...and live in harmony with the Earth

The Deposition of Judi Bari Trailer

2011-03-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

Green Unionism, Too!

2011-03-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

A Piece for the Free Press Cooperative of Central MN and the IWW Blog by EJDoyle

Friends, readers, and fellow workers,

last month in this Free Press Cooperative, I wrote on the need for Industrial Unionism here in Central Minnesota, to combat the exploitation of the working people. I write this month to highlight a second great injustice of the capitalist system: the degradation our common home, the pollution of our air and water, the waste of both finite and renewing resources, the devaluing of nonhuman life, and the permanent altering of our habitat in such a way that it is no longer hospitable to that life which has heretofore adapted to it- in short, the ecological devastation that has seized the world in its deathly grip since the dawn of our current economic epoch.

Capitalism lays waste to our common home. Some would be inclined to blame industry, or the concept of civilization itself, as the source of these problems; this is ignorant. While there is no doubt that the specialization of labor allowed by the agricultural revolution has enabled our species to construct a myriad of technologies, which have in turn enabled us to expand our footprint within the ecosystem, to blame technology is to ignore the power that chooses how we use that technology.

In capitalism, that power is the capitalists, both as individuals and a class. To understand how we have reached our ecological crisis, we must understand how capitalism has forcibly guided the hand of industry in the short-term interest of the few at both the short and long-term expense of people and the Earth.

The capitalist system places value only in what is both owned and can be sold. For example, to this system, air quality is an ‘externality’, because it is a damage to our common resource- air cannot be owned nor sold and so does not count in the economic calculations of capitalists. While this is called, by the apologists of exploitation, a ‘tragedy of the commons’, we know it for what it really is; a tragedy that occurs when the needs of private holders takes precedence over the needs of those who use the commons; it is a tragedy of privatization and commodification.

The response to this tragedy, enforced on the global south by the World Bank and their ilk, and increasingly coming to invade and dismantle the scant protection of progressivism in the north (all in the name of ‘free trade’), is to further privatize what is commonly held; already, they have privatized land, water, fisheries, and even ‘genetic information’- seeds. Such privatization serves only to further consolidate wealth into the hands of the capitalist class, to be further mismanaged.

Capitalism mismanages because it and the privatization scheme places the power to make decisions in the hands of a tiny class, disregarding the needs of communities. Consider the suffering of Appalachia: Who decides that it is most ‘efficient’ to blow up mountains, dump the mud and rock into the valleys, choke the air with carcinogens, and poison the rivers with acid runoff, all to extract coal to power some capitalist’s machines in some other place, choking that town’s air and poisoning its water, and at every step of the way spewing forth carbon, contributing to the deathly toll of climate change?

It is the capitalist (or, in the modern corporation, the Board elected by the capitalists), safe in his office, away from the poisons he commands- the capitalist who can afford to keep his own home relatively free of pollution, and keep some crude semblance of wilderness alive in his estates for his enjoyment.

The needs of the people of Appalachia do not factor into the mining company’s decisions, nor do the needs of the people of Manchuria factor into the decisions of the manufacturing bosses or the State’s party bosses- so can the absentee bosses shift the ecological burden to the working classes, and ignore the costs of production, making a false efficiency from willfully blind industrialism. To the people who live and work in Appalachia or Manchuria, however, the pollution of their air and water, the loss of habitat and wildlife, the losses to public health, are all pressing concerns.

Had the workers, living with the consequences of industry, their say, would such degradation be tolerated? Common sense, and the growing alliance of labor with the environmental movement, dictates that it would not, but as long as the decisions are made in the board room, dictating the will of the capitalist class without regard to the consequences suffered by workers and their communities, such degradation continues.

These insanities of capitalism, among others, ensure that any attempt to ‘green’ the system is doomed. The public can try, as they have and as they should, to introduce public regulation of pollution. But, the hand of the boss class, kept powerful by the labor of the dependant workers, has ways of breaking down, bypassing, and rewriting these regulations. Unopposed by the organized power of the workers, the bosses can make these regulations mean little or nothing, and continue with more or less regular capitalist relationships to the environment. The other action people can take is direct and economic; they can refuse to purchase unsustainable products. This is a popular and welcome strategy, but again, it is not enough- it does not change the fundamental nature of the industry, but only creates a niche market, a sub-section of that industry, still controlled by the capitalists, but selling organic or ‘fair trade’ (less exploited) goods- often, with the money flowing to exact same corporate despoilers to be reinvested in their deadly industrial processes.

Consumer pressure alone is not enough, because it requires the huge majority of consumers to choose not to support industries that are poisoning people and destroying ecosystems. While it seems obvious that it is no more acceptable to pollute someone’s air and water or otherwise destroy their environment than it is to outright assault them, there are enough shortsighted blockheads and scissorbills in the world who don’t realize this and will continue to buy whatever good is cheapest in commodity price, regardless of its cost to the world. There is another course of action, an effective and powerful course that addresses the problem directly at its primary source. This is the course of green unionism. Labor addresses the threat to the environment where it is greatest; in the factories, fields, and mines of industry.

A capitalist may work around the other two strategies of environmental defense, and can even recuperate the losses of direct action, but what can they do, when the labor that keeps their industry running, refuses to work until real change is made? Though any union will help to bring the environmental needs of the community into the question of economic decision-making, industrial unionism is especially suited to this job.

An industrial union, such as the IWW, does not believe in shifting the burdens from one group of workers to another, as some business unions do. We don’t believe that getting rid of a polluter is progress, if they just move their pollution to a poorer side of town. We don’t think that putting solar panels up to power a business is sustainable, if the copper was gotten by ruining someone else’s home. We recognize that industrial pesticides hurt not only the workers in the field, but all the workers and communities downstream. Moving towards sustainability means solidarity not only with your own local community, but with people all over the world; this is a value that both bosses and too many business unions lack, but that forms the foundation of industrial unionism- a harm to one, whether through economic or ecological injustice, is a harm to all.

An industrial union is suited to green unionism because it is democratic. As we’ve already seen, hierarchical power relationships mean that the goals and values of one party take precedence over the values of others. While business unions are certainly better than no union, even they can form a controlling clique, and ignore the needs and desires of the rank and file. Industrial unions like the IWW don’t allow this centralization of power.

The IWW structure is radically democratic- each shop, industry, and local is its own center of power, with the IWW general body serving as a coordinator, not a commander, of activities. This structure, whether applied to a union, an activist network (for example, Earth First!, which the IWW has worked with in the past and which uses this grassroots, federative organizational principle), or a society, ensures that people get a voice in what affects them; a central goal of designing an ecologically just society. Finally, industrial unions are key to the defense of the environment in the workplace, because unlike business unions, the IWW and other industrial unions are openly and proudly advocates of economic democracy. Economic democracy is the negation of the capitalist method of organization, and the expansion of those things that make industrial unionism great; it is worker and community control of the factories and fields, the primacy of the people’s needs, both for constructed goods and for a healthy world, in the economic process, and the replacement of top-down control that benefits the owners without regard for the workers, with worker’s control, which benefits the workers and the community. In an ecologically conscious economic democracy (almost a redundancy), all value is considered; not only the value of commodity goods and stocks to the capitalist, but the very real value of our common resources and the people who depend on them, our children’s futures, and habitats and lives of non-human species- values that capitalism, in its commoditization of human and non-human life and devaluing of the wants and needs of the dispossessed, can never realize. Whatever other measures are taken to ensure the continued well-being of our environment, the power of industry will exploit and recklessly plunder the world, unless guided by the hands of all those who share that world, and not a privileged few.

Sustainability requires economic democracy and green unionism, and these demand industrial unionism. The IWW, with its commitment to sustainability and real change, is just the union we need, to make ecological and economic democracy come to life.

book trailer for Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege

2011-03-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

Next month, City Lights Books will release Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, by author of the Green is the New Red blog Will Porter. The following is the online trailer for the book:

DeChristopher speaks after verdict

2011-03-07T12:41:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, a jury in Salt Lake City declared climate activist Tim DeChristopher guilty for his interference with an oil and gas auction held at the end of the Bush administration. He faces a sentence of up to 10 years, to be determined by a judge.

The following is a transcript and video of Tim’s speech outside of the courthouse after the guilty verdict was handed down.

The Worm in the Coffee Bean: Starbucks' Union-busting, Greenwashing Tactics and the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

2011-03-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

This is an old piece from the Huffingtonpost.com. Still, nothing has changed; Starbucks continues to green-wash, Starbucks continues to union-bust.

The Worm in the Coffee Bean: Starbucks' Union-busting, Greenwashing Tactics and the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

Daniel Goldin

A few days after putting up my post "Starbucks and the White Whale" -- a reflection on Starbucks' ambition to become a cultural taste-maker -- I received an email from Daniel Gross, a Starbucks union-organizer in New York, pointing out some facts I had got wrong. I had said that "most of Starbucks' employees work part-time." In fact, all of Starbucks' retail employees work part-time (the company includes management in its statistics), with no guarantee even of the twenty hours needed to stay on the company's part-time worker health plan. I had compared Starbucks favorably to WalMart, but a little research revealed that in the area of insurance Starbucks fell short of WalMart, insuring only 42% of its workers (this figure also includes management), against WalMart's 47%.

Even more alarming is Starbucks' union-busting policies. Starbucks new CEO Jim Donald hails from -- you guessed it -- WalMart, as well as Safeway, companies famous for playing hard-ball against unions, and he seems to have imported similar hard-scrabble tactics to the running if Starbucks.

The IWW recently won a settlement against Starbucks from the National Labor Relations Board in response to charges against the company for illegal union-busting policies, including firing workers for union activity. In this agreement, Starbucks admitted no guilt but agreed to the following:

"NOT TO issue adverse performance reviews or deny pay increases to our employees in order to discourage them from joining or supporting Industrial Union 660."

"NOT TO provide employees with free pizza, free gym passes and free baseball tickets in order to encourage employees to withdraw their support for Industrial Union 660"

"NOT TO create the impression among their employees that their union activities are under surveillance or engage in surveillance of employees."

It is not hard to read between the lines of this settlement to figure out what the company did do. It is also not hard to understand why. The presence of a union hurts Starbucks' "progressive" brand by implying that its workers have grievances. The company's official line is that it is already committed to the well-being of its "partners." Why join a union, it tells its employees, when we're looking out for you?

This "noblesse oblige" argument that a corporation can internalize a feeling of obligation toward its workers -- as well as toward the environment -- and regulate itself, is at the heart of the "Corporate Social Responsibility" movement or C.S.R.. The gigantic turnout for the Social Responsibility Conference in New York last week shows just how mainstream C.S.R. has become. The conference included representatives from Chevron, J.C. Penny, Pfizer, McDonalds, Ford Motor, Exxon Mobil and, of course, Starbucks.

Starbucks has long been at the forefront of the C.S.R. movement. The company donates to military personnel, offers community building programs, claims a commitment to sustainable agriculture and to the rights of foreign workers. "More than our logo is green," goes the slogan. Critics complain that Starbucks engages in "green-washing," offering only a minuscule percentage of certified Fair Trade coffee -- and only after public lobbying from human rights organization Global Exchange -- and an even smaller percentage of coffee derived from sustainable coffee farming. They bring up union-busting and low wages. The company's supporters bring up insurance and the fact that the company supports fair trade at all, which goes against its bottom line. They say Starbucks does what it can, balancing a desire to be socially responsible with a need to compete in global markets.

Who's right? Is Starbucks a good corporate citizen -- or a lousy one?

To understand this notion of corporate citizenship, we need to consider the history of the corporation. The first corporations were chartered by the government to accomplish public works requiring pooled capital. The Massachusetts Bay Company was one of these, charged with colonizing the New World. By the early 19th century, American corporations formed to build factories with no long-term goal beyond the accumulation of wealth. The Supreme Court, under John Marshall, protected these new capitalist collectives against state regulation by invoking the "obligation of contracts" clause in the constitution, which states that "no state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts." 1886 brought a landmark decision that still affects our thinking about corporations. In the case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific railroad, the court defined corporations as "persons" and ruled that they deserved the same protections of "life, liberty and property" accorded citizens under the 14th amendment. The legal metaphor persists to this day under the term "corporate personhood," and contributes to a confusion in America between democracy and capitalism.

A confusion Starbucks exploits when it invokes its good intentions against a need for oversight. Corporations are not people, despite the court's attempt to personify them. A corporation does not have feelings or good intentions, or a conscience, for that matter. It lacks empathy, and no P.R. department or Corporate Responsibility program can substitute for this quintessentially human check on selfishness. Corporations are not evil. But they are not good either. Moral terms do not apply because corporations are not human. Is Starbucks a good corporate citizen? Of course not. It is not a citizen at all. The argument that Starbucks' workers do not need to unionize because the company has their interests in mind presupposes that it has a mind in the first place -- which it doesn't.

Corporations are powerful engines of growth, but we make a grave error when we assign human qualities to them. C.P.R. programs prove that external pressures work. But they do not indicate some intrinsic corporate goodness that should encourage us to let up our guard.

Judi Bari on Sundance TV

2011-03-05T17:19:00.001-08:00

Check out Make your workplace bottled water free < Privatization, Water | CUPE

2011-03-03T14:14:00.001-08:00

CUPE: Make your workplace bottled water free

On March 10, 2011, communities across Canada will be mobilizing to ban the bottle and reclaim public water. This date marks the second annual Bottled Water Free Day. It’s never too soon to start your campaign to ban bottled water in your workplace As leaders in the fight against water privatization CUPE is working with the Canadian Federation of Students, the Sierra Youth Coalition, Development & Peace and the Polaris Institute to promote Bottled Water Free Day.
It’s increasingly difficult to access public drinking water in Canadian workplaces. Public fountains aren’t being maintained – or installed in new buildings. And bottled water corporations are moving in to corner the market, replacing public infrastructure with private vending machines.
This year CUPE and our partner organizations are pushing hard to make university and college campuses and municipal workplaces bottled water free. Already 81 municipalities and ten university and college campuses have taken action toward being bottled water free. But much more can be done.

Take the Tap Water Pledge today to add your voice to the growing number of Canadians who want to protect and promote access to public drinking water.

Get involved in Bottled Water Free Day:

Encourage your members, networks, friends and colleagues to sign the pledge and endorse the campaign by visiting www.bottledwaterfreeday.ca
Organize an event in the build-up to and on Bottled Water Free Day. Materials and ideas are available on the website.
Contact your city councilors, school board trustees and university/college presidents and ask them to make the Bottled Water Free Day Pledge.

Visit www.bottledwaterfreeday.ca to get started

Check out Make your workplace bottled water free < Privatization, Water | CUPE

End:Civ, a new revolutionary panacea?

2011-02-25T16:41:00.000-08:00

This article delves into the development of anti-civilization ideology and critiques it as a potential dead end without the growth of an movement that crosses simple pronouncements.

I think that it is recognizable that modern industrial development has been, on a whole, destructive to the environment. The need then is how to dismantlement harmful industrial technologies and provide a just transition for the workers within those industries. We need to build solidarity, against sexism, patriarchy, capitalism, and for a new, green world.

Originally posted here

End:Civ, a new revolutionary panacea?

BLOG POST about SolidaritySexualityLabourIdeasGenderEnvironment posted on February 24, 2011 by curly_haired_antagonist

Blog posts are the work of individual contributors, reflecting their thoughts, opinions and research.

A lot of the bad publicity for Marxist groups has come as a result of those members who preach Marxist dogma just as Christians preach their gospel. There's no need to study many texts on Marx's writings to realize this current created a lot of red-robed priests telling us “what the great Karl really meant”. It seems as though new ideologists haven't learned from the mistakes of the past, as we're witnessing the dawn of a new generation of “green-robed priests”. This review traces parallels between Marxists' mistakes, and new ideas in anti-civilization discourse; focusing on the aim to propagate an argumentative structure formed from “premises”, the tendency to split and fork into smaller groups, and the "inevitable future" discourse that stresses the importance of acting in an emergency.
Argumentative structure
Maoist movements were delivered sentences by the Little Red Book just as End:Civ (like End Game) is structured around premises for involvement in the anti-civilization movement. These sentences make the anti-civilization movement assume particular answers to questions that need to be addressed collectively-the problem is that accepting the premises from End Game dismisses all the major discussions grassroots organizations must go through in their development and radicalization.
An example is the premise "love does not imply pacifism". Involvement in social movements will force you to have discussions on that topic over and over again, inside groups, because of the obvious importance of having unity over tactics. You have to be open-minded and understand your opponent's points of view if you want to develop arguments that they view as relevant. The movie does help discussion on this topic. However, by stating one opinion as a given premise, it pushes out people who have not yet decided over the issue.
The same problems will arise from the premise "civilization, especially industrial civilization, can never be sustainable". End:Civ tells us we should take this as granted. Meanwhile, we have millions of Canadians giving money to the Canadian Pension Plan (the biggest investor in military equipment suppliers), who could be convinced of the risky nature of their pension system-which could erupt just as in Greece or France. Here, the majority of the population should be rejected by that premise,just because they ignore the risky nature of our economic institutions. Even among those who don't ignore it, a lot of them should also be rejected on behalf of their materialism; because they are refusing to have a firm position on something that can't be proven.
If an ideology takes for granted the answers to major questions deserving to be addressed within our struggles, it takes us away from those movements-puts us above their discussions. It's hard to know what will come of the anti-civilization movement, but Marxism isolated individuals in groups of highly radicalized people, who spoke an hermetic language, who acted on behalf of others, and who were mimicked by following generations...
...that repeated the same mistakes!
Marxists movements in Canada never achieved a critical mass, in a tendency that might be depicted as confusing ideological and personal disagreements. Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, all ignored each other in their publications. They did so to hide the tensions between groups and pretend that everything was perfect in the communist world, and above all, they were the only solution to capitalism.
In the anti-civilization world, there was a first generation including the likes John Zerzan and Dave Foreman, who supported veganism and the Animal Liberation movement. While End:Civ covers the "environmentalist movement", nothing is said of the ALF, the ELF, Earth First or operation backfire (because of which Rod Coronado, pictured in the movie, has been in jail).
As a refresher, the ALF and ELF were allegedly active in 40 countries, did massive campaigns of animal liberation, attacked power lines, etc., and ended up with a large amount of people in jail after operation backfire, in which the CIA infiltrated a cell. It's useful to explain that the environmentalist movement contains groups that have been co-opted, but ignoring those who have been crushed by the state prevents the movement from connecting with its past.
One conclusion of the West Coast episode of the ALF is that if you want to sustain any kind of direct action movement over time, you need a humongous amount of support and resources. These things take a long time to build. They require a lot of effort and a lot of contacts, sustained over a long period of time...
...but our days are counted!
Just as Marx made the mistake of declaring that capitalism would inevitably fall (more precisely, first in England, and finally in Russia), an End Game premise declares industrial civilization "unsustainable".
Saying "the longer we wait for civilization to crash, the worse life will be after its fall", without addressing head-first the quantity of work there is to do to “smash the state”, can lead to many misconceptions about the nature of this work. The struggle against “civilization” will be won when there are no longer enough believers in the capitalist mode of production to overthrow our thriving post-revolutionary society; not just when the White House or Monsanto's headquarters burn down.
But it gets worse as the "act right now" discourse in End:Civ ignores different streams of struggle to focus only on the one against civilization. Prioritizing struggles has been the main source of failure from the Marxist movements of the past. To "Fuck Patience" here would be to postpone the important work done by other groups until after the revolution, keeping a lot of allies out of the struggle.
Take as an example the 1969 Chicago convention of the Students for a Democratic Society, which fell into disarray after Marxists (formerly the Worker Student Alliance and the Progressive Labour Party) took over; postponing the anti-racist and feminist discussions for "after the revolution". This is why some anarchists tend to separate the anti-civilization movement from anarchism. The anarchist tradition includes large anarcho-syndicalist, anarcho-feminist, anarcho-queer, and anarchist people of colour segments, which emphasize having a movement structured in the same way as the post-revolutionary society. Therefore most anarchists refuse the principle of ideological unity, because all those fighting back deserve to have their voices equally heard.
It is as important to understand the refusal of civilization, as it is to understand the 200 years of resistance that the worldwide population has waged in struggle against the capitalist system, as it is to understand the struggle against patriarchy, heterosexism, homophobia, ableism and all other systems of oppression. The more angles of approach we have, the more likely we are to inflict some damage.

Movements for social justice should try to move beyond such efforts as convincing people to follow “premises” and threatening them with Armageddon without disclosing how previous movements have already experienced the outcomes of such approaches. People defending the land are in an important struggle, but people also face oppression because of their gender (or lack thereof), their skin colour, their heritage, etc., and are also fighting back! People understand the links between patriarchy and capitalism, the similitude of racism and heterosexism... Disregarding these links between different oppressions, between different movements, can turn one valid point of resistance into a dead-end analysis that simply snubs other groups in struggle.

The Attack on Labor: Six Reasons Sustainability Activists Should Care

2011-02-19T14:22:00.001-08:00

The Attack on Labor: Six Reasons Sustainability Activists Should Care

JOE UEHLEIN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
Advocates for sustainability, under assault from climate deniers and drill-baby-drillers, are struggling to protect the earth from global warming, desertification, extinction of plants and animals, and other looming threats. Why should they also be concerned about the escalating attack on America's labor unions?

According to a recent New York Times report, many governors and state legislatures are now seeking "far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions, including private sector ones." While much of the attack is spearheaded by Republicans, many Democratic politicians are joining in the charge.

Here are some examples:

-- Legislators in ten states are planning to introduce legislation to prevent private sector unions from requiring members to pay dues or fees.

-- Sixteen state legislatures are considering laws to prevent unions from spending money on political activities unless it comes from individual members who have agreed to "opt in" for such expenditures.

-- According to the Columbus Dispatch, newly elected Ohio governor John Kasich is proposing to take away the right of state-financed child care and home care workers to unionize. He says of teachers, "If they want to strike, they should be fired." He wants the right to pay construction workers less than union pay scales on public contracts. And he even wants to ban binding arbitration for government employees. Former governor Ted Strickland points out that the state's workers, far from making extravagant demands, voluntarily agreed to forgo raises and take ten unpaid furlough days.

-- According to the Green Bay Press Gazette, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced he wants to "end collective bargaining for nearly all public employees." He also "updated emergency plans and alerted the National Guard just in case" they are needed to "ensure state services aren't interrupted." The Press Gazette headlined the article, "Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker says National Guard ready for any unrest over anti-union bill."

"In the long run, if these measures deprive unions of resources, it will cut them off at their knees. They'll melt away," said Charles E. Wilson, a law professor at Ohio State University. Sustainability activists may be tempted to say, well, why should we take time off from trying to avert global catastrophe to concern ourselves with what is happening to the unions? After all, aren't unions just concerned with the narrow interests of their members? Aren't they just about getting some folks a bit more of the pie? And haven't they opposed or stalled action on many issues important to sustainability? But before they come to that conclusion, sustainability advocates should consider:

1. Organized labor is the most powerful force for fighting conservative ideology. If unions "melt away," American politics will be totally dominated by a combination of corporate greed, right-wing media, and tea party extremism.

2. Despite occasional elements of discord, the alliance of labor, environmental, and sustainability movements has been crucial ever since the first Earth Day in supporting and passing environmental legislation. It will continue to be crucial in the future.

3. The right-wing strategy is to divide progressive groups that should be natural allies, and play them off against each other. For example, they are attempting to drive a wedge between private sector and public sector workers. Similarly, they constantly harp on the theory that environmental protection will destroy workers' jobs - while implying that workers have no interest in protecting the environment.

4. The most promising strategy for reviving popular support for sustainability policies is a program to create full employment by creating millions of green jobs protecting the climate and the environment. Organized labor has been a major supporter of green jobs. If unions "melt away," so will a major pillar of support for environmental policies that create jobs.

5. Unions are far more likely to support sustainability policies if in their hour of need they receive support from sustainability activists. The support of groups like the Sierra Club for right-to-organize legislation played a significant role in encouraging unions to support climate legislation, for example. It helped to persuade the Teamster's to reverse its position on Arctic drilling and pull out of the coalition that supports it.

6. Even when they differ on particular issues, unions are the most important allies of sustainability activists in the political arena. Unions recently spent more than $200 million to defeat candidates who are threatening to break the labor movement. In virtually all cases they are the very same candidates who are trying to gut environmental protection policies and who claim global warming is a myth. Even on the minimal basis of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" sustainability activists should be try to keep organized labor from being "cut off at their knees."

The defense of the rights of workers to organize, bargain collectively, and take concerted action is taking place right now at every level from the White House, to state legislatures, to city councils. It is very much a struggle for the hearts and minds of citizens, workers, and community members. Which side the sustainability movement is on in that struggle will help determine how significant a role the labor movement will play in building a sustainable future.

Joe Uehlein is co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability, which is dedicated to rallying trade unionists for economic, social and environmental sustainability. Learn more at www.labor4sustainability.org

Kentucky Rising! Day Two: Why Kentucky Can't Wait

2011-02-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

Coal Miners, Mine Inspectors, nurses, labour historians and writers Sit-In agianst mountin top removal and strip mining. (from huffingtonpost.com)

Governor's Sit-In Day Two: Why Kentucky Can't Wait
Jeff Biggers
Author, "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland"
Posted: February 12, 2011 09:54 AM

As the nation's beloved author/farmer philosopher Wendell Berry settled his 76-year-old lanky frame onto the floor of Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear's office last night, he picked up a copy of The Tempest. But in joining other protesters in this extraordinary sit-in to halt reckless mountaintop removal mining, including a coal miner and inspector who dedicated 40 years of his life to the industry, a Harlan County activist whose brother was killed in a mine, a nurse who has served black lung-affected coal miners for decades, and some of the country's top Appalachian labor and history scholars, Berry was not taking part in any Shakespeare spectacle.

When Prospero commands in the classic play, "We are such stuff, as dreams are made on," Kentuckians, who have lived among the ravages of strip-mining for a century -- and mountaintop removal operations since 1970 -- were making it clear that they can no longer wait for the elusive dream of coalfield justice and democracy in their own homeland of central Appalachia.

When Martin Luther King wrote his game-changing letter for the Civil Rights movement on the need for civil disobedience, "Why We Can't Wait" from the Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963, the neighbors and families of these same Kentuckians were already in the throes of a growing movement to stop the devastation from unyielding and increasingly lawless strip-mining operations.

While King sought "to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," besieged strip-mined residents in Knott County in eastern Kentucky organized their own sit-ins and protests to keep unchecked strip-miners from destroying their historic homelands and hillsides and watersheds. They exclaimed to the world: "We feel we have been forsaken."

As early as 1965, a 50-car convey of coalfield residents made the same trek as today's protesters to the governor's office in Frankfort, and called on him to enact enforceable laws to keep absentee coal companies from "ruining our farms and fields and streams."

Yesterday's meeting between the sit-in activists and Gov. Steve Beshear revealed the state's still astonishing denial of the human, environmental and economic cost of coal placed on the shoulder of its coalfield citizens. Beshear refused to acknowledge any of the impacts from strip-mining, including the widely documented irreversible and pervasive destruction of federally-protected waterways from mountaintop removal dumping. He dismissed the EPA as a meddler in state affairs.

Later in the day, Beshear's administration was symbolically reprimanded by a circuit court judge in his decision to include citizen participation in a stunning case of coal industry fraud and violation over the Clean Water Act. Beshear's administration had attempted to dismiss the citizens groups as "unwarranted burdens."
In one of the most poignant moments in the meeting, eastern Kentucky coalfield resident Rick Handshoe said to the governor: "I pay a higher electric bill than you: I pay my electric bill, and I pay with my family's health, my nephew's health. We pay a bigger price. We're paying with our lives there."

More than four decades since King's letter and the Kentucky movement to abolish strip-mining, Kentuckians and the nation have watched as close to 300 mountains and nearly 600,000 acres of hardwood forests, and hundreds of miles of headwater streams, have been irreversibly destroyed by mountaintop removal strip mining. In the process, more than 60 percent of the coal miner jobs have been stripped by the heavily mechanized operations, leaving the local economies in ruin and without any hope of economic diversification. According to recent studies, less than four percent of any mountaintop removal reclamation operation has resulted in verifiable post-mining economic productivity excluding forestry and pasture.
Kentuckians are as forsaken today as they were when the desperate Knott County residents called on the nation for assistance in the 1960s.

As the most egregious human rights and environmental crime over the past 40 years, mountaintop removal mining in all of central Appalachia, which provides less than 5-8 percent of our national coal production, has resulted in the largest forced removal of American citizens since the the mid-19th century.
Martin Luther King dispelled the role "outside agitators" in his letter, and provided the "four basic steps" of non-violent civil disobedience: "The collection of the facts to determine whether injustice exists; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action."

As Berry and the sit-in protesters remain holed up in his office for the weekend in this inspiring act of protest, in anticipation of the call for a mass rally on Monday at the Kentucky capitol for "I Love Mountains Day," the nation will continue to watch as this veritable Kentucky Rising plays out.
The question remains: Will Kentucky continue to deny the costly and deadly impacts of mountaintop removal, or begin the process, as Martin Luther King wrote, "to heal" the legacies of the past and move his state toward a just transition for clean energy?

Either way, Kentucky can't wait.

Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology and Ecology

2011-02-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology and Ecology

by Graham Purchase

This article originally appeared in issue #35 (Summer, 1995) of Kick It Over

In an anarchist society, the absence of centralized state authority will permit a radically new integration of nature, labour and culture. As the social and ecological revolution progresses, national boundaries will become cartographical curiosities, and divisions based upon differences in geography, climate and species distribution will re-emerge. This essay addresses the question of what role unionism will play in these changes.

First, it seems obvious that telecommunications, transportation and postal networks all require organization which extends far beyond the individual ecological region, and activities like road building between communities require cooperation beyond that of individual locales. Thus, a return to a community-based lifestyle need not and cannot imply a return to the isolation of the walled medieval city or peasant village.

Anarcho-syndicalists (that is, anarchist unionists) argue that the best way to address such needs is for the "workers of the world" to cease producing for capitalist elites and their political allies. Instead, they should organize to serve humanity by creating not only communication and transportation networks, but industrial, service, and agricultural networks as well, in order to ensure the continued production and distribution of goods and services.

Yet there are many people in anarchist and radical environmental circles who regard anarcho-syndicalism with distrust, as they mistakenly identify it with industrialism. They argue that global industrialism has been responsible for centralized organization and environmental destruction. They view industrialism as necessarily based upon mass production, and the factory as inevitably involving high energy use and dehumanizing working conditions. In short, critics believe that providing six billion people with toilet paper and building materials (let alone TVs, VCRs and automobiles) necessarily involves large-scale, mass production techniques ill-suited to ecological health - regardless of whether capitalist leeches or "free" workers are running the show. Industrialism, it is argued, is an environmental evil in and of itself; it is only made slightly more destructive by the narrow, short-term interests of capital and state. Such critics argue that technology has likewise outgrown its capitalistic origins, and has taken on a sinister and destructive life of its own.

I am not unsympathetic to this argument. That children and adults alike spend hours on end surrounded by deafening noise and blinding lights in video arcades, in an utterly synthetic technological orgy, is ample evidence of our species' sick fetish for non-organic, superficial pleasures. The regimentation of the work day, and the consignment of leisure and play to half-hour television slots interrupted by nauseating commercials, is nothing short of the industrial robotification of human nature - an alarming process that has led many to argue that humanity should abandon the industrial and technological revolutions altogether. They further argue that we should return to small-scale, minimally industrial technologies that utilize simple devices such as the hand loom. Given the enormously destructive effects of today's industrial system, such a course may ultimately be the only path open to humanity. At this point, however, simply abandoning our cities and our technologies and hoping that our species will somehow return to a small-scale, pre-industrial existence appears both unlikely and reckless.

Worker Control

In recent years, there has been a revolution in the distasteful discipline of "personnel" management. For, example, "experts" are declaring a new day in industrial relations because bosses now eat in the same canteen as the workers in some industries. In the past, when the bosses seemed to be distant figures, the inequities of the class/wage system were obvious to all. But, if the bosses exercise with the rank and file in the company gym, they are perceived as "really just some of ,us." In such circumstances, workers tend to forget the 10- or 20-to-one pay differential, company car, and handsome retirement scheme that comes with being the boss. One example of this new type of "personnel management" is found in Australia, where there has been much fuss recently about a "harmonious, happy" outfit which "allows" employees to set their own wages, holiday arrangements, and production quotas. No wonder the boss is happy with this arrangement; s/he no longer has to go to the trouble of working all this out for them. Letting the workers spend their time figuring out the fine details of their own wage slavery is touted as the pinnacle of modem management techniques. (Not only would the employees be much better off financially if they sacked the boss and shared all the profits among themselves, their work would become a richly human experience instead of a dehumanizing and unrewarding one.) Merely by providing a semblance of an egalitarian work environment, modern management has dramatically increased production and minimized sabotage. Imagine the efficiency and satisfaction that would result if this appearance of worker control were turned into a living reality.

Efficiency and Self-Sufficiency

Although the local, small-scale production of manufactured items should be encouraged in every ecological region, it would be absurd to expect that every village, town or region would produce its own can openers, razor blades, nails and windmill blades. Even if it were possible for craftspeople in every community to produce these products and thousands like them, this would surely involve an enormous waste of time and energy. No one wants to suffer the noise and clamor of the factory and be a slave to the machine, but neither do most people want to make their own nails and rope by the methods traditionally employed by village blacksmiths and rope, makers. The hellfire and brimstone of the factory floor on the one hand, and hours of tedious, mind-numbing weaving on the other, are not desirable alternatives to the wire cutter and the mechanical loom, respectively. There is simply no good reason to reject industrial workshops as a means for producing the wide variety of manufactured items that are required in our daily lives.

Only certain regions have the ores necessary to the production of iron, steel, copper and aluminum, and even if the manufacture of the many items made from such ores were carried out in each local region, it would still require a transport network to get the ores there in the first place. In adopting the ecoregionally self-sufficient community as the basis for a future anarchist society, we must not blind ourselves to its real limitations. In the absence of intercommunal worker associations for the provision of transport, communication, and basic articles of consumption, the anarchist vision is reduced to an absurd and unworkable utopia. Although we may justly assert that many items such as bread, food, energy, building materials ad infinitum should, and in many cases could, be produced by the inhabitants of each city-region, insisting upon a concept of total self-sufficiency, as anti-syndicalist anarchists are apt to do, is unrealistic and dogmatic.

No one wants to spend their whole life in the factory or workshop, but everyone needs nails, transportation, or rope at some time, It would only be fair that all people spend a few hours every week helping to provide these useful products in co-operation with their fellows. Machines do help us make these things more easily; people only become slaves to their machines because they are slaves to their bosses and to a wasteful, growth-oriented economy. If there were no useless bosses who collect the profits but do no work at the machines they own or oversee, and if production did not always have to be increased to fuel an ever-expanding, growth-oriented consumerism, then it is doubtful that any of us would have to work more than a few hours per week. Those who are by temperament "workaholics" could spend their time improving upon, and experimenting with, products or projects of their choice.

Primitivism and Technophilia

Looking back toward the Stone Age or forward toward some post-industrial techno-utopia is equally pointless. Primitivists long for a quick fix from a (largely imagined) glorious past, while technophiles long for the quick fix in an idealized future - when the way out of the present mess probably entails an imaginative mixture of Neolithic community and selected technologies. For example, the use of non-renewable oil and coal resources during the past two centuries is undoubtedly ill-suited to the ecology of our planet, but so would be the Neolithic firewood hearth, were it to be used by Earth's six billion people today. (In time, all non-renewable energy sources will of necessity be superseded by renewable ones such as wind and water.)

Capitalism and a Clean Environment

But, returning to the present industrial/technological nightmare, it seems evident that new technological priorities tend to produce changes of emphasis in the realm of so-called pure science. Biology was, until quite recently, seen as a "soft" science compared to the "MM" and more "logical" sciences of inorganic chemistry and physics. This is now changing, and the study of molecular biology is at the forefront of contemporary intellectual and popular interest. Botany, biology and biochemistry are emerging as the main sciences of a second industrial age.

Every day, natural products are being discovered that can take the place of the outdated, chemical synthetic materials of bygone eras. It is now possible to envision a time when every item of industrial manufacture presently associated with environmental destruction cars, fuels, oils, aircraft, plastics, computers, etc. - is constructed with materials that have been harmlessly extracted from nature, and which can in turn be harmlessly and quickly re-absorbed by nature.

Industrialism is, however, beginning to partially reform itself. (Of course, environmental reforms under capitalism will succeed only to the extent that they are compatible with the profit motive.) Even our capitalist bosses cannot escape skin cancer and oil slicks while they sun themselves at their exclusive beach resorts; and many people no longer wish to buy or use environmentally unsound products. The capitalists, ever watchful of the market, have become increasingly aware of this fact; those companies which have presented a superficial "Green image" while persisting in unsound practices have on the whole been "found out," and are beginning to regret their dishonesty. Green journalism has created a better informed and extremely angry public which will no longer be easily fooled by transparent corporate tactics. Capitalists now fully appreciate that a Green image with genuinely Green products behind it will translate into big dollars and huge profits in the future.

Capitalists are not the only segment of our population undergoing Green-inspired change. Everywhere in the world inventors, scientists, engineers and botanochemists are becoming inspired by the vision of a greener world, and the number of new and potentially environmentally safe processes and products multiplies with every passing day.

Consumerism and Environmentalism

Industrialism is not inherently anti-ecological, and the strength of Green consumerism will almost certainly ensure that the resource base for many of the manufactured products that we consume must and will change for the better. But the individualistic mass consumer culture which has grown up around the industrial system is another matter. If people continue to insist upon having three cars ad individually owning every conceivable appliance and convenience, then things are unlikely to get very much better.

No environmentalist wishes to see many millions of acres of land devoted to the monocultural production of maize or palm oil in order to provide bio-fuels for our cars. But neither syndicalism nor, indeed, industrialism, requires capitalism's promotion of "growth" and individualistic over-consumption. For example, syndicalists are committed to providing extensive public transport networks and other basic utilities on a non-profit basis for the benefit of all; and the provision of utilities or public transport using manufactured industrial products in no way requires the destructive and profit-oriented consumer culture of the present day. It might take X number of acres of biomass to power an electric railway, but it would well take 100 times that much to fuel the number of privately-owned automobiles which would transport a similar number of people as the train. It might take Y amount of natural fiber to provide seating for all that train, but it might take 100 times that much to outfit all of those cars. While it might be possible to grow enough biomass or fiber on small lots in a large number of small, organically diverse farms to support the train, the attempt to produce 100 times that amount to support the cars almost inevitably implies the need for extensive monocultural production - with all the degradation of wilderness and soil that such farming methods entail.

Capitalists are committed to growth-oriented consumerism; it does not mater much to them whether they are selling natural or artificial products so long as people keep buying and consuming more and more. As a consequence, more and more of the available land is being given over to producing more and more products for individual consumption. Syndicalists, on the other hand, understand the need for the communal consumption of industrial resources. They understand that a well-constructed trolley line might last 100 years and transport millions or even tens of millions of people in its lifetime. Once a railway or trolley line is built, there is no inherent requirement for growth. Chances are, one line from point A to point B will be all that will ever be needed; there probably will be no need to construct another, let alone 20 or 30 of them. The point is that syndicalists are not interested in growth or profit, and their concept of industrialism must not be confused with the profoundly destructive consumer culture of contemporary capitalism.

Anarcho-Syndicalism and Environmentalism

Only time will tell whether human technology and society can co-evolve successfully with nature. Neither the "primitivists" nor the "technophiles" can read the future, but I am convinced that neither alone holds the answer. That we can simply dismantle the industrial and technological revolutions and return to small-scale tribal communities seems even more naive a proposal than some old-fashioned anarcho-syndicalists' view that workers self-management alone will bring about the "free society." The idea that a workers' paradise could simply be built upon the shoulders of global capitalism is simply preposterous. The large-scale, centralized, mass-production approach that developed with capitalism, idolized by many Marxists, was, unfortunately, never seriously challenged by either the union movement or by anarcho-syndicalists. The wider anarchist movement, however, has always distrusted large-scale, wasteful industrial practices and deplored the regimentation involved in work and the factory system, and has placed its faith in the self-governing, environmentally integrated community. Anarcho-syndicalists should review the intellectual insights of the broad anarchist movement to a much greater extent than they have. Otherwise, anarcho-syndicalism will become just another tired, 19th-century socialist philosophy with an overly optimistic assessment of the liberatory potential of mass industrial culture.

Nevertheless, it is only through organizing our fellow wage-earners, who have the least to gain from the continued functioning of global capitalism, that we can build any lasting challenge to the state and its power elite. The traditional methods of syndicalism, such as the general strike, could bring the global mega-machine to a complete standstill overnight. No other group can achieve this, because wage-earners, and especially the growing army of service workers, represent the majority (at least 60%) of the adult population. Once the people wrest the industrial and service infrastructure from the hands of the elite, we can do what we will with it. Maybe the majority of workers will choose to dismantle their factories and abandon their fast-food restaurant chains, committing industrial mass manufacture to the dustbin of history; or perhaps they will elect to develop new, more localized versions of their industries. Of course, unless anarchists persuade their fellow workers to organize themselves to resist and eventually eliminate the current state and corporate coercive apparatus, this whole discussion is so much pie in the sky. This is the most compelling reason why an environmentally sensitive and rejuvenated anarcho-syndicalist movement represents one of the most practical methods of halting the destructive advance of the state and the mega-corporation.

The worldwide nature of pollution provides more reason for international workers' organizations. Even though governments have achieved some successes in controlling pollution, these successes have been sporadic and limited. For example, the Montreal protocol appears to have been successful in slowing the continued production of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, of CFCs. These chemicals are, however, mainly produced by only six companies, and we should not be too optimistic about the possibility for global co-operation between capitalists and national governments on environmental issues. (The failure to do anything about "greenhouse" gas emissions shows the near-total lack of environmental concern of those in power.) Although CFCs were first synthesized in 1894, they were not used industrially until 1927. Had they been used beginning in 1894, we may not have had an ozone layer left to protect. We are told that, after a period of thinning, the ozone layer will most likely begin to repair itself. But what other long-term or irreversible industrial damage is occurring without our being aware of it?

The industrial system as we know it may indeed be causing such damage, but what do anti-syndicalist anarchists propose to do about it? Even if humanity decided to give up industrialism altogether and return to a craft economy, global co-operation among the industrial workers of the world would be necessary to implement that decision - via a permanent, worldwide general strike. In the absence of a grassroots and anarchistically inspired workers' movement that could mount a sustained opposition to industrial capitalism, such a course does not even present itself as a possibility. Anti-syndicalist anarchists, if they are sincere in their desire to abolish the industrial system, should as a matter of logic talk with working people, persuade them to accept their point of view, and then help organize them to implement it. Neither capitalists nor unorganized, unaware workers will abandon their factories and consumerist habits. And, as long as there are industrial capitalists - and no massive international opposition to them - industrialism as we know it will assuredly remain.

Means and Ends

It is true that we may ultimately discover that most technology, and even the industrial system itself, is inherently environmentally destructive. It is even possible that many of the new eco-technologies that seem to offer hope may turn out to have unforeseen side effects, and that humanity will be compelled to give up modem technology altogether. But, if this happens, it must be an organic process. Its starting point, one would hope, would not be simply to smash up the machines, dynamite the roads and abandon the cities, beginning again at "year zero" - as Pol Pot attempted to do in Cambodia. The only non-authoritarian way in which the "year zero" can come is for the people to decide unanimously to destroy their factories, stores, highways, and telephone systems themselves. If this happens, there would be nothing anyone could or should do to stop them. But starvation, dislocation, chaos and violence would almost certainly be the immediate result of such reckless actions, leading to dictatorship, horrendous suffering, and political and social passivity in the long run. (And even if primitivists would, by some miracle, convince a majority of our fellow citizens to discard science and technology, would that give them the right to force the rest of us to submit to their will?)

The everyday needs of humanity are enmeshed in the continued functioning of the industrial machine. One cannot simply smash up the life-support system and hope for the best. Instead, it must be carefully dismantled while new methods and practices are developed. If we are to achieve an eco-anarchist society, workers must wrest power from their employers, after which the goal should be production of socially necessary and environmentally benign goods. Once people are no longer forced to produce useless consumer goods and services, it is likely that every person will work only a very few hours per week - leaving people with much more time to devote to their own interests and to their communities. By eliminating the parasitic classes and reducing industrial activity to the production of basic necessities, a huge amount of human energy would be released. The reconstruction of the eco-regionally integrated human community from the corpse of the state could thus commence in an incremental way, ensuring that basic human needs would be effectively met while retaining the positive aspects of the industrial infrastructure. Each of us would have to continue to work a few hours per week to keep the industrial machine minimally functioning while we made changes.

If, in the face of sustained efforts to reduce its adverse effects and to integrate it with the local eco-region, the industrial system still proved to be an environmental menace, then humanity would, one hopes, have had the time to explore new ways of life suited to meeting its basic needs without industry as we know it. Industrial syndicalism is one relatively bloodless way of doing away with the state/capitalist elite, and of allowing construction of an anarchist society; it may or may not have a place in the creation of an ecologically sound way of life, but it is a sure method of returning economic and industrial power into the hands of the people. Anarchists - be they industrial-syndicalist, technophile, or neo-primitivist - thus have no program other than to bluntly declare that it is the people who must decide their own social and environmental destiny.

Of course, the question remains of whether industrial syndicalism is the only, or most satisfactory, anarchist method of reorganizing the distribution of goods and services within communities. What we can be sure of is that the individualistic mass consumerism of the current state/capitalist system is quite ill-suited to the health and sustainability of life on Earth.

The Organization of Daily Life

In order to have influence, anarchists, who have always believed that the individual and the collectivity are of equal value and can co-exist harmoniously, must clarify the alternatives to both capitalist and authoritarian "communist" economics. For example, nonprofit, community-based forms of individual skills exchange, such as barter-based networks, represent co-operative efforts which strengthen the autonomy of both individuals and communities. Local skills exchange systems use their own bartered "currency" and distribute goods, services and labour within the community; community infrastructures can thus develop according to the ideals of their members, without dependence upon government, capital or state.

The value that ordinary people place upon individual effort and exchange cannot be ignored by anarchists; there is simply no need to collectivize or industrialize those services that do not require elaborate structures. Further, the rise of the service sector (counseling, food services, daycare, etc.), together with the need to reduce the work week and to minimize consumption by producing only socially necessary goods, will mean that the social organization of work will be increasingly directed toward community-based and non-profit activities such as skills exchange networks.

But, unless the trains run and municipal water and energy supplies, are assured, the social situation will quickly dissolve into chaos. The intercommunal postal and transport networks needed to deliver basic goods and services obviously cannot be supplied by community-based skills exchange networks.

Again, anarcho-syndicalists' traditional approach to providing such services via worker-controlled organizations points to a solution: workers in non-profit industries would simply exchange their labour and products for credits in local skills exchange networks. Small-scale, non-industrial approaches and their integration with local exchange networks are thus viable steps toward an anarchist society. The realization of a federation of free communities requires a multifaceted attack upon the institutions of capital and state, involving elements of traditional syndicalism as well as more individually oriented yet essentially non-capitalist systems of production and consumption, systems that allow for adequate levels of consumer choice.

Village life is in decline everywhere and, even if it will eventually be necessary to return to a world composed of small villages, at present we face the problem of increasing millions of urban dwellers living on the outskirts of cities which long ago ceased to be discernible social entities. The social ills upon which modem life is based - mass alienation, consumerism and self-centered individualism - may prove fatal to our species, and should be democratically eradicated through education. Syndicalism, local skills exchange networks, and traditional co-operative ventures are ways of helping people to educate themselves about community and regionally-based ways of life. These possibilities are far superior to either the Stalinist "proletarianization" of the people through terror, or the state, capitalist robotification of the urban and rural masses by an endless media circus that lobotomizes people into insatiable consumerism, cynicism, and social apathy.

Reprinted from Anarchism and Environmental Survival (See Sharp Press, PO Box 1731, Tucson, AZ 85702 USA). Anarchism and Environmental Survival is available in the US directly from See Sharp for $11.95 + $2.00 p&h. This book, and Graham Purchase's pamphlets Anarchism and Ecology: The Historical Relationship, Anarchist Organization: Suggestions and Possibilities, and The New Anarchy are also available from AK Distribution (PO Box 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682, USA), Left Bank Distribution (4142 Brooklyn NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA), and Jura Books (110 Crystal Street, Petersham, NSW 2111, Australia).

Earth First!, Meet the IWW - Notes on Wobbly Environmentalism

2011-02-06T18:45:00.000-08:00

Earth First!, Meet the IWW - Notes on Wobbly Environmentalism

By x322339 - From the Industrial Worker, May 1988

This article was obviously written for an Earth First! audience largely unfamiliar with the IWW.

Organized in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World has been fighting the boss class and the megamachine--the industrial wreckers of the world--for [nearly a century] now and has chalked up quite a record for militant, hard-hitting, straight-from-the-shoulder direct-action style, rank-and-file democratic labor unionism. Ask any seasoned old fighter from any half-decent union he or she'll tell you that the Wobblies set a standard that has rarely been approached and never beaten.

We don't like to brag, so we'll just refer you to a couple of good histories: Fred Thompson's The IWW: It's First Seventy Years and Joyce Kornbluh's beautifully illustrated IWW anthology, Rebel Voices (both available form the IWW). In these books (and dozens of others you can find in bookstores and libraries), you can read all about the epoch-making organizing drives, strikes and free-speech fights that the IWW has waged over the years, and that have made One Big Union an inspiration for every indigenous radical current that has come along to challenge the existing order. Civil rights, antiwar, anti-nuclear and student activists, the New Left, anarchists, feminists, and now animal-liberationists and radical environmentalists have all acknowledged the influence of the good ol' rebel band of labor.

Here we'd like to note a few of the things that make the IWW different from other "labor organizations," especially in regard to environmental and ecological issues.

First, in our view, the "official" so-called labor movement, the AFL-CIO, is not really a labor movement at all, but rather a corrupt statist, CIA-dominated bureaucracy whose specific function is to control labor. Some of these unions are undoubtedly better than others, and a few of them are able now and then to act honestly better than others, and a few of them are able now and then to act honestly and decently. But all of them are afflicted with outdated hierarchical structures and above all an idiotic ideology submissive to the capitalist system of wage slavery.

Consider, for example, a ridiculous bumper-sticker slogan promoted by several AFL-CIO unions: "Pollution: Love it or leave it." This hideous inanity was supposed to save steel mills and oil-refineries in industrial hell holes like Gary, Indiana. In other words, the AFL-CIO mobilizes workers to defend pollution in order to save jobs that will create more pollution. Would a real labor movement, one responsive to the real interests of working women and men, do a thing like that?

Don't think that this typical AFL-CIO slogan was some sort of accident. On the contrary, the AFL-CIO's self-confessed love of pollution is consistent with its whole policy. After all, if you support capitalism--and you have to support the things that automatically go with it: militarism, war, racism, sexism, and pollution, in ever-increasing doses.

Instead of the imbecile slogan, "Pollution: Love it or leave it," the IWW inscribes on its banner the ecological watchword, "Let's make this planet a good place to live." And we argue that the best way to accomplish this goal is to organize One Big Union of All workers to abolish the wage-system. The bosses are able to cause such vast environmental devastation because they have organized industry their way for their profit. The IWW says to the workers of all industries: Dump the bosses your backs, dump the ecocidal profit-and-wage system, and organize your jobs for yourselves, for your own good and for the good of the Earth!

Historians of the conservation and environmental movements have not examined the contributions of the IWW, but there's a remarkable story there that should be told some day, at length. The Wobblies, in fact, can lay claim to being the only group in the history of North American labor to have been consistently on the side of the Earth against its commercial and industrial despoilers.

In its early years the Union urged that the organized working class would exercise an enlightened stewardship of the planet. The anthropocentric notion of "stewardship" has now been superseded, of course, but in those days it represented the thinking of all but a few conservationists.

Even in that early period, however, the IWW sometimes looked far beyond the limited horizons of the conservation movement at the time, and now and then the Union's voice of protest rang out in tones that bring to mind the impassioned vociferations of John Muir himself.

No organization in American history, for example, has done more to fight and expose the ruinous, murderous deeds of the lumber barons. From the 1910s on, the IWW press published numerous warnings of the great dangers to America's forests posed by these malevolent mercenaries. The Industrial Pioneer for December 1925 called for immediate "conservation action" to stop the lumber companies' "criminal and wholly unnecessary wastage" of forests: "Nothing but mute stumps over thousands of acres....Where is it going to end?" An accompanying photograph of devastated woodland is captioned: "A Forest Gone to Waste--Made Into Chicago Tribune Editorials."

Another article (One Big Union Monthly, October 1919) denounced the "totally destructive" character of then-current methods of reforestation, and pointed out that under the administration of workers' self-management that the IWW proposed, such thoughtless destruction would be inconceivable.

Some of the old-time Wobblies stand out as real champions of the Earth, a living part of the wilderness they loved, and forerunners what today is often called "deep" ecology (to distinguish it from the superficial Mickey mouse version which begins and ends with depositing one's beer-can in the waste-receptacle rather than throwing it on the lawn). Wobbly bard Ralph Chaplin, left us some powerful poems reflecting a profound awareness of Earth's natural diversity. And then there were guys like Irish-born Fellow Worker John Dennis who, after working for a time on the Great Lakes headed west, fell in love with the wilderness ("This was as far as I wanted go. Idaho looked like the best county in the world"), joined the IWW, and fought the good fight for many a long year. Toward the end of his life he served as field consultant for St. John's Flora of Eastern Washington and Harrison's Flora of Idaho. "What they needed," he explained, "was someone to show them where they could find various plants, and I knew the elevations and places where they grew." These wilderness Wobblies deserve to be better known.

Let's say a few words, finally, on over-population. As early as the 1910s Wobblies argued that a smaller workforce could more easily win higher wages and shorter hours, as well as better living and working conditions and working conditions, and therefore the Union became a vigorous advocate of birth-control. Of course they could have further justified their position with feminist and environmentalist arguments. What is important, however, is that they reached conclusions compatible with feminism and environmentalism not by adopting someone else's arguments, but on their own, out of their own experiences as workers in revolt.

These are just a few elements in the "hidden history" of the IWW that many of us are trying to develop today, in the hope of building a mass workers' movement capable of responding effectively to the specific challenges before us here and now and tomorrow. We are convinced that the IWW heritage is the best foundation to build on, and also that American working men and women are increasingly ready to take action along IWW lines.

We urge all of you out there to help us in any ways you can. Spread the word about the IWW among your friends and fellow workers. And if you know of unorganized (or misorganized) workers who are looking for a real union with vision and guts, tell them about us (or about them).

Remember, we're all in this together. x322339.

Green Unionism in Theory and Practice by Dan Jakopovich

2011-02-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

Green Unionism in Theory and Practice

by Dan Jakopovich

A new current in the global anti-capitalist movement has begun to develop in the last few decades. Rather than unfolding into a cohesive, self-assured and well received movement, it has largely existed on theoretical and practical margins, thwarted by dogmatic party-political, “affinity group” and NGO dominance, yet periodically reappearing as the “star of the day” wherever favorable socio-economic conditions or visionary initiatives gave it the broad attention and determination it needed to flourish.

The biggest hope for the greening of the labor movement lies in the revival of this decentralized, grassroots unionism. The parochialism, corrupti-bility and ingrained authoritarianism of the union officialdom have been shown time and time again, and only a bottom-up, rank-and-file approach to union work can seriously aid environmental protection and wider social change.

A basic tenet of green unionism is that labor struggles and ecological struggles are not necessarily separate, but have a potential to be mutually reinforcing. The basis for a working relationship between differing strands is the unity-in-diversity approach to organizing a mutually respectful and supportive alliance.

Especially since the late 60s and early 70s, partly as a response to working-class de-radicalization and often an integration of traditional “workers’ organizations” — statist, bureaucratic political parties and business unions — there has been a massive practical and theoretical retreat from questions of class and especially class struggle, particularly in the “new social movements” which have gained in popularity after the second world war.

With the onset of neoliberal globalization, there has been a reversal to previously held positions, decomposition of people’s political “representation” (especially in social-democratic parties), a deterioration of workers’ rights and living conditions. A six-hour working day even seemed more plausible at the beginning of the 20th century (and indeed, some called for its implementation) than it does today.

Parallel to the de facto progressive deterioration of working conditions, depoliticization of the workplace has also continued, along with a general activist culture largely still hostile to labor issues (although this has partly been changing recently, especially due to the “new organizing model” exemplified by the Justice for Janitors campaign).

A dynamic understanding of people as workers and workers as activists is missing. For several decades now, there has occurred a shift of the concept of oppression from production relations (as the material basis for exploitation) to consumption, especially among many mainstream Greens who would have us confined to our roles as consumers, where we are inherently relatively powerless and almost always disorganized. This approach, as commonly understood and implemented, produces an individualistic and moralistic substitute for sustained political activity.

People are in their materially most powerful role as producers of goods and services …

It is important to recognize the central importance of class and the revolutionary implications of class struggle at the point of production. People are in their materially most powerful role as producers of goods and services, capable of withholding labor, and also democratically taking over the means of production and distribution.

It is the material conditions of life which restrict and deform peoples’ humanity; therefore the struggle against those conditions also has to be concrete:

The constitution of new identities as expressive human beings in transcendence of alienated class identities implies a successful struggle over the very structures of domination, regimentation, hierarchy and discipline which exist concretely within the workplace. One cannot assume that the job site will simply wither away with the flowering of a new identity. [1]

Murray Bookchin discards the syndicalist strategy as narrow economism [2], and while it is true that the syndicalist movement has in fact often been guilty of “cultural workerism,” productivism and the idealization of the working class and its role in society, especially in the past, this has been widely challenged in and by the movement itself, and is only a secondary tendency now.

Not believing in the future of the workplace as an arena of political and social change, Bookchin calls instead for a sole focus on the “community” (as though communities exist without workplaces or classes). When talking about his libertarian municipalism, Bookchin conveniently forgets it is precisely the syndicalists who have the strongest and most successful tradition of community organizing among all explicitly libertarian currents and wider. [3]

However, democratic unionism from below is not inconsistent with the conversion to a bioregional structure consisting of self-governing, socialized units of producers and consumers, and in a system of production for need, not profit, rank-and-file unions might be able to provide the necessary councilist infrastructure necessary for decentralized decision-making and distribution, at least in the transitional period.

Green syndicalists insist that overcoming ecological devastation depends on shared responsibilities towards developing convivial ways of living in which relations of affinity, both within our own species and with other species, are nurtured (See Bari, 2001). They envision, for example, an association of workers committed to the dismantling of the factory system, its work discipline, hierarchies and regimentation — all of the things which Bookchin identifies (Kaufmann and Ditz, 1992; Purchase, 1994; 1997b). This involves both an actual destruction of some factories and their conversion towards “soft” forms of small, local production. [4]

Building the new society in the shell of the old entails changing who controls production, what is produced and how it is produced. This can be achieved only through democratizing the workplaces and empowering the communities. “The questions of ownership and control of the earth are nothing if not questions of class.” [5]

Green bans

The context in which the best-known Australian green ban struggles occurred (where workers refused to work on projects that are held to be anti-environmental) strongly resembles the current context of widespread gentrification (“regeneration”) of working-class areas.

The interests of home buyers and architectural heritage lost out against often purely speculative construction. At one stage, there was ten million square feet of vacant office space in Sydney’s business district, while people looking for their first homes or flats could find nothing. [6]

The first green ban was implemented by the Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) to protect Kelly’s Bush, the last remaining bushland in the Sydney suburb of Hunter’s Hill.

Green bans, among many other achievements, protected historic eighteenth century buildings being demolished to make way for office space, and prevented the Royal Botanic Gardens from being turned into a carpark for the Sydney Opera House.

The union went on imposing green bans wherever community support for the ban was expressed in the form of an enthusiastic public meeting by the people concerned (there were 42 green bans from 1971–74 until the federal branch leadership of the BLF with wholehearted support of the politicians, the media and the “property developers” dismissed the union branch leadership “on the grounds that the New South Wales branch had overstepped the bounds of traditional union business.” [7]

…direct industrial action of this sort is far more effective in defending the environment than are the lobbying and symbolic actions …

It is estimated that BLF’s green bans held up approximately 18 billion Australian dollars (in 2005 money) worth of development. [8] Although the local BLF’s initiative was suppressed, the movement spread to other unions. Their experiences are particularly relevant concerning the growing calls by companies and the British government for new nuclear plants in Britain. For instance:

In 1976, the Australian Council of Trade Unions banned the mining, handling and export of uranium. A national strike in 1977 got a Queensland train guard fired for stopping a uranium shipment his job back. In 1981, Darwin unions blocked loading of uranium ore for export for several weeks, though the ACTU finally intervened under government pressure to allow the loading of the ore. In October of this year, the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal abandoned efforts to dock in Melbourne for a 10-day “goodwill mission” when seamen refused to send out thugs, supporting disarmament groups who charged that the warship carried nuclear weapons… [9]

The example of our Australian fellow workers demonstrates that, where the necessary educational and organizational work has been done, workers are willing to take action in defense of the environment (just as US and Irish workers have taken direct industrial action in solidarity with their South African fellow workers) even where that action involves short-term financial hardship.

… the alliance she envisaged was only possible if environmentalists educated themselves about workers’ concerns …

And direct industrial action of this sort is far more effective in defending the environment than are the lobbying and symbolic actions favored by the self-proclaimed defenders of “Mother Earth.” Rather than focusing our scarce energies and resources on lobbying campaigns or one-shot symbolic actions aimed at bringing pressure to bear upon our exploiters (though such actions may have a place in bringing issues to a wider public or in maintaining morale), we need to focus our efforts on organizing in our workplace and in our communities to build a better environment ourselves.

This can entail campaigns as seemingly mundane as organizing against toxic chemicals in the workplace — a campaign which implicitly and, properly conducted, explicitly goes far beyond the right to a safe environment to pose questions of the link between the workplace and the environment, who has the right to control work processes, and the need for different modes of union organization and activity. [10]

Some other notable campaigns include:

Builders, seafarers, dockers, transport, and railworkers boycotted all work connected with the nuclear industry, and the Franklin River project — which would have flooded the Tasmanian National Park (including Aboriginal land) for a large hydro-electric project — a victory. Similarly, workers opposed the attempts of the Amax corporation to drill and mine for oil and diamonds on aboriginal land at Noonkanbah. These workers also actively supported the militant occupation of the site by aboriginal people. In Britain, in the 1980s, rank and file seafarers boycotted the dumping of nuclear waste at sea, forcing the government to abandon the policy. In Brazil, rubber tappers forged an alliance with native peoples and environmentalists to oppose the massive deforestation of the Amazon rainforest by big landowners and business interests. Their success led to the murder of union activist Chico Mendes by hired assassins in December 1988, but the struggle continues. [11]

Jack Mundey, one of the leaders of the local branch of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, argued recently that

…the political significance of the green-ban movement, while it lasted, was that it forged a winning alliance between environmentalists and trade unionists. As 90% of the population resides in urban areas, success in preserving the built environment is vital, and trade unionists are especially well placed to influence the construction of the built environment: The task of achieving a sustainable society, with a human face, an ecological heart and an egalitarian body, requires a massive joint effort by environmentalists and the organized working class. [12]

“Timber wars” in the Pacific Northwest

David Pepper posited that an ingress of libertarian unionism might revitalize the Green movement in North America just as syndicalism revived the labor movement in early 20th century. [13]

The late Wobbly and Earth First! organizer, Judi Bari, came closer to that objective than anyone else. Starting in 1989, she initiated an alliance between the exploited timber workers and radical environmentalists committed to the protection of redwood forests in Northern California. To this goal she organized an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Local 1 with workers and eco-activists (and environmentally aware workers) as members.

Originating from a working-class background herself, she was fully aware that the alliance she envisaged was only possible if environmentalists educated themselves about workers’ concerns, and realized that they could only work together on the principle of mutual aid and respect. It meant “rejecting ecological moralizing and developing some sensitivity to workers’ anxieties and concerns.” [14] She aimed to help transform Earth First! from a narrow-minded conservationist movement into an allied social force aiming to change social relations themselves, and the new and inventive way she went about it was undoubtedly the reason why she and her fellow organizer Darryl Cherney were subjected to an attempted bomb assassination in 1990, and were immediately charged with intentionally blowing themselves up by the FBI.

She was determined to fight the polarization of work-dependent people within communities, while addressing the class tensions and inequalities which are usually tucked under the carpet. They creatively engaged themselves with the neighboring population. [15] Workplace issues such as health and safety were used as a potent weapon against the logging companies.

“In her work, Bari forged real connections between the suffering of timber workers with ecological destruction today. The history of workers’ struggles becomes part of the history of ecology.” [16] She pushed for Earth First! to embrace non-violent direct action and renounce tree-spiking and any other tactics that could injure timber and mill workers, fighting against the “eco-terrorist” image that played into the hands of the companies.

“This system cannot be stopped by force. The only way I can even imagine stopping it is through massive non-cooperation.”

Advocating tactics beyond mere theatrical demonstrations and unthinking sabotage alike, she opposed violent insurrectionist notions which often occur when real sources of people’s power are neglected. In a Wobblyesque tone, Bari noted: “This system cannot be stopped by force. It is violent and ruthless beyond the capacity of any people’s resistance movement. The only way I can even imagine stopping it is through massive non-cooperation.” [17]

Consistently against blaming workers, and criticizing the lack of almost any class consciousness on the part of many Earth Firsters, she stressed they should be concentrating on the causes, not just effects; the root cause of ecological destruction and the destruction and exploitation of logging communities is corporate greed. It was necessary to make links between unsustainable overcutting and worker layoffs (“when the trees are gone, the jobs will be gone too”). This was connected to opposing speed-ups and pointing out environmental hazards that the workers and their communities were forced to endure. She nicely summed up the green unionist idea of inclusivity, wider networks of solidarity and strategic positioning against the power structures:

A revolutionary ecology movement should also organize among poor and working people. For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness. [18]

Dan Jakopovich is the main editor of the major new magazine of the participatory democratic Left on the ex-Yugoslav territory (mainly Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia) called Novi Plamen (http://www.noviplamen.org).

Notes

1. Jeff Shantz, Radical ecology and class struggle: A re-consideration. http://nefac.net/node/161
2. See for instance Bookchin, Purchase, Morris, Itchtey, Hart & Wilbert, Deep ecology and anarchism, Freedom Press, London, 1997, pp. 47–58.
3. See for instance Iain McKay, Anarchism and community politics, http://www.anarchism.ws/writers/anarcho/anarchism/community/communitypolitics.html
4. Jeff Shantz, op. cit.
5. Ibid.
6. A perspective on Sydney’s green ban campaign, 1970 – 74, Teaching heritage in V. Burgmann, Power and protest, 1993. http://www.teachingheritage.nsw.edu.au/d_reshaping/wd2_burgman.html
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. John Judis, Australian unions foil corporate developers, In These Times, January 5, 1977, p. 10. Ironically, the same page contains an article about how Swedish voters who relied on the ballot to block nuclear power were thwarted.
10. Jon Bekken, Anarcho-syndicalism and the environmental movement, Libertarian labor review, Issue 6, Winter 1989, pp.15–16.
11. Group of authors, Ecology and class — where there’s brass, there’s muck, Anarchist federation, London, p. 34.
12. V. Burgmann, Ibid.
13. David Pepper, Eco-socialism, from deep ecology to social justice, London, Routledge, 1993.
14. Jeff Shantz, Syndicalism, ecology and feminism: Judi Bari’s vision, http://www.cvoice.org/cv3schantz.htm
15. “This past summer, a three month long series of actions were held. The actions included nonviolent blockades of ports and of logging, demonstrations, picketing, humor and song, and reaching out to everyone in the communities. It was called Redwood Summer. 5000 people participated. The goal was, and is, to turn the timber industry to sustained-yield harvesting under community and worker control and ownership.” (Jeff Ditz, We Must Live in Harmony With the Planet, Libertarian labor review, Issue 10, Winter 1991, p. 25.
16. Jeff Shantz, Radical ecology and class struggle: A re-consideration.
17. Paul Buhle & Nicole Schulman (ed.), The Wobblies — A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Verso, New York, 2005
18. Ibid.

BP Oil: Murderer of Workers! Killer of the Planet!

2011-01-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

On April 20, 210, a fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig led to an explosion. This explosion lead to one of the the largest ecological disasters in American history, realizing more oil into the ocean then the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. What is often left is that the explosion the unleashed the horror onto Louisiana's coast also caused the death for 11 workers. There names where:

Jason Anderson
Aaron Dale Burkeen
Donald Clark
Stephen Curtis
Roy Wyatt Kemp
Karl Kleppinger
Gordon Jones (M-I SWACO)
Blair Manuel (M-I SWACO)
Dewey Revette
Shane Roshto
Adam Weise

(Their bodies have never been found, but all are presumed dead. You can leave condolences for the workers' families by clicking here.)

The most recent issue of Earth First! Journal, there is a very good article about how oil companies play off fears of unemployment to turn workers against environmentalists. The following is a quote:

When black plumes of oil began gushing forth from the silent bottom deep in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, everyone in South Louisiana reverted to the crisis mode we have all lived in for periods of time since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Our first question became "What can we do to help save our wetlands?" Thousands of willing Louisianians signed up to volunteer in the protection and cleanup efforts, and people began planning to carpool down the road to the coast to help out.

Like a mine explosion, an outbreak of smallpox, or a chestnut blight, BP's oil spill looked like just another disaster, a tragic mistake made by benevolent capitalists. But like those past tragedies, this oil spill is a predictable consequence of an industrial civilization where risks are not calculated by those who will face the consequences should something go wrong. There was no doubt that a deepwater oil spill could rob people of their landbase and their ability to feed themselves, but that consequence was considered an acceptable risk by those who do not live in South Louisiana: Those affected by a spill could just move to the city and work for money to buy their food if something did happen, right?. As is always the case, the people weighing these risks were not those who would be denied the ability to feed themselves; they were lawyers, CEOs and businessmen in corporate offices—where shrimp cocktail plates and grilled fish greet their conference room meetings exactly at 12:30 p.m., every day.

Are the benefits worth the risks? Ask the fishermen and shrimpers and bayou people who live off of the bounty of South Louisiana: is oil drilling worth the risk of destroying the ability of Louisianans to eat seafood and live on the coast? They were never consulted. These decisions were made in business offices, and after the proper campaign contributions, they were dutifully echoed in the halls of Congress. They can still be heard to this day in those halls, far from the shattered ecosystems of South Louisiana. They call for an end to the moratorium on new drilling, and use the fear of poverty by those who want jobs to amplify their charade. Even though their fishermen neighbors have been devastated by the spill, politicians scare oil workers that have no other employment options into echoing their big oil agenda. In spite of miles of toxic, oiled marshes, 5,000 dead pelicans and other birds, more than 500 dead sea turtles, and ten times the oil of the Exxon Valdez spill contaminating our homeland, the oil-funded fear-mongers in DC can only bring themselves to ask for more of the same and threaten us with poverty if we don’t give in.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

We are in a place where we need to develop an environmental movement that bridges the gap between workers economic concerns, and the rights of the earth. We cannot let big oil threaten us with poverty if we don't give into it's ecocide. The environment is not an "outside concern" of middle-class hippies.

The Myth of Venezuelan 'eco-socialism'

2011-01-26T20:46:00.000-08:00

This text, which appeared in El Libertario # 58, March-April 2010, critically examines what has been meaning the government of Hugo Chavez from an environmental point of view, highlighting the clear separation between the rhetoric speeches that are emitted from power and the specific facts being promoted and implemented.

Also in Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #54.

Venezuela: the myth of "Eco-socialism of the XXI Century"

[The author is Professor and Researcher at the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas. This contribution is the revised excerpt from a longer article appeared in Spanish in the Journal of Economics and Social Sciences (FACES-UCV) entitled "XXI Century Eco-socialism and Bolivarian Development Model: the myths of environmental sustainability and participatory democracy in Venezuela ", 2009, vol. 15, No. 1, pp.187-223 (Available on http://www.scielo.org.ve/pdf/rvecs/v15n1/art10.pdf), where quoted references are marked with appropriate details. Not included here for space reasons.]

Venezuela is a country of mining and extractive industry economy, whose model development has been based on the exploitation of oil and other non renewable natural resources that causes strong impacts on the environment. More than a decade, some researchers (Garcia Guadilla et al, 1997) strongly questioned the sustainability of development models in the nineties under the presidencies of C. A. Perez and R. Caldera. In the decade 1999-2009 the government has blamed the "savage capitalism and neoliberal policies” and consequently, property and private exploitation of resources for the environmental problems, despite that current exploitation of these resources and the design of economic policies that support the so-called Bolivarian Development Model reproduce these practices labelled as "neoliberal or savage capitalism", causing negative environmental impacts same strong or higher than in the past.

In the decade 1999-2009, the conflicts and protests for environmental post materialistic and materialistic demands, have had as main actors environmental organizations, indigenous communities, public sectors and even human rights organizations; basing its struggle on the 1999 Constitution, approved by a Constituent Process, that did incorporate participatory democracy and environmental rights, both socio-cultural and indigenous, among others (García Guadilla, 2001). Many of these rights have been violated, and participatory democracy has not resulted in an environmental democracy when resolving such conflicts, which in fact have been multiplied since Hugo Chavez became President of the Republic.

_Memorial of grievances_

Some of the most significant socio-environmental conflicts of this decade in Venezuela have to do with the negative impacts of oil exploitation and mining, and the potential impacts associated with energy mega-projects, proposed both nationally and internationally, to supposedly reduce the U.S. dependence and achieving the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean by the now called Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas People (ALBA).

The Bolivarian Development Model has been defined discursively by Government spokesmen including President Chavez as "sustainable, endogenous, equitable and participatory" (Fergusson undated; Francia 2007, Perez, undated; Velasco, 2005.2007; Ministery of Science and Technology, undated). The electoral tender made in 1998 by the then presidential candidate Hugo Chavez to support the struggles that environmentalists and indigenous were doing at the time around their conflicts, along with his environmental sustainability speech and criticism of the "neo-liberalism and wild capitalism ", created an expectation among the social movements that if he became president would set a vision more consonant with environmental sustainable development.

However, these expectations were frustrated because according to the announcement made in 2005 by President Chavez, it is contemplated to double the oil production for 2012 through the exploitation of 500,000 km2 of marine platform and over 500,000 km2 in mainland, plus the construction of new refineries and a gas complex in the Gulf of Paria. Other activities included in those development plans are mining extractions in the Imataca Forest Reserve, the substantial increase in coal mining in the Sierra de Perija and increased hydropower production for export to Brazil through electric power lines. The economic crisis along with the government inefficiency have delayed or halted those plans, but if they ever settle, it will affect almost the entire territory, including areas that are now environmentally protected by the laws and Constitution such as Canaima National Park where the Gran Sabana is placed, Imataca Forest Reserve and the basins of the country main rivers. These plans reflect continuity with the policies of previous governments, branded by President Chavez as "neoliberals, capitalists and predators of the environment."

As for the Caribbean and South America, Venezuela is one of the twelve member countries of the Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA), which provides 507 projects with high environmental and socio-cultural impacts spread over ten areas of development, involving construction of major works infrastructure (communication and transport, roads, dams, gas pipelines and waterways) to the length and breadth of South America (AMIGRANSA, 2005). The mega-plan Great Southern Gas Pipeline, one of the most important plans to achieve energy integration between Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, among other countries and base of the ALBA project, requires cross 8000 kilometres, so it would affect extremely fragile and bio diverse areas which, according with some researchers, are the latest environmental reserves that exist in Latin America. As in the previous case, these mega-plans are paralyzed or delayed due to the economic crisis, but if they’re activated, the impacts on the environment could be compared with the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), ideological mother of the ALBA.

_Resistance beyond rhetoric discourses_

The development model based in the exploitation of hydrocarbons that the Venezuelan government has proposed on a national level, for countries part of the ALBA and the South American and Caribbean region that participates in the IIRSA, has been strongly questioned by the environmental, indigenous and human rights movements due to the large scale environmental and socio-cultural impacts that will generate. In various discussions on the subject made in the World Social Forum carried out in Caracas in January 2006, indigenous social movements and environmentalists of Venezuela and the world expressed strong criticism against the negative effects of oil exploitation, being the largest mobilization of the Forum the march against exploitation and expansion of coal developments in the Sierra de Perija in support of life, environment, cultural identity and, in general, rights sanctioned in the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 (Soberania.org.ve, 2006). Currently, there are frequent protests against negative effects of oil and gas in Ecuador and Venezuela, and questioning via national and international digital environmental networks such as oilwatch.org, maippa.org, soberanía.org and amigransa.blogia.com; because these spaces are privileged and globalized electronic networks of resistance against the negative impacts of oil and gas exploitation in tropical countries.

In Venezuela as in the whole globalized world, the logic behind social movements is to face "neoliberal policy" whether the government has a "anti-neoliberal discourse", which means that the Bolivarian Development Model, like the other governments that are called left, can generate resistance and mobilization on the part of those movements which demand not only materialistic values but also respect for human rights, own culture, gender equity and a healthy environment. Therefore this can not be understood solely with the logic of neoliberalism or anti- neoliberalism, because both can go against the promotion of these values.

In the case of Venezuela, such resistance movements and proposals can come both from within and outside Chavez circles because of the big ideological heterogeneity of the groups supporting the president; and given the lack of a shared and clear ideological project within the Chavez movement, environmental policies strategies can be woven that do not necessarily have a reference in the anti-neoliberalism or neoliberalism. This could be the case of Venezuelans environmental and indigenous social movements that, while by definition are anti-neoliberal and many of its members support the president Chavez, transcend this dichotomy questioning the model of “civilization” and demand a transformation on the political, cultural, gender, social and environmental rationality.

So far, the great ideological heterogeneity and class differences between environmentalists, has hampered the formulation of collective proposals and has contributed to the estrangement between different social movements that in the past were articulated around strategic alliances of environmentalists. All this seems to affect the expanded environmental movement, the indigenous and human rights organizations, that has lost their power as a result. (García Guadilla & Lagorio, 2006): the missing of an objective reading on the socio-environmental crisis and the lack of a joint strategy about alternative collective proposals related with their identity and constitutionally support, have contributed to this weakening. While ideological alliances become unrealistic given the large heterogeneity and polarization, the protests against a predator model that cause big impacts on the environment and the proposals to "build the new meanings, languages and symbols "of the new model of civilization could be channelled through mobilizations, virtual or real, and new forms of resistance in communities.

_For a consistent Eco-Socialism_

The anti-neoliberal speech of the Bolivarian Development Model can be a first step towards the implementation of a more fair model; nonetheless the rationality implicit in the plans and policies planned within the XXI century Eco-socialism in Venezuela attempt against it, since the productivist, instrumental and developmental logic has not change. In addition, the conception of revolutionary transformation implicit in that model is not different from the '60s and, in any case, its guidelines come from above. Can we speak of justice, social equity and solidarity when the development model does not take into account the environmental dimension or intergenerational equity?, when it sacrifice the welfare and the right to cultural identity of its Indigenous communities for economic development, or a Latin American integration that transcends the expectations of welfare into the national actors involved?, when the model do not recognize the negative impacts that the designed mega-projects have (call these gas pipelines, oil pipelines, or large infrastructure projects) and whose economic costs, socio-cultural and environmental impacts are "invisible" for the sake of a new vision of Latin American integration?; can we speak of a revolutionary model that does not stimulate more equitable practices and relationships with the environment, their communities and future generations?

The construction of the XXI Century Eco-socialism in Venezuela passes, first, to overcome the deep gap between the rhetoric discourse and the reality of the development model; secondly, it requires that the desirable model of civilization is built collectively and not to be imposed from above as in the present and, finally, that his source of inspiration is the transition to a post-petroleum society, such as the one envisioned by Salvador De La Plaza, an eminent Venezuelan historian and politician, who warned about the harmful effects of oil and the need to control them to achieve national sovereignty. He implicitly noted that the oil industry to be sustainable requires that the environment benefits and costs arising from the exploitation of hydrocarbons needs to be listed in the "accounting" not only economically but also cultural and socio-environmental.

This view is not very different from Kovel & Lowry (2002) who in their Eco-socialist Manifesto indicate that a society with a high degree of harmony with nature should lead to "the extinction of dependence of the fossil fuels”, which they considered attached to industrial capitalism. Get rid of this dependence "can provide material base for the liberation of the oppressed countries by oil imperialism "and reduce global warming and other problems arising from the ecological crisis.

Maria Pilar Garcia Guadilla - mpgarcia@usb.ve

[Translation: Julio Pacheco]

El Libertario - ellibertario@nodo50.org - www.nodo50.org/ellibertario

Global Peasant Movement Left Seeing REDD

2011-01-23T16:44:00.000-08:00

From Common Cause (Onterio)

Global Peasant Movement Left Seeing REDD

by Chris Bisson

At the close of 2010, delegations from 184 governments assembled in Cancun, Mexico for the 16th gathering of the “Conference of Parties” (COP) under the banner of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This gathering of the global political class under the guise of climate change mitigation produced an agreement much heralded by bureaucrats, CEOs and journalists alike.

Though this agreement set a maximum cap of 2 degrees Celsius average global rise in temperature, it involves no binding agreements and relies almost entirely on market mechanisms to accomplish this. Most nefarious of all, the primary mechanism opted for is the “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” (REDD) programme – which is basically a system whereby rich industrialized countries bribe poor developing countries into cutting back on deforestation.

There are currently no specific details on where this money will come from, though theoretically it is supposed to be generated through a mixture of carbon markets and government funding. This combination, unoriginal to the continuous neoliberal colonization of the Global South, is sure to exacerbate levels of repression and dispossession of the world’s poorest, because there is no doubt where the money will be going; it is common knowledge that aid and foreign investment almost invariably ends up in the hands of multinational corporations and resource extractors. REDD’s only difference is that it doesn’t even try to hide this fact.

Another glaring problem with the program is the unequal capacity for ecological destruction that industrial countries will hold. For instance, in Canada, the government will be able to continue subsidizing the Athabasca Tar Sands, and multinational oil corporations will be able to further expand their operations, provided they increase their financial commitment to the REDD programme. Additionally, this agreement carries with it the risk of further complacency amongst the general public; Canadians may begin to approve of heavier greenhouse gas emissions, not understanding the fallacy of the supposed off-set, nor grasping the myriad other ecological implications of further development - such as the increased cancer rates being found downstream in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.

A final issue relates to how the terms set out in the programme define the mitigation of deforestation strictly as “conservation”. This form of “environmental” policy will result in the wholesale eviction and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples from regions they have lived in since time immemorial. In addition, those dependent on agroforestry for their livelihoods will have their lands confiscated in order to fit the agreement’s narrow criteria of conservation. Land will also face unjust redistribution, as it is converted into acceptably defined commodified “carbon sinks”, such as golf courses and eucalyptus plantations. These so-called carbon sinks will contain minimal biodiversity and result in what some have termed “green deserts”.

As a result of REDD’s prominence at the COP16 discussions, peasant farmers and allies worldwide rallied at the gates of the talks under the banner of La Via Campesina. Donned with green scarfs, they are a global coalition of 148 international peasant farmer organizations, including the National Farmer’s Union of Canada. La Via Campesina has been advocating for food sovereignty, ecological sustainability and peasant justice since 1999. La Via Campesina has organized against REDD specifically, because they argue it will be ineffective in mitigating climate change, threaten indigenous sovereignty, reward logging and development corporations, and lead to further privatization of the world’s forests.

As peoples worldwide continue to be dispossessed of their rights to land and their very means of production through such programmes as REDD, there can be little doubt that this movement will continue to organize in opposition to capitalism and the state. La Via Campesina is currently mobilizing for a worldwide movement for climate justice based on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth adopted at the World Peoples’ Conference in April, 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Throughout this process, they will seek to prove that sustainability can only be achieved through liberation from hierarchical structures of control - not through the creation of new “green” market schemes.

People for Sustainable Forests, Jobs, and Communities

2011-01-20T16:13:00.000-08:00

People for Sustainable Forests, Jobs, and Communities

On May 24, 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were on their way to an organizing meeting for Redwood Summer when a bomb exploded under the driver's seat of Bari's car in Oakland, California. Almost immediately the Oakland Police and FBI named Bari and Cherney as the prime suspects. After several weeks, they were forced to drop the charges against Bari and Cherney, but the bomber remains unknown and at large to this day. Much has been written about the bombing and subsequent investigations into who and why. Needless to say it threatened the work of Earth First! - IWW Local #1.
This Press Release was issued just days after a bomb exploded in Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney's car. The remarkable thing about this release is the number of Earth First! activists, loggers, and gyppo log employers that signed it. That demonstrates that Local #1 had already built bridges among the labor and environmental movements that were too strong to be broken, even in the face of catastrophic events.

PEOPLE FOR SUSTAINED FORESTS, JOBS, & COMMUNITIES!
TRUST: We agree when possible and disagree when necessary, but we will always respect each other's "given word". Without trust nothing is possible. We accept the philosophy that all people are innocent until proven guilty.
NON-VIOLENCE: We stress non-violence and condemn any person involved or associated with violent activity, including destruction of property.
CIVIL-DISOBEDIENCE:

(a) When Redwood Summer conducts a one-day shutdown of logging operations, the operator will be notified prior to the demonstration.

(b) When Redwood Summer finds it necessary to protect critical habitat areas, old-growth forests or violations of Timber Harvest Plans, a dialogue with the operator will be opened with the operator to communicate the intent.

(c) When Redwood Summer plans to demonstrate at public sites, CDF, mills, offices, etc., the demonstration may extend more than 1 day but will not block timber workers from their jobs, except at the export docks.

SUSTAINED YIELD: We are committed to sustaining the forests and will strive To improve the environment in every possible way.
RULE OF REASON: We agree that our goal is to sustain the forests of our county and to work to integrate the economic, ecologic (sic), and social needs of our local communities and all families.
This was signed by the following individuals who unanimously voted for the above statement on May 29, 1990 in Willits.
Art Harwood -- Harwood Products.
Jim Little -- Harwood Products.
Blake Bennett
Robert Pardini
Jerry Philbrick -- Philbrick, inc.
Wayne Hiatt -- Hiatt Logging, inc.
Anna Marie Stenberg -- IWW Local #1, Ft. Bragg Earth First!
Rick Cloninger -- Laytonville Earth First!
John Welch -- Cahto Wilderness Coalition
Pam Davis -- Somoma County Earth First!
Tom O'Neil -- North Coast Nonviolence Collective
Steven Day -- Eel River Habitat Conservation Planning
Naomi Wagner -- Sherwood Forest Protection Association
Judith Bailey -- Bailey's
Bill Bailey -- Bailey's
James Smith -- S-W Logging
Gary Ball -- Mendocino Environmental Center
Betty Ball -- Mendocino Environmental Center
Bill Evans -- Laytonville Earth First!
Steve Zuieback
Rich Padula -- R & J Lumber

Briarpatch: Teamsters and turtles, ten years on

2011-01-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

Letter from the Editor: Teamsters and turtles, ten years on

By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

“During the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, the phrase ‘Turtles & Teamsters, Together At Last’ jumped from protest sign to guiding philosophy. It symbolically described hundreds of thousands of Sierra Club activists (who dressed as sea turtles) and union members who marched to demand that human and environmental concerns be included in discussions of global free trade regimes. ‘Turtles & Teamsters’ also put a name to the increasingly common alliances between environmentalists and labor unions, which were no longer willing to accept that protecting the environment and jobs were mutually exclusive conditions.”

Jay McKinnon, LongBeachPolitics.org

Turtles and teamsters, together at last. Ten years after the anti-globalization movement shut down the World Trade Organization negotiations, that slogan, and the vision it embodied of trade unionists and environmentalists joining forces to halt neoliberal globalization in its tracks, continues to inspire activists in both camps. In the midst of the current global recession and a steadily worsening environmental situation, there are hopeful signs that, rather than retreating to their respective corners, trade unionists and environmentalists, particularly in the United States, are working more closely than ever to advance their common struggles.

The Blue Green Alliance, for example, was formed in 2006 by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, and now speaks for 8 million Americans when it lobbies for “good jobs, a clean environment and a green economy.” Environmental groups have thrown their support behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize, while unions are actively organizing in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, considered the most important piece of U.S. environmental legislation in years.

These signs of cross-movement solidarity are badly needed on both sides. Ten years after sea turtles and teamsters danced in the streets of Seattle, workers of all nations continue to be pitted against one another in a race-to-the-bottom scramble for jobs, and evidence continues to accumulate that humans are rapidly damaging the planet’s very ability to support life. As Robin Tennant-Wood argues in this issue, addressing the economic and environmental crises requires that we put our economies at the service of our communities and the environment, rather than the other way around.

Global problems require global solutions. If trade unionists and environmentalists in the Global North can make common cause with those, particularly those in the Global South, who bear the brunt of capitalism’s excesses, including slum dwellers, migrant workers, climate refugees, indigenous peoples, farmers and others, then we may witness in the coming years the formation of a global revolutionary subject capable of seizing the means of production and putting them to work for the planet, rather than against it.

Call it the planetariat: the proletarian revolutionary class of the 21st century, defined by its suffering at the hands of global capitalism and its demands for the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, health, work with dignity and a life in harmony with others and with the environment. It could be the planet’s last best hope. Whether it’s expressing itself in the efforts of American trade unionists to pass a climate change bill, in environmentalists lobbying for green-collar jobs, in First Nations blockades of mining and timber operations, in the food riots that rocked the cities of the Global South last year, in the self-organizing efforts of slum dwellers uncounted by any government or in farmers’ efforts to wrest control of the food system from transnational corporations, this nascent revolutionary subject, the planetariat, has already begun to plant the seeds of a new world in the cracked thoroughfares of the old.

Let us learn to recognize these seedlings when we see them, and nurture them towards maturity.

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Green Unionism - Arthur J. Miller

2011-01-17T10:16:00.000-08:00

Arthur J. Miller is a long time member of the IWW and is a noted writer of multiple of topics including environmentalism, indigenous struggles and labour rights. He has recently wrote a book on his experiences in the Maritime industry called "Yardbird Blues" (which can be found here). One of the chapters in Yardbird Blues deals directly with environmentalism and how to begin to make earth safe ships.

Green Unionism

Like it or not, we humans are dependent upon the environment for our survival. Fact is capitalism has been the most harmful human activity to the environment in history. We don't even know all the harmful effects of capitalist industry of the past 100 years or more. That fact can be seen in the reality of all that was buried, like industrial waste, and the long term process of that waste reaching the groundwater or the rivers and oceans. As capitalist industry developed the proliferated the use of known and unknown threats to the environment at an ever increasing rate. The amount of harmful substances created by industry has swelled significantly. Whereas in the past it took 50 years to produce the same amount of harmful substances that later it took 10 years to produce, today we produce that same amount of harmful substances in less than a year. And this tend will only increase.

Tens of thousands of new chemicals are produced every year and most of the testing of harmful effects is done by the same companies that profit from its production. Given all that we do know and realizing, all we don't know about the harm capitalist industry has on the environment, and given the fact that capitalism's overwhelming priority is profit at any experience, we should clearly understand that capitalism cannot be reformed to become truly green.

Much of the environmental movement, both liberal and radical reformists, is so overwhelmed by the problem that it cannot do much about it. It is having less of an effect than sticking its finger in a hole in a dike trying to hold back the water. It takes them so long to make any gains and in that time capitalist industry has increased the dangers many times over.

Given that capitalism and its multinational corporations have made such gains in its goal of global conquest of everything that can be exploited for profit and its global corporate facism to protect its conquest, makes the idea of reform even less possible.

This reality is hard to comprehend. So some resort to creating fantasies such as small acts by eco-warriors or so-called primitivism. Small acts will never add up to enough to solve any problem. Primitivism, even if 3/4s of the population was removed, what was left would strip the natural world of everything that it could in order to survive and there would be wars to fight over what natural resources were left. So this fantasy would be even worse than capitalism in it impact on the environment. They point to early tribalism, but what they fail to understand is even early tribalism took hundreds of years to develop and cannot be created over night.

All of the above looks rather grim. But there is a real solution to the environmental problem. Industrial change at the point of where the problems are create, at the point of production. And who is at the point of production doing the producing? Not the capitalists, but we workers.

Workers have a direct interest in making environmental changes in industry, not just because we depend upon the environment to survive, but also because more often than not, we are the first victims of hazardous production and more likely than not it is our communities that are first polluted.

We Wobblies have sought to organized at the point of production to gain greater control over our production with the goal of gaining complete control over our labor and thus end the exploitation of our class by capitalism. With greater control over our production should also come greater responsibility for the effects of our production on other working people, on our communities and on our plant Mother Earth.

Much of the so-called environmental movement has been blinded by class bigotry that they have not realized that the solution to to the harms created by capitalist industry can only be changed by changing capitalist industry itself at the point of production. They are too sold-out to class privilege to be real environmentalists, for if they were not they would get into industry and organize!

I believe than good unionism should take on the environmental problems, often this is called health and safety, with the same amount of struggle as any other union issues. We workers understand our industries and we know how to change our production. We do need good information from research workers on the problems and on safe industrial methods and we can use our union power to create industrial change including using direct action and green strikes if need be.

Based upon the IWW idea of organizing industry for day-to-day struggles, and that should include environmental struggles, as a means of organizing the power of production to the point that the organized power of the working class is greater than the organized power of the capitalist class and then withhold our production from the capitalists and take control over our labor, we can create a new society based upon those that do the labor control their labor and take responsibility for the effects of their labor and use production for the well-being of all, including Mother Earth.

The point of production is not the only place we working people need to organize. We need to organize in our working class communities. We need to educate, and organize through direct action to confront environmental problems and create alternatives to the madness of capitalist consumerism. We need to rebuild our communities based upon our real needs and not the profits of the capitalists. The organized struggles at the point of production and within our communities should stand hand in hand in solidarity with each other.

The real solutions to the environmental problems does not exist within fantasys, it does not exist within small acts of destruction. It does not exist within any political system and reforming it. The real solutions can be found in true green unionism.

The first step is to do a Toxic Index of our workplaces. While it is true that we don't know all the harmful effects industry has, we can begin to identify those possible dangers based upon information we can gain through MSDSs and other research. A Toxic Index would list known toxic hazards, how they are used in our workplaces, how we can improve the use of these hazards, and possible safe alternatives. No matter what it seems like, every workplace can improve its environmental safe way of doing things. For example, many places are very good at recycling, but parts of the recycling industry do use toxic processes and thus it would be better to reuse rather than recycle.

The next step could be a Waste Index. A great contributor in the over use of nature resources is needless waste. The best example of that is in over packaging. In the construction industry a lot of older construction material is discarded that could still be reused. Even the practice of demolition of older homes or buildings just to put up new ones to sell is a process we could add to a Waste Index. Look at what your workplaces dumps in the trash and if that could be recycled or reused? And then include alternatives to creating so much waste.

Last create an Environmental Responsibility Index. What are the environmental impacts of your workplace and what you produce on the environmental and the surrounding community? What can be done to make your workplace and what it produces earth safe? What are better alternatives?

Once you have your have all this information then you know where to begin your green union struggle. Different shopfloor union organizations have different committees like grievance committee, health and safety committee and so on. Each shopfloor organization should also have an environmental committee. Industrial training is also important. There is the training of job skills, health and safety and union training. There should also be environmental training.

Good community outreach is also important. Communities are often put into danger by the industries around them. Thus it makes very good sense to outreach to communities to gain their support of your green union struggles on the job. Also, it is important to hear the concerns of communities as to the impact that industry has on them. You could even organize a union/community solidarity council to be able to work together on common issues.

Some of the changes you can make by direct action on the job. Back in the old days of the IWW, some workers won the 8 hour day by just quit working after 8 hours. This tactic can be used in green unionism by just doing your jobs, where you can, by doing earth safe work. You and your Fellow Workers can refuse to pollute the environment. At contract negotiation time you can include environmental issues in your contracts. And if the situation calls for it you can even have a green strike if needed.

Green unionism will only work if we have real worker solidarity. When workers through green unionism act we need to stand with them in the same way we do with any other issue. This needs to be our commitment and not fall for the tricks of so-called reformists of the system. Like so often happens their so-called reform only takes away from us and gives more power to the state that functions for the bosses. Our working class environment struggle is to important to have such political tricks played on us. Thus our struggle needs to be base upon true Principles of Labor Solidarity. An example of what those principles could look like are below.

Principles of Labor Solidarity:

Every worker on every job throughout the world has a right to organize with their fellow workers in their common interests.
Every worker throughout the world has a right to a living wage, safe and healthy working conditions, and health care coverage.
Every worker throughout the world has a right to labor free of harassment and discrimination based upon race, sex, nationality, religion, or any other form of bigotry.
Every worker throughout the world has the right to refuse to participate in or support wars where working people of one country are used to fight and kill working people of another country.
Every worker throughout the world has the right and responsibility to protect the environment of our world.
Every worker throughout the world has the right to withhold their labor as means to advance the above principles.
No worker throughout the world should ever be a scab.
No worker should ever cross the picket line of striking workers.
No worker should ever supply a shop on strike with goods or services.
No worker should ever handle scab goods.
No worker should ever consume scab goods.
No worker should ever do the work that striking workers would have done if they were not on strike.
Whenever workers are faced with government repression because of their right to organize and strike then all workers have the right to withhold their labor from the companies and industries profiting from that repression and a universal boycott should be in place on all goods going to and from that country, and on the companies profiting from the repression in that country.
Every strike or job action is a class action and should be supported by direct solidarity unless that action violates the Principles of Labor Solidarity.

Labor Solidarity needs to become a part of international working class culture and practiced on a daily basis.

Capitalism by its very nature cannot control itself. Even when the capitalists understand the impact they have on people and the earth, their driven lust for profit drives them on no matter what the cost is. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It has been the historic interest of working people to end the exploitation by the capitalists and gain control over our labor. Worker self-management comes with a responsibility to end exploitation and to produce for needs rather than profit. It is also an important part of worker self-management for workers to take responsibility for what they produce, how it is produced and what it is used for. And part of that responsibility of production needs to include the impact our production has on the environment. Thus the new union movement that is needed must include Green Unionism as a fundamental part of it.

Arthur J. Miller

People's Agreement from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

2011-01-15T22:15:00.000-08:00

While not a green syndicalist text, we repost this piece as an important part of a developing eco-socialist critique coming out of the global South. Posting does not imply agreement or endorsement of the Bolivian government, it's ideology or it's president Evo Morales.

What is important to take from this piece is:

Laying the blame for climate change directly at the feet of the capitalist system of production, distribution and greed.
The inter-connectivity of environmental degradation and the destruction of indigenous people's communities
The Centrality of capitalist agribusiness/food production and distribution in the process of distruction of the Planet
Total rejection of "green capitalist" and band-aid technological fixes that continue the systems of oppression and degradation.

World People’s Conference on Climate Change

and the Rights of Mother Earth

April 22nd, Cochabamba, Bolivia

PEOPLES AGREEMENT

Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.

If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from hunger would increase dramatically, a figure that already exceeds 1.02 billion people. The corporations and governments of the so-called “developed” countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have led us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.

We confront the terminal crisis of a civilizing model that is patriarchal and based on the submission and destruction of human beings and nature that accelerated since the industrial revolution.

The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.

Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials, and human beings into consumers and a means of production, into people that are seen as valuable only for what they own, and not for what they are.

Capitalism requires a powerful military industry for its processes of accumulation and imposition of control over territories and natural resources, suppressing the resistance of the peoples. It is an imperialist system of colonization of the planet.

Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings. And in order for there to be balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings. We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of Indigenous Peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of “Living Well,” recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship. To face climate change, we must recognize Mother Earth as the source of life and forge a new system based on the principles of:

harmony and balance among all and with all things;
complementarity, solidarity, and equality;
collective well-being and the satisfaction of the basic necessities of all;
people in harmony with nature;
recognition of human beings for what they are, not what they own;
elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism and interventionism;
peace among the peoples and with Mother Earth;

The model we support is not a model of limitless and destructive development. All countries need to produce the goods and services necessary to satisfy the fundamental needs of their populations, but by no means can they continue to follow the path of development that has led the richest countries to have an ecological footprint five times bigger than what the planet is able to support. Currently, the regenerative capacity of the planet has been already exceeded by more than 30 percent. If this pace of over-exploitation of our Mother Earth continues, we will need two planets by the year 2030. In an interdependent system in which human beings are only one component, it is not possible to recognize rights only to the human part without provoking an imbalance in the system as a whole. To guarantee human rights and to restore harmony with nature, it is necessary to effectively recognize and apply the rights of Mother Earth. For this purpose, we propose the attached project for the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, in which it’s recorded that:

The right to live and to exist;
The right to be respected;
The right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue it’s vital cycles and processes free of human alteration;
The right to maintain their identity and integrity as differentiated beings, self-regulated and interrelated;
The right to water as the source of life;
The right to clean air;
The right to comprehensive health;
The right to be free of contamination and pollution, free of toxic and radioactive waste;
The right to be free of alterations or modifications of it’s genetic structure in a manner that threatens it’s integrity or vital and healthy functioning;
The right to prompt and full restoration for violations to the rights acknowledged in this Declaration caused by human activities.

The “shared vision” seeks to stabilize the concentrations of greenhouse gases to make effective the Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which states that “the stabilization of greenhouse gases concentrations in the atmosphere to a level that prevents dangerous anthropogenic inferences for the climate system.” Our vision is based on the principle of historical common but differentiated responsibilities, to demand the developed countries to commit with quantifiable goals of emission reduction that will allow to return the concentrations of greenhouse gases to 300 ppm, therefore the increase in the average world temperature to a maximum of one degree Celsius.

Emphasizing the need for urgent action to achieve this vision, and with the support of peoples, movements and countries, developed countries should commit to ambitious targets for reducing emissions that permit the achievement of short-term objectives, while maintaining our vision in favor of balance in the Earth’s climate system, in agreement with the ultimate objective of the Convention.

The “shared vision for long-term cooperative action” in climate change negotiations should not be reduced to defining the limit on temperature increases and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but must also incorporate in a balanced and integral manner measures regarding capacity building, production and consumption patterns, and other essential factors such as the acknowledging of the Rights of Mother Earth to establish harmony with nature.

Developed countries, as the main cause of climate change, in assuming their historical responsibility, must recognize and honor their climate debt in all of its dimensions as the basis for a just, effective, and scientific solution to climate change. In this context, we demand that developed countries:

Restore to developing countries the atmospheric space that is occupied by their greenhouse gas emissions. This implies the decolonization of the atmosphere through the reduction and absorption of their emissions;
Assume the costs and technology transfer needs of developing countries arising from the loss of development opportunities due to living in a restricted atmospheric space;
Assume responsibility for the hundreds of millions of people that will be forced to migrate due to the climate change caused by these countries, and eliminate their restrictive immigration policies, offering migrants a decent life with full human rights guarantees in their countries;
Assume adaptation debt related to the impacts of climate change on developing countries by providing the means to prevent, minimize, and deal with damages arising from their excessive emissions;
Honor these debts as part of a broader debt to Mother Earth by adopting and implementing the United Nations Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.

The focus must not be only on financial compensation, but also on restorative justice, understood as the restitution of integrity to our Mother Earth and all its beings.

We deplore attempts by countries to annul the Kyoto Protocol, which is the sole legally binding instrument specific to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries.

We inform the world that, despite their obligation to reduce emissions, developed countries have increased their emissions by 11.2% in the period from 1990 to 2007.

During that same period, due to unbridled consumption, the United States of America has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 16.8%, reaching an average of 20 to 23 tons of CO2 per-person. This represents 9 times more than that of the average inhabitant of the “Third World,” and 20 times more than that of the average inhabitant of Sub-Saharan Africa.

We categorically reject the illegitimate “Copenhagen Accord” that allows developed countries to offer insufficient reductions in greenhouse gases based in voluntary and individual commitments, violating the environmental integrity of Mother Earth and leading us toward an increase in global temperatures of around 4°C.

The next Conference on Climate Change to be held at the end of 2010 in Mexico should approve an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol for the second commitment period from 2013 to 2017 under which developed countries must agree to significant domestic emissions reductions of at least 50% based on 1990 levels, excluding carbon markets or other offset mechanisms that mask the failure of actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

We require first of all the establishment of a goal for the group of developed countries to achieve the assignment of individual commitments for each developed country under the framework of complementary efforts among each one, maintaining in this way Kyoto Protocol as the route to emissions reductions.

The United States, as the only Annex 1 country on Earth that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, has a significant responsibility toward all peoples of the world to ratify this document and commit itself to respecting and complying with emissions reduction targets on a scale appropriate to the total size of its economy.
We the peoples have the equal right to be protected from the adverse effects of climate change and reject the notion of adaptation to climate change as understood as a resignation to impacts provoked by the historical emissions of developed countries, which themselves must adapt their modes of life and consumption in the face of this global emergency. We see it as imperative to confront the adverse effects of climate change, and consider adaptation to be a process rather than an imposition, as well as a tool that can serve to help offset those effects, demonstrating that it is possible to achieve harmony with nature under a different model for living.

It is necessary to construct an Adaptation Fund exclusively for addressing climate change as part of a financial mechanism that is managed in a sovereign, transparent, and equitable manner for all States. This Fund should assess the impacts and costs of climate change in developing countries and needs deriving from these impacts, and monitor support on the part of developed countries. It should also include a mechanism for compensation for current and future damages, loss of opportunities due to extreme and gradual climactic events, and additional costs that could present themselves if our planet surpasses ecological thresholds, such as those impacts that present obstacles to “Living Well.”

The “Copenhagen Accord” imposed on developing countries by a few States, beyond simply offering insufficient resources, attempts as well to divide and create confrontation between peoples and to extort developing countries by placing conditions on access to adaptation and mitigation resources. We also assert as unacceptable the attempt in processes of international negotiation to classify developing countries for their vulnerability to climate change, generating disputes, inequalities and segregation among them.

The immense challenge humanity faces of stopping global warming and cooling the planet can only be achieved through a profound shift in agricultural practices toward the sustainable model of production used by indigenous and rural farming peoples, as well as other ancestral models and practices that contribute to solving the problem of agriculture and food sovereignty. This is understood as the right of peoples to control their own seeds, lands, water, and food production, thereby guaranteeing, through forms of production that are in harmony with Mother Earth and appropriate to local cultural contexts, access to sufficient, varied and nutritious foods in complementarity with Mother Earth and deepening the autonomous (participatory, communal and shared) production of every nation and people.

Climate change is now producing profound impacts on agriculture and the ways of life of indigenous peoples and farmers throughout the world, and these impacts will worsen in the future.

Agribusiness, through its social, economic, and cultural model of global capitalist production and its logic of producing food for the market and not to fulfill the right to proper nutrition, is one of the principal causes of climate change. Its technological, commercial, and political approach only serves to deepen the climate change crisis and increase hunger in the world. For this reason, we reject Free Trade Agreements and Association Agreements and all forms of the application of Intellectual Property Rights to life, current technological packages (agrochemicals, genetic modification) and those that offer false solutions (biofuels, geo-engineering, nanotechnology, etc.) that only exacerbate the current crisis.

We similarly denounce the way in which the capitalist model imposes mega-infrastructure projects and invades territories with extractive projects, water privatization, and militarized territories, expelling indigenous peoples from their lands, inhibiting food sovereignty and deepening socio-environmental crisis.
We demand recognition of the right of all peoples, living beings, and Mother Earth to have access to water, and we support the proposal of the Government of Bolivia to recognize water as a Fundamental Human Right.

The definition of forests used in the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which includes plantations, is unacceptable. Monoculture plantations are not forests. Therefore, we require a definition for negotiation purposes that recognizes the native forests, jungles and the diverse ecosystems on Earth.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples must be fully recognized, implemented and integrated in climate change negotiations. The best strategy and action to avoid deforestation and degradation and protect native forests and jungles is to recognize and guarantee collective rights to lands and territories, especially considering that most of the forests are located within the territories of indigenous peoples and nations and other traditional communities.

We condemn market mechanisms such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and its versions + and + +, which are violating the sovereignty of peoples and their right to prior free and informed consent as well as the sovereignty of national States, the customs of Peoples, and the Rights of Nature.

Polluting countries have an obligation to carry out direct transfers of the economic and technological resources needed to pay for the restoration and maintenance of forests in favor of the peoples and indigenous ancestral organic structures. Compensation must be direct and in addition to the sources of funding promised by developed countries outside of the carbon market, and never serve as carbon offsets. We demand that countries stop actions on local forests based on market mechanisms and propose non-existent and conditional results. We call on governments to create a global program to restore native forests and jungles, managed and administered by the peoples, implementing forest seeds, fruit trees, and native flora. Governments should eliminate forest concessions and support the conservation of petroleum deposits in the ground and urgently stop the exploitation of hydrocarbons in forestlands.

We call upon States to recognize, respect and guarantee the effective implementation of international human rights standards and the rights of indigenous peoples, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under ILO Convention 169, among other relevant instruments in the negotiations, policies and measures used to meet the challenges posed by climate change. In particular, we call upon States to give legal recognition to claims over territories, lands and natural resources to enable and strengthen our traditional ways of life and contribute effectively to solving climate change.

We demand the full and effective implementation of the right to consultation, participation and prior, free and informed consent of indigenous peoples in all negotiation processes, and in the design and implementation of measures related to climate change.

Environmental degradation and climate change are currently reaching critical levels, and one of the main consequences of this is domestic and international migration. According to projections, there were already about 25 million climate migrants by 1995. Current estimates are around 50 million, and projections suggest that between 200 million and 1 billion people will become displaced by situations resulting from climate change by the year 2050.

Developed countries should assume responsibility for climate migrants, welcoming them into their territories and recognizing their fundamental rights through the signing of international conventions that provide for the definition of climate migrant and require all States to abide by abide by determinations.

Establish an International Tribunal of Conscience to denounce, make visible, document, judge and punish violations of the rights of migrants, refugees and displaced persons within countries of origin, transit and destination, clearly identifying the responsibilities of States, companies and other agents.

Current funding directed toward developing countries for climate change and the proposal of the Copenhagen Accord is insignificant. In addition to Official Development Assistance and public sources, developed countries must commit to a new annual funding of at least 6% of GDP to tackle climate change in developing countries. This is viable considering that a similar amount is spent on national defense, and that 5 times more have been put forth to rescue failing banks and speculators, which raises serious questions about global priorities and political will. This funding should be direct and free of conditions, and should not interfere with the national sovereignty or self-determination of the most affected communities and groups.

In view of the inefficiency of the current mechanism, a new funding mechanism should be established at the 2010 Climate Change Conference in Mexico, functioning under the authority of the Conference of the Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and held accountable to it, with significant representation of developing countries, to ensure compliance with the funding commitments of Annex 1 countries.

It has been stated that developed countries significantly increased their emissions in the period from 1990 to 2007, despite having stated that the reduction would be substantially supported by market mechanisms.
The carbon market has become a lucrative business, commodifying our Mother Earth. It is therefore not an alternative for tackle climate change, as it loots and ravages the land, water, and even life itself.
The recent financial crisis has demonstrated that the market is incapable of regulating the financial system, which is fragile and uncertain due to speculation and the emergence of intermediary brokers. Therefore, it would be totally irresponsible to leave in their hands the care and protection of human existence and of our Mother Earth.

We consider inadmissible that current negotiations propose the creation of new mechanisms that extend and promote the carbon market, for existing mechanisms have not resolved the problem of climate change nor led to real and direct actions to reduce greenhouse gases. It is necessary to demand fulfillment of the commitments assumed by developed countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change regarding development and technology transfer, and to reject the “technology showcase” proposed by developed countries that only markets technology. It is essential to establish guidelines in order to create a multilateral and multidisciplinary mechanism for participatory control, management, and evaluation of the exchange of technologies. These technologies must be useful, clean and socially sound. Likewise, it is fundamental to establish a fund for the financing and inventory of technologies that are appropriate and free of intellectual property rights. Patents, in particular, should move from the hands of private monopolies to the public domain in order to promote accessibility and low costs.

Knowledge is universal, and should for no reason be the object of private property or private use, nor should its application in the form of technology. Developed countries have a responsibility to share their technology with developing countries, to build research centers in developing countries for the creation of technologies and innovations, and defend and promote their development and application for “living well.” The world must recover and re-learn ancestral principles and approaches from native peoples to stop the destruction of the planet, as well as promote ancestral practices, knowledge and spirituality to recuperate the capacity for “living well” in harmony with Mother Earth.

Considering the lack of political will on the part of developed countries to effectively comply with commitments and obligations assumed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, and given the lack of a legal international organism to guard against and sanction climate and environmental crimes that violate the Rights of Mother Earth and humanity, we demand the creation of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal that has the legal capacity to prevent, judge and penalize States, industries and people that by commission or omission contaminate and provoke climate change.

Supporting States that present claims at the International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal against developed countries that fail to comply with commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol including commitments to reduce greenhouse gases.

We urge peoples to propose and promote deep reform within the United Nations, so that all member States comply with the decisions of the International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal.

The future of humanity is in danger, and we cannot allow a group of leaders from developed countries to decide for all countries as they tried unsuccessfully to do at the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. This decision concerns us all. Thus, it is essential to carry out a global referendum or popular consultation on climate change in which all are consulted regarding the following issues; the level of emission reductions on the part of developed countries and transnational corporations, financing to be offered by developed countries, the creation of an International Climate Justice Tribunal, the need for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and the need to change the current capitalist system. The process of a global referendum or popular consultation will depend on process of preparation that ensures the successful development of the same.

In order to coordinate our international action and implement the results of this “Accord of the Peoples,” we call for the building of a Global People’s Movement for Mother Earth, which should be based on the principles of complementarity and respect for the diversity of origin and visions among its members, constituting a broad and democratic space for coordination and joint worldwide actions.

To this end, we adopt the attached global plan of action so that in Mexico, the developed countries listed in Annex 1 respect the existing legal framework and reduce their greenhouse gases emissions by 50%, and that the different proposals contained in this Agreement are adopted.

Finally, we agree to undertake a Second World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2011 as part of this process of building the Global People’s Movement for Mother Earth and reacting to the outcomes of the Climate Change Conference to be held at the end of this year in Cancun, Mexico.

Green Syndicalism: An Alternative Red–Green Vision

2011-01-14T08:55:00.000-08:00

Green Syndicalism:
An Alternative Red–Green Vision
JEFF SHANTZ

Most approaches to Red and Green (labour and environmentalist) alliances have taken Marxian perspectives, to the exclusion of anarchism and libertarian socialism. Recent developments, however, have given voice to a “syndical ecology” or what some within the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) call “green syndicalism”. Green syndicalism highlights certain points of similarity between anarcho-syndicalism (revolutionary unionism) and radical ecology. These include, but are by no means limited to, decentralisation, regionalism, direct action, autonomy, pluralism and federation. The article discusses the theoretical and practical implications of syndicalism made green.

Introduction

Recently, interesting convergences of radical union movements with ecology have been reported in Europe and North America. These developments have given voice to a radical ‘syndical ecology’, or what some within the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) call “green syndicalism” [Kauffman and Ditz,. 1992]. The emergent greening of syndicalist discourses is perhaps most significant in the theoretical questions raised regarding anarcho-syndicalism and ecology, indeed questions about the possibilities for a radical convergence of social movements. While most attempts to form labour and environmentalist alliances have pursued Marxian approaches, Adkin [1992a: 148] suggests that more compelling solutions might be expected from anarchists and libertarian socialists. Still others [Pepper, 1993; Heider, 1994; Purchase, 1994: 1997a; Shantz and Adam, 1999] suggest that greens should pay more attention to anarcho-syndicalist ideas.

Pepper argues [1993: 198] that an infusion of anarcho-syndicalism might shake up the contemporary green movement in North America just as syndicalism shook up the labour movement of the 1910s. Martel [1997] argues that confronting ‘jobs versus environment’ blackmail may require nothing less than militant labour-based organisations, arming workers with the necessary weapons to confront the power of capital and to strike over ecological concerns. Still, little has been said about green syndicalism and its specific red–green vision. This article attempts to correct that oversight by offering a discussion of the varied perspectives, the different theoretical and practical strands, which might make up a syndicalist ecology.

The Emergence of Green Syndicalism

In Australia, the ‘green bans’ movement showed a number of features which were suggestive of a syndical ecology although the primary union organisation behind the green bans was not a syndicalist organisation [Burgmann, 2000; Burgmann and Burgmann, 1998]. Beginning in the early 1970s in New South Wales, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) worked to stop the destruction of green spaces, historic districts and working-class communities by refusing to work on those projects. The BLF did all of this against its own economic interests, taking advantage of labourers’ newfound economic clout in the midst of a massive development boom which was transforming Sydney and destroying low-income neighbourhoods. Between 1971 and 1975 more than 49 bans halted projects worth more than A$5 billion [Burgmann, 2000]. Forest and island reserves were defended and parks were saved from destruction. In what must have been a blow to the national bourgeoisie, the bans successfully ended plans for a car park adjacent to the Sydney Opera House which would have threatened the root systems of Moreton Bay Fig trees. Perhaps most significantly, the BLF was able to make the connection between destruction of the environment and the destruction of working-class communities. The union opposed the eviction of tenants and refused to take part in gentrification projects. Significantly the union’s actions inspired a groundswell of local opposition to redevelopment [Anderson and Jacobs, 1999].

During 2000 the Electrical Trades Union resurrected the green ban tactic in an effort to halt construction of a 34-metre light tower near the Melbourne Zoo. The union claimed that the light towers would harm the sleeping and breeding patterns of some animals. In September 2001 a number of community actions were held to support green bans against construction of a gas fired power generator and its pipeline in Somerton, Victoria because the pipeline would destroy the habitat of the endangered Growling Grass Frog.

In the early 1990s Roussopoulos [1991] noted the emergence of a green syndicalist discourse in France within the Confédération Nationale du Travail (CNT). Expressions of a green syndicalism were also observed in Spain [Marshall, 1993]. There the Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT) adopted social ecology as part of its struggle for ‘a future in which neither the person nor the planet is exploited’ [Marshall, 1993: 468].

Between 31 March and 1 April 2001, the CGT sponsored an international meeting of more than one dozen syndicalist and libertarian organisations including the CNT and the Swedish Workers Centralorganization (SAC). Among the various outcomes of the meeting were the formation of a Libertarian International Solidarity (LIS) network, commitments of financial and political support to develop a recycling cooperative and the adoption of a libertarian manifesto, ‘What Type of Anarchism for the 21st Century’, in which ecology takes a very crucial place [Hargis, 2001]. The real contribution of these decisions may not be known until the next congress scheduled for 2003 in France.

Among the more interesting of recent attempts to articulate solidarity across the ecology and workers’ movements were those involving Earth First! activist Judi Bari and her efforts to build alliances with workers in order to save old-growth forest in Northern California. Bari sought to learn from the organising and practices of the IWW to see if a radical ecology movement might be built along anarcho-syndicalist lines. In so doing she tried to bring a radical working-class perspective to the agitational practices of Earth First! as a way to overcome the conflicts between environmentalists and timber workers which kept them from fighting the corporate logging firms which were killing both forests and jobs. The organisation which she helped form, IWW/Earth First Local 1, eventually built a measure of solidarity between radical environmentalists and loggers which resulted in the protection of the Headwaters old-growth forest which had been slated for clearcutting [Shantz, 1999].

The IWW’s Greenward Turn

In 1991 the Wobblies (IWW), following a union-wide vote, changed the preamble to the IWW constitution for the first time since 1908. The preamble now reads as follows:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among

millions of the working people and the few, who make up the

employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers

of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of

production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the
earth [emphasis added].

These seven words present a significant shift in strategy regarding industrial unionism and considerations of what is to be meant by work. At the same time, their embeddedness within the constitution’s original class struggle narrative draws a mythic connection with the history of the IWW and the practices of revolutionary syndicalism.

The greening of the IWW was more explicitly expressed through a statement issued by the General Assembly at the time of the preamble change. It is worth quoting at length.

In addition to the exploitation of labor, industrial society creates wealth by exploiting the earth and non-human species. Just as the capitalists value the working class only for their labor, so they value the earth and non-human species only for their economic usefulness to humans. This has created such an imbalance that the life support systems of the earth are on the verge of collapse. The working class bears the brunt of this degradation by being forced to produce, consume and live in the toxic environment created by this abuse. Human society must recognize that all beings have a right to exist for their own sake, and that humans must learn to live in balance with the rest of nature.

This philosophical shift has been simultaneous with the recent upswing in IWW activism. While the IWW has never returned to the numbers of members it enjoyed in the 1910–20s, the last decade has seen a revitalisation of the radical union as it has organised a number of workplaces in North America. As it was historically, the IWW is a union which organises the unorganised including the unemployed. Significantly, the increase in direct actions around ecology have come from the largest workplace branches, not simply students or unemployed members. Ecological activism has encouraged a decentralisation of formerly centrist union projects along with a revival of contacts with other industrial unions.

Murray Bookchin’s Anti-Syndicalism

Upon first reading it might appear curious to seek an ecological or antiindustrialist theoretic within anarcho-syndicalism. Syndicalism is supposedly just another version of narrow economism, still constrained by workerist assumptions. Certainly, that is the criticism consistently raised by social ecology guru Murray Bookchin [1980, 1987, 1993, 1997].

Bookchin’s work has served as a major focal point for much discussion, at least in libertarian Left and anarchist environmental circles. Even, Marxist ecologists, in journals such as Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, have given much time to discussions of Bookchin’s writings.

His recent [1995] re-discovery of social anarchism aside, social ecologist Bookchin has displayed a longstanding hostility to the possibilities for positive working class contributions to social movement struggles.

Bookchin’s critique rightly engages a direct confrontation with productivist visions of ecological or socialist struggles which, still captivated by illusions of progress, accept industrialism and capitalist technique while rejecting the capitalist uses to which they are applied [Rudig, 1985; Blackie, 1990; Pepper, 1993]. These productivist discourses do not extend qualitatively different forms, but merely argue for proletarian control of existing forms.

Bookchin’s critique of the workplace, by asserting the inseparability of industry from its development and articulation through technology, offers a tentative beginning for a post-Marxist discussion of productive relations and the obstacles or possibilities they might pose for ecology.

Severe limits to Bookchin’s social theorising are encountered, however, within the conclusions he draws in his attempt to derive a theory of workers’ (non)activism from his critique of production relations. Bookchin [1987: 187] makes a grand, and perilous, leap from a critical anti-productivism to an argument, couched within a larger broadside against workers, that struggles engaged around the factory give ‘social and psychological priority to the worker precisely where he or she is most co-joined to capitalism and most debased as a human being – at the job site’.

In his view, workers become radical despite the fact that they work rather than through their work experiences.1 He concludes that the efforts of socialists or anarcho-syndicalists who might organise and agitate within the realm of the workplace are typically only strengthening those very same aspects of workers’ identities which must be overcome in the radical transformation of social relations. And, moreover, this is correct in so far as workplace discourses are limited to purely corporatist demands of a quantitative nature [Gramsci, 1971; Telò, 1982]. However, within Bookchin’s schema the Marxist error is repeated, only this time in reverse.

For Bookchin, workers’ relations to capital, rather than being objectively antagonistic as in the Marxist rendering, are depicted as being necessarily conciliatory. In each case workers’ positions are drawn as one-sided, derived from a supposedly external and objective realm, in abstraction from the diversity of their often contradictory expressions and outside of any transformative articulation. Bookchin, as with the Marxists, substitutes an abstraction ‘the proletariat’ for the complex web of subject positions – including that of ecologist, feminist and worker – constitutive of specific subjectivities.

Bookchin is correct in asserting that categories ‘worker’ and ‘jobs’ as presently constituted are incompatible with ecological survival. Likewise, industrial production has already been rendered ecologically obsolete. But how can the authoritarian ‘realm of economic necessity’ [Bookchin, 1980] ever be overcome except through direct political action at the very site of unfreedom? There is no disagreement with Bookchin as regards the importance of overcoming the factory system; a difference emerges over the position of workers’ self-directed activism in any democratic articulation toward such an overcoming. It cannot be expected, except where an authoritarian articulation is constituted, that industrialism will be replaced by non-hierarchical, ecological relations without workers’ confronting the factory system in which they are enmeshed.

It is difficult to follow the logic of Bookchin’s leap from a critique of industrialism as ‘social relations’ to his explicit rejection of any and all working-class organisation. Bookchin insists upon a grass-roots politics, including any of the new social movements, but he is unclear how a movement might be grassroots and communitarian while at the same time excluding an articulation with people in their subject-positions as workers.

What he actually recommends sounds more like the radical elitism so often attributed to ecology [Adkin, 1992a; 1992b]. Bookchin’s rigid dualism of community/workplace further interferes with his critique of syndicalism. The idea, which Bookchin attributes to syndicalism, that social life could be organised from the factory floor is but a simplistic caricature. ‘This caveat is, of course, pertinent to all institutions comprising civil society. It would be impossible to nurture and sustain democratic impulses if schools, families, churches, and the like, promoted an antithetical ethos’ [Guarasci and Peck, 1987: 71]. While he rightly criticises those, such as Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, who permit a wilderness/culture duality he falls into a similar trap himself in his vulgar separation of workplace and community.2

Finally, Bookchin’s biases are especially curious in light of his own ecological conclusion regarding the resolution of ecological problems: ‘[t]he bases for conflicting interests in society must themselves be confronted and resolved in a revolutionary manner. The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared’ [1987: 172]. This provides a crucial beginning for a radical convergence of ecological social relations articulated beyond a ‘jobs versus environment’ construction. In turn it must be recognised, even if Bookchin himself fails to do so, that questions of ownership and control of the earth are nothing if not questions of class.

Theoretical Syndicalism and Radical Working-Class Histories

For his part, R.J. Holton [1980] explicitly rejects the characterisation of syndicalism as economistic. He suggests that such perspectives result from the gross misreading of historic syndicalist struggles. In the works of Melvyn Dubofsky [1969], Jeremy Brecher [1972], David Montgomery [1974], and Kenneth Tucker [1991] one finds substantial evidence against the positions taken by radical ecologists such as Bookchin, Dave Foreman [1991] and Paul Watson [1994]. Guarasci and Peck [1987] stress the significance of this class struggle historiography as a corrective to theorising which objectifies labour. Tucker [1991] argues that much of the theoretical distance separating new movements from workers might be attributed to a refusal to explore syndicalist strategies.

Historic anarcho-syndicalist campaigns have provided significant evidence that class struggles entail more than battles over corporatist concerns carried out at the level of the factory [Kornblugh, 1964; Brecher, 1972; Thompson and Murfin, 1976; DeCaux, 1978; Tucker, 1991]. In an earlier article, Hobsbawm [1979] identifies syndicalist movements as displaying attitudes of hostility towards the bureaucratic control of work, concerns over local specificity and techniques of spontaneous militancy and direct action. Similar expressions of radicalism have also characterised the practices of ecology. Class struggles have, in different instances and over varied terrain, been articulated to engage the broader manifestations of domination and control constituted alongside of the enclosure and ruthlessly private ownership of vast ecosystems and the potentialities for freedom contained therein [Adkin, 1992a: 140–41].

From a theoretical standpoint Tucker’s [1991] work is instructive. His work provides a detailed discussion of possible affinity between French revolutionary syndicalism and contemporary radical democracy. Tucker suggests that within French syndicalism one can discern such ‘new’ themes as: consensus formation; participation of equals; dialogue; decentralisation; and autonomy.

French syndicalist theories of capitalist power place emphasis upon an alternative revolutionary worldview emerging out of working-class experiences and offering a challenge to bourgeois morality [Holton. 1980]. Fernand Pelloutier, an important syndicalist theorist whose works influenced Sorel, argues that ideas rather than economic processes are the motive force in bringing about revolutionary transformation. Pelloutier vigorously attempted to come to terms with ‘the problem of ideological and cultural domination as a basis for capitalist power’ [Holton. 1980: 19].

Reconstituting social relations, in Pelloutier’s view, becomes possible when workers begin developing revolutionary identities, through self-preparation and self-education, as the means for combatting capitalist culture [Spitzer, 1963]. Thus, syndicalists have characteristically looked to labour unrest as an agency of social regeneration whereby workers desecrate the ideological surround of class domination, for example, deference to authority, acceptance of capitalist superiority and dependence upon elites. According to Jennings [1991: 82], syndicalism ‘conceived the transmission of power not in terms of the replacement of one intellectual elite by another but as a process of displacement spreading power out into the workers’ own organizations’. This displacement of power would originate in industry, as an egalitarian problematic, when workers came to question the status of their bosses. ‘This was not intended as a form of left “economism” but
rather as a means of developing the confidence and aggression of a working class threatened with the spectre of a “sober, efficient and docile” work discipline’ [Holton, 1980: 14]. Towards that end syndicalist movements have emphasised ‘life’ and ‘action’ against the severity of capitalist labour processes and corresponding cultural manifestations.

It might be argued that, far from being economistic, syndicalist movements are best understood as counter-cultural in character, more similar to contemporary new social movements than to movements of the traditional left. Syndicalist themes such as autonomy, anti-hierarchy, and diffusion of power have echoes in sentiments of the new movements. This similarity is reflected not only in the syndicalist emphasis upon novel tactics such as direct action, consumer boycotts, or slowdowns.

It also finds expression in the extreme contempt shown by syndicalists for the dominant radical traditions of its day, exemplified by Marxism and state socialism, and in syndicalist efforts to divorce activists from those traditions [Jennings, 1991]. Judi Bari [1994: 2001] emphasised the similarities in the styles and tactics of labour and ecology against common depictions within radical ecology, as exemplified in the positions held by Bookchin. Towards developing this mutual understanding green syndicalists have tried to engender an appreciation of radical labour histories, especially where workers have exerted themselves through inspiring acts which seem to have surprisingly much in common with present-day eco-activism. Attempts have been made within green syndicalism to articulate labour as part of the ecological ‘we’ through inclusion of radical labour within an ecological genealogy. Within green syndicalist discourses, this assumption of connectedness between historic radical movements, especially those of labour, anarchism and ecology has much significance. In this the place of the IWW is especially suggestive.

The IWW, as opposed to bureaucratic unions, sought the organisation of workers from the bottom up. As Montgomery [1974] notes, IWW strategies rejected large strike funds, negotiations, written contracts and the supposed autonomy of trades. Actions took the form of ‘guerilla tactics’ including sabotage, slowdown, planned inefficiency and passive resistance.

Furthermore, and of special significance for contemporary activists, the Wobblies placed great emphasis upon the nurturing of unity-in-diversity among workers. As Green [1974] notes, the IWW frequently organised in industrial towns marked by deep divisions, especially racial divisions, among the proletariat.

Interestingly, Montgomery [1974] notes that concerns over ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of strikes were not of the utmost importance to strikers. Strikes spoke more to ‘the audacity of the strikers’ pretensions and to their willingness to act in defiance of warnings from experienced union leaders that chance of victory were slim’ [Montgomery, 1974: 512]. This approach to protest could well refer to recent ecological actions. Such rebellious expressions reflect the mythic aspects of resistance, beyond mere pragmatic considerations or strict pursuance of ‘interests’.

Contemporary workers have little, if any, knowledge of historic IWW struggles, even in their own regions and industries. In my view, green syndicalist articulations are important in informing or reminding ecology activists and workers alike that there are radical working-class histories in addition to the histories of compromise; workers are not always willing pawns. ‘Historically, it was the IWW who broke the stranglehold of the timber barons on the loggers and millworkers in the nineteen teens’ [Bari, 1994: 18]. It is just this stranglehold which needs again be broken – this time for nature as well as for workers. ‘Now the companies are back in total control, only this time they’re taking down not only the workers but the Earth as well’ [Bari, 1994: 18].

Workers’ Control: Ecology Enters the Machine

As the ones most often situated at the nexus of ecological damage [Bullard, 1990; Kaufmann and Ditz, 1992] workers in industrial workplaces may be expected to have some insights into immediate and future threats to local and surrounding ecosystems. Such awareness derived from the location of workers at the point of production/destruction may allow workers to provide important, although not central, contributions to ecological resistance.

However, this possibly strategic placement does not mean that any such contributions are inevitable. Those people who suffer most from ecological predations, both at workplaces and in home communities, are also those with the least control over production as presently constituted through ownership entitlements and as sanctioned by the capitalist state [Ecologist, 1993; Faber and O’Connor, 1993; Peet and Watts, 1996]. These relations of power become significant mechanisms in the oppression of not only workers but of non-human nature as well. Without being attentive to this web of power one cannot adequately answer Eckersley’s [1989] pertinent questions concerning why those who are affected most directly and materially by assaults upon local ecosystems are often least active in resistance, both in defending nature and in defending themselves. Thus the questions of workplace democracy and workers’ control have become crucial to green syndicalist theoretics.

‘The IWW stands for worker self-management, direct action and rank and file control’ [Miller, 1993: 56]. For green syndicalism workers’ control becomes an attempt by workers to formulate their own responses to the question ‘what of work?’ Within the IWW, decisions over tactics are left to groups of workers or even individual workers themselves. Worker selfdetermination ‘on the job’ becomes a mechanism by which to contest the power/knowledge nexus of the workplace.

Labour insurgency typically articulates shifting relations within transformations of production and the emergence of new hegemonic practices. Times of economic reorganisation offer wide-ranging opportunities for creating novel or unprecedented forms of confrontation on the parts of workers. The offensives of capital can provide a stimulus to varied articulations of renewed militancy. Such might be the case within the present context of capital strike, de-unionisation, and joblessness characterising cybernetised globalism. Of course the emphasis must always remain on possibility as there is always room for more than one response to emerge. Green syndicalists recognise that ecological crises have only become possible within social relations whose articulation has engendered a weakening of people’s capacities to fight a co-ordinated defence of the planet’s ecological communities.

Bari [1994: 2001] argued that the restriction of participation in decision-making processes within ordered hierarchies, prerequisite to accumulation, has been a crucial impediment to ecological organising And it seems to me that people’s complicity should be measured more by the amount of control they have over the conditions of their lives than by how dirty they get at work. One compromise made by a whitecollar Sierra Club professional can destroy more trees than a logger can cut in a lifetime [Bari, 1994: 105].

The persistent lack of workers’ control allows coercion of workers into the performance of tasks which they might otherwise disdain, or which have consequences of which they are left unaware. Additionally the absence of self-determination results in workers competing with one another over jobs or even the possibility of jobs. Workers are left more susceptible to threats of capital strike or environmental blackmail [Bullard, 1990]. This susceptibility is perhaps the greatest deterrent to labour/ecology alliances. Without job security and workplace power workers cannot provide an effective counterbalance to the power of capital.

Radical ecology, outside of green syndicalism, has failed to appreciate these negative consequences of diminished workers’ control for participation in more explicitly political realms. Only through a development of political confidence can such activism be engaged. Furthermore, the degree of workplace democracy can depend largely upon the influence of supposedly exterior concerns such as impacts upon nature. In recognising the relationship between workplace articulation and political participation green syndicalism poses a challenge to received notions within ecology.

Participation as conceived by green syndicalism cannot come from management. ‘Such awareness has to question unflinching deference to experts, as part of a more general attack on centralized power and managerial prerogatives’ [Guarasci and Peck, 1987: 70]. Direct participation is understood as contributing to worker self-determination, constituted by workers against the veiled offerings of management which form part of ecocapitalism.

Eco-capitalist visions leave the megamachine and its power hierarchies intact and thus offers no alternative. Production remains undemocratic and profitability is the final word on whether or not resources should be used. Thus, eco-capitalism introduces to us the wonders of biodegradable take-out containers and starch-based golf teas [Purchase, 1994].

Green syndicalism emerges, then, as an experiment in more creative conceptions of workplace participation. For Purchase [1994, 1997a, 1997b], productive control organised around face-to-face, voluntary interaction and encouraging self-determination might be employed towards the freeing up of vast quantities of labour from useless, though profitable production, to be used in the playful development of life-affirming activities. Thus a common theme of working-class radicalism becomes an important element of an ecological theoretic. Leftists have long argued that eventually human needs must become the primary consideration of production, replacing profitability and accumulation. Such critiques of production must now go even further, raising questions about the ‘needs’ of ecosystems and non-humans.

Rethinking Unionism

The decreased demand for labour, within cybernetised capital relations, means that corporations are less compelled to deal with mainstream trade unions as under the Keynesian arrangement.3 If unions are to have any influence it can only come through active efforts to disrupt the labour process. These disruptive efforts may include increased militancy within workplace relations. Evidence for a rebellion among workers has been reflected typically in such activities as sabotage, slowdowns and absences.

IWW activists explicitly agitate for ‘deliberate inefficiency’ as a means to encourage the desecration of work relations. For green syndicalists the desired tactics against corporate-sponsored destruction of the environment include such direct, non-bureaucratic forms of action as shop-floor sabotage, boycotts, green bans and the formation of extra-union solidarity outside of the workplace, within workers’ home communities. Of course, strikes, the power to halt production, is unmatched in its capacity to confront corporate greed.

Environmentalists can stop production for a few hours or a few days. There is no more effective counter-force to capital accumulation and the pursuit of profit than the power of workers to stop work to achieve their demands. Ecological protection, as with work conditions, benefits or wages, must be fought for. Where workers are involved this means they must be struck for. This, however, requires that workers develop a position of strength. This, in turn, means organising workers so that they no longer face the prospects of ‘jobs versus environment’ blackmail. In order for this to occur, non-unionised workers must be mobilised. (Otherwise they are mobilised by capital – as scabs.) Recognising this the IWW gives a great deal of attention to organising the traditionally unorganised.

A green syndicalist conception of workers’ organisation rejects the hierarchical, centralised, bureaucratic structures of mainstream unionism. Economistic union organisations and bureaucrats who have worked to convince workers that environmentalists are responsible for job loss point up the need for syndicalist unions organised around ecologically sensitive practices.

Green syndicalists generally reject the perspective of Fosterism or the practice, as advocated by William Z. Foster in the 1910s, of ‘boring from within’ the mainstream unions.4 Examples abound of the difficulties in trying to build ecological perspectives, committees and work within mainstream unions. Laurie Adkin [1998] provides detailed accounts of the obstacles faced by activists in the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), supposedly the most progressive social union in Canada, when attempting to build rank and file environmental committees. Ontario’s Green Work Alliance (GWA) provides another instance in which rank and file workers
were thwarted by union bureaucrats in their efforts to establish green union perspectives. In that case union support for Ontario’s ruling social democratic party (New Democrats) interfered with the GWA criticisms of NDP environmental policies. Recent divisions between the ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ alliance of the Seattle anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests, especially over labour support for President Bush’s plan for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge emphasise the serious obstacles which remain in forging alliances with business unions [Buss, 2001].

This is not to say that green syndicalists refuse to act in solidarity with workers in mainstream unions. Indeed, Local 1 worked in support of workers in Pulp and Paper Workers Local 49 and Judi Bari points out that many actions would have been impossible without inside information provided by workers in that local. Green syndicalists do work with rank and file members of mainstream unions and many are themselves ‘two-carders’, simultaneously members of mainstream and syndicalist unions.

Neither is it true to say that strong environmental policies cannot come from mainstream unions. Mainstream unions can and do at times take up specific policies and practices of syndicalism but the lack overall vision and participatory structures means that such policies and practices are not part of overall strategy and are often vulnerable to leadership control or the limitations of bargaining with employers.

While not a syndicalist union the BLF did adopt a number of policies which are hallmarks of syndicalism, most notably openess, radical democracy and participation. It must be stressed that these structural changes were essential for the development of the BLF’s environmental perspective [Burgmann and Burgmann, 1998]. Job site autonomy was encouraged, officials’ wages were linked to industry wages and officials were not paid during strikes. The union also established a ‘limited tenure of office’ and executive meetings were opened to all members [Burgmann and Burgmann, 1998]. The BLF also showed the expansive vision of working
class solidarity which is a strength of syndicalism. For example, the union banned work at Macquarie University after a gay student was expelled. The BLF also offered strong support for aboriginal land rights and squatters and banned work on the construction of a $1 million maximum security prison block. Unfortunately the BLF was betrayed by the same authoritarian forces which have haunted the syndicalists. Maoists and Stalinists within the National conspired with bosses to impose Federal control over the union, expel leading militants and end the bans.

The Question of Work

The green syndicalist responses might be understood, most interestingly, as characterising a broader revolt against work. ‘The one goal that unites all IWW members is to abolish the wage system’ [Meyers, 1995: 73]. Ecological crises make clear that the capitalist construction of ‘jobs’ and ‘workers’ are incompatible with the preservation of nature. It is, perhaps, then, not entirely paradoxical that green syndicalism should hint at an overcoming of workerness as one possible outcome.

Radical ecology activists have increasingly come to understand jobs, under the guise of work, as perhaps the most basic moment of unfreedom, one which must be overcome in any quest towards liberty. Too often, previously, the common response has been one of turning away from workers and from questions relating to the organisation of working relations. Green syndicalism hints that radical theory can no longer ignore these questions which are posed by the presence of jobs. Indeed it might be said that a return to the problematic of jobs becomes the starting point for a reformulation of radicalism, at least along green lines.

Green syndicalism conceives of the transformation of work as an ecological imperative. What is proposed is a radical alteration of work, both in structure and meaning. Solutions to the problems of work cannot be found merely in the control of existing forms. Rather, current practices of production along with the hierarchy of labour must be overcome.

For theorists of green syndicalism [Kaufmann and Ditz, 1992; Purchase, 1994, 1997a, 1997b], among the prerequisites for ecological change is a reduction in the amount of work being done. Their concern is that much of work, involving massive appropriation of natural elements, is useless. That includes the defence and reproduction of work relations in political (ownership) and economic (circulation) forms. In addition, an even more radical change is perceived as being required to transform the nature of that work which might remain towards ecological ends such as recovery, repair, and reconstruction. Furthermore, the processes of transforming existing work involve those who perform and are most familiar with the tasks under
question. Green syndicalists [Kaufmann and Ditz, 1992; Purchase, 1994) envision work being performed through democratic, participatory means within which work is conceived more as craft or as play.

Production, within a green syndicalist vision [Purchase, 1994, 1997a, 1997b], may include the provision of ecologically sensitive foods, transportation or energy. Work, newly organised along decentralised, local, democratic lines might allow for the introduction of materials and practices with diminished impact upon the bioregion in which each is employed.

Green syndicalist discourses are raised against the undermining influences of work in contemporary conditions of globalism. Far from being irrational responses to serious social transformations, workplace democratisation and workers’ self-determination become ever more reasonable responses to the uncertainty and contingency of emerging conditions of (un)employment.

Green syndicalists emphasise workers’ empowerment and selfemancipation – against pessimistic or cynical responses such as mass retraining which simply reinforce dependence upon elites. They offer but one initiative towards the overcoming of work and a movement towards community-based economics and productive decision-making.

Beyond Leftism and Ecology: Reflections on Green Syndicalist Visions

Green syndicalism highlights certain points of similarity between anarchosyndicalism
and ecology. These include, but are by no means limited to: decentralisation; regionalism; direct action/sabotage; autonomy; and pluralism and diversity. Syndicalists, however, can no longer disregard, as some Marxists [Blackie, 1990; Raskin and Bernow, 1991) are wont to do, the linkages between industrialism, hierarchy, and ecological destruction.

The mass production techniques of industrialism cannot be reconciled with ecological sustenance, regardless of whether bosses or sturdy proletarians control them. To be anti-capitalist does not have to imply being pro-ecology. In this regard the utopians have surely been more insightful. Ending capitalist relations of production, however, remains necessary for a radical transformation of the social since these relations encompass many positions of subordination. However, this is only one aspect of radical politics.

Thus, green syndicalists reject the workerist premises of ‘old-style’ leftists who argue that issues such as ecology are external to questions of production and only serve to distract from the essential task of organising workers, at the point of production, towards emancipation. Within green syndicalist discourses ecological concerns cannot, with any reason, be divorced from questions of production or economics. Rather than being represented as strictly separate discursive universes, nature, production, economics or workplace become understood as endlessly contested topographical features in an always shifting terrain.

The workplace is but one of the sites for extension of social resistance. Given the prominent position of the workplace under capitalism, as a realm of capitalist discipline and hegemony, activists must come to appreciate the significance of locating struggles within everyday workplace relations. Within a green syndicalist perspective workplaces are understood as sites of solidarity, innovation, cultural diversity, and personal interactions expressed in informal networks and through multiple antagonisms. In turn, those social realms which are typically counterpoised to the factory within radical ecology discourses – Bookchin’s ‘community’ – should be recognised as influenced by matters of accumulation, profit and class. The character of either realm is not unaffected by workplace antagonisms.

This ‘steel cage’ appears inescapable only because it remains isolated, practically and conceptually, from a host of important social, cultural, and political-economic dynamics operating inside and out of workplaces proper. Critical to any discussion, work organizations must be seen as series of settings and situations providing choices that are constrained, but not immutably, by the broader fabric of the
society into which they are woven [Guarasci and Peck, 1987: 72].

Green syndicalism calls for the replacement of profit-driven capitalist production with socially necessary production through means which are ecologically sensible [Purchase, 1994]. Production would be organised around human and ecological considerations rather than the rapacious requirements of accumulation and expansion characterising capitalist organisation. Syndicalists suggest that if production and distribution are to be carried out in a dark green manner workers must stop producing for capitalist elites according to the whims of the market. Syndicalists are interested neither in profit nor in growth and their conception of industry
has nothing to do with the consumerism of advanced capitalism. Finally, green syndicalist discourses express a realisation that overcoming ecological devastation depends upon shared responsibilities towards developing convivial ways of living wherein respectful relations, both within our own species and with other species, are nurtured.

In addition, the re-integration of production with consumption, organised in an egalitarian and democratic fashion – such that members of a community contribute what they can to social production – may allow for a break with consumerism. People might consume only that which they’ve had a hand in producing; people might use free time for creative activities rather than tedious, unnecessary production of luxuries; and individual consumption might be regulated by the capacities of individual production, (for example, personal creativity), not from the hysterics of mass advertising.

Syndicalism might be freed thusly from requirements of growth or mass consumption characterising industrialism as ‘social relations’ [Purchase, 1994, 1997a, 1997b; Bari, 2001]. Green syndicalism, as opposed to Marxism or even revolutionary syndicalism, opposes large-scale, centralised, mass-production. Green syndicalism does not hold to a socialist optimism of the liberatory potential of industrialism.
Ecological calls for a complete, immediate break with industrialism, however, contradict radical eco-philosophical emphases upon interconnectedness, mutualism and continuity. Simple calls for a return to nature reveal the lingering fundamentalisms afflicting much ecological discourse. The idea of an immediate return to small, village-centred living as espoused by some deep ecologists and anarchists is not only utopian, it ignores questions concerning the impacts which the toxic remains of industry would continue to inflict upon their surroundings. The spectre of industrialism will still – and must inevitably – haunt efforts at
transformation, especially in decisions concerning the mess that industry has left behind [Purchase, 1994]. How can we disconnect society from nature given the mass interpenetrations of social encroachments upon nature, for example, global warming, or depletion of the ozone layer? Where do you put toxic wastes? What of the abandoned factories? How will decommissioning occur? One cannot just walk away from all of that.

Without romanticising the role played by workers, green syndicalists are aware that workers may offer certain insights into these problems. In responding to this dilemma, green syndicalists [Kaufmann and Ditz, 1992; Purchase, 1994, 1997a, 1997b; Bari, 2001] have tried to ask the crucial question of where those who are currently producers might belong in the multiple tasks of transformation – both cultural as well as ecological. They have argued that radical ecology can no longer leave out producers, they will either be allies or enemies. Green syndicalism, almost alone among radical ecology, suggest that peoples’ identities as producers, rather than representing fixed entities, may actually be articulated against industrialism. The processes of engaging this articulation, wherein workers understand an interest in changing rather than upholding current conditions, present the perplexing task which has as yet foiled ecology.

Dismantling industrial capital, the radical approach to industrialism, would still require the participation of industrial workers provided it is not to be carried out as part of an authoritarian articulation. Any radical articulation, assuming it be democratic, implies the participation of industrial workers in decision-making processes. Of course, the democratic character of any articulation cannot be assumed; the possibility for reaction, to the exclusion of workers [Foreman, 1991; Watson, 1994], is ever-present.

One sees this within ecological fundamentalism or in strengthened corporatist alliances pitting labour/capital against environmentalists, each calling for centralised and bureacratic enforcement of regulations. In the absence of a grass-roots articulation with workers any manner of authoritarian, elite articulation, even ones which include radical ecology [Foreman, 1991; Watson, 1994], might be envisioned.

For their part theorists of green syndicalism envision the association of workers towards the dismantling of the factory system, its work, hierarchies, regimentation [Kaufmann and Ditz, 1992; Purchase, 1994, 1997a, 1997b]. This may involve a literal destruction as factories may be dismantled; or perhaps converted towards ‘soft’ forms of localised production. Likewise, productive activity can be conceived in terms of restoration, including research into a region’s natural history.

Reconstruction might be understood in terms of food and energy provision or recovery monitoring. These are acts in which all members might be active, indeed will need to be active in some regard. These shifting priorities – towards non-industrial relations generally – express the novelty of green syndicalism as both green and as syndicalist.

For green syndicalism it is important that ecology engage with workers in raising the possibilities for resisting, challenging and even abandoning the capitalist megamachine. However, certain industrial workshops and processes may be necessary [Purchase, 1994]. (How would bikes, or windmills be produced, for example?) The failure to develop democratic workers’ associations would then seem to render even the most wellconsidered ecology scenarios untenable. Not engaging such possibilities
restricts radicalism to mere utopia building [Purchase, 1994].

Green syndicalists argue for the construction of ‘place’ around the contours of geographical regions, in opposition to the boundaries of nationstates which show only contempt for ecological boundaries as marked by topography, climate, species distribution or drainage. Affinity with bioregionalist themes is recognised in green syndicalist appeals for a replacement of nation-states with decentralised federations of bioregional communities [Purchase, 1994, 1997a]. For green syndicalism such communities might constitute social relations in an articulation with local ecological requirements to the exclusion the bureaucratic, hierarchical
interference of distant corporatist bodies.

Local community becomes the context of social/ecological identification. Eco-defence, then, should begin at local levels: in the homes, workplaces, and neighbourhoods. Green syndicalist discourses urge that people identify with the ecosystems of their locality and region and work to defend those areas through industrial and agricultural practices which are developed and adapted to specific ecological characteristics. One aspect of a green syndicalist theoretic, thus, involves ecology activists helping workers to educate themselves about regional, community-based ways of living [Bari, 1994; Purchase, 1994, 1997b]. A green syndicalist perspective encourages people to broaden and unite the individual actions, such as saving a park or cleaning up a river, in which they are already involved towards regional efforts of self-determination protecting local ecosystems [Purchase, 1994].

The point here, however, has not been (nor is it for theorists of green syndicalism generally) to draw plans for the green syndicalist future. Specific questions about the status of cities, organisation of labour, means of production, or methods of distribution cannot here be answered. They will be addressed by those involved as the outcome of active practice. Most likely there will be many varieties of experimental living — some are already here, e.g. autonomous zones, squats, co-ops and revolutionary unions. These are perhaps the renewed politics of organising.

Human relations with nature pose crucial and difficult questions for radicalism. Those relations, under capitalism, have taken the form of ‘jobs’ where nature and labour both become commodified. Indeed nature as ‘resources’ and work as ‘jobs’ provide the twin commodity forms which have always been necessary for the expansion of the market [Polanyi, 1944].

Thus capitalist regimes of accumulation, growth and commodification remain crucial concerns for ecological politics. Questions concerning the organising of life are still radical questions, though what might constitute acceptable answers has changed. One might ask: ‘What does work – intervention in nature – mean for ecology?’ Taking ecology seriously means that the realms of work, leisure (work’s accomplice), sustenance, need etc. – what might be called production – must be confronted.

NOTES
1. For interesting accounts of the radicalisation of workers in response to unsatisfying or
degrading workplace experiences see Zimpel [1974] and Sprouse [1992].
2. Bookchin’s criticism of workers’ organisations becomes even more curious given his
attachment to technological solutions to ecological degradation. He remains unclear, for
example, on the matter of who might design, construct, repair or recycle his much desired
eco-technologies [Purchase, 1994]. For a discussion of the technocratic and anthropocentric
dimensions of Bookchin’s writings see Marshall [1993].
3. Montgomery [1974] suggests that workers’ struggles generally belong to two types: control
struggles and wage struggles. Employers spend much energy trying to prevent the
convergence of the two currents. Unions have, since 1945, been preoccupied typically with
wage struggles, while control struggles have been traded for wages and benefits or diverted
through limited participation schemes, as exemplified in recent approaches to management,
or in ‘commitments to quality’. The challenge again confronting organised labour is
precisely to revitalise control struggles. This challenge also faces ‘new movement’ activists
in their attempts to engage with labour.
4. For a discussion of the debates around Fosterism see Bekken [2001]. Recently, Wobblies in
Edmonton, Canada attempted to revive Fosterism within the IWW, a proposal which was
overwhelmingly rejected.
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Developing working class environmentalism - Arthur J. Miller

2011-01-11T11:34:00.000-08:00

Developing working class environmentalism

I do not say that all things that eco-groups do are bad. But we tend to follow the direction of groups that do not have the same interests as ours. Because of this we get burdened with baggage harmful to our class. For this reason and many others, we need to develop our own form of environmentalism based on working class interests.

Much environmentalism of other eco-groups is based on the eurocentic idea of superiority. They seek to define the natural world as having values which do not exist in it. They see humans as something above or outside of the natural world This is why they come in conflict with indigenous people and other workers.
Humans are not outside of the environment. Rather they are part of it Thus, human conditions should be as much a part of the environmental movement as the conditions of anything else.

The basic cause of most environmental problems (including humans) is the system of industrial greed: capitalism, both private and state. The owners of industry treat workers like they treat the rest of the environment. Our environmentalism should come from the understanding that all things are connected.

Workers who are forced to work for wages and workers who are able to work outside of the wage system come under attack by the industrial rulers for the same reason: industrial greed. Thus, the workers struggling against the wage system controlled by the industrial rulers, and those workers struggling to keep from being controlled by the industrial rulers are all a part of the same struggle. All things are connected.

Often other eco-groups will blame both types of workers for those things for which the industrial rulers are responsible; and the sacrifices these groups call for often are sacrifices from our class.

Many eco-groups are more inclined to look at the effects rather than the real causes of environmental problems. They also tend to focus on pet issues rather than the environment as a whole. They will come out against something they don't like and then present some type of alternative. But often they will not look at the effects that the alternative has on the environment.

A good example of this is solar power. Many of the systems I have seen, which involve moving solar heated water from the panels into the house, use copper tubing. The largest strip mine in the U.S. is a copper mine, which by the way is on land stolen from the Western Shoshone. Real environmentalism must look at the effect everything has on the environment, not just pet issues.

Something that we learn when we take a good look at all industrial production is that ALL of it contributes to the problem. It is not so much industrial production itself, but rather the values of industrial production, being maximum profit for the owners at the expense of everything else.

Just as workers want better pay, they should also want better environmental conditions. Those first exposed to the hazards of industrial production are workers. The next to be exposed are working class communities. When was the last time you saw the owners of industry living next to a chemical plant?

Working class environmentalism would start at the point of production and from there struggle for earth-safe industrial production. It would create a struggle against the owners of industry, uniting on-the-job struggles, working class community struggles and the struggles of those who are resisting being taken over by the greedy industrial system.

Being that we are a revolutionary working class organization, we will use the skills of working people to transform the capitalist industrial system into a system where all of the environment matters, including humans. We will base our production on the well-being of all rather than the profit of a few.

This revolutionary struggle will mean that we will be opposed by the owners and there will be affects upon us due to changes. Thus, we need to stand together in solidarity, be it a strike, be it the resistance of indigenous people, be it against such things as racism, and be it the hardships that change or economic devastation has on working class communities. Thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Arthur J. Miller is a long time I.W.W. member

Cassie The Caulker: An Eco-Syndicalist Icon

2011-01-06T17:38:00.000-08:00

From nefac.net. "For those curious about the imagery, this poster is inspired by Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter", except it's "Cassie the Caulker" as an eco-syndicalist anarchist. Rockwell's original was itself inspired by the painting of the prophet Isaiah from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Rockwell originally cribbed from and Isaiah's prophecy of looking away from The Deluge to Mary and the birth of Jesus. With Cassie, that's a shortened version of Cassandra. Cassandra was the Prophetess of Troy's downfall; and the environmental movement is often regarded as having a "Cassandra Complex" of accurately prophesizing doom which all others ignore. Our Cassie, however, instead of just preaching is taking action into her own hands. She's "armed" with the caulk gun! Thus theory is transformed into action and self-activity. A bit of DO-IT-YOURSELF as part of WE CAN DO IT!"

1971: The Kelly's Bush green ban

2011-01-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

Kelly's Bush, Australia

A short account of how construction workers saved the Kelly's Bush area of park land in Australia from development by refusing to work, and kick-started a movement of environmentally-minded industrial action.

In 1971 a group of women from the fashionable suburb of Hunter's Hill in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were trying to save Kelly's Bush, the last remaining open space in that area. Construction firm AV Jennings planned to build luxury houses over the bush land.

They approached the local council, the mayor, the local state member and the Premier, all to no avail. The women then sought the help of the NSW branch of the Builders Labourers' Federation (BLF), a trade union of construction workers.

The union branch believed that the labour movement should involve itself in all struggles of the working class, not just struggles over wages and working conditions. The BLF asked the Hunter's Hill women to call a public meeting at Hunter's Hill and show that there was community support for the request for a union ban on the destruction of Kelly's Bush. Over 600 people attended the meeting, which formally requested a ban. This ban was called a green ban, to distinguish it from a black ban - a union action to protect the economic interests of its own members. In this case the union was going against the immediate economic interests of its members for the sake of a wider community and environmental interest.

AV Jennings declared it would build on Kelly's Bush using non-union scab labour, but building workers on an office project of AV Jennings in North Sydney sent a message to their bosses:

'If you attempt to build on Kelly's Bush, even if there is the loss of one tree, this half-completed building will remain so forever, as a monument to Kelly's Bush.'

This influenced AV Jennings, and alarmed property developers generally.

The first green ban was a complete success - and Kelly's Bush is still there as an open public reserve, complete with a monument to the world's first green ban. The building workers' direct action with the support of resident which defeated the developers was then imitated. A wave of green bans began which lasted four years and stopped billions of dollars of development harmful to local communities and the environment.

Compiled by libcom.org from information taken from "A perspective on Sydney's Green ban Campaign, 1970-74" by Burgmann, V. Power and Protest 1993, and Wikipedia.

Earth First! - IWW Greenhouse Demo By Judi Bari

2011-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

This is the earliest known Industrial Worker article by Judi Bari, and although the article was published in March of 1989, the action took place the previous September. This effort predates the formation of Earth First!-IWW Local #1. Here one can see the beginnings of a deeper consciousness among labor and environmental activists—as evidenced by IWW members attempts to dialog with timber workers targeted in the demonstration described here.

Earth First! - IWW Greenhouse Demo

By Judi Bari - Industrial Worker, March 1989.

The best thing about our regional Earth First! gatherings are the demonstrations afterwards. I mean, as long as you've got 200 yahooing Earth First!ers together, you might as well do an action. So, in keeping with this venerable tradition, our California Rendezvous last September decided to go for an all-day roving picket line with the theme of the Greenhouse Effect. We whipped up a few big banners saying "Guilty Guilty-Greenhouse Effect Violator," and prepared some indictment forms to lay on the perpetrators.

We had plenty of violators to pick from, but time constraints forced us to limit it to four --Simpson Pulp Mill, Pacific Lumber Corp., Eel River Sawmills, and a public hearing on offshore oil. Simpson was the most dramatic. Truck drivers were surprised by the sudden appearance of a raggedy mob, just back from three days in the woods, blocking the entrance road to the Simpson plant. The first truck stopped and we ran over to tell the driver that the IWW says take a break on us. That was fine with him, and he kicked back to enjoy the show. The driver coming the other direction, though, didn't take it so easy. No damn hippies were gonna stop him from going to work --he was going to ram our line. "Stop Mr. Block!" chanted the crowd, but the truck kept coming until Earth First!er Corbin Solomon courageously dove under the front wheel of the moving semi. The driver stopped, cursed, then rolled forward. Our line held firm, and people started yelling "Brian Wilson!" as the truck wheels came within feet of Corbin's body before it finally stopped.

IWW rep Billy Don Robinson jumped up on the truck's running board to talk some sense into his fellow wage slave. But Mr. Block wasn't in a talking mood, and took a swing at Bill Don. "No jobs on a dead planet!" chanted the crowd, as the standoff continued for 30 minutes, with trucks backed up down the highway in both directions. Finally the police showed up and ordered us to leave. Since we had more work to do that day, we cheerfully obliged, jumping into our cars loudly announcing "Eel River Sawmills next!" Then we proceeded to Pacific Lumber Corp., skipping Eel River for now and losing our police escort.

At Pacific Lumber we paraded around their quaint 19th century company town singing "You can't clear-cut your way to Heaven" and Where are we gonna work when the trees are gone?" Eventually we ran into a hastily assembled counterdemonstration of loggers' wives carrying signs that said "Earth First! is the Worst!" The Earth First! women immediately responded by calling a women's action, and, with the men staying back, we approached the women one on one. We talked about how we had kids too, and how Pacific Lumber wasn't interested in their families' futures. This tactic seemed to take them so off guard that they stopped yelling at us, and, with the intervention of the local minister, agreed to set up a conciliation meeting between Earth First! and Pacific Lumber employees in the near future.

So it was on to our next target. We hung "Greenhouse Effect Violator banners on the mile-long Eel River Sawmills log deck without incident, which was a good thing because by then we were already late for the oil hearing. Although this was an official state hearing, it somehow must not have gotten onto the liberals' computer network.

In contrast to earlier oil hearings where 2000 people showed up to protest offshore oil, hardly anybody came to this one. The testimony was stultifying, with the shirt and-tie bureaucrats droning on about mitigating impacts and overriding economic benefits. Finally our turn came, and Earth First!/IWW songwriter Darryl Cherney took to the podium guitar in hand. We unfurled our banners as he began singing "We're All Dead Ducks", with Earth First!ers in the audience quacking on the chorus and dancing in our seats.

We woke up the hearing, but not enough, because a speaker shortly afterward contended that sonic booms underwater (used in seismic testing to locate oil) don't affect marine mammals. So on cue we all yelled "Sonic BOOM!" at the top of our lungs. The startled bureaucrats started to chastise us, but Darryl just gave them an innocent look and said "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said sonic booms don't affect mammals!"

By then the day was winding down and so were we. We stood outside in the cold and huddled in a circle and sang for a while. Then, as the sun slowly set on the golden California clear cuts, we went our separate ways, home to our cabins and communes to smoke a joint, drink a beer, and get ready for the next blockade. The Earth First!/IWW 'alliance had pulled off our first joint action, and we were ready for more.

Resolution: The Environment: Basic principles for Struggling with Conflicts

2010-12-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

In August 1997, at the Canadian Autoworkers Constitutional Convention in
Vancouver, BC, the following resolution was agreed upon.

THE ENVIRONMENT
BASIC PRINCIPLES FOR STRUGGLING WITH CONFLICTS

The environment is not an issue involving “others”.

• The environment is first of all a public health issue, affecting the air we
breathe, the water we depend on, the food we eat, the soil our children
play in; it’s about chemicals, poisons and carcinogens in our community.
• It’s about the future resources we leave for the next generation; it’s about
preserving and therefore sharing the beauty of nature.

Environmental issues can’t be separated from the economic
system we live in.

• An economic system that treats humans as commodities, interested
only in their contribution to profits and discarding them at will, is
unlikely to give much priority to our natural environment.

Our economic system divides us regarding our concerns over
jobs vs our concerns over our environment.

• Although the long-term effects of environmental damage will negatively
impact on all our lives, the need to earn a living in uncertain times
pushes workers to focus on the short term, which often means laying
environmental issues aside.
• Somehow we must address both the short-term (jobs) and long-term
(environment) aspects of survival.

We can learn from our experience over health and safety.

• In the early days of the health and safety movement, workers were often
confronted with the choice between trading off health (the work
environment) for profits and competitiveness (i.e., jobs). When we
resisted – with significant success – was this anti-social and a false
choice?
•We demanded both a safe environment and decent jobs, and we are
making substantial progress in this area.

Tensions will occur and we must think strategically in dealing
with them.

• The most difficult choices involve jobs that affect a specific group vs
environmental implications that primarily affect a broader and different
group. To deal with this, both sides must think strategically.
• Those who make the environment the centre of their political activities
can’t build a constituency if they’re perceived as being insensitive to jobs
and people’s livelihoods.
•Workers and unions can’t build the broader alliances they need in
today’s times – especially with young people – if we’re cornered into
being seen as insensitive to the wider community and the kind of
environment we will leave for future generations.
•We need public education and will to achieve that campaign goal, unions
and environmentalists need to think and work strategically, but we’re
barely talking to each other.

Syndicalism, Ecology and Feminism: Judi Bari’s Vision

2010-12-20T11:15:00.000-08:00

Syndicalism, Ecology and Feminism: Judi Bari’s Vision

Jeff Shantz

According to the late Wobbly organizer and Earth Firster, Judi Bari, a truly biocentric perspective must really challenge the system of industrial capitalism which is founded upon the ‘ownership’ of the earth. Industrial capitalism cannot be reformed since it is founded upon the destruction of nature. The profit drive of capitalism insists that more be taken out than is put back (be it labour or land). Bari extended the Marxist discussion of surplus value to include the elements of nature. She argued that a portion of the profit derived from any capitalist product results from the unilateral (under)valuing, by capital, of resources extracted from nature.

Because of her analysis of the rootedness of ecological destruction in capitalist relations Bari turned her attentions to the everyday activities of working people. Workers would be a potentially crucial ally of environmentalists, she realized, but such an alliance could only come about if environmentalists were willing to educate themselves about workplace concerns. Bari held no naïve notions of workers as privileged historical agents. She simply stressed her belief that for ecology to confront capitalist relations effectively and in a non-authoritarian manner requires the active participation of workers. Likewise, if workers were to assist environmentalists it was reasonable to accept some mutual aid in return from ecology activists.

In her view the power which manifests itself as resource extraction in the countryside manifests itself as racism and exploitation in the city. An effective radical ecology movement (one which could begin to be considered revolutionary) must organize among poor and working people. Only through workers’ control of production and distribution can the machinery of ecological destruction be shut down.

Ecological crises become possible only within the context of social relations which engender a weakening of people’s capacities to fight an organized defence of the planet’s ecological communities. Bari understood that the restriction of participation in decision-making processes within ordered hierarchies, prerequisite to accumulation, has been a crucial impediment to ecological organizing . This convinced her that radical ecology must now include demands for workers’ control and a decentralization of industries in ways which are harmonious with nature. It also meant rejecting ecological moralizing and developing some sensitivity to workers’ anxieties and concerns.

To critics this emphasis on the concerns of workers and the need to overcome capitalist social relations signified a turn towards workerist analysis which, in their view, undermined her ecology. Criticisms of workers and ‘leftist ecology’ have come not only from deep ecologists, as discussed above, but from social ecologists, such as Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl, who otherwise oppose deep ecology. Social ecology guru Bookchin has been especially hostile to any idea of the workplace as an important site of social and political activity or of workers as significant radical actors. Bookchin repeats recent talk about the disappearance of the working class , although he is confused about whether the working class is ‘numerically diminishing’ or just ‘being integrated’. Bookchin sees the ‘counterculture’ (roughly the new social movements like ecology) as a new privileged social actor, and in place of workers turns to a populist ‘the people’ and the ascendancy of community. Underlying Bookchin’s critique of labour organizing, however, is a low opinion of workers which he views contemptuously as ‘mere objects’ without any active presence within communities .

Lack of class analysis likewise leads Janet Biehl to turn to a vague ‘community life’ when seeking the way out of ecological destruction . Unfortunately communities are themselves intersected with myriad cross-cutting and conflicting class interests which, as Bari showed, cannot be dismissed or wished away. Notions of community are often the very weapon wielded by timber companies against environmentalist ‘outsiders.’

Biehl recognizes the ecological necessity of eliminating capitalism but her work writes workers out of this process. This is directly expressed in her strategy for confronting capital: ‘Fighting large economic entities that operate even on the international level requires large numbers of municipalities to work together’ . Not specific social actors – workers – with specific contributions to make, but statist political apparatuses – municipalities. To confront ‘macrosocial forces like capitalism … [Biehl proposes] … political communities’ . All of this is rather strange coming from someone who professes to be an anarchist.

Biehl even states that the ‘one arena that can seriously challenge’ current hierarchies is ‘participatory democratic politics’ but makes no reference to the specificity of the workplace in this regard . Yet, within capitalist relations, the workplace is one of the crucial realms requiring the extension of just such a politics. And that extension is not likely to occur without the active participation of people in their specific roles as workers. Bari, concerned with encouraging this participation, did not have the luxury of overlooking the everyday concerns of workers.

As a longtime feminist and unionist Judi Bari was well aware of tendencies within the labour movement, and the left generally, to treat concerns of gender or environment as subordinate to the larger movement or worse as distractions. Bari was no vulgar materialist given to economistic analyses, however, and she rejected Dave Foreman’s characterization of Local 1 as simply ‘leftists’ or a ‘class struggle group’. She too remained sharply critical of Marxist socialism and what she saw as its acceptance of the domination of nature.

We are not trying to overthrow capitalism for the benefit of the proletariat. In fact, the society we envision is not spoken to in any leftist theory that I’ve ever heard of. Those theories deal only with how to redistribute the spoils of exploiting the Earth to benefit a different class of humans. We need to build a society that is not based on the exploitation of Earth at all — a society whose goal is to achieve a stable state with nature for the benefit of all species. .

For inspiration Bari turned to non-authoritarian traditions of socialism. Specifically, her materialism took the form of syndicalism – revolutionary libertarian unionism . Bari developed her green syndicalist approach as an attempt to think through the forms of organization by which workers could address ecological concerns in practice and in ways which broke down the multiple hierarchies of mainstream trade unionism. She recognized in syndicalist structures and practices certain instructive similarities with the contemporary movements for ecology and radical feminism.

Historically anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary unionists fought for the abolition of divisions between workers based upon, for example, gender, race, nationality, skill, employment status and workplace. Revolutionary unions, such as the IWW, in fighting for ‘One Big Union’ of all working people (whether or not they were actually working) argued for the equality of workers and the recognition of their unity as workers while realizing that workers’ different experiences of exploitation made such organization difficult.

Like radical feminists, anarcho-syndicalists have argued for the consistency of means and ends. Thus syndicalists organize in non-hierarchical, decentralized and federated structures which are vastly different from the bureaucratic structures of mainstream trades unions which have been largely resistant to participation by women. The alternative organizations of anarcho-syndicalism are built upon participation, mutual aid and cooperation. Anarcho-syndicalism combines the syndicalist fight against capitalist structures and practices of exploitation with the anarchist attack on power and awareness that all forms of oppression must be overcome in any struggle for liberty. The IWW has long fought for the recognition of women as ‘fellow workers’ deserving economic and physical independence (i.e. self-determination) and access to social roles based upon interests and preferences .

Regarding the affinity between anarcho-syndicalist organization and ‘second wave’ feminist practice Peggy Kornegger has commented: ‘The structure of women’s groups bore a striking resemblance to that of anarchist affinity groups within anarchosyndicalist unions in Spain, France, and many other countries.’ Kornegger laments that feminists did not more fully explore the syndicalist tradtions for activist insights.

Besides, as Purchase argues, industrial unions ‘are composed of people – feminists, peace activists and ecologists included – and are simply a means by which people can come to organise their trade or industry in a spirit of equality, peace and co-operation.’ The exclusion of workers from new social movements discussions is both arbitrary and inaccurate.

Exactly what sense we are to make of such sweeping dismissals of centuries of sustained resistance to the encroachments of capital and state by ordinary working people is quite unclear. Besides, in the absence of state-supported industrial [or green] capitalism, trades unions and workers’ co-operatives – be they bakers, grocers, coach builders, postal workers or tram drivers – would seem to be a quite natural, indeed logical and rational way of enabling ordinary working people to co-ordinate the economic and industrial life of their city, for the benefit of themselves rather than for the state or a handful of capitalist barons, and it is simply dishonest of Bookchin to claim that anarchism has emphasised the historical destiny of the industrial proletariat at the expense of community and free city life.

The concerns raised by Foreman, Bookchin and Biehl are well taken. Indeed, much Old Left thinking, of various stripes, did fail to appreciate the causes or consequences of ecological damage. However, as Graham Purchase has pointed out, the reasons for this are largely historically specific rather than inherent. The ecological insights of social ecologists like Bookchin (e.g. ecological regionalism, and green technologies) are not incompatible with syndicalist concerns with organizing workers.

Bari asked how it could be that there were neighbourhood movements targeting the disposal of toxic wastes but no workers’ movement to stop the production of toxics. She argued that only when workers are in a position to refuse to engage in destructive practices or produce destructive goods could any realistic hope for lasting ecological change emerge. The only way to bring the system to a standstill is through mass-scale non-cooperation, what an earlier generation of syndicalists knew as the ‘General Strike.’ Bari’s vision for Earth First! combined a radicalization of the group’s initial ideas of biocentrism and an extension of the decentralized, non-hierarchical, federative organization, the nascent syndicalist structure of EF!, into communities and workplaces.

While agreeing with the old guard of Earth First! that efforts should be given to preserving or re-establishing wilderness areas, Bari saw that piecemeal set-asides were not sufficient. The only way to preserve wilderness was to transform social relations. This meant that Earth First! had to be transformed from a conservation movement to a social movement. Earth First! needed to encourage and support alternative lifestyles. To speak of wilderness decontextualized the destruction of nature.

Jeff Shantz is currently living in Toronto where he has been active for several years with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). He is the host of the Anti-Poverty Report on community radio station CHRY in Toronto and is a co-founder of his union's Anti-Poverty Working Group.
References

Bari, Judi, Timber Wars (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1994)
Biehl, Janet, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books,1991)
Bookchin, Murray, Remaking Society (Boston: South End Press, 1990)
Bookchin, Murray, ‘Deep Ecology, Anarchosyndicalism and the Future of Anarchist Thought’ in Deep Ecology and Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1997)
Kornegger, Peggy, ‘Anarchism: The Feminist Connection’ in Reinventing Anarchy, Again, ed. by Howard J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996)
Purchase, Graham, ‘Social Ecology, Anarchism and Trades Unionism’ in Deep Ecology and Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1997)

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