ALLIED GROUNDS · Toolbox for Exploring the Links Between Labor Struggles and Environmental Struggles · BG°2023 Project
I. INTRO
Theme
Exploration
Results
The project is based on a series of 46 texts published by BG in German and English over the course of the year. A three-day conference at the House of Democracy and Human Rights (10|5-7) created a hybrid platform to bring together researchers, activists, and cultural workers to jointly produce further knowledge resources: video talks, projects, and audios. The conference report is available in 10 languages. The results – all under a Creative Commons license – are bundled on this project website: an archive and toolbox for critical knowledge and solidarity practices.
II. VIDEO TALKS
Preliminary note
Catastrophe and Class
The moral force of today’s environmental movements seems undeniable. But the very qualities that give them their particular strength and appeal seem to make them resistant to becoming agents of fundamental change, namely the transition from capitalism to eco-socialism, argues anthropologist Florin Poenaru in his “Allied Grounds” video talk, urging us to reassess the political potential of the refugee workforce.
Resisting Green Capital
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, coal miners are key to a potential convergence between anti-capitalist and ecological struggles, and thus key to any challenge of market-oriented “green” transition, as scholar-activist Svjetlana Nedimović suggests in her “Allied Grounds” video talk, which explores how the “traditional” energy of workers can be harnessed to build a future not yet imagined.
Climate Proletariat
Infrastructural Solidarity
Today, the geopolitics of labor mobility and energy transition are increasingly intertwined. It is a political priority for workers to understand how these connections operate in order to build infrastructural solidarity along them and reinvent internationalism. This requires a politics of translation between subjectivities, spaces, and scales, argues political theorist Brett Neilson in his “Allied Grounds” video talk.
Working-Class Environmentalism
While green capitalists, with the support of governments, are creating future markets that are profitably compatible with the climate crisis, a grassroots response can and should take the form of an alliance between the climate and labor movements, as is being tested in the struggles at the former GKN factory near Florence, argue scholar-activists Francesca Gabbriellini and Paola Imperatore in their “Allied Grounds” video talk.
Against Eco-Apartheid
As the global economic-ecological crises intensify, the spread of racist nationalism accelerates. This is a major problem for all of us: Workers are turned against each other (“white workers” vs. “non-white workers”) rather than challenging the exploitation and expropriation of all kinds of labor and the environment at large, as scholar-activist Harsha Walia argues in her “Allied Grounds” video talk.
Sustainable Work
Workers of all stripes and their communities potentially have an existential interest in sustainable, non-polluting production. And they are also the ones who will bear the brunt of a social-ecological transformation. Therefore, if workers do not take a central role in defining and practicing the transformation, it will not happen, as the social scientist Dario Azzellini argues in his “Allied Grounds” video talk.
Converging Struggles
Labor struggles have tended to trigger ‘fixes’ and ‘innovations’ of capital, including technological ones. Thus, the question is how current labor struggles can contribute to eco-social and decolonial ends, rather than fueling the next phase of capitalist accumulation and thereby ultimately accelerating the climate crisis, argues researcher Lorenzo Feltrin in his “Allied Grounds” video talk.
III. PROJECTS
Setting
(Un)Working Balkans
Eco-Internationalism for All?
Jobs vs. Nature?
Dismantling Eco-Fascism
Working-Class Environmentalism
IV. TEXTS
Intro
Magdalena Taube · Krystian Woznicki · Common Labor Struggles? The Eco-Social and Decolonial Question of Climate Crisis · URL
Working People in Movement
Jennifer Kamau · Climate Crisis and Racial Capitalism: Deconstructing the European Development Model in Africa · URL
Brett Neilson · Electrification and Infrastructural Solidarity: Why Climate Struggle Requires the Reinvention of Internationalism · URL
Shuree Sarantuya · Climate Production on the Move? Nomadic Land and Labor in the Age of Sedentarism · URL
Harsha Walia · Against Eco-Apartheid: Towards Internationalist and Multi-Racial Worker Struggles · URL
Rural Worker Struggles
Natacha Bruna · Green Extractivism and Expropriation of Emission Rights: Are Rural Workers in the Global South Subsidizing the Next Leap of Postcolonial Capitalism? · URL
Anoushka Zoob Carter · “Agroecology or Barbarism”: What Does It Mean to Struggle For Transition Justice in Agriculture? · URL
Eva Gelinsky · Farmers’ Protests in the Netherlands: Just a Reactionary Defense of the Status Quo of Intensive Agriculture? · URL
Rahul Goswami · Against the International of Capital: Why We Must Resist the Financialization of Land and Labor in the Global South · URL
Salma Rizkya · Beyond Health and Safety: The Struggle of the Alienated Body and the Emergence of New Forms of Worker Organization on Palm Oil Plantation · URL
Alliances of the Exploited
Alexander Behr · Planetary Alliance Politics and Solidarity-Based Division of Labor: Notes on Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living · URL
Max Haiven · Climate Workers of the World, Unite!? Searching for Affective Connections, Common Enemies, and Shared Narratives · URL
Özgün Eylül İşcen · Disaster Capitalism, Class Struggles, and Situated Alliances in Post-Earthquake Turkey · URL
Davide G. Lassere · For an Internationalist Ecologism: Can We, the Multiplicity of the World’s Exploited Workers, Reinvent the Politics of Alliances? · URL
Anna Saave · Are You A Meta-Industrial Worker? Ecofeminist Understandings of Labor Are Our Allied Ground · URL
Resisting Green Capital
Boris Kagarlitsky · Internationalist Movements? Climate Crisis, Working Class, and the Means of Production · URL
Svjetlana Nedimović · Fires of the Future in the Furnaces of the Past: Building Socio-Environmental Alliances in the European South(East) · URL
Matteo Rossi · Striking the Green Transition: Autoworkers’ Struggle in the Climate Class Conflict · URL
Tatjana Söding · Against the End of History: Why We Should Resist the Remaking of Fossil Capital into Green Capital · URL
John Szabo · Transportation as ‘Climate Production’: Are Electric Vehicles Advancing the Commodification of Labor and Nature? · URL
Collective Agency?
Sita Balani · Repairing or Policing the Planet? Struggles for Social and Environmental Justice at the Edges of Democracy · URL
Lorenzo Feltrin · Emanuele Leonardi · Converging Struggles: Working-Class Composition, Technological Development, and Ecological Politics · URL
Marc Herbst · Prefigurative Politics: Fabulating the Intersection Between Labor and Environmental Struggles · URL
Muskaan Jagadish Khemani · Embracing an Ethic of Love: A Radical Path to Revolution in a World of Exploited and Divided Workers · URL
Florin Poenaru · How Can Declinism Be Politicized? The Quest for the Agents of System Change · URL
Jaron Rowan · Climate Production Anyone? Why We Need to Be Collaborating on Everything, Everywhere, at the Same Time · URL
Reimagining Work
Stephen Bouquin · Reclaiming Life from Capital: The Decommodification of Labor and Nature as Resistance to Ecocide · URL
Slave Cubela · Communism of the Body: Politicizing the Intersection of Labor and Environmental Struggles · URL
Maja Hoffmann · Refusing to Be Nothing But Workers: Why Our Warming Planet Needs a Movement Against Work · URL
Ela Kagel · Sustainable Climate Production: Absenteeism, Universal Basic Outcome, and Platform Cooperatives · URL
Manuela Zechner · Struggles for Work Beyond the Wage: Keep Kindling Rebellious Spirits and Other Imaginaries of Work · URL
Post-Growth Pathways
Alistair Alexander · Indigenous Degrowth? Recognizing Visions of What a World Beyond Growth Could Actually Look Like · URL
Angelina Kussy · Rethinking Work, Building a Post-Growth Pathway: How to Crack the Dominant System Through Care · URL
mirko nikolić · Shutting Down Monocultures of Capital: Reinventing Labor Struggles by Forging the Connections Between Rural and Urban Communities · URL
Alex Pazaitis · The Value of Exploitation: How to Reclaim Our Lives and Livelihoods in Common · URL
Nora Räthzel · Workers as Agents of a Post-Growth Transition: Recalibrating Our Work-Life Balance Beyond the Needs of Capital · URL
Just Transition from Below
Dario Azzellini · Optimizing or Abolishing Capitalism? Sustainable Work and Just Transition Instead of Work Society and Climate Catastrophe · URL
Maura Benegiamo · The Labor of the Future, the Future of Labor? A Just Transition Critique of the Digital Agriculture Utopia · URL
Francesca Gabbriellini · Paola Imperatore · An Eco-Revolution of the Working Class? What We Can Learn from the Former GKN Factory in Italy · URL
Jörg Nowak · Velocities and Scales: Why the Post-Carbon Transition Needs Socialist Ecological Planning · URL
Stoyo Tetevenski · Your Job or Your Climate: How the Just Transition in Bulgaria Was Hijacked by Capitalists · URL
Ecological Unionism
Antje Dieterich · Daniel Gutiérrez · The Strategic Hypothesis of Ecological Unionism: Why We Need to Think Social and Environmental Rationalization Together · URL
Sydney Lang · Merle Davis Matthews · Just Transition Politics in Ontario and the Potential for an Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist Labor Movement · URL
Salma Rizkya · Beyond Health and Safety: The Struggle of the Alienated Body and the Emergence of New Forms of Worker Organization on Palm Oil Plantation · URL
Silpa Satheesh · Red-Green Rows: Making Sense of the Conflicts between Trade Unions and Environmental Movements in Kerala · URL
Hariati Sinaga · Organizing Plantation Workers: What it Means to Activate Collective Memory For a Just Transition · URL
V. AUDIOS
Politicizing the End(s) of the World
(Neo)colonial capitalism is bringing about the end of the world. Environmentalists in the Global North urge us to recognize that this dystopian scenario is looming in the near future. For the oppressed peoples of the Global South, however, the apocalypse has been a reality for more than five hundred years. And it is from these regions that the growing mass of migrant and refugee labor continues to emerge, not least as a reserve army of labor to support the centers of capital. This challenges us all to imagine and facilitate multiracial workers’ struggles against capitalism.
The opening panel of the “Allied Grounds” conference, “Agents of System Change,” addressed these issues. Moderated by Claudia Núñez, Florin Poenaru, and Jennifer Kamau gave talks at the House of Democracy and Human Rights, which can be listened to by clicking on the play button below.
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Merging Anti-Capitalist Interests
Labor movements have been continually absorbed by market forces and thus repeatedly declared dead. In recent years, however, they have re-emerged as a potentially anti-capitalist force. At the same time, the environmental and climate movements in the Global North, long motivated by moral concerns, are gradually discovering their anti-capitalist interest. In a number of recent struggles, the labor and environmental movements are coming together, building alliances, and expanding their capacities to shape eco-socialist futures.
The “Resisting Green Jobs” panel explored cases in the Balkans and Italy. Moderated by Rositsa Kratunkova, Svjetlana Nedimović, Paola Imperatore, and Francesca Gabbriellini gave talks at the House of Democracy and Human Rights, which can be listened to by clicking on the play button below.
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Preparing the Ground for Alliances
In contemporary capitalism, workers are increasingly fragmented and divided, along the lines, for example, of productive and reproductive labor, wage and unpaid labor. Yet they could realize their common interests not least by confronting the capitalist threat to their social and ecological environment and to their collective capacity to create a life worth living. This requires translation not only between different languages, but also between different cultural, social, economic, political, and not least class contexts, both at the individual and collective levels.
On the final day of the “Allied Grounds” event, the “Politics of Translation” panel addressed these issues. Moderated by Anna Saave, Dario Azzelini, Lorenzo Feltrin, and Brett Neilson gave talks at the House of Democracy and Human Rights, which can be listened to by clicking on the play button below.
Click on the button to load the content from Soundcloud.
VI. INFO
Organizers
Curators
Newsletters
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The BG conference “Allied Grounds” is funded by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb, Schwingenstein Foundation, and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The conference is a cooperation with Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte. Outreach partners include Arts of the Working Class, AthensLive, Common Ecologies, Critical Data Lab, Furtherfield, Harun Farocki Institut, Kuda.org, LeftEast, NON, Supermarkt, TNI, and Undisciplined Environments.
This website features texts and photos by BG, and artworks by Colnate Group. CC by NC 4.0. See for imprint and privacy policy below.