ALLIED GROUNDS · Toolbox for Exploring the Links Between Labor Struggles and Environmental Struggles · BG°2023 Project

I. INTRO

Theme

The BG began to explore critical questions of political ecology with annual projects such as “Water Knowledge” (2009), “More World” (2019), and “After Extractivism” (2022), linking issues of environmental pollution, resource commodification, and climate collapse to the intertwined social and economic crises caused by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. “Allied Grounds” – the BG 2023 project – expanded on this research by tackling the ecological dimension of work and the means of (re-)production as the means of climate (re-)production.

Exploration

The “Allied Grounds” project sought to explore two related but rarely linked constellations: In the Global South, environmental concerns have been an integral part of working-class struggles against expropriation, exploitation, and extractivism literally since the colonial-capitalist conquest of the New World. In the Global North, in contrast, working-class environmentalism emerged in the 19^th century as a response to industrialization and urbanization, while only in recent years have labor and environmental movements reclaimed their potential for alliance.

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

In the face of increasing polarization and desolidarization, right-wing mobilization and the recalibration of capitalist warfare, any meaningful response must amplify new narratives that help build transnational alliances among the oppressed and exploited. The video lectures produced as part of BG’s “Allied Grounds” conference, in their polyphony, make such a groundbreaking narrative audible: pointing across the boundaries between workers in production and reproduction, labor and environmental movements, North and South, and more.

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

Colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism have caused, or even created, disasters in the Global South (floods, droughts, etc.), displacing millions of people, putting them out of work, and turning them into “reserve army of labor” in the centers of capital in the Global North. Here, the least protected and the most exploited could become agents of system change, argues activist Jennifer Kamau in her “Allied Grounds” video talk.

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

The workshops on October 5, 6, and 7 were the heart of the BG conference “Allied Grounds.” They brought together researchers, activists, and cultural workers from more than 25 countries and enabled new ways of spending quality time together.

Workshop guests at BG conference 2023. Photo: Leonie Geiger

Taking five different thematic approaches to the key questions of the “Allied Grounds” project, the workshops featured guests invited by the conference organizers and additional participants who joined through an open call for registration. Here are photos of the processes. And read on to learn more about the resulting projects.

(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?

Zoë Aiano, Nidzara Ahematova, Lori Šramel Čebular, Nina Djukanović, Adriana Homolova, Holger Kral, Svjetlana Nedimović, mirko nikolić, Sofija Stefanović, and Mihajlo Vujasin were looking for answers. Take a look at their resulting project.

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?

Carola von der Dick, Max Haiven, Özgün Eylül İşcen, Rositsa Kratunkova, Angelina Kussy, Davide Gallo Lassere, Eliana Otta, Nicolay Spesivtsev, Alexandra Stefanescu, and Anna Zett were looking for answers. Take a look at their resulting project.

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?

Sana Ahmad, Angelina Davydova, Paola Imperatore, Marina Milanović, Janus Petznik, Cristina Pombo, Tanja Potezica, and Gracie Matu were looking for answers. Take a look at their resulting project.

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?

Jennifer Kamau, Katrin Kämpf, Claudia Núñez, Marta Peirano, Florin Poenaru, Kübra Tokuç, Niloufar Vadiati, Manuela Zechner, and Dzina Zhuk were looking for answers. Take a look at their resulting project.

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?

Alistair Alexander, Dario Azzelini, Lorenzo Feltrin, Francesca Gabbriellini, Nelli Kambouri, Gorana Mlinarevic, Jaron Rowan, and Sotiris Sideris were looking for answers. Take a look at their resulting project.

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

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

Multi-layered collage: Farm worker in Kerala; buildings of the Eloor-Edayar industrial belt in Kerala; toxic clouds causing air pollution. Artwork: Colnate Group, 2023 (cc by nc).

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.” Moderated by Claudia Núñez, Florin Poenaru and Jennifer Kamau gave talks at the House of Democracy and Human Rights on October 5, 2023.

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 took place. Moderated by Anna Saave, Dario Azzelini, Lorenzo Feltrin, and Brett Neilson gave talks at the House of Democracy and Human Rights.

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.

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VI. INFO

Organizers

Berliner Gazette (BG) is a nonprofit and nonpartisan team of journalists, researchers, artists, and coders, analyzing and experimenting with emerging cultural and political practices. Since 1999 we have been publishing berlinergazette.de under a Creative Commons License with more than 1,500 contributors. In dialogue with our international network we create annual projects, exploring the issues at hand not only in the form of text series but also conferences and books. Our latest projects include After Extractivism (2022), Black Box East (2021), Silent Works (2020), More World (2019), Ambient Revolts (2018), Signals (2017), A Field Guide to the Snowden Files (2017), Friendly Fire (2017), Tacit Futures (2016), UN|COMMONS (2015), BQV (2012), and McDeutsch (2006).

Curators

The curators of the “Allied Grounds” project are Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki. Magdalena is editor-in-chief of the internet newspaper Berliner Gazette and professor of Digital Media and Journalism at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. She is the author of “Disruption des Journalismus” (2018) published by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam and co-editor of numerous readers, including “Invisible Hand(s)” (2020) published by Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb. Krystian is a critic, photographer, and the co-founder of Berliner Gazette. Exploring the common(s) at the intersection of globalization and digitalization, he has created books that blend writing and photography, most recently “Fugitive Belonging” (2018) and “Undeclared Movements” (2020).

Newsletters

If you would like to be kept up to date by email, you are welcome to subscribe to our newsletter. The newsletter informs you about current BG projects as well as initiatives of our subscribers, network partners and neighbors. And, of course, about what we publish in the online newspaper berlinergazette.de. The newsletter is free and available in English and German.

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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.

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