An ecofeminist just transition

Below is a talk given by Stefania Barca about the kind of workers’ struggle needed for an ecosocialist future, based on Barca’s new book, Workers of the Earth.

The talk was organised by rs21 and the Red Bird Editorial Collective.

This book is a collection of articles that I started writing back in 2010. It’s been a long-time research interest of mine to look at how the experience of pollution and environmental contamination, and environmental crisis of all kinds have been experienced by workers themselves, because this was something that was really missing in the accounts of the ecological crisis that I was reading about or hearing about. I was interested in looking at this different perspective on the ecological crisis. Everybody just assumed that workers, that labour and the environment had nothing to do with each other, even if not being opposed and in conflict. 

Mine was not a theoretical position. I was actually inspired by stories that I’d heard about, that I read about, stories of workers that had actually struggled for environmental regulation and for compensation of environmental damage. And also, about how in some cases even labour movements, trade union movements have done so in the past. So as a historian I always thought that the past matters and the stories that we tell about the past and our past especially. When I say ‘our’, I mean the Western world, the industrialised countries. We buy into this narrative that the West has made a lot of good things for humanity and that the ecological crisis is just the downside of that. And that only environmental movements and conservation and science are looking at how to remediate, but workers are not interested in that. We have all been socialised into this narrative right of the environmental movement as something much more urban, middle class white and consumerist oriented. 

The more I dig into the different stories of workers – I started with industrial workers and stories of petrol chemical contamination in Italy, that was my entry point into this – but the more I read, and looked into this in different contexts, the more I learned about how this story, this narrative, was faulty and how that was the problem. It was a political problem because that reproduced this idea that labour movements have nothing important to do and to say about the ecological crisis. So, with the passing of time, I became more involved in the ecosocialist perspective and the ecosocialist movement, the Marxist ecofeminist or materialist socialist ecofeminist movement and I started to gain new perspectives on this whole thing. That reinforced my idea, that I try to convey in the book, that it is not consumers or citizens or even scientists that can make an ecological revolution. As an ecosocialist I believe that only workers can make an ecological revolution, provided that the right conditions are in place and that they achieve unity in struggle. So, unity in struggle is my other obsession and has become my obsession more recently, and strategically thinking about how to achieve this unity in worker struggles towards an ecological revolution. 

So yes, the other obsession has been also thanks to my encountering the Wages for Housework movement with the Global Women’s Strike. I didn’t know they had a long-term history, I thought the campaign was something from back to the 70s and it was only about women and domestic work. But then I learned that they have five decades of struggles and the struggles are not exactly restricted to domestic work per se but they have a much broader meaning, so much so that recently in 2019 I came to work with Selma James.

Together we worked on a policy document called ‘Blueprint for a European Just Transition’. There was an attempt, failed I should say, an attempt at putting together a vision for a green new deal in Europe that was alternative to the Green Deal of the European Commission. So, we were trying to put together a plan based on the principles of environmental justice and global climate justice and also based on a families approach in which unwaged work and domestic work and care work more generally was central to the just transition and ecological transition. So that was also eye-opening work for me, that also led me to go back to my research and look for how domestic work and subsistence work and care work more broadly had also been part of the struggle of workers against ecological and climate crisis. That’s how I came across these stories that are told in the book. I came to incorporate stories that I already knew on how women in working class communities, like the community of Mondragon in Italy which is told in Chapter 2, or the women that were in the Wages for Housework struggle in Bristol back in the 1980s who had struggled against industrial hazards and were part of the anti-nuclear energy movement. In the case of Manfredonia it was about environmental justice and recognition of the biological damage done by the petrochemical industry. I came to realise these were workers’ struggles, not just women’s struggles, because this category women doesn’t really resonate with an ecosocialist perspective. These were struggles of domestic workers basically, unwaged domestic workers, subsistence workers.

Talking about subsistence workers, I came across the story in the Amazon forest, the story of the extractivist movement as they call themselves which is of course a different meaning of the term extractivism. It’s not extraction of resources for profits but it is a form of extracting from nature what is needed for the human subsistence, for human development and for the autonomy of these communities. Those were stories that I came across through a former PhD student, a Brazilian PhD student, who came to work with me when I was in Portugal. He brought the story with him of how these people have been struggling for and winning their struggles and getting a new form of conservation from the government, a new form of conservation that was actually based on their role as caretakers of the forest, and centred on their perspective.

So, for me that was a very positive and hopeful story that told me that workers struggle even when they are not particularly supported by the trade unions, but they are still workers struggles. Also, this story started with a trade union actually, started with the union of the rubber tappers of the Amazon forest so it was the result of an alliance between the union and the indigenous movement.  That was also a very important lesson: that these kinds of alliances give strength to workers struggles and they are important also to liberate the labour movement from its obsession with industry, with everything industrial. Not because we don’t need industry or industrial workers, but because we need alliances across different kinds of work, they all have their role to play in the political struggle. The fact that that struggle was successful made me think that that is something that we should learn from, even though clearly, we cannot apply mechanically one story to other contexts, to different periods and different places. The challenge here is to try and look at our own struggles in our own context and learn what can be useful, what can be understood, what can be brought into our own struggles from those that were done in the past, especially when they were successful.

In the first part of the book I tell the stories, and then in the second part of the book I do a critique of the way in which the just transition, the labour just transition discourse and strategy, has been developed over the past decade, I would say to the point of becoming a keyword in the labour movement, especially from industrial trade unions, but then it became institutionalised, co-opted. Now it’s all over the place, in the European Union framework, the UN, everybody talks about just transition but then the problem is what they mean by this term. So, we have two problems, one is how institutions co-opt the term and how they use it in way that is not really consistent with the just transition with ecological transition that is socially just. But the other problem is also how the labour movement itself has come to develop it in a kind of restricted sense. Understanding it just as a way of compensating industrial workers for the loss of certain types of jobs. Training workers for the new green economy and what have you. But this is a very restricted understanding and not very transformative. I don’t see any revolutionary potential in this kind of just transition understanding, even though I’m not discarding it. The point is not to discard the just transition, the point is to reclaim it.

The just transition has the potential to respond to real needs of workers and working class people, it just needs to be expanded and it needs to be radicalised. By expanded, I mean first of all to extend the definition of the labour subject as something more than industrial jobs, even something larger than commodity production. Of course, workers in the production of commodities have certain kinds of power in making trouble to the system, but they’re not the only ones. We need to extend justification to unwaged workers and subsistence workers like the extractivistas in the Amazon, but not only the Amazon. Now there are similar movements in lots of rural areas, so this is another point – extending the definition of just transition to rural work. Let’s not forget that 50% of the world’s population is rural, so cities are not the only place, and the rural world is essential to the development of global capitalism because the rural world is the place where capital looks to extract resources not only to make profit but also to make the ecological transition. For example, capital looks at the rural world for the rare earth materials that are needed for capital to green itself, and also as a sink for the waste. 

So, we need to be aware of the struggles of rural people, not only in food production but also in the forests, on the oceans and fisheries, in all kinds of rural production sites, but also rural communities and their struggles to keep autonomy over their territories. Territorial struggles are key in this ecological transition and subsistence work broadly speaking, also care work broadly speaking, which is not just care work. It is broader than domestic work, there is a lot of care work that is waged as well and the just transition strategy does not in its current formulation take into account the waged care workers that are more and more important in the economy, to the point that now there is a lot of talk about the care economy.

We also need the just transition to organise care workers as ecological subjects because care work has a lot to do not only with caring for people but it matters where governments put their money. If they put all their money in the industrial sectors and they defund the caring sector, that matters not only to the workers but also to all of us, all the working class people who are depending on public care services. And that is also relevant to the ecological transition because of course care work is much less carbon intensive than other kinds of jobs. So this resonates a little with the slogan ‘invest in caring not killing’, again from the Wages for Housework campaign. But also the caring work that’s spent on the land in the territories in local landscapes, again by people in the rural world but also in the urban environment – like for example I’m thinking of environmental justice movements and people in marginalised urban communities who struggle against incinerators or polluting infrastructures. They resist the expansion of this system and they claim the right to a healthy and safe environment. So, I see those also as forms of caring work – unwaged of course but still very important. 

My message with this book is that we need to try and keep all these different kinds of workers together in a unified vision of the struggle, even though they are different and they must maintain their autonomy as organised sectors. So I’m not proposing here to go back to some kind of Leninist vision but I’m talking about something more perhaps more difficult which is organising together different sectors of the workers of the earth.