We smell what?
We smell a global political economy based on the transfer of wealth from the global working classes, to an elite minority.
We smell neoliberal development institutions and policies forcing extractive energy models onto former colonised, ecologically vulnerable nations.
We smell a greenwashed energy transition for Europe set to reproduce these imperial dynamics.
We smell the gas and hydrocarbon industries as fuellers and funders of settler colonial occupations and genocide.
We smell the securitisation of energy infrastructure protecting the interests of private profits at the expense of local people.
We smell an energy market reliant on the cheapened labour of racialised, precarious, and migrant workers.
We smell a growing movement of movements against racial capitalism and imperialism. A movement fighting for transnational workers solidarity, for public ownership of energy production and resources, for a worker-led energy transition, for radical, revolutionary care that demands a more inhabitable planet for all.
We Smell Gas
WeSmellGas is a collective of organisers, researchers and film-makers based in Northern Europe. We formed in 2022 around a shared framework: the overlapping crises we face today, including climate change, are fuelled by a racial capitalist global economy, driven by empire and colonialism. Climate justice can only be realised by dismantling capitalism and the imperial processes that reinforce it, including our current extractivist energy system.
Our current energy system is both imperial, colonial capitalism’s material base and the key driver of climate change. Europe is the home of the biggest historic empires and some of the biggest corporate perpetrators of racialised extractivism and exploitation worldwide. As such, WeSmellGas targets European energy imperialism, and focussing in particular on the EU.
We organise along three interrelated tracks. We conduct critical research to locate Europe’s key perpetrators of energy imperialism and work with those in resistance to new extractivist energy projects. We do political education in Northern Europe to translate these findings into creative media, workshops and written content. We take action in European imperial cores, to disrupt, resist energy projects that weaponise and reinforce racial capitalist dynamics, to demand better for us all.
Principles
- Abolish: We believe in the abolition of racial capitalism. Therefore we believe in the abolition of the structures and institutions that uphold it: empire, nations, borders, private property, profit-making corporations and the police. Abolition is a principle and practice of life making, across difference and distance to co-create a form of planetary being that is habitable for all.
- Care: We organise because none of us are free until we are all free. We embody this in our collective organising model and in our internationalist politics of solidarity.
- Stand in solidarity: We aim to show up for our siblings facing the worst impacts of extractivism, colonialism and precarity globally, by taking disruptive action with material impact.
- Fight imperialism: Challenging the actors, processes and structures that uphold imperialism is how we will realise a more just world for all.
- Imagine: Feeling, narrative, lived experience, art are often neglected by mainstream political organising and its utilitarian logics. Our political methodology includes all of these things alongside its more pragmatic approaches.
- Hope: In moments of crisis, it is essential to maintain hope that our movements will win. We are fiercely critical of capitalist institutions and their supporters. We are fiercely optimistic about the work of our friends, comrades and movements for justice from across the world.