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Stefania Barca is an environmental historian and a feminist political ecologist. She is the author of Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene and of Enclosing Water: Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley, which was awarded the Turku Environmental History Book Prize.

Issue #134 features an excerpt from her book, Workers of the Earth. Here Barca highlights that degrowth must address the lived contradictions of workers trapped in fossil-fuel economies, amplifying their voices and struggles for dealienated, sustainable livelihoods while confronting the challenges of just transition and labor rights.

A good vantage point from which the contradictions in social metabolism can be analysed is the perspective of those workers whose livelihood depends on fossil-driven economic growth, and whose voice rarely makes it to degrowthers’ ears. At the time when I was writing this chapter, one of those voices reached me from a distant place through an article published on The Leap website. It was that of a Mapuche oil worker from Patagonia, who told a sad story of dispossession and destruction of local agriculture by Argentina’s powerful oil business sector. Together with a history of racial discrimination and state repression, this left him and thousands of others no choice but to join the extractive industries. Working in the oil fields for 25 years, he came to know firsthand the devastating impact they had on his community’s land and bodies, and he lost two family members to cancer due to the widespread contamination of water in the area. Despite all this, he considered himself to be fortunate in having a job that allowed him to pay his bills and medical expenses, and to buy bottled water – especially when comparing his situation to that of local farmers who are literally on the verge of starvation. This gives us a measure of how difficult it is for many workers to even consider the possibility of losing their job, no matter how dirty and dangerous, in the absence of viable alternatives.

In this Mapuche man’s experience, environmental violence was inextricably linked to alienation from the labour process: once hired, he reported, workers in the oil industry are made to sign a confidentiality agreement ‘that gives away (their) right to speak out publicly’; in addition, they are trained in what the company calls ‘environmental safety’, which means that whatever disaster may happen, the blame is immediately shifted onto their supposed errors. The truth is, however, that disasters occur almost invariably (in this and many other cases) because management orders workers to keep production going despite reported faults or potential leaks. And, if they question choices internally, they face a variety of repercussions. This tells us that weak unions and virtually non-existent enforcement of labour regulations play a major role in determining the environmental impact of production.

Nevertheless, this worker was perfectly aware of the root causes of this situation, and of the negative balance left behind by promises of prosperity based on oil extraction. His quest was one for dealienation, in the sense of gaining control over not only the labour process and product, but also the political process where decisions are made over the best route to prosperity for his country. As he claimed, ‘We, as people, have to question and ask ourselves: what gives us more prosperity?’ The answer for him was in the development of a flourishing and diversified agriculture without oil, based on the rich natural resources of the country, rather than on soy and other soil-eroding monocrop plantations. This kind of sustainable agricultural development, he explained, is what would give people the opportunity to flourish by getting back ‘what’s theirs’ – that is, the product of their labour. Following his vision, we might imagine, if not degrowth, at least a prosperous way out of fossil-driven economic growth, built upon a dealienated relationship of workers with the labour process and the product of their labour.

The centrality of dealienation in a discussion of degrowth becomes even clearer when we analyse the concrete historical examples in which dealienated workers have been able to enact sustainable modes of production, that is, of working-class environmentalism. While the history of twentieth-century environmentalism is ridden with conflicts between environmental activists and workers, which have compromised any possibility for political alliance in many cases, it also shows important – if less well-known – stories of labour environmentalism, some of them opening the possibility for truly emancipative ways of organising social metabolism. Probably the most well-known example is that of the rubber tappers’ struggles of the 1980s, which initiated the emancipative conservation experience of the Amazon ‘extractive reserves’. But other stories can be dug out of oblivion, and other voices from working-class and labour environmentalism can be heard. One example is that of the occupied factory Ri-Maflow in Italy, a former producer of auto components, which went bankrupt and laid off 320 workers in 2009. After the new owners had dismantled and taken away all machinery, a group of former workers organised a coop and occupied the space, with the idea of reappropriating it as a starting point for building new forms of production, consumption and waste disposal. Adopting the slogan ‘Re-use, re-cycle, re-appropriate’, these workers have initiated a workshop of computer and appliance repair, a flea market, and the processing and distribution of local produce. They also run the place as a space for community music and arts activities and social events, and for hospitality to refugees. Their plan was to collect enough resources to be able to turn these and other activities into a stable form of income, that is, to develop dealienated forms of work and production.

The labour/degrowth relationship is complicated by the fact that, even when they claim to be sensitive to climate and environmental issues, trade unions and labour parties in the capitalist world are mostly locked in the growth paradigm, rather than in an anti-capitalist perspective of dealienation. Their proposals for Green New Deal or Just Transition get trapped into the idea that a green capitalism is possible, by which they mean a set of public policies can be implemented that would reduce carbon emissions while stimulating the green economy and creating ‘decent’ jobs. In other words, the majority of trade unions now aim for positive changes that would address the multiple current crises of ecology, economy and social inequalities without waiting for some systemic change that is difficult to envision and agree upon. This perspective is not to be dismissed too easily, as it does represent the official position of large labour confederations and so-called blue–green alliances, which have the possibility to orient union policies at the national and local level, and might influence public investment choices among alternative options, for example, between coal and solar power. The Just Transition proposal, for example, is premised upon the notion that the shift to a post-carbon economy will inevitably imply massive layoffs of workers who are dependent on the fossil economy, and thus consequent suffering in their communities. Degrowth cannot avoid considering this aspect of the transition to a non-fossil-based and substantially different production system. Therefore, degrowth policy proposals must include concrete recommendations for dealing with those foreseen layoffs, sustaining the livelihoods of working-class communities in the transition process, and replacing fossil-generated wealth with different forms of income and welfare. All this compels us to engage with the discussions and positioning that are expressed by organised labour at different levels. Simply dismissing organised labour as a non-relevant actor in the transition to a post-carbon, post-capitalist or degrowth society will not do.

Excerpted with permission from Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change by Stefania Barca and published by Pluto Books.

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