Degrowth Communism: Part II
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Bue Rübner Hansen and Emanuele Leonardi
QUESTION 4: Essential work and the organization of work
Lele: In your piece on biocommunism, Nick, you discuss the issue of 'essential work': how do you/we think degrowth—or political ecology at large—can have relevance in defining that notion and, also, in informing supportive policies, e.g. Jameson's 'universal army of labor', which connects work activities based on use-value and reduction of working time? Moreover: may degrowth be instrumental to build at the very least a conversation between this strand—close to an ecological reading of the job guarantee (so, a centrality of state intervention)—and other possible paths, like universal basic services and unconditional basic income?
Nick: Thanks for this question, Lele. Indeed, one of the starting points for my “biocommunist” hypotheses was the issue—recently raised by Sandro Mezzadra (2020) and others—of the pandemic role of the “essential worker” laboring in dangerous conditions in sectors such as health care, schools, warehouses, delivery, meatpacking and food processing. Depending on national conditions, some of this labour is in the public sector; elsewhere, it is state legislation that determines what labour should continue and what should halt.
In capitalist society this designation of “essential” labour is subjected to a dual and contradictory logic, that of preserving social reproduction to a degree such that the reproduction of capital can continue; a portion of this “emergency” labour is forced labour to prevent or palliate capitalist emergency, and indeed to generate new opportunities for accumulation. In a biocommunist society, however, this work would be aimed at the equitable protection of people in disaster circumstances, abrupt or protracted. It would be truly “public works” (Marx 1857).
How might “essential work” develop in an ongoing “polycrisis” (Tooze 2021) where escalating costs of living, pandemics, climate change, and war intertwine. I am struck by Cory Doctorow’s (2020) critique of Aaron Bastani’s (2019) “fully automated luxury communism”. He argues remediating climate change will involve “unimaginably labor-intensive tasks”: relocating coastal cities, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation, caring for millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoonotic and insect borne pandemics.
To this list one can add emergency firefighters, mass tree planters, rewilding land clearers, solar panel installers, housing insulators, coders of climate-sensing software, gigafactory workers, and many more. Indeed, if we think of climate emergency as a situation that is going to persist not just for years but for decades or indeed centuries, then we are envisaging a situation in which a very large proportion of necessary social labour is indeed that of the “essential worker”!
One way in which this situation might be handled is indeed a “government job guarantee” with an eco-crisis orientation, an idea advanced by some Green New Deal advocates (Tcherneva 2020), usually with a social democratic orientation: one can envisage better and worse implementations, most of which would be compatible with forms of state-of-exception capitalism.
However, it is also possible to envisage a far more radical version of “essential work”, whereby in climate emergency that lasts not just for years but decades (and perhaps centuries) such public works could become a central institution in the organization of labour, usurping the marketized sale of labour power across a range of “vital systems”.
It is in this context I return to Fredric Jameson’s (2013) controversial proposition of a socialism based on “universal army of labour” in which every capable person performs obligatory part-time “public works employment”, across a very wide range of activities, for four hours a day (or some weekly or annual equivalent). This would be the main social organ of labour assignment, a livelihood is guaranteed, and the rest of your time is free.
Jameson’s military terminology is a provocation to the anti-statist left. Nonetheless, conceived as part of an agenda of revolutionary democratization in governmentality, recognition of “essential” nature of reproductive labour, and with forms of both central and decentralized participatory planning, it could be a very flexible and pacific “army”.
Indeed, such an organization could combine both direct public service work and self-organized mutual-aid of the “disaster communism” (Out of the Woods 2018) type, and a variety of hybridizations between these top-down and bottom-up organizations. In this form, mobilization of de-commodified collective work would be part of the process by which in communism the state is transformed into “vast association” (Marx and Engels 1848).
As you say, the idea of a “universal army of labour” invites, indeed requires, articulation with concepts either of a basic income, or, my preference, a use-value allocation of basic services (housing, health, education), which could in turn be an element of a program that incorporates degrowth elements by unite sufficiency with equality.
The problem will, however, arise of how mandatory “universal labour” is compatible with “universal” provision of service or “universal income”. What of those who, for various reasons, decline such labour? One can see solutions ranging from the libertarian to authoritarian. A humane and practical response to this issue would, I think, require both an education and training system far more careful and thorough than that provided within capitalism, and ample provisions and exemption for medical and psychological reasons. With these provisos, however, collective cooperative labour might be abducted from the market, and repositioned in relation to eco-social crisis and species-survival.
Bue: Nick, what tendencies, if any, do you see in the present that point in the direction of such a vast socialisation of labour and the means of reproduction?
Nick: You are right to ask that question, because on the surface, nothing could seem more unlikely after some fifty years of neoliberalism than a revival of interest in collective ownership and public works! One might well say that while there is ample evidence of the dissatisfaction with the status quo in the sequence of uprisings that spread round the planet from 2018 on—in France, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, then to Black Lives Matter in the USA and globally, and so many other unrests—no positive alternative agenda is yet apparent. However, I think one can go further than that now, and name at least four sectors where struggles over collective provisioning are in motion. First, an effect of the pandemic has been to raise awareness of the importance of the much maligned “public sector”, particularly in health care, but also around schools and other institutions: here unions and professional associations that unsparingly name the disasters caused by neoliberal policies are of critical importance, and we also see an international dimension in the fight against “vaccine apartheid.” Second, there is a wave of social movements sparked by the disrepair of social infrastructures: I am here thinking first of energy systems, particularly initiatives to re-make national electricity grids, an issue propelling movements that diffuse, complex, often contradictory—but with strong components that are for, in a very literal sense, “power to the people”. One might also here think of a wave of agroecological initiatives and contestations over the infrastructures of food security. Third, there are more sharply demarcated class struggles, especially around provision of housing in conditions of extreme income inequality and the condition of the homeless. And fourth, there is the environmental movement itself, where the concept of a Green New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, has explicitly articulated connections between climate emergency, employment creation, jobs guarantees and public works. So, I would say there is an incipient composition of struggles repudiating marketization and privatization and formulating a new collectivist synthesis, currently locked in battle with the polar opposite tendencies of “disaster capitalism”, and that a task of degrowth communists is to help connect, amplify and voice the connective logics of this new force.
QUESTION 5: Bargaining for the common ecological good
Bue: Lele, you have written incisively about the need to pay attention to often forgotten histories of working class environmentalism, especially in struggles against noxiousness. This is a working class who has lives and concerns outside the workplace, and who come to notice how they are affected by toxins and environmental degradation where they live. What are the subjective and objective conditions, as you see it, of workers joining the wider ecological struggle en masse, and how may unions come to bargain for the common ecological good?
Lele: Thanks for this challenging question, Bue. It seems to me that, in order to articulate objective and subjective conditions for the becoming-ecological of working-class struggles, two moves are needed. First, a comprehensive understanding of the labor-ecology nexus and its political development. Second, a wager about which mobilizations can better define a terrain for convergences between environmental/climate justice instances and workers’ demands.
1. The reason why I often insist that the history of working-class environmentalism is key to organizing current conflicts is that conventional wisdom assumes that labor and nature are to be considered in oppositional terms: either one, or the other. This position—which is today politically true (as many instances of industrial collective bargaining sadly remind us, on a regular basis)—is historically false (or, at the very least, partial). As various contributions in the emerging field of environmental labor studies have shown, the ecological crisis became policized in the 1960s/70s through workers’ struggles, not in spite of them. In the moment in which class struggle questioned not only the level of exploitation, but its kernel, an alliance between human production of use values and non-human production of use values became conceivable. The substitution of this perspective with the aut-aut one—either labor or nature —is due to the political defeat of the working class, which is encapsulated in the rise of neoliberalism and its environmental façade, namely the green economy. What is often overlooked, in this shift from ecology as a crisis of capital to ecology as a crisis for capital, is the process of relegating organized labor to the background. The actors of the green economy are smart, innovative entrepreneurs and smart, careful consumers; dirty working hands—and their unions—are nothing more than obstacles in the way of an ecological transition ‘from above’.
From this perspective, a research project I’m undertaking with Maura Benegiamo and younger comrades such as (to name but a few) Giulia Arrighetti, Giorgio Pirina and Federico Scirchio aims at investigating the ‘joint’ genealogy of sustainability and digitization. It is indeed plausible to put forward the hypothesis that these two are, so to speak, 'twin' responses to the same problem, that of the excessive rigidity of the wage-earning society (to use Robert Castel’s well-known formula). Here I think our path overlaps quite nicely with Nick’s. Moreover, it may be useful to recall an essential trait of such a society, which degrowth scholar and historian Mathias Schmelzer refers to as the growth paradigm, that is, a specific set of discourses, theories, and statistical standards that converge in asserting and justifying the idea that economic growth as conventionally defined is a necessary means of achieving social goals, such as full employment, and substantive equality. Through the dynamism of a powerful virtuous circle (...> employment > wages > welfare > access to mass consumption > employment...) it was possible
“to turn difficult political conflicts over distribution into technical, nonpolitical management questions of how to collectively increase GDP. By thus transforming class and other social antagonisms into apparent win–win situations, it provided what could be called an “imaginary resolution of real contradictions” [Eagleton] and played a key role in producing the stable postwar consensus around embedded liberalism: It helped integrate labor and the political Left, rendered rearmament feasible without a decline in living standards, it helped stabilize the Bretton Woods system, and in the context of global inequalities it offered the (post)colonial countries in the global South a possible route out of poverty towards what came be defined as ‘progress’” (Schmelzer 2015).
It is against this backdrop that Fordism shows itself as an entropic device: the inextricable nexus between capital accumulation and the reduction of inequality (largely limited to the global North) can only work if the costs of a constant increase in the volume of production are offloaded onto the biosphere (and, more generally, onto the subjects of social reproduction—which, in addition to the natural environment, include domestic labor, mostly performed by women, and servile labor, mostly performed in the colonies).
The crisis of this entropic device illuminates the issue of the proximity between sustainability and digitization: indeed, both respond to an excess of ‘rigidity’, imposed on the one hand by workers' mobilizations (particularly those against industrial noxiousness) and social mobilizations (especially the feminist revolution), and on the other hand represented by the upsurge of international competition in a period marked by profound geopolitical transformations. Here, then, is where the nexus between infinite growth and the reduction of socio-economic inequalities (with the sphere of reproduction bearing the costs) gives way to a new conceptual pair, that between infinite growth and environmental protection—via sustainable innovation, green and technological (with social equality bearing the costs, since the subject of the new nexus is the most forward-looking entrepreneurship, selected 'meritocratically' by the market—understood as a formal model of social relations).
The main point to be made here is that, after at least 20-30 years of implementation, this innovative way of articulating capitalist development and ecological preservation has proved ineffective. Its promise was to decouple economic (positive) growth and environmental (negative) impacts; its outcome is a scarcely profitable proliferation of financial eco-assets and an outstanding boost of CO2-equivalent emissions:
The profound crisis of the green economy—as expressed ‘subjectively’ by the powerful rise of movements such as FFF and XR/JSO and ‘objectively’ by the multiple impasses of the COP-system—opens up the political space for an ecological transition ‘from below’, namely the unprecedented experimentation of the nexus between fighting inequality and protecting the environment, with economic growth reduced to a desirable but in no way decisive option.
This is, I believe, the fundamental character of the condition in which we find ourselves from an objective standpoint.
2. Such ‘objectivity’, of course, is not at all disconnected from an emerging subjective disposition—which regards society at large. I have already mentioned the movements for climate justice (CJ). What I’d like to do now is to move a few steps forward with analysis, starting with a definition, then providing a trajectory of internal transformation, and finally discussing a few lines of further development.
As is well-established, CJ as a political tool for social mobilizations has emerged in close connection with the anti-globalization cycle of struggles, also referred to as no-global, new-global or ‘movement of movements’. It was at that juncture that ecology turned from a discrete theoretical field into a systemic viewpoint, a general connective tissue, a broad perspective through which the traditional dualism between nature and society could be redefined. It is no coincidence that the very expression climate justice was coined in a 1999 text circulated on the eve of the Seattle uprising. In that context, what the movement of movements wanted to emphasize was “the ethical and political dimension of global warming”, conceived of as a “not purely environmental or climatic issue” (Corporate Watch 1999). Quite correctly, climate naysayers—or, merchants of doubt, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway would have it (2010)—were indicated as reactionaries unable to face an enormous and unprecedented challenge: making atmospheric stability a political stake.
Perhaps less correctly—in hindsight—the UN-led climate governance was seen as a meaningful response: if not immediately effective, at least politically adequate to this challenge. In this sense, every preliminary definition of ‘alterglobal’ CJ is based on the recognition that those who have been least responsible for the historical volume of emissions—the countries of the global South—are also the ones who are most vulnerable to pay the price it entails. In this perspective, CJ was originally for the most part a geopolitical critique dealing especially with historical responsibility (for cumulative emissions) and (repayment of) climate debt.
2019 as the annus mirabilis of CJ constitute a radical rupture with regard to this framework. Greta Thunberg’s message perfectly captures such rupture, in three different ways:
a) delegitimization of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change: “our political leaders have failed us”, so “I will not ask them anything. Instead, I will ask the media to start treating the crisis as a crisis” (Katowice, Dec 3, 2018);
b) inversion of the relationship between economy and ecology: “some companies and some decision makers” are to blame for the climate crisis. They “have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money” (Davos, Jan 22, 2019);
c) call for action rather than negotiation: “We’ve had 30 years of pep talking and selling positive ideas and I’m sorry but it doesn’t work. Because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now . . . . The one thing we need more than hope is action” (Stockholm, Nov 24, 2018).
These speeches fueled a political process which eventually erupted in the first global climate strike on March 15, 2019. Instead of NGOs providing legitimacy, 2019 brought to the UNFCCC a mass movement undermining its very raison d’etre. Such mass movement for CJ is marked by some key features. First, it thoroughly changed the social perception of global warming: from apocalyptic scenario to driver of worldwide youth mobilization. Second, it incorporated the centrality of transfeminism not only with regard to critical repertoires, but also, more directly, within its structure of leadership: Greta Thunberg is accompanied with young women such as Vanessa Nakate, Luisa Neubauer, Helena Gualinga. Third, within and against the institutional process of climatization of the world (Aykut 2020), it turned CJ from an oppositional stance to a general political framework for the convergence of different struggles.
From this perspective, it is important to highlight that the four climate strikes of 2019 progressively enlarged CJ’s focus on geopolitics so that it now includes social inequality within national communities as a key target of its critical endeavor. What is now explicitly posed is an unprecedented proximity between social equality and conflicts for atmospheric stabilization (linked primarily to emissions reduction).
The failure of ecological transition ‘from above’ has merged with mass protests, opening up unprecedented space for thinking and practicing ecological transition ‘from below’, which is to say based on the critique of carbon inequality. It is against the background of such ‘new clothes’ of CJ that a convergence between workers’ struggles and political ecology can actually take place.
It is important to note that the first effect of the 2019-as-rupture concerns the political visibility of global warming. Prior to that, statistics about emissions were based on countries’ performances: you could focus either on ‘absolute emissions’ (then blame China and India) or on ‘relative, per capita emissions’ (thus blame the US and Russia). What we have now is a different scenario, directly connected to CJ’s ‘new clothes’ and its interest in carbon inequality. This is expressed below in a figure from the Oxfam Media briefing in September 2020:
We see here a new understanding of what has to change in order for the 1.5° target (set by the Paris Agreement) to be achieved: not the lifestyle of ‘developed’ countries in general but, primarily, the lifestyle of the richest 10%, worldwide. The main character of this new story isn’t ‘China’, nor the ‘average American’; rather, it is the decoupled interest of different income groups at the global level. This does not mean that individual or national contributions are to be considered unimportant; quite the opposite is true when it comes to climate activists. Simply, contemporary CJ postulates that individual and national efforts can be effective only against the background of systemic transformations of the economic structure of consumption.
The latest report by Oxfam from November 2022 goes even further by introducing the point of view of production. It gets there via the financial leverage 253 billionaires can exercise over global investment. As the following table unmistakably shows, if the carbon distance between rich and poor is outstanding from the perspective of consumption—the top 1% emitting roughly 100 times the bottom 50%—it is absolutely stunning from the perspective of production: 3 million times!
Such ‘revolution’ in political visibility has partially translated into conflictual practices, as the GKN case in Italy shows. While it is important to avoid wishful thinking, it is just as important to note that: a) the ‘objective’ crisis of the green economy has entailed a loosening of the link between working-class identities and fossil-intensive sectors; and b) the rise of CJ inspired mass movements provide the working class with a new ground for ecologically-minded alliances. Thus, the interplay amongst technical, social and political class composition can be posed at a new level. Differently from the recent past, we are now in a position to pose the following questions: since an encounter between workers’ struggles and political ecology is finally possible, how to make it happen? How to make it last?
References
Aykut, Stefan (2020) Climatiser le Monde. Paris: Quae.
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Corporate Watch (1999) Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice. Transnational Resource and Action Center, https://www.corpwatch.org/sites/default/files/Greenhouse%20Gangsters.pdf
Doctorow, Cory (2020) “Full Employment.” Locus Magazine, 6 July, https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
Jameson, Frederic (2016) “An American Utopia.” In Jameson, Fredric, ed. Zizek, Slavoj. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London: Verso. 1-96.
Marx, Karl (1857) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive//marx/works/1857/grundrisse/
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1848) “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm
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