solutions to the implacable capitalist model, we are proposing that as long as the relations of exploitation between human beings and human beings with the world are not transformed, we will not be able to live in equal conditions.”

Corporate appropriation and commodification of territories and nature is expanding in sectoral, geographical, and political terms. The extractive mega-projects linked to the exploitation of crucial minerals, the development of large renewable energy estates, agro-industrial macro farms, agribusinesses and all kinds of giant infrastructures are taking on a prominent role as preferred spaces for capital accumulation. Also, classic mining and hydrocarbon extraction keep on being strategic to sustain capitalist dynamics.

Capitalism defines a mercantilist and exploitative relationship of nature, while at the same time it is unable to solve the energy, health, ecological and socioeconomic crises that affect the popular classes around the world. It is a neo-colonial and rentier stage of capitalism where the plundering of nature through extractions, corporate power and militarization lead a real offensive on the different territories, especially in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. At the root there is a growing dispute over energy and materials supply, which goes on fuelling unsustainable consumption from the North, based on natural resource exploitation that destroys habitats and exclusively benefits small economic-political elites at global, national, and local scales.

The hydrocarbons and raw materials key to the development of the areas of this renewed military and digital green capitalism are concentrated in specific locations, generally outside the borders of the central states, so effectively it is only a matter of encouraging extractions and specifically encouraging the large mining companies of the world to exploit whatever it needs to change the main source of energy resources. Meanwhile, the hegemonic discourse disguises this extractive fever naming it climate neutrality or green and digital transition, or in political pacts such as the European Green Deal that only paints the greed of capitalism in green.

This green and digital transition only deepens social inequalities on a planetary scale, while underpinning an extractive energy matrix and accelerating the overcoming of the planet’s biophysical limits. Moreover, in geopolitical terms, it further increases the power of transnational corporations, fuels the war regime, and deepens this neo-colonial offensive. Hence, the great powers are disputing the access to and control of the supply chains necessary for their economies, placing a set of economic, diplomatic, and military devices at the service of this strategy. Their interests are spread out through the signing of free trade and investment treaties, which is the usual modus operandi of capitalist globalisation: While all kinds of social and labour benefits and environmental safeguards are promised to the signatory countries, these not only do not revert positively in the social majority, but their effects are returned to them in the form of serious socio-ecological impacts. At the same time, there is a proliferation of bilateral and regional energy and raw materials deals, which only feed the profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. and loss accounts of elites and big corporations, while exhausting the working class and the peoples. The militarization and consolidation of the state of war in strategic territories is already an obvious reality within this neo-colonial offensive.

Small- and large-scale mining has irreparable consequences in terms of damage to the surface of the earth, air pollution, pollution of surface and groundwater, impacts on flora and fauna and the displacement of communities from their territories of origin through violence that only replicates the logic of colonization. Extractive activities happen generally in areas of high ecological sensitivity such as moorland, pampas, plains, seas, forests, high basins, sources of water, as well as in places that are the basis of a long-term agro-productive economy and where the damage caused ends up affecting the food production of the rural and urban population. The development of mega-mining, the oil industry or agribusiness means continuing the history of plundering territories and imposing the non-production of our food in the framework of food sovereignty, but on the contrary favouring the large food production chains.

If the eco-social transition is necessary and inevitable, it must lean on a popular and democratic class perspective that decides about its progress: which issues, who and how. Extractions, as a critical lever arm of capitalist production, based on the intensive and devastating exploitation of the working class, peasants, and mother earth, generates serious social, economic, cultural, and environmental impacts on communities and territories around the world. In this context, social and popular self-organisation becomes a key tool defending territorial rights and environmental justice and for constructing an alternative eco-social proposal that faces up to the extractive onslaught and its legal, political, and corporate machinery. It is time to think about other futures Futures A futures contract is a standardized advance commitment, negotiated on an organized futures market, to deliver a specified quantity of a precisely defined underlying asset at a specified time – the ‘delivery date’ – and place. Futures contracts are the most widely traded financial instruments in the world. beyond this model of emptying and dispossession.

Against the privatisation and extractive approach there are other ways of generating wealth in our territories with their enormous ethnic and cultural wealth, stemming from the popular, peasant and indigenous classes with their own potential and respecting nature. Opening new paths for other ways of organising economy and communal life does not mean devolving on the allied States with corporate power or relying on the goodwill Goodwill The difference between the assets on a company’s balance-sheet and the sum of its tangible and intangible assets. When one company takes control of another company, the acquiring company generally pays a price that is higher than the value of the net assets. Goodwill generally consists of intangible elements, such as brands, which are evaluated subjectively. of the owners of large fortunes. The limits shown by progressive governments and cross-class agreements are more than evident. That is why it is necessary to go further: to reorganise global, national, and local spaces led by popular organisations strengthening conflict dynamics and explicitly facing the hegemony of the political-business elites.

An internationalist solidarity that brings together communities in struggle and peoples in resistance to confront capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, and ecocide remains key. The only fair way out of the crisis will be supporting the peoples and the popular struggle defending the territories against corporate power and strengthening alternative proposals and transnational counter-hegemonic networks that demand and enforce the rights of the social majorities. In this sense, the idea of being able to organise the struggles of the peoples is born as a light to generate internationalist popular organisation and continue territorial struggles by joining forces and thus qualify and amplify the struggle against extractions in all its forms, as one of the most active sectors of the social struggle and that emphasises the contradictions of capitalism.

The key proposal is the creation of an International People’s Network against Extractions against capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and for climate justice, with the aim of:
1) presenting common strategies to fight against transnational extractive companies. These are the common enemy against which we can respond with greater impact and strength from this internationalist space.
2) shaping the union of popular organisations fighting against mining and extractions in all its forms, understanding that these are a direct consequence of capitalist dynamics in a worldwide scale. We draw from the premise that it is not possible to fight the effects without fighting the causes root of the economic model that allows and encourages all kinds of relations of oppression, neo-colonisation, and plundering.
3) establishing alliances to contribute to deepening the structural and historical analysis of the causes of extractions, linked to the development of capitalist modernity, and to deepen political and class responses.
4) presenting the defence of the planet, of life in flora and fauna, from a radical class perspective, that of the oppressed peoples and especially, those facing the worst environmental and social consequences of this predatory system.

Specifically, we call on all of us, the fraternal peoples fighting for a new world, to join our voices of hope and organise ourselves through this great international network. For which the first steps are specifically:
–  To identify related struggles in each of our countries and to articulate ourselves resolutely creating or strengthening broad alliances with social, political and trade union organisations as a key objective of the Network.
–  The commitment to eco-territorial internationalism, attached to community networks.
–  The active rejection of war and neo-colonial logic of plundering and invasion.
–  A varied structure, rooted in popular struggles and looking beyond state borders as the only possible framework for political action.
To go on deepening into this, we call on grassroots organizations, peoples in struggle and various anti-extractive resistances to an international meeting in which this global articulation will be rolled out, coinciding with the Peoples’ Summit to be held in November in 2025 in Belém (Brazil).

This is how we self-organise ourselves for a world in climate and social crisis.