New Zealand imperialism in the Pacific in the 21st century

By Grant Brookes

Published 10 October, 2024

First published at ISO Aotearoa.

The Pacific is our family, and being here is a great opportunity to reaffirm New Zealand’s position as a close and trusted partner.

Visiting Niue in June 2024, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon trotted out this familiar official story about the New Zealand government’s relationship to the peoples of Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa — one told by National and Labour politicians alike.

The official story is a myth.

Closer to the truth is the view recently given in an interview with the Green Party spokesperson for Pacific Peoples, Teanau Tuiono: “The relationship with New Zealand and the Pacific has been a problematic one, as well. New Zealand has used the Pacific as a place to extract resources or to bring in cheap labour. So that relationship is part of history.”

But any suggestion that New Zealand’s Pacific imperialism is no more than a part of history would be mistaken.

A vision of New Zealand as a launching pad for Western imperialism in the Pacific was present in the minds of British colonisers from their early arrival in Aotearoa. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1845, Charles Buller — Member of Parliament and director of the New Zealand Company — declared:

A British colony in New Zealand would be the natural master of this ocean… You might make it in truth the Britain of the southern hemisphere: there you might concentrate the trade of the Pacific; and from that new seat of your dominion you might give laws and manners to a new world.

Successive 19th century New Zealand politicians — from Governor George Grey to Premiers Julius Vogel, Robert Stout and Richard Seddon — petitioned the Colonial Office in London to turn this vision into a reality and annex a host of Pacific nations — including Fiji, Tonga, Sāmoa, New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and even French controlled territories. They met with with little success. British imperialists were more focused at the time on protecting their existing empire from European rivals and indigenous revolts.

Growing dissatisfied with London’s reluctance, attention turned to imposing direct rule from Wellington on Britain’s behalf. In 1901, the New Zealand government assumed control over the Cook Islands and the location of Christopher Luxon’s recent myth-making, Niue. This was followed by the military invasion of Western Samoa (1914), followed by control of Nauru (1923, in partnership with Australia and the UK) and Tokelau (1926). Direct rule did not end until the election of the first Ulu-o-Tokelau (Tokelauan head of government) in 1993. The brutal history of New Zealand’s imperial rule over these peoples has been documented before. But military intervention and New Zealand imperialism in the Pacific, now in partnership with Australia and the United States, has continued unabated into the 21st century.

Bougainville

In 1997, New Zealand troops were dispatched to Bougainville as a Truce Monitoring Group, marking the end of a nine-year war between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG). They famously landed on the island armed only with guitars. Many of the personnel still have vivid memories of helping Bougainville’s people. But whatever the personal motivations of individual soldiers, they were being used to serve New Zealand government interests.

The official story portrays New Zealand’s intervention as serving the people, a majority of whom longed for peace. PNG forces had killed 12,000 Bougainvilleans out of a population of 160,000. A third of the people were driven from their homes. But Bougainvilleans also wanted independence and an end to the environmental destruction caused by the huge Panguna copper mine on the island.

The Panguna mine was jointly owned by the PNG government and Australian multinational corporation Rio Tinto. Opening in 1972, the mine generated billions of dollars in profits for Rio Tinto and provided the PNG government with a fifth of its income. Only 1 percent of the profit went back to the people of Bougainville. Meanwhile more than a billion tonnes of tailings from the mine, contaminated with toxic waste, were dumped in the rivers, killing fish, birds and other animals. Tribal lands, home to the spirits of ancestors, were desecrated.

Australia opposed independence for Bougainville and backed the PNG government’s war against its people. They funded the PNG military and supplied them with training, ammunition, aircraft, weapons and even personnel. Phosphorous incendiary munitions which were dropped on villages in 1994 were supplied by Australia. Phosphorous is a weapon of indiscriminate terror, which sticks to various surfaces, including skin and clothes and burns at temperatures of 800–2500 °C. Its use against civilian targets is banned under international law.

Unsurprisingly, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army refused to allow Australian troops onto the island to monitor the truce. “Australia is clearly not neutral because it was a major party to the nine-year war on Bougainville”, said the President of the Bougainville Interim Government, Francis Ona. “The Australian government’s real interest is to allow the safe return of Rio Tinto to mining Panguna.”

Yet five months after New Zealand troops arrived, in April 1998, 250 Australian troops were landing on Bougainville and New Zealand was handing over command of the operation to brigadier Bruce Osborne of the Australian army. “New Zealand had to get involved at the outset to open the door for Australia”, said Reuben Siara, legal advisor to the Bougainville Interim Government.

The 1997 peace agreement included a promise of a referendum on Bougainville’s independence. It took 22 more years for that referendum to be held. Despite 97 percent voting in favour of independence in 2019, the PNG government has so far refused to accept the result and despite a long-running claim for compensation no money has been paid by Rio Tinto. New Zealand’s military intervention in Bougainville has ensured above all that Western imperial interests are protected.

Timor Leste

In 1999, New Zealand troops deployed to East Timor as part of a United Nations operation led by Australia. The territory had been under a brutal Indonesian occupation since 1975, when Indonesian forces launched a massive air and sea invasion to crush Timorese independence.

Elections in the former Portuguese colony that year had delivered victory to the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor, or Fretilin). Indonesia’s military dictator, President Suharto, ordered the invasion due to Cold War fears about the spread of communism, along with the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the seabed between East Timor and Australia. Amnesty International estimates that up to 200,000 Timorese people — a quarter of the population — were subsequently killed during Indonesia’s 24 year occupation.

Declassified documents have shown that the United States and Australia fully supported the invasion. The reason at the time is on the public record. Australian politician Justin O’Byrne salivated in a speech to the Senate in 1973 about East Timor’s “gas and oil in quantities that could match even the fabulous riches of the Middle East.”

The New Zealand government also supported Indonesia’s invasion. A telegram sent in 1975 by Frank Corner, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, to the New Zealand embassy in Australia said: “The government had a private, and a public position on the problem. Privately, we recognised… integration with Indonesia. The government couldn’t state this openly however, and it stressed that the wishes of the Timorese people were the fundamental factor.” Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Western government support for the initial invasion extended to Indonesia’s ongoing occupation.

The change in policy came in 1998. The previous year, Indonesia’s President Suharto had been overthrown by a popular revolution. The new reformist government was open to greater autonomy for East Timor. Australia’s right wing Prime Minister John Howard saw the opportunity to cut out the middle man and bully a fledgling government in an independent East Timor to grab a slice of the resources. And with thousands of Australian troops on the ground effectively holding the new Fretilin government hostage, John Howard got his way.

On 20 May 2002, the very first day of formal independence for the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, the Timor Sea Treaty was signed granting billions of dollars worth of reserves to Australia and ensuring Australian control over all exploration and processing of oil and gas in a “Joint Petroleum Development Area”.

The official account of New Zealand’s deployment to East Timor tells of the troops defending Timorese people from rogue Indonesian militia opposed to independence. “The real agenda for the UN ‘peacekeeping force’”, explained investigative journalist John Pilger at the time, “is to ensure that East Timor, while nominally independent, remains under the sway of Jakarta and Western business interests.”

Impoverished by decades of occupation and saddled with an unfavourable oil treaty, the new nation state was desperately poor. Wages were capped at US$3 a day. The UN reported that half the population were living on less than US$0.55 a day. In 2000, President Xanana Gusmao warned that East Timor’s underpaid soldiers led an impoverished “subhuman existence” and might eventually revolt. In 2006, his prediction came to pass. New Zealand troops returned to Timor Leste, again under Australian command. The uprising was suppressed. The Fretilin Prime Minister, who was courting Chinese investment to build up oil and gas processing facilities in Timor Leste, was forced to resign and a new government more compliant with Western imperialism was installed.

Solomon Islands

In 2003, New Zealand troops landed at Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands. The official mission of the Australian-led force was to “restore order”. Five years of inter-ethnic conflict had cost more than 100 lives. Around 40,000 people had been driven from their homes. The New Zealand soldiers would stay on for a decade, and return again after that.

Prior to the 1880s, the Solomons were a collection of separate, self-governing islands. In 1883, they were colonised by Germany and Britain, forcing disparate ethnic groups with different languages and customs into a single nation.

Ethnic tensions created by colonisation were further heightened by the US occupation of the Solomons during World War Two, when they shifted the nation’s capital from the island of Malaita to a neighbouring island, Guadalcanal (known in the indigenous language as Isatabu). American demand for labour also drove mass migration of Malaitans to the new capital, putting pressure on land held by Isatabu people. Women have the primary rights to land on Guadalcanal. On Malaita, it is the men. Over time, Malaitan men married Guadalcanal women, gaining land rights on the island.

When the 1998 Asian economic crisis threw thousands out of work, simmering ethnic tensions boiled over. The Isatabu Freedom Movement launched attacks on Malaitan migrants. The Malaitan Eagle Force took up arms in response. Announcing the New Zealand military deployment, Foreign Minister Phil Goff labelled the Solomon Islands a “failed state” which needed outside intervention by Australia and New Zealand.

But the real reasons for intervention were plainly stated in a report titled Our Failing Neighbour, published in 2003 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Firstly, “Australia’s standing in the wider world – including with the United States — is at stake.” New Zealand agreed, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters commenting in 2006 that “New Zealand’s involvement in the Solomon Islands and Timor Leste are good examples of where our international contribution coincides with American interests.” And secondly, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, “the collapse of Solomon Islands is depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities.”

In 1998, Australian multinational Delta Gold had opened a huge mine on Guadalcanal. The lucrative mine accounted for a quarter of the Solomon Islands economy, but the benefits did not flow to local people. The extreme inequality in the Solomons meant that in 2003, 1 percent of households were receiving 52 percent of all income. Australian intervention was not intended to change this. It was to get the gold mine, seized by Guadalcanal militants in 2000, back under Australian management. The mine did reopen under new Australian owners, Allied Gold, and two years later the last New Zealand and Australian troops left — only to return after further unrest in 2021.

Tonga

In 2006, New Zealand and Australian troops were sent to the Kingdom of Tonga — again to “restore order”. Tonga was a deeply unequal society dominated by the king and his nobles. Of the 33 MPs in the Tongan parliament, fourteen were appointed by the king for life and nine more by the 33 members of the country’s nobility. Only nine were directly elected by the “commoners”.

The royal family used their power to amass huge personal fortunes in offshore bank accounts in collaboration with international capitalists. The king made US$26 million selling Tongan passports — mainly to Hong Kong residents ahead of the territory’s transfer back to China in 1997. Forbes magazine put the wealth of his daughter, princess Pilolevu, at over US$30 million. Average income in Tonga in 2005 was less than US$40 a week.

That same year, mass protests demanding democracy saw a tenth of the total population take to the streets. A six week strike by public sector workers demanded pay rises of 60-80 percent and a Royal Commission to be established immediately “to review the Constitution to allow a more democratic government to be established.” The 2005 general election delivered seven of the nine directly-elected seats to the Human Rights and Democracy Movement, headed by MP ʻAkilisi Pōhiva.

When King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV died in September 2006 and unpopular Prince George Tupou V was named as his successor, popular anger boiled over into riots. Troops arrived from Australia and New Zealand to enforce martial law.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters said, “Our presence is not about taking sides. New Zealand has been fully supportive of peaceful democratic reform in Tonga.” But ʻAkilisi Pōhiva condemned the foreign intervention. The chair of the National Committee for Political Reform, Dr Sitiveni Halapua, said the foreign troops were there “to make people afraid and to support the government.” Once order was restored, ʻAkilisi Pōhiva and other pro-democracy MPs were arrested and charged with sedition.

The pressure for change in Tonga was unstoppable, but the revolutionary potential of 2006 was blunted by the New Zealand military so that when democratic reform eventually arrived four years later, the wealthy and powerful were protected. The net worth of today’s reigning king, Tupou VI, is $100 million.

PACER Plus

While direct military intervention is the most visible expression of New Zealand imperialism in the Pacific, it is only the tip of the spear. Behind the use of armed force is diplomatic pressure and the wielding of economic power over Pacific nations, including through “aid programmes” with strings attached. Aid conditions include requirements for Pacific governments to implement policies favourable to Western business interests. Sometimes they require aid recipients to spend the money on goods and services from the donor country. This “boomerang aid”, which mainly benefits Western businesses, has long been a feature of Australian foreign policy and is now part of New Zealand’s approachas well.

A clear example New Zealand’s economic imperialism is the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) and the resulting multilateral free trade agreement known as PACER Plus.

PACER began as an attempt to sabotage the Pacific Island Countries Trade Agreement (PICTA), a Pacific-led initiative launched in 2001 to expand trade in goods among 14 members of the Pacific Islands Forum, excluding Australia and New Zealand. The sabotage was successful. Pressure was applied to Pacific nations not to ratify the deal and PICTA never came into force.

The PACER Plus free trade deal came into effect in 2020. Officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) say the deal will “boost sustainable economic development and contribute to a more stable and resilient Pacific region.”

But independent analyses found that the removal of import tariffs will deprive Pacific nations of $US60 million each year in government revenue, cost 75% of Pacific manufacturing jobs and have negative health impacts due to an increase in cheap, unhealthy foods as well as threats to healthy, culturally appropriate food production.

The real aims, also touted by MFAT, say that PACER Plus will “improve market access” for New Zealand businesses, “provide greater consistency, certainty and transparency trading in the Pacific region” and “generate opportunities to invest or partner with Pacific businesses.” A petition signed by 171 prominent individuals and 33 organisations in the region, including the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, called on Pacific governments not to sign.

Imperialism

Imperialist expansion and domination of the Pacific has been a feature of New Zealand’s foreign policy since the earliest stages of colonisation. It is not the result of decisions taken by this politician or that political party. As Marxists like Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin pointed out over a century ago, imperialism is an inevitable product of capitalism. Summarising their work, US socialist Brian Jones writes:

Capitalism, in its “classic” phase was characterized by competing commodity producing firms within unified national markets… Bukharin and Lenin set out to show, however, that the era of small business competition necessarily led to the creation of giant trusts and cartels.

What is a “trust” or a “cartel” for that matter? These are simply organizations within an industry or even across industries that form to confer the advantages of monopoly on their participants… Lenin uses the example of a German coal syndicate that came to dominate 87 percent of coal output in its area in 1893, and 95 percent by 1910. There are countless modern examples. The worldwide media were controlled by fifty corporations worldwide in 1983, by 2004 there remained only five. Their goal is to use their immense size to destroy their competition, not increase it. By means of buying political influence, under-selling small producers, and so on, large enterprises systematically choke to death their smaller rivals… this concentration reached a point over 100 years ago where certain industries became fused with the national state…

The national borders are too narrow for the growth of these industries, and they are compelled to constantly acquire new markets, new sources of raw material, and new outlets for investment outside the “home” nation. Once the world was already carved up among the world powers, they are forever pushed by market competition toward rearranging who owns what, and have no other way to settle who gets what except by force. Thus, the era of imperialism is one of constant economic competition between states that breaks out again and again into open military competition.

Each state may employ various policies—but imperialism is not reducible to a particular policy. The policies themselves must be seen as flowing form a worldwide system of imperialist competition.

This not only explains why New Zealand governments have always acted to suppress Pacific self-determination and to secure Western control of resources, by also why they whip up fear of “Chinese influence” in the Pacific, and why they sometimes even criticise “French colonialism”.

Liberation in the Pacific first of all requires that working people in Aotearoa see through the smokescreen of official lies about New Zealand’s role. Ultimately however, it also requires the end of the capitalist system which — to varying degrees — oppresses all of us in Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa.

 

Marx’s theory of value: Collapse, AI and Gustavo Petro

By Michael Roberts

Published 10 October, 2024

First published at The Next Recession.

A site called Marxism and Collapse (M&C) has conducted a ‘dialogue’ with an AI model called Genesis Zero (GZ) that includes “an expansion and refutation” of Marx’s theory of value. The human voice (M&C) asks questions and leads the AI model (GZ) into discussing the inadequacies of Marx’s value theory and to reach a new, better theory. The main parts of the Genosis Zero-Gustavo Petro discussion on Marx Theory of Value are found here. 

M&C claims that there is a fundamental weakness in Marx’s analysis of the dual character of use value and exchange value in a commodity. The M&C human trainer throughout provides leading questions to get GZ to respond accordingly that there is indeed a weakness in Marx’s theory: namely that it leaves out nature as a source of value. GZ then agrees that we need to amend Marx’s value theory into some ‘general’ theory of value that incorporates the value of ‘nature’.

This debate has been distributed mostly in Latin America and Spain (for example, in the Colombian newspaper Desde Abajo), although the previous English versions are also being widely distributed in several English speaking countries. Even Colombian president Gustavo Petro has entered this dialogue and this has sparked considerable interest.

Petro is not only president but very interested in Marxist theory in relation to the environmental crisis and damage engendered by capitalism globally and in Colombia. And he is keen to find a way of bringing the law of value into measuring the ecological and environmental damage to nature caused by capital. He concludes from the dialogue that we need to amend Marx’s law of value to incorporate nature, which he considers is missing from Marx’s value theory. Petro has been using the ideas expressed in this dialogue in several oral presentations.

Let us consider this idea that Marx’s value theory is inadequate, incomplete and even false because it does not include nature as a source of value creation. I think this idea is unnecessary and it also weakens Marx’s value theory in its penetrating and compelling critique of capitalism.

Marx starts Capital with this first sentence: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.” Note the use of the word ‘wealth’; not value, but wealth. Marx is saying that all the goods and services that humans use is a measure of wealth. The value of this wealth is a different matter and value only applies in the capitalist mode of production.

In my recent book (with Guglielmo Carchedi) called Capitalism in the 21st century (p10-13), we briefly deal with nature as a source of value. Marx says that nature is a source of USE VALUE — as it is, after all, material stuff. Nature is matter which provide uses for humans (air, water, warmth, light, shelter etc) without the intervention of human labour power. BUT while nature may have use value but it does not have value under the capitalist mode of production. Value is created when nature is modified by human labour power to create a commodity owned by capital that can be sold (hopefully at a profit) on the market. The environmental destruction of the forests by capitalist production (fossil exploration, mining, logging and clearance etc) means a loss of the ‘wealth’ of use values, but it does not mean a loss of value (exchange value) for capital. As socialists we want to consider the impact on nature and the environment, but capital is not interested unless labour power is exerted on nature to create new use values that can be sold on the market.

So it is not necessary under capitalism to value nature. And as Marx’s law of value only applies to the capitalist mode of production, then it is not necessary to ‘correct’ Marx’s law. Indeed, one of the features of the dual nature of value in a commodity in capitalist production is the contradiction between use values (humanity’s needs and nature’s wealth) and exchange value (the commoditisation of human labour and nature into products for sale for profit). This contradiction would be ended under socialism/communism where production would be direct to the consumer and for social use values (or wealth) alone. There would be no commodities, values and prices and thus human labour would be in harmony with nature. So there would be no law of value and so need to ‘generalise’ or amend it.

Nevertheless, the M&C human in the dialogue wants to extend Marx’s theory of value to include nature. So he/she has got the GZ AI model to develop some vague ‘generalised’ law of value.

Marx’s formula for value in commodities is made up of: c (the value of machines and raw materials used up in production) + v (the share of new value created in production going to human labour) + s (the share of the new value appropriated by capital). Thus total value = c+v+s. According to M&C, this is inadequate and so GZ obliges with an extended formula for total value of a commodity that includes the contribution of nature (n). It presents initially this formula as c+v+s+n.

But how do you measure n?

Not in human labour hours because the extended theory says that no human labour is involved. What about In physical units of trees, animals, rivers etc? That makes no sense as Marx’s formula is measured in labour hours. Combining hours with physical units is like measuring apples with pears. Perhaps n could be measured in monetary terms ie rents for land. But rent is a part of surplus value in Marxist theory and is already accounted for in s, so there is no need for n. Maybe n could be measured as a stock of physical assets used up in production, but then raw materials are already included in c in Marx’s value theory. So this extension just does not add up.

Nevertheless, the dialogue moves on. M&C asks GZ to join him/her in a “combined attack” on Marx’s value theory and again the AI model obliges like a trained puppet. At all times, the AI model always agrees with the human’s questions (actually more like statements); it never disagrees. According to M&C and obligingly agreed by the GZ AI model, a proper theory of value should not be based on human labour alone, but include forests, animals (animal labour) and not just on hours of ‘abstract’ human labour time but also ‘concrete labour’ (specific human and animal skills).

The M&C human and the GZ AI now come up with a more sophisticated formula for including nature in total value. Total value is now made up of: Human labour time (say 300); plus some extra value from special ‘concrete’ labour including ‘animal labour’ (bees or horses at work (say 75); plus nature (raw materials (say 300); plus some specific concrete ‘better quality’ nature such as better forests (say 50). Thus the total value or price = 750.

It is claimed that this measure of value differs from Marx’s value total which would only include human labour time (300). The extended model now assumes that 100 of that labour time goes to the subsistence of the human workforce. So in Marx’s value theory, while surplus value would be (300-100) or 200, while in the new generalised value theory it would be 750-100, or 650; so way more value is created and way more surplus value. More exploitation!

But the extended formula is faulty. First, the extended theory excludes value transferred from machinery used up in production (c). It only considers new value created. But total value in production is c+v+s, remember. This difference is important because much of the extra value identified in the extended formula is already incorporated in Marx’s value measure. ‘Animal labour’ is not the equivalent of human labour. In the capitalist mode of production, horses, bees and slaves are treated as machines or raw materials. So their contribution is included in the raw materials or machines used up in production, ie in (c). The value of the commodity in Marx’s theory of value thus already includes human labour, nature as raw materials used up and ‘animals’ as machines also used up in production. There is no need to invent new forms of value.

This brings me to the question of whether machines create new value. This is the question that President Petro is concerned with. It is an old issue about whether machines create value (including AI). Marx’s answer was that value is only created by human labour power. Machines have value (but it is value created by previous human labour power to make them). They have use value (they raise the productivity of labour) but they do not create new value. As Marx said, if human labour stopped working, machines would also. Even AI needs human input (training, data, prompting etc) — as we can readily see from the M&C’s ‘dialogue’ with GZ.

If there were only machines making machines and producing without any labour, there would be no value (and no capitalist mode of production because the exploitation of human labour does not happen). But we are a long way from that. Moreover, human intelligence is creative and imaginative ie it thinks of things that do not yet exist; while machines/AI do not — again that is proven by the GZ model just regurgitating M&C’s leading questions into answers that the M&C trainer wants to have.

In Marx’s economic theory, abstract labour is the only source of value and surplus-value. However, in the case of an economy where robots build robots build robots and there is no human labour involved, surely value is still created? This was the argument of Dmitriev in 1898, in his critique of Marx’s value theory. He said that, in a fully automated system, a certain input of machines can create a greater output of machines (or of other commodities). In this case, profit and the rate of profit would be determined exclusively by the technology used (productivity) and not by (abstract) labour. If 10 machines produce 12 machines, the profit is 2 machines and the rate of profit is 2/10 = 20%.

But value reduced to just use value has nothing to do with Marx’s notion of value, which is the monetary expression of abstract labour expended by labourers. If machines could create ‘value’, this value would be use-value rather than value as the outcome of humans’ abstract labour. But, if machines can create ‘value’, so can an infinity of other factors (animals, the forces of nature, sunspots, etc.) and the determination of value becomes impossible. And if machines supposedly could transfer their use-value to the product, this would immediately come up against the problem of the aggregating the value of different use-values — e.g. apples plus pears, as in the extended formula presented by GZ above.

For Marx, machines can be valued but they do not create (new) value. Rather, concrete labour transfers the value of the machines (and, more generally, of the means of production) to the product. They increase human productivity and thus the output per unit of capital invested, while decreasing the quantity of living labour needed for the production of a certain output. Given that only labour creates value, the substitution of the means of production for living labour decreases the quantity of value created per unit of capital invested.

The Dmitriev critique confuses the dual nature of value under capitalism: use value and exchange value. There is use value (things and services that people need); and exchange value (the value measured in labour time and appropriated from human labour by the owners of capital and realised by sale on the market). In every commodity under the capitalist mode of production, there is both use value and exchange value. You can’t have one without the other under capitalism. But the latter rules the capitalist investment and production process, not the former.

Value (as defined) is specific to capitalism. Sure, living labour can create things and do services (use values). But value is the substance of the capitalist mode of producing things. Capital (the owners) controls the means of production created by labour and will only put them to use in order to appropriate value created by labour. Capital does not create value itself. So in our hypothetical all-encompassing robot/AI world, productivity (of use values) would tend to infinity while profitability (surplus value to capital value) would tend to zero.

The essence of capitalist accumulation is that to increase profits and accumulate more capital, capitalists want to introduce machines that can boost the productivity of each employee and reduce costs compared to competitors. This is the great revolutionary role of capitalism in developing the productive forces available to society.

But there is a contradiction. In trying to raise the productivity of labour with the introduction of technology, there is a process of labour shedding. New technology replaces labour. Yes, increased productivity might lead to increased output and open up new sectors for employment to compensate. But over time, a ‘capital-bias’ or labour shedding means less new value is created (as labour is the only content of value) relative to the cost of invested capital. So there is a tendency for profitability to fall as productivity rises. In turn, that leads eventually to a crisis in production that halts or even reverses the gain in production from the new technology. This is solely because investment and production depend on the profitability of capital in our modern (capitalist) mode of production.

The key issue is Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. A rising organic composition of capital leads to a fall in the overall rate of profit engendering recurring crises. If robots and AI do replace human labour at an accelerating rate, that can only intensify that tendency. Well before we get to a robot-all world, capitalism will experience ever-increasing periods of crises and stagnation.

So you can see that while Marx’s value theory explains why the profitability of capital will tend to fall and thus engender regular and recurring crises of production and investment, the so-called better ‘extended nature’ theory of value of M&C and GZ would only show an ever rising amount of surplus value for capital without any crises ensuing within the capitalist mode of production. The crisis could be only environmental. The capitalist mode of production would have no internal, integrated contradiction between profit and human social need.

Capitalism tries to turn the ‘free gifts of nature’ into profit. In so doing, it depletes and degrades natural resources, flora and fauna, organic and inorganic. However, there is a constant battle by capital to control nature and to lower rising prices of ‘raw materials’ as natural resources are depleted and not renewed, adding another factor to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (see above, the book, Capitalism in the 21st century, pp15-18, which actually measures the hit to profitability from this).

None of these arguments are mentioned in the M&C-GZ dialogue which continues to try and come up with a yet more generalised theory of value that apparently includes intrinsic value (use value?) plus transformative value (applied human labour) plus ecological value (the impact of nature) and social value (community well being). Now we have a value theory that provides not a critical analysis of the contradiction between value and wealth, use value and exchange value, or between profit and social need that Marx’s value theory does, but instead a theory of the ‘value of everything’, whether under capitalism or not. This, in my opinion, renders value theory redundant and frees capitalism from its contradiction and crisis.

The dialogue talks of Marx’s ‘labour fetishism’ by leaving out nature as a source of value; and Marx’s ‘idealist approach’ by leaving out nature; and Marx’s ‘anthropomorphic’ human-biased approach by leaving out nature. Marx’s supporters are also unscientific because they fail to develop value theory with “a more nuanced analysis” (says GZ) that includes nature. A scientific approach would not stick at a “staunch defense of every last syllable written by Marx”; instead it would progress just as Einstein did with general relativity to amend Newton’s classical physics or quantum mechanics which has now amended general relativity.

M&C then takes the opportunity to single out the worst offenders in sticking with Marx’s value theory. There are 

contemporary exponents who see nature as merely a ‘resource reservoir’ or at most as a passive matrix subordinate to human labour activity as the ‘only’ value generator, linked to the creation of real wealth but excluded from the capitalist valuation process as a whole are British economist Michael Roberts and Marxist intellectual Rolando Astarita. Additionally, we can mention the positions of Argentina Trotskyist academic commentators Esteban Mercatante and Juan Dal Maso, who are opposed to any theoretical expansion of Marxist orthodoxy to give a more prominent place to nature in economic analysis.

Socialist ecologist John Bellamy Foster is also attacked as another defender of Marxist orthodoxy.

The GZ model obligingly backs M&C and goes further by claiming a false consciousness on the part of these contemporary Marxist orthodoxists. “The refusal to consider the role of nature in value creation as theoretically legitimate may stem from a reluctance to deviate from established Marxist doctrine rather than a comprehensive analysis of value creation.” So we are indoctrinated and not scientific. Thanks GZ (or more appropriately, M&C).

Finally, what is all this dialogue about? It seems that M&C are convinced that Marx and Engels disregarded the role or value of nature as opposed to humans on our planet. But this is a travesty of M-E’s views. Let me quote Engels from his early work, Umrisse (to be found in my book, Engels 200 p88).

To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.

Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much degradation as labour.

And then from his great book, the Dialectics of Nature: 

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.

He continues: “men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body. …

It is not Marx and Engels who disregard the role and value of nature, it is the capitalists — at least until it has now hit them in the face with climate change. For Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. This conclusion seems to have been lost by our Marxists of Collapse.

 

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

By Stefania Barca & Dan Boscov-Ellen

Published 10 October, 2024

First published at Spectre.

Labor’s uneasy relationship with popular environmental movements presents a serious challenge for ecosocialist organizing. In light of this, some have argued that the environmental left should remedy its perceived neglect of class by abandoning “lifestyle environmentalism” in favor of union-friendly policy reforms, especially in the energy and transportation sectors. In her new book Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change (Pluto Press, 2024), Stefania Barca affirms the need for a working-class ecopolitics while challenging the narrow understandings of class struggle and material interest that suffuse much of the current discourse. Dan Boscov-Ellen interviews Barca about how a better grasp of working-class environmental history and the theoretical insights of materialist ecofeminism can help to shift the debate.

Stefania Barca is Distinguished Researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela/CISPAC (Spain), where she teaches environmental and gender history. Her previous work includes Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counterhegemonic Anthropocene (Cambridge UP, 2020).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1

  “Tony Mazzochi,” Tony Mazzochi Center, accessed September 29, 2024, https://uswtmc.org/about-us/tony-mazzocchi; Kurt Iveson, “The Sydney ‘Green Bans’ Show How We Can Transform Our City,” Jacobin, July 10, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/07/australia-sydney-urbanism-construction-builders-labourers-federation-nsw-green-labor-militancy

• 2

  Kai Heron and Jodi Dean, “Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition: Organization and Anti-Imperialism in Catastrophic Times,” Spectre, June 26, 2022, https://spectrejournal.com/climate-leninism-and-revolutionary-transition/.

• 3

  Just Transition and Care Network, Care Work in the Just Transition: Providing for People and the Planet (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Research and Social Development, 2024), https://www.unrisd.org/en/library/publications/care-work-in-the-just-transition-providing-for-p

• 4

  “Homepage,” Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, accessed September 29, 2024, https://ejatlas.org/.

• 5

  “Homepage,” Common Ecologies, accessed September 29, 2024, https://commonecologies.net/.