Workers of the Earth, unite!: An interview with Stefania Barca

Your book makes important interventions on several fronts, but perhaps the most central is how it mobilizes a materialist ecofeminist analysis against a more conventional vision of working-class environmental politics. This vision, if I can paint with a broad brush, is primarily focused on appealing to the material interests of (often male) formal-sector industrial and utility workers as part of a reformist electoral political strategy. What, in your view, are some of the problems with this understanding of working-class ecopolitics, and how can materialist ecofeminism help us to do better?

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood called Gianturco, in the industrial area of East Naples, Italy, during the 1970s; there I experienced firsthand the ugliness and risks of urban working-class life. The streets I walked through to get to my school were full of big noisy trucks and their fumes, and car repair shops full of men in blue overalls. The place looked like a big open-air factory; I do not remember any women or kids crossing those streets. I hated living there, and I was very happy when we finally moved out. Later, I learned that that was the end of a century-old era of industrial growth for my city, beyond which there remained poverty, emigration, Camorra, and urban decay (I mean, this is what remained for the once numerous and combative Neapolitan working class. Elsewhere, the bourgeoisie was still having its terrace parties with a view on the gulf).

This brief personal life sketch might give you a sense of where my views on working-class ecopolitics come from, my sense of the contradictions that lay within it: the reality of living amidst exhaust fumes, and side by side with giant petrol tanks, and the nostalgia for a glorious past that I, as a young girl, had not shared and never could have because my existence was tangential, even irrelevant to it. In fact, what strikes me most, in my memories of Gianturco, is the invisibility of working-class women — where were they? Most likely, busy with housework and social reproduction work in their own and other places: making the next generation of industrial and domestic workers and servicing society in essential, though mostly invisible, forms. But their work, their lives even, did not seem to count for anyone. All I read and heard around me was about the industrial jobs lost and the political consequences of a declining industrial base for the Neapolitan left.

Then I went on with my studies and discovered political ecology, environmental justice, ecosocialism; further on, I learned about materialist ecofeminism. I started to see working-class ecopolitics as necessarily having to do with the production of both life and commodities as regulated by capital, and the potential subject of ecological revolution as the workers in both spheres. I was never convinced that “consumers,” “citizens,” or “scientists” could make the ecological revolution; only workers can — provided that the right conditions are in place, and that they achieve unity in struggle. Unity among the various sectors of the working classes — waged and unwaged — is key. This is what ecofeminism adds to working-class politics, in my view.

The materialist ecofeminist perspective that you articulate here poses a powerful challenge to overly restrictive understandings of work and class, but as you acknowledge, it developed “as an outsider to the traditional labor movement, and has remained so to this day.” A partisan of the conventional view might respond by arguing that although materialist ecofeminism is theoretically illuminating, it is not capable of mobilizing large numbers of workers to achieve political victories. They might typically also suggest that this is because formal-sector “productive” workers are more easily organized and better positioned to exert their collective power, and that the social value of unpaid or semi-formal social reproductive labor does not easily translate into political efficacy. How would you respond to this sort of objection?

Well, the histories of the Alliance of Forest People in the Brazilian Amazon and of the working-class women of Bristol and of Manfredonia struggling against nuclear power and petrochemical industries — which I tell in fourth, second, and third chapters of Workers of the Earth — suggest otherwise. Subsistence and domestic workers have made the history and politics of the environment as much as blue-collar workers. The entire environmental justice movement could be seen as a way for the unwaged to organize themselves and fight in defense of life against capital in all its forms — including the state, the military, the mafias, and so on. These movements are typically organized around positions and perspectives that are not represented by traditional trade unions. Nevertheless, they do have the power of organizing, and to strike the system from their unique position in social reproduction. Just think of the La Via Campesina movement — to mention only one macro example, which, while not touched upon in the book, is of enormous relevance to climate and biosphere struggles. A feminist ecosocialist perspective allows us to see the working class, Indigenous and peasant women, and people of all genders who do the work of (re)producing life and organize to protect it. It is high time to take that agency into account when thinking about how to pull the brake on the capitalist train and give people a chance to board other trains.

True, organized wage labor has demonstrated great capacity for social change over the industrial era, including significant environmental actions. I greatly admire visionary labor leaders of the 1970s and 1980s like Tony Mazzocchi in the United States, or Jack Mundey in Australia, who showed the way for industrial workers to pull the brake on the Great Acceleration (that is the exponential increase in the exhaustion of human and nonhuman natures in the post-World War Two era).1 However, this has not been enough to prevent the catastrophic crisis we are in. Something was missing from that kind of labor environmentalism, and that something — as shown in my sixth chapter — was a structural, noncontingent alliance with unwaged workers and their struggles. So what I am advocating for is a working-class ecopolitics capable of uniting waged and unwaged labor in the struggle for systemic change.

I do see hope in the politics of Just Transition (JT), a concept and praxis that comes from the history of the labor movement resisting pollution and a variety of hazards. I see the JT strategy as a tool for radical realism, that is developing concrete alternatives for people to struggle for a better, less exhausted life — which is what radical climate politics is all about (a point convincingly made also by Ajay Singh Chaudhary in The Exhausted of the Earth). I completely agree with Kai Heron and Jodi Dean’s claim that what we most need at this point in the planetary crisis is “a politics of revolutionary transition.”2 But I also think that the JT strategy must be revised with a view to include caring and subsistence work — a vision which is starting to gain traction.3 In the book’s epilogue, I offer concrete suggestions on how the Global Climate Jobs campaign could evolve in that direction. The way I see it, centering JT around life-making work would definitely help in moving beyond the value form (rather than subjecting more life-making to it, as many have been fearing). Massive public funding in domestic and community care, subsistence, healthcare, earthcare, and education would empower the millions of carers that are needed to fulfill the unmet human and nonhuman needs of our burning world, responding to the call to “invest in caring, not killing” that the Wages for Housework/Global Women’s Strike movement has been shouting for the past fifty years. This empowerment would allow many others to join a socially valued and politically strong army of care workers, enabling them to lead the transition into an ecosocialist revolution. This is what I see as a radical realist plan — one which starts from the realm of the possible (the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that states can radically reorient financial and monetary politics if they have to) and necessary (fulfilling the most essential needs for the majority of people in all societies) to empower revolutionary subjects. Demanding clean tech jobs, or even allowing women to access those jobs, are of course necessary, but also utterly insufficient steps in the direction of a better life for all. We need much more ambitious goals, and those can only be envisioned by rethinking labor as something bigger and more powerful than commodity-making.

Before delving into these contemporary political debates, the first half of the book explores a number of remarkable case studies in the history of workers’ environmental struggles, ranging from militant Italian factory workers and scientists organizing for safe working environments in the late ’60s to the radical coalitional politics of the Brazilian rubber tappers’ movement in the ’80s. Why did you feel that it was important to begin with these histories, even if our current context may be different in important respects?

I believe in the power of narratives — for good and for bad. For neoliberal subjects like myself and most people in my world who have socialized in the neoliberal TINA narrative, it is very difficult to imagine that we­­­ — the workers of the earth — have some kind of collective power, and that we can use that power to tackle something as gigantic as the climate crisis. And since every good fight starts with a good story, digging out histories of workers’ power is a good place to start from. Learning about a world where blue-collar workers can demand direct control over environmental health and safety, and win; or working-class women bring their case against the state before the European court for human rights and win; or a trade union ally itself with Indigenous people to fight for forest conservation and again, win….Even though these victories are hardly permanent ones, what I find most important is that they show us that there are indeed alternatives, and that what makes these alternatives possible is workers’ organizing and struggling with all the social allies that they can make.

Now, of course, we live in a different world than those of my stories, but that does not mean that things were easier before. All the struggles I talk about in the first part of the book were waged against all odds and against powerful forces. People still fight today, of course. You only need to take a look at the Environmental Justice Atlas to get some sense of what is going on on the ground, who is really fighting the fight against climate change and earth system degradation.4 What we are missing, I believe, even among ecosocialists, is a sense of how these are all not just anticapitalist or survival struggles: they are workers’ struggles, fought by the waged and the unwaged of the earth against the squeezing grip of capital, and if organized as such they have a much better chance of winning.

So, it is not only science fiction that can give us hope, but history too, although of a different kind, because it is founded upon the real life experiences of real people, struggling against the very same enemies that we still face today, though in different contexts and conditions. Analyzing their successes and their failures can give us tremendous power of vision and strategy; most of all, it can give us back something that has been denied for too long — the sense of workers’ power. In short, we need all the good stories we can get, and we need radical-realist analysis of our past strengths and weaknesses to make us stronger.

One interesting moment in this transnational history involved the Wages for Housework campaign’s antinuclear advocacy, which you note helped to tally the true costs of the industry on unpaid workers and marginalized communities in and beyond the United Kingdom. As you discuss, these organizers pushed back against the sexist “contempt with which the…nuclear industry treated women, ridiculing their opposition as a manifestation of ‘poor education.’” Much of the contemporary ecomodernist left has adopted an aggressively pronuclear stance, often using similar language to describe its critics. What do you make of this trend?

The fact that ecomodernists love nuclear energy is not surprising, given their obsession with abundance and with technology, but it also confirms a longer historical trend in the labor movements of the West, which I analyze in sixth chapter — that is, the tendency to identify the socialist cause with all things industrial (to put it simply), while disregarding the perspective of reproductive work as represented by the ecofeminist, peasant, antiextractivist and global justice movements that represent the majority of the world. This is the main reason why, in my opinion, ecomodernists end up on the wrong side of history.

In any case, the argument of “lack of knowledge,” which is often employed by nuclear power supporters against the “right to say no,” simply does not stand because experts themselves have always been divided about the safety and efficiency of nuclear power. Historically, the antinuclear movement has been supported or even initiated by many scientists. Generally speaking, antiextractivist and environmental justice movements are not against science and technology per se — they have always found their best allies in those “experts” that speak truth to power and that take their concerns seriously. This also applies to workers’ struggles against industrial hazards, as I show in the book’s second chapter, which tells the story of how militant doctors in Italy successfully changed the dominant conceptions of workplace health and safety by acknowledging the validity of workers’ direct knowledge of the work environment. Similarly, many scientists have taken women’s concerns with radiation risk seriously.

But what fascinated me about the Wages for Housework mobilization against Hinkely C was the originality of their profoundly materialist argument: that is, they pointed to the devaluation of domestic work and care in general, which was taken for granted and overlooked by governments when evaluating pros and cons to energy choices, and which was greatly affected by radiation risk — especially in low-income and racialized communities living along the extraction, production, transportation, and disposal chain of nuclear energy. This kind of argument is hard to find in the usually heated debates about nuclear energy that have divided both the ecologist camp and the left since the beginning.Radiation risk is of course one among many factors considered, but not associated (to the best of my knowledge) with the work of preventing the damage, protecting children and other dependents, or taking care of those who have been contaminated. This perspective resonates a lot with that of environmental justice, and with the myriad struggles of working-class and racialized people who lay on the frontlines of uranium extraction and disposal, and/or around nuclear facilities.

Women’s movements, and particularly the ecofeminist movement, have been historically vocal against nuclear energy in connection with their opposition to the nuclear arms race. I believe this has to do with the fact that, in the heteropatriarchal order, women are almost universally socialized into the role of caretakers, so it is rather obvious that they are more concerned with the hidden costs of nuclear power in terms of human health and safety. Even in socialist states, starting with the former Soviet Union, care work has continued to be largely seen as a women’s affair. This is why working-class ecopolitics must take antipatriarchal struggles seriously — which is not the case with ecomodernism, not even the leftist kind, as far as I can see.

Another central contrast with ecomodernist labor politics emerges in your exploration of how the Alliance of Forest Peoples helped workers come to “understand labor as an interspecies act.” You suggest that although that coalition developed in a specific time and place, “the Indigenous call for interspecies commoning coming from different places worldwide, has resonated with other anti-master subjects across the colonial divide,” and that this resonance “speaks to today’s labor environmentalism in important ways.” I would love to hear you say a bit more about this. Are there specific sites of struggle and subjectivation that seem like fertile terrain for “non-extractive ontologies and relations” to grow and thrive? What kind of political programs could help to move us beyond the dichotomy of anthropocentric working-class ecomodernism vs. upper-middle class lifestyle environmentalism, creating space for humans and nonhumans to live and work together in a range of contexts?

Interspecies commoning is a concept that I develop in Workers of the Earth‘s fourth chapter, based on the experience of nut collectors in the Amazon forest, as described by themselves. I connect it to a longer history of struggles against capitalist extraction beginning with Chico Mendes’s rubber-tappers in the mid-1970s and culminating with new conservation institutions called extractive reserves created via federal law in 1990. It is a truly unique story, whose relevance is at once material and symbolic. First, because it has allowed the preservation of millions of acres of forest and other local biomes throughout Brazil precisely by recognizing the importance of human communities and their subsistence work. In fact, the term extractive reserve means a different kind of extraction: not the capitalist type, which is aimed at maximizing profit, but the subsistence type, which is aimed at maximizing the re/productivity of human and nonhuman life in a symbiotic relation. (The re/productivity concept comes from western ecofeminist scholarship, but it perfectly encapsulates what the Resex is all about). People take from — and give back to — nonhuman nature what they need for their subsistence and cultural development, through circular metabolic relations.

Obviously, this is completely different from wilderness conservation or from deep ecology approaches, which deepen — rather than bridge — the separation between humans and nature. In this model, nature is no “other” elsewhere to keep intact while we enjoy the comforts of urban industrial lifestyles, but it is what people depend upon, materially and symbolically, for their daily subsistence and development. Preservation it is not an act of “altruism” but of self-care. The symbolic importance of all this lay in what this unique, specific story tells us about labor and about humanity. I have written about this at length in my previous book, Forces of Reproduction. It tells us that humanity is not one but multiple, and capitalism does not represent it. And it tells us that human labor is not the enemy of nature; in fact it can be its ally against capitalist extraction, or, as Marx brilliantly put it, capital’s power of exhausting both the soil and the laborer.

Now, what keeps extractive reserves alive still today in their permanent struggle for survival within a highly globalized capitalist economy is the legal recognition and technical support of state institutions, not least through the labor of workers in conservation agencies who assist with the management of the reserves and protect them from external threats, and of academic researchers who record the system’s re/productivity and resilience. In short, interspecies commoning is a collaborative endeavor involving waged and unwaged workers in subsistence and knowledge sectors, Indigenous peoples, nonhuman nature, and the State.

So this, I believe, is a clear example of a successful political program, promoted by a form of labor environmentalism radically different from both the ecomodernist and from the lifestyle ones.

The example of extractive reserves could be used to inspire similar programs, adapted to local contexts and histories. Over the past few years, I have been interested in what is happening in rural Europe, where small farmers and fishers are being strangled by big agribusiness and agricultural policies, but also increasingly by droughts, floods, and other plagues associated with climate change. Throughout the Great Acceleration era, the European countryside has lost significant population. Today, it struggles with the problem of generational renewal and rural abandonment. At the same time, it has received a new inflow of migrant workers from the European peripheries and from other parts of the world. Landless farm workers — migrant or not — are experiencing forms of exhaustion, abuse, and violence similar to those experienced by the Amazon rubber tappers of the 1970s, with an increasing number of workers dying every summer from excessive heat and the lack of any elementary protection against exploitation. I think all this makes for a potentially revolutionary situation.

The diffusion of rural organizations which promote agroecology, permaculture, or food sovereignty testifies to widespread and radicalized rural malcontent versus a food system which has clearly failed both producers and the environment. It also speaks to the resistance of modes of re/production and ontologies, which are never entirely conquered, to capitalist extractivism. Of course, not all rural politics are ecosocialist or even compatible with a global environmental justice agenda. But as peasant farmers and fishers increasingly experience the climate and biodiversity crises on their own skin, I believe the conditions are in place for them to connect the dots between environmental and labor struggles and ally with Indigenous peoples (for example, the Sami herders of the Arctic regions), mountain and island communities, and migrant workers, in order to demand some kind of “extractive reserve” (or similar institution) that could regenerate both rural ecosystems and the people who live and work in them.

Agroecology is increasingly recognized as a necessity to preserve the soil (broadly construed) and the workers that produce food in today’s world, but the shift to it will not happen naturally or by market laws — not the least because agroecology is not just a farming technique but a mode of relation between human and nonhuman nature which is fundamentally alien to capitalist agribusiness. So, if we are serious about the need to move towards agroecological food systems and relational ontologies, then we need to support those food producers that are resisting capitalist exhaustion — as my friends of the common ecologies network have been doing over the past few years—and promote the kind of ecopolitics that is capable of empowering them so that they can lead the agroecology transition.5 

As you suggest, these historical examples help show that other kinds of class-based environmental politics are not only necessary but possible. However, you are also clear about the many constraints and contradictions of organizing within the system of wage labor and the messiness of real-world political alliances. You note, for instance, that “being locked in the growth society…working-class people have a limited ability to make sense of and struggle against the current organization of social metabolism.” What do you view as the greatest challenge for an attempt to develop a “global political alliance of anti-master subjects,” and how should we approach that challenge?

That idea of antimaster subjects is a concept I have more fully developed in my previous book Forces of Reproduction. By this concept I mean all those workers (both waged and unwaged) who, in one way or another, resist capitalist industrial modernity and struggle for alternative modernities which require neither their exhaustion, nor that of other beings, nor that of the earth. It is a very broad concept, which may sound vague — or at least vaguer than simply talking about wage labor. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is necessary to enlarge our conceptions of the revolutionary subject to include unwaged workers, who still represent around 45 percent of all labor on a global level according to ILO 2018 data and who, in many cases, have demonstrated greater revolutionary potential in ecological terms than waged workers. So, a vision of the revolutionary subject that excludes them is simply wrong and doomed to failure.

Antimaster alliances between unions and other social movements have happened in the past and are happening today, even if not enough. There is still too much competition for hegemony between organizations (and individual leaderships), and there are still multiple forms of exclusion and oppression within the organizations themselves, which weaken and divide them. These are problems that need to be urgently dealt with as they are great obstacles to a coordinated struggle of all the forces of reproduction.

However, what I see as the greatest challenge is the lack of antimaster vision on the part of (the largest part of) organized labor. In times of extreme danger like the one we are living, we would need workers’ organizations with revolutionary vision and strategy and the audacity of leadership to pull the brake of the capitalist locomotive, while also demanding, practicing, and supporting system-changing actions wherever possible. We would need workers’ power at its highest capacity, this is, organized and coordinated actions of strike, resistance, sabotaging, counterplanning, reclaiming, and remaking everything; we would need waged and unwaged workers taking responsibility for their destiny and that of the entire planet. Trade unions have been greatly weakened and delegitimated over the neoliberal era, but the planetary polycrisis we are living through requires nothing less than a remaking of labor’s vision and strategy as one of universal salvation. This is why I believe our duty as ecosocialists is precisely that of pushing for and contributing to creating this new vision for labor struggles everywhere and in all areas of work. Ecosocialism has offered a broad and inclusive vision of the revolutionary forces over the past decades — I have taken part in various international ecosocialist meetings that testify to that. But the time has come now to reclaim the trade-union movement itself — because the global capitalist system can only be dismantled by the allied forces of waged and unwaged workers.

Dan Boscov-Ellen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and is currently working on a book manuscript (provisionally) entitled Critical Climate Ethics: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis. He is an associate web editor for Spectre.