Venue: Student House of the Goethe University, Mertonstrasse 26, 60325, Frankfurt am Main
Overview
● Download the reader with programme and infos: [PDF] Transnational Meeting in Frankfurt
● Read the call out “We Want More: Strike the War and the Climate Crisis“
● We aim to bring together participants from a variety of different collectives, worker unions, climate movements and migrants.
● We want to develop our understanding of the present situation – in all its complexities and contradictions by providing a space for exchange and inquiry.
● We come together to challenge our assumptions, reflect on the effectiveness of our struggles and form new alliances and insights to face up to the challenges.
Friday
16:00: Students, Struggles, Self-government. City Walt at the University Campus Bockenheim (@Studierendenhaus)
17:00 – 18:00: Welcome, presentation of the TSS Platform and structure of the meeting (@Festsaal)
Together with the local supporters from the Interventionist Left, we will introduce the meeting, the structure, the goals and the stakes of these three days. But we will also explain how we did get there and why we decided to call this meeting.
18:00 – 20:00: Fighting the war politics, for a transnational politics of peace (@Festsaal)
On Putin’s aggression on Ukraine, TSS launched the Permanent Assembly Against the War to take a transnational stance against the war. It identified in the war not only deaths and destruction in Ukraine but an ongoing global realignment including open threats of nuclear escalation that undermines our collective future. In these difficult times, marked by tensions, anxieties and fractures. The PAAW has provided a crucial space for coming together and not turning away from this reality of the war and its effects. It has been a space where to reimagine what it takes today to build an anti-war initiative. In this assembly, we want to discuss how what we define as an ongoing third-world war is affecting our living and working conditions and requiring us to rethink the way in which we struggle. While the war seems to become a new normality, it is spreading well beyond the Ukrainian borders with its material effects – the most visible being mass movements, inflation, and food and energy prices.
In the shadow of this war, rearmament is rampant everywhere and military aggressions and armed tensions increase, fueling war in other areas, such as in Kurdistan. A wider militarization of economic policies and labour laws, the exacerbation of patriarchal violence, the legitimation of institutional racism and the worsening of the climate crisis are among the effects of the war. We will discuss how to cope with the difficulties of building an anti-war movement transnationally. A movement that goes beyond the simple positioning around the aggression in Ukraine and beyond the geopolitical fronts. We want to build a different political path towards a transnational politics of peace.
Together with the subjects hit by the war and its material effects, against nationalisms and state politics, a transnational politics of peace is what sets the bases for present and future struggles. The Manifesto for a Transnational Politics of Peace, released by the PAAW after months of meetings and discussions, will serve as a guide in this discussion and will help us to look beyond the present condition.
20:00: Dinner and welcome drinks (@Festsaal)
Saturday
08:30 – 09:45: Breakfast (@Café Koz)
10:00 – 12:00: INQUIRIES ON THE PRESENT PART I
End of the Month, End of the World – Same Struggle
As the climate crisis deepens, environmentalist movements demand a solution and a radical change in the structure and geography of the carbon economy. Attempts of alliances and coalitions with workers and trade unions have been made using the slogan “End of Month, End of World: Same Struggle”. We know that the problem we are confronted with is more complicated than that of coming together as workers and ecologists. We know also that the “end of the month” means different things in a reality of differentiated working conditions and wage levels, where precarity, informal labour and unemployment cut across different conditions, marked by sex, gender, race, and migration status. In this section, we want to deal with these different dimensions of the climate class struggle to come in parallel moments of collective discussion. The participants are asked to contribute and collectively attempt to work through a central question/proposition.
● Exchanges and experience of climate movement(s): From lobbying to climate camps to blockades – what effect have climate movements had – what do they do well, and what do they do badly? (@Festsaal)
● NetZero & The Green Transition – New cycles of capitalist accumulation: How do we understand the move by states and capital in view of COP26/27, the declarations around NetZero by 2050, and the role of the European Green Transition? (@K1)
● Workers for and against Climate: Analysis of the current tensions that manifest around points of production, fossil fuel industries, new right formations/authoritarianism, conspiracy and just transitions (@K4)
12:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break (@Café Koz)
14:00 – 16:00 INQUIRIES ON THE PRESENT PART II
Striking Social Reproduction
In this section, we want to deal with struggles in social reproduction led by women, LBGTQ people, migrants, and workers against patriarchal violence, racism and exploitation recognizing the centrality of Central and Eastern Europe in these struggles. The participants are asked to contribute and collectively attempt to work through a central question/proposition in parallel moments of discussion.
● Rising the tide: connecting feminist and essential struggles: what are the conditions for the feminist strike today? How to engage with the incoming transnational mobilizations as the 8th of March? (@Festsaal)
● Migration as a social movement: how to fight for the freedom of movement and against institutional racism within and beyond Europe? (@K4)
16:00 – 16:45 Coffee Break (@Café Koz)
17:00 – 19:00 PLENARY (@Festsaal)
STRIKE AS A LEVERAGE: Building Power in Times of War and Climate Crisis
Within the impending climate crisis and after three years of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine has radically changed the conditions where we live, work and struggle, making clear that a local plan of the initiative is insufficient. In this plenary event, we want to discuss the force and limits of the ongoing struggles, and pose the question: how can we build power in times of war and climate crisis?
We will discuss the different experiences of strikes that are marking these ages, reflecting and elaborating on their strengths and weaknesses. Labour strikes called by trade unions are happening in different places. But while they build leverage for the involved workers, we often see very poor or no communication among different categories and conditions. Meanwhile, the use of the word strike has expanded, as proved by the experiences of migrant strikes, the transnational circulation of the feminist and climate strikes and, more recently, the bill strike against rising costs of living.
The strike has affirmed itself as the most powerful and evocative form of struggle: from the idea of the strike as a single tactic used by specific organizations, the strike has become a tool to mobilize and organize within the struggle. From a conception of one-dimensional struggle within working places, the focus on social reproduction has extended the reach of what strike can mean today. This plenary will bring together the day’s discussions and attempt to point towards the possibility of the transnational social strike as a process to build power in times of war and climate crisis. Because we want more.
From 19:30 Dinner and Bar Evening (@Café Koz)
Sunday
9:30 – 10:15 Breakfast (@Café Koz)
10:30 – 13:30: FINAL PLENARY (@Festsaal)
Prospects for New Transnational Movements
In this final plenary we will report and wrap up the discussions held the days before and develop the next steps following three main axes:
● Strike the war and climate crisis, building a transnational politics of peace: strategies and common goals for a better future
● From the local to the transnational and back: shared words, common tools
● Strengthening the political infrastructure: how to join the TSS Platform?
