Theme

With annual projects such as “Water Knowledge” (2009), “More World” (2019), and “After Extractivism” (2022), the BG began to explore various questions of political ecology, linking issues of environmental pollution, resource commodification, and climate collapse to the toxically intertwined and mutually fueling economic and ecological crises caused by imperialism and capitalism.

Approaching this inquiry from a new, fresh angle, “Allied Grounds” – the BG 2023 project – intends to revisit and further explore so-called “sacrifice zones” and “transition countries,” zoom in on struggles for labor and environmental justice, and, ultimately, probe the organizational practices and potentialities of these very struggles.

Exploration

Central to the exploratory nature of the Allied Grounds project is a series of texts. Reflecting the politics and possibilities of internationalism, commons, and (re-)organization, all of the inquiries are linked by a common concern: to research and construct connections between environmental and labor struggles.

The overarching question of the project is: Since the means of production have become the means of climate production, how can we – all kinds of exploited workers around the world – seize these very means and address both the eco-social and decolonial question of the climate crisis?

Read more about the concept in the introductory outline “Common Labor Struggles? The Eco-Social and Decolonial Question of Climate Crisis.”

Milestones

Engaging researchers, activists, and cultural workers in a variety of forms and encounters, we will be co-producing knowledge resources in different media formats.

Call for papers
In 2023 we will publish around 50 texts. See the first “Allied Grounds”-articles below. If you would like to contribute to the text series, mail us at info(at)berlinergazette(.)de

Conference
The BG conference “Allied Grounds” will take place on Oct. 5, 6, and 7, 2023 at the House of Democracy and Human Rights. Info on the workshops is already available. See below.

Multimedia website
We will be compiling all of our findings and adding audio, video, and more to this site by the end of 2023, as we did for “After Extractivism.”

Setting

The workshops on October 5, 6, and 7 are the heart of the BG conference “Allied Grounds.” They bring together researchers, activists, and cultural workers from more than 25 countries and enable new ways of spending quality time with each other.

Taking five different thematic approaches to the key questions of the “Allied Grounds” project (see columns on the right and below), the workshops will feature guests invited by the conference organizers and additional participants who registered through an open call. For more info on the schedule click here.

(Un)Working Balkans

The Balkans are virtually absent in the dominant political discourse of Europe: out of sight, out of mind. At the same time, central economic and geopolitical interests of the EU are concentrated in this region, not least in the course of creating “green future markets.” Here, the logic of (green) capitalism and imperialism has a specific dimension – for example, due to the post-“communist” formation of this region – and at the same time a dimension that is representative of the periphery of the world system: Capitalism creates and thrives on divisions among workers; these divisions are key to the development of the capitalist system of production and to maintaining the profitability of capitalism itself; to ensure profitability, only a minority of the working class can be protected against the adverse effects of market forces in general and the creation of new markets in particular. Understanding this is key to tackling the divisions that are being created today between workers in the “old” carbon industries and the “new” post-carbon industries. How can these divisions be politicized and turned into a basis for shared working class struggles and alliances with environmental movements that challenge green imperialism?

Guests: Zoë Aiano, Nidzara Ahematova, Lori Šramel Čebular, Nina Djukanović, Svjetlana Nedimović, mirko nikolić, Sofija Stefanović, Mihajlo Vujasin. Moderation: Adriana Homolova, Holger Kral.

Eco-Internationalism for All?

If every economic activity has an ecological footprint, then it is obvious that we, as people who in one way or another work in a capitalist economy, have a significant share in climate production, albeit a largely unintentional and unconscious one. The ongoing restructuring of labor in the name of a green transition reproduces and even reinforces this destructive dimension of capitalism. Thus, reorganizing work as conscious and sustainable climate production based on internationalist alliances implies the following challenge: At the subjective level, issues of health (physical and mental) must be addressed in order to provide a basis for the growth of our political consciousness and agency as climate workers. At the collective level, the international division of labor needs to be addressed, as well as the enforced opposition between productive and reproductive work and the abandonment of large parts of the world’s population by systems of legal, economic, political, and health care protection. How can we rethink the sustainability of work as co-dependent on our health? And how can we co-constitute an eco-international that bridges the North-South and West-East divides in the name of a truly just and common future?

Guests: Carola von der Dick, Özgün Eylül İşcen, Rositsa Kratunkova, Angelina Kussy, Davide Gallo Lassere, Eliana Otta, Nicolay Spesivtsev, Alexandra Stefanescu, Anna Zett. Moderation: Max Haiven.

Jobs vs. Nature?

The future of productive and reproductive labor is directly intertwined with the ecological future of the planet and the immediate environment of workers. In the capitalist system, wage labor and ecology are played off against each other, for example, in the form of so-called environmental blackmail, which promises jobs in ecologically polluting industries. Or, more recently, the other way around: by creating supposedly “green jobs” to legitimize mass layoffs. In this context, the dilemma of jobs versus the environment only makes sense if we do not question the basic assumptions of capitalism. The problem therefore needs to be reframed: It is not “environmental protection that endangers jobs,” but the ecologically destructive or at best ecologically modernized business as usual (also read: fossil or green capitalism), whose class-specific consequences also affect many laborers’ living and working conditions. How do we want to work now and in the future? What do we want to produce and under what conditions? How can we redefine work in a gender-just way? How can we redistribute work in an internationalist context and overcome the deep inequalities of the international division of labor?

Guests: Sana Ahmad, Angelina Davydova, Aslı Dinç, Daniel Gutiérrez, Paola Imperatore, Marina Milanović, Janus Petznik, Tanja Potezica. Moderation: Abiol Lual Deng, Cristina Pombo.

Dismantling Eco-Fascism

The forces of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism cause, or even create, disasters in the Global South (floods, droughts, etc.), displacing millions of people, putting them out of work, and making them support economies around the world, such as the centers of capital in the Global North. Here, the most vulnerable become the least protected and the most exploited. Worse, the threat of “replacement by cheaper labor” is used to blackmail workers who have more rights or protections: “If you comply, we’ll keep them at bay and secure your job and ecosystem.” Such eco-fascism is advancing alongside green capitalism as the other major capital-conformist approach to contain labor and climate struggles, sabotage alliances among workers, and prevent environmental justice. Thus, the concerns of the migrant proletariat are closer to the heart of the social order and the source of the conditions that determine the fate of “primary human needs” and “universal goods” than many of the (predominantly white) environmental movements that have placed these needs and goods on their protest agendas. What does an eco-internationalism based on the struggles of migrant workers look like?

Guests: Jennifer Kamau, Marta Peirano, Florin Poenaru, Kübra Tokuç, Niloufar Vadiati, Manuela Zechner, Dzina Zhuk. Moderation: Katrin Kämpf, Claudia Núñez.

Working-Class Environmentalism

Throughout history, workers have taken control of industries and replaced capitalists as the organizers of the social division of labor, as in the Soviets of St. Petersburg in 1917, among the anarchists of Barcelona in 1936, in the cordones industriales of Chile in 1972, and most recently in the factory occupations of Argentina, Greece, and Italy in the early 21st century. These struggles raise different issues than those that seek only security (typically through the state), or those that seek higher wages and more control within a factory. Such struggles represent the prospect of workers shaping the social division of labor toward universal ends. This seems particularly relevant at a time when the dream of simply raising living standards through increased productivity – the promise of states of the right and left in the twentieth century – is running aground on ecological reality. Can workers play a role in directly shaping what is produced, how it is produced, and not just who gets what? Can this lead to a resurgence of working-class environmentalism, as the recent case of the former GKN factory in Italy suggests? And how can internationalist, cross-class alliances be built around it?

Guests: Alistair Alexander, Dario Azzelini, Antje Dietrich, Lorenzo Feltrin, Francesca Gabbriellini, Nelli Kambouri, Gorana Mlinarevic, Jaron Rowan. Moderation: Sotiris Sideris.

Dario Azzellini · Optimizing or Abolishing Capitalism? Sustainable Work and Just Transition Instead of Work Society and Climate Catastrophe · URL

Sita Balani · Repairing or Policing the Planet? Struggles for Social and Environmental Justice at the Edges of Democracy · URL

Alexander Behr · Planetary Alliance Politics and Solidarity-Based Division of Labor: Notes on Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living · URL

Slave Cubela · Communism of the Body: Politicizing the Intersection of Labor and Environmental Struggles · URL

Antje Dieterich · Daniel Gutiérrez · The Strategic Hypothesis of Ecological Unionism: Why We Need to Think Social and Environmental Rationalization Together · URL

Lorenzo Feltrin · Emanuele Leonardi · Converging Struggles: Working-Class Composition, Technological Development, and Ecological Politics · URL

Francesca Gabbriellini · Paola Imperatore · An Eco-Revolution of the Working Class? What We Can Learn from the Former GKN Factory in Italy · URL

Rahul Goswami · Against the International of Capital: Why We Must Resist the Financialization of Land and Labor in the Global South · URL

Max Haiven · Climate Workers of the World, Unite!? Searching for Affective Connections, Common Enemies, and Shared Narratives · URL

Marc Herbst · Prefigurative Politics: Fabulating the Intersection Between Labor and Environmental Struggles · URL

Özgün Eylül İşcen · Disaster Capitalism, Class Struggles, and Situated Alliances in Post-Earthquake Turkey · URL

Boris Kagarlitsky · Internationalist Movements? Climate Crisis, Working Class, and the Means of Production · URL

Ela Kagel · Sustainable Climate Production: Absenteeism, Universal Basic Outcome, and Platform Cooperatives · URL

Nelli Kambouri · The Mobile Knowledge Worker Dilemma: Constructing Alternative Ecological and Social Theories of Care – but Unable to Live Them? · URL

Muskaan Jagadish Khemani · Embracing an Ethic of Love: A Radical Path to Revolution in a World of Exploited and Divided Workers · URL

Angelina Kussy · Rethinking Work, Building a Post-Growth Pathway: How to Crack the Dominant System Through Care · URL

Sydney Lang · Merle Davis Matthews · Just Transition Politics in Ontario and the Potential for an Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist Labor Movement · URL

Davide G. Lassere · For an Internationalist Ecologism: Can We, the Multiplicity of the World’s Exploited Workers, Reinvent the Politics of Alliances? · URL

Svjetlana Nedimović · Fires of the Future in the Furnaces of the Past: Building Socio-Environmental Alliances in the European South(East) · URL

Brett Neilson · Electrification and Infrastructural Solidarity: Why Climate Struggle Requires the Reinvention of Internationalism · URL

mirko nikolić · Shutting Down Monocultures of Capital: Reinventing Labor Struggles by Forging the Connections Between Rural and Urban Communities · URL

Jörg Nowak · Velocities and Scales: Why the Post-Carbon Transition Needs Socialist Ecological Planning · URL

Alex Pazaitis · The Value of Exploitation: How to Reclaim Our Lives and Livelihoods in Common · URL

Florin Poenaru · How Can Declinism Be Politicized? The Quest for the Agents of a Fundamental Change · 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

Anna Saave · Are You A Meta-Industrial Worker? Ecofeminist Understandings of Labor Are Our Allied Ground · URL

Shuree Sarantuya · Climate Production on the Move? Nomadic Land and Labor in the Age of Sedentarism · URL

Stoyo Tetevenski · Your Job or Your Climate: How the Just Transition in Bulgaria Was Hijacked by Capitalists · 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

Harsha Walia · Against Eco-Apartheid: Towards Internationalist and Multi-Racial Worker Struggles · URL

Manuela Zechner · Struggles for Work Beyond the Wage: Keep Kindling Rebellious Spirits and Other Imaginaries of Work · URL