Degrowth Communism: Part III
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Bue Rübner Hansen and Emanuele Leonardi
QUESTION 6: Degrowth and class composition
Lele: In your piece on batshit jobs, Bue, you analyze the internal differentiation of 'batshit work', and the very sensitive issue of 'working class' possible complicity with it. To what extent, in your/our opinion, can degrowth be useful in mapping the 'technical' (re: productive process), 'social' (re: territorialized dimension) and 'political' (subjective disposition) aspects of contemporary class composition?
Bue: The idea of batshit jobs is that there are some jobs that involve profound contradiction: They make workers participate in the destruction of the conditions of life in order to make a living. The most obvious examples of such work happens in fossil industries, but also aviation, car manufacture, industrial agriculture, the military. Corporate management, finance, and advertising and many other sectors organised around facilitating and enabling ecologically destructive processes of production, extraction and wastage also merit the description. The term plays off David Graeber’s notion of “bullshit jobs”: work that workers themselves characterise as pointless, meaningless, or socially harmful. Low-level service work, corporate paper-pushing, and ballooning layers of PR and HR staff inventing tasks for themselves and others are some examples. Whereas bullshit jobs create little of value, batshit jobs are necessary for the production of most of the commodities we currently consume as well as for capitalism itself, making its abolition a much more radical and complex proposal.
While workers often don’t reflect on the insanity of destroying the conditions of life to pay their bills, it’s a form of madness on a structural level, hence the riff on the American slang expression “batshit crazy”. Indeed, many workers would go mad if they truly faced the contradiction, leading to various strategies of repression or overeager affirmation of the pride they take in their work, think Cara Daggett’s analysis of petro-masculinity. But more and more workers end up refusing to work in batshit industries. Take this 2021 report in Oil & Gas IQ, a global platform for workers in the fossil fuel industries:
“Nearly half of oil and gas professionals have said that they expect to leave the industry in the next 5 years, according to a new survey out earlier this week. […] Over three quarters (82%) of recruiters have had at least 10% of their open positions unfilled for over three months. Drilling & Well delivery (14%), and Geoscience (12%) are the most difficult roles to fill.”
Unlike the reluctance of workers to take shit and bullshit jobs under “the Great Resignation”, work in oil and gas tends to be very well paid and professionally satisfying. If more and more workers are refusing work in the industry, the number of workers who are demanding the transformation of their industries, or sabotaging them from within, must also be growing if still small. In any case, batshit jobs aren't just a rich problematic for social psychology and psychoanalysis, but also for eco-social agitation and organizing.
In a class analytical perspective, the notion of batshit jobs points to the fact that class isn’t just a matter of the organization of production (technical composition), of social reproduction (social composition), and of subjectivity and political organisation (political composition), but also of how the class is inserted into more-than-human relations, what we may call ecological composition. Because all production, reproduction, and all political orientations and aims are differentially inserted into the web of life, whether they have the luxury to ignore this insertion, or carry on the often abject and hyper-exploited labour of sustaining human life at the “metabolic frontline” of capitalist society. To really understand what is at stake here, we need to move from abstract diagrams (like the question of “human-nature metabolism”, as if the human species makes up a sort of super-organism) to concrete analyses of how different kinds of human activity affect non-human activities and flows. How do humans organized in specific social relations harm or sustain, mobilize or abandon, co-depend on or break ecological relations between different species, material flows and climatic processes? What forms of metabolic front-line labour must be expanded, which can be transformed, and which must be abolished? This is a question of material activities upon things, that is of labour and of the ideas and compulsions that direct it. Put in the terms of Marx’s Capital, this is a question of concrete labour, not just as a producer of perceived use-values (always a question of ideas, wants, or material compulsions) but also as “form-giving fire” which cuts, moulds, melts, freezes, burns, fuses, processes, and mobilises living and non-living “matter” in ways both mechanical, chemical, and organic: from hammering a stone, or opening a coal mine, to planting a seed or cajoling moulds to produce penicillin on industrial scales.[1]
The pandemic, global warming, and ecosystem crisis all force us to pose the question: What labour must be suspended to avoid disaster and what labour must continue? Many terms apart from “batshit jobs” have already been proposed to navigate such a shift: “green jobs”, “reproductive labour”, “essential work”, “earthcare labour”, “hybrid labour”, “meta-industrial labour” vs. “brown jobs”, “carbon jobs”, or “toxic work”.[2] In the years to come, the debate about transition will continue to intensify the question of the abolition or transformation of carbon jobs, and the character of work in an ecological transition. But economists, be they heterodox or mainstream, as well as Marxists and trade unionists, are mostly used to speaking of labour and labour conditions in quantitative dimensions: wages, the length of the work day, productivity, etc. Here we must learn from Marxist eco-feminists who insisted on the importance of centring concrete labour, both to value and affirm various forms of care and reproductive labour, to criticize the gendered, degraded and hyper-exploited form it happens under, and to strongly criticize other forms of concrete labour for the harms they do (remember, that primitive accumulation, colonization, and environmental degradation, and policing all proceeds through labouring activity). Batshit jobs should not, from an ecological perspective, be valued and affirmed, no matter whether they are well-paid and dignified, or hyper-exploitative and destructive for the workers’ body and mind. From the perspective of eco-social transformation, these are jobs that must either be abolished along with their industries (e.g. coal mining), or transformed (e.g. an automotive plant that becomes a producer of electrical buses). The problem with batshit work lies in its concrete character, specifically in the harmful material processes that could not take place without it. To understand whether a work-process is harmful or not is a matter of careful tracing of harm to its sources, a process about which environmental justice movements and studies of them have much to teach us, and which relies on many silent and vocal witnesses and accusers: sick workers and coughing neighbours, climate scientists, activists, technicians who take samples in toxic streams, indigenous defenders of the forest, dead birds falling from the sky, and many more.
The workers who facilitate the destruction of the earth do so for the profits and prestige of a few, as well as for “the wealth of their nations”, and the sustenance of their families. They may or may not know of the harm they participate in, and if they do, they may or may not care. But just as they have the power to keep harm going simply by doing their job, they have the power to disrupt it through strikes, sabotage, and the refusal to work. In either case, their attitudes are of decisive importance to the future of the habitability of our local and planetary habitats. So how do we think about their attitudes?
Abstractly speaking, workers may relate to batshit work in various ways: they may or may not be invested in it (aspiration, pride, belief in the utility of the work, etc.) and they may or may not be dependent upon it (for paying their bills, receiving a pension, maintaining their social status, etc.). If we combine these two axes, we have four fields in which workers may fall:
Workers in the first quarter—a case in point being the coal miners who have gotten into fistfights with Ende Gelände activists some years ago—will fight for their jobs because their lives as they know them depend upon it, both subjectively and objectively. Workers in the second quarter are often skilled workers who can find other employment fairly easily, but somehow believe in the social value or personal remuneration of being, say, an advertiser or engineer of SUVs. Workers in the third quarter will be excited to shift into other lines of work but often find it hard to find something that fits with their skills or economic needs, examples could be budget-airline workers who hate their jobs and are open to the abolition of aviation. Finally, there are workers who are neither invested in nor dependent upon batshit jobs, like those working in public transportation, renewables, care work, disaster relief, or agroecology.
Of all these groups, the fourth is the natural class base of socio-ecological transformation. They are workers whose employment security, income, unions, and sense of pride is most likely to grow in the process of transformation. The task, with regards to the other groups (especially 2 and 3), is to get as many as possible on the side of transformation, and to lessen the resistance and resolve of the rest. This also implies that some will remain hostile to socio-ecological transformation, and that some will knowingly engage in activities that can only be described as socio-ecological scabbing. Lessening resistance and bringing people over can be done by offering economic and subjective alternatives, and by producing shame and distaste for batshit work. Many tools for this already exist in public discourse: Union and left parties’ policies of Just Transition and Green New Deals, climate activists shaming proud coal miners and the adults’ participation in a destructive economy. But I fear it’s dangerous and disempowering for the movements to rely only on policy measures and moralizing. Because it is rarely in our power to impose the needed policy changes, and moralizing is typically ineffective or counterproductive, giving rise to all manner of reaction formations even where it does stroke a sense of guilt. This is where we must circle back to class composition, and consider it in its social and ecological dimensions.
Marxist feminists and the Black radical tradition remind us that the world of labour is much greater than the world of waged work, and that class is not just a matter of un/employment, but of other strategies of survival and enjoyment. People suffering from the proletarian condition—lack of control of the means of re/production—don’t just survive through wage labour, but by marrying someone with access to money, living on charity or welfare, moving in with family, engaging in illicit and criminal activity, migrating, gardening, scavenging, gathering, squatting vacant land and buildings, etc.[3] And they are not just characterized by their relation to work and reproduction, but in relation to forms of pleasure and enjoyment: eating, drinking, fucking, dancing, playing, discussing, reading, breathing clean air, hiking, bird watching, doing sports, grilling in the park, gardening again, but also ecologically harmful forms of enjoyment like consumerism, airplane travel, at least in wealthy countries, etc. These are matters of social and ecological composition. Importantly, they demonstrate that workers have desires and pleasures that are in contradiction to their investments in their work, be it batshit work (like a birdwatching airport worker), or sustainable work (like the skilled windmill worker who loves joy-riding in his old Landrover). And workers also, to varying degrees, have access to care, support, and resources which gives them some capacity to exit jobs they hate (the “Great Resignation” is a recent example of this).
While workers rarely have the capacity to engage in seriously harmful consumption, their symbolic and desiring attachment to it may align them with the fossilist interests of corporate and reactionary actors. But workers’ most serious contribution to ecological harm comes not from consumption, but from participation in destructive industrial, transportational, and agricultural activities. Rather than shame them, the key question here is what non-waged sources of reproduction may lessen their dependence on harmful work, and what non-toxic sources of joy and pleasure may decrease their subjective investment in harmful pleasures.
So while social movement unionists, who insist on “whole worker organizing” are very right to stress workers must organize or be organized as more-than-workers, we must add that the worker “being whole” can be part of the problem. Socio-ecological struggle may require empowering one side of working-class life against another, accentuating the contradiction between them. Transformative organizing and struggle cannot be merely “political” and “economic”, but must involve and transform social reproduction and ideas of the good life more broadly. Here degrowth has much to contribute to any project of socio-ecological transformation. And in relation to those workers who see themselves as middle or aspire to be middle class, degrowth’s invitation to middle class treason is rather pertinent, not just in ecological terms, but in terms of breaking with the forms of ideological capture aligned with the every-expanded reproduction of capital. The very real fact that most of the working class need “more” and better material goods and services (housing, quality food, transportation, public health, etc.) can be solved through massive transfers of wealth to the poor and a transformation of the meaning and practice of the good life (free time, communal luxury, personal sufficiency, etc.). Those who cannot imagine degrowth with communist measures, and communism with degrowth characteristics, are forced to find a path within the hegemonic liberal ideology according to which scarcity can only be overcome through growth, and needs only satisfied by ever increasing production.
Final remarks
Bue: Reflecting on our dialogue, I was reminded by how the French philosopher of strategy François Jullien draws a distinction between two genres of strategic thought. One conception of strategy, which is dominant in the western tradition, is focussed on plans of action through which a model or aim is imposed on reality. The other conception of strategy, which Jullien sees in classical Chinese thought (but which there are plenty of examples of in Marxism and beyond), has to do with the assessment of situational potentials, where the question becomes how to unleash or channel the potentials of a situation, how to respond to the contingencies of a process, or how to manipulate forces at their source rather than “downstream” where they already have overpowering momentum.[4]
I think of this, because our conversation makes one point very clear: As the interconnected crises of our time deepen, the scope for plans of action decreases, while the need for situational, strategic thought increases. For decades, climate strategy was characterised by strategic plans (“this needs to happen”) developed on the basis of scientific facts with no immediate connection to anyone’s everyday life. The turn to eco-social politics over the last decade has changed this, but often maintained the focus on the strategic plan. Thus the Green New Deal was characterised by a certain hope that reality could be reshaped by left candidacies like Sanders’ and Corbyn’s. It was, in the words of Thea Riofrancos, both a plan, a mood, and a battlefield.
Today, the mood is less hopeful, the battlefield has shifted, and planning has become more difficult, where it was ever conceivable without major antecedent struggle. Global warming is increasingly affecting key economic variables such as food, energy, and supply chain security in the Global North. Just in the summer of 2022, drought hit harvests, hydroelectric and nuclear energy production, and essential industrial waterways. Furthermore, the kinds of responses that are available to deal with inflation or energy scarcity—such as a return to coal or the expansion of agricultural land through deforestation—are in contradiction with the necessities of a “rapid and unprecedented societal transformation” to stop catastrophic climate change.[5] The serious risk of this situation, as a recent report outlines, is that we get into a “doom loop”, where
“the consequences of the [climate] crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”
Examples of harmful feedback loops are many, from the increased use of fossil-energy to run air conditioning during heat waves, to the massive amount of concrete and heavy machinery needed to protect or move cities from rising seas. Most immediately, the end of cheap food and cheap energy—as per Jason Moore—brings capitalist economies into a circle of inflation and rising interest rates, which increases poverty on the one side, and decreases the financial scope for transition measures on the other. In such a situation, planning doesn’t quite become impossible, but it becomes improvisational and ad hoc, “a permanently unfolding situational-relational problem”, to adopt a phrase from my Common Ecologies comrade Daniel Gutiérrez.
In degrowth and ecosocialist thought, the dream of a planned and orderly transition is still very central, as is the articulation of that plan, especially in ecosocialism, to a given class composition. Among “green" liberals, this has also long been the case, only the mechanisms of planning are market-centric, and the class constituency very different. In all these cases, the problem to which strategy provides answers is not immediately practical, but mediated by climate science, and ideas of justice or efficiency. However, this is now changing. In the period we have now entered, all actors will increasingly be faced with immediate practical problems caused by ecological and social disasters and decline. The pandemic is one harsh example. Here the project of socio-ecological transition and abolition of fossil fuels are no longer articulated in an ideal space of planning, but within a space of emergency measures. But emergency measures, like planning more broadly, require territorial control and a capacity for mass coordination. Few movements have that, and without serious changes of class forces, we know emergency measures are unlikely to be just, inclusive, democratic, and ecological.
Instead of dreaming about what the left would do if it had such powers (“if we controlled the state, we should do x and y”), the immediate and urgent task is to develop repertoires of class and (counter-)institutional recomposition, under conditions of disaster and decline. This is the condition of any other strategy of just ecological transformation. Without this, there is no pushing the state to do the right thing, no taking state power, nor any revolution—and no solidaric survival if those fail. Social, ecological, technical, and political recomposition is a matter not just of organisation, but of subjectivity (including wants and desires), the production of the needs of life, and ecological inhabitation. Grand schemes of social change will remain weak and abstract unless they are aligned with and concretized through new popular subjectivities and strategies of survival and living. People may not appear “ready” for this, but more and more will be, as the crisis will severely undermine their/our old expectations of the future, and the utility of their/our experiences in navigating the present. And if those who fight for justice, solidarity, ecology do not offer solutions, many people will gather under the banners of fascist self-help networks, religious charities, and the politics of nostalgic reaction.
Struggles to transform social and socio-ecological relations are most radical and have the greatest likelihood of durable success when they respond to the key problems of their time, and when the powers that be don’t have much of a clue what to do. This being the case, it is important to remember that we’re not just facing irreversible destruction, and disastrous reaction, but the chance of durable change for the better.[6]
Within the fight for the defence or satisfaction of socio-ecological needs and desires lie crucial resources for a reproductive and subjective transformation of working class life, which is autonomous from policy (creating conditions for changes in policy, and not dependent upon them) and immanent to values arising in the class itself (but never all of them; choices will have to be made, contradictions will have to be faced). This is the basis upon which organic demands and critiques can be built in a process of collective empowerment. This is where it becomes possible to fight for biospheric integrity and stability not just because of climate science and sympathy for ice bears, but because it is a condition for survival and living well in ways inimical to the spiral of economic growth and socio-ecological destruction. This is where it becomes possible to imagine a transformation not just of industry and the employment structure, as in “Just Transition” discourse and some variants of the GND, but an attack on the centrality of alienated labour, and a vast expansion of time for care, rest, and play.
Lele: Thanks Bue for this rich conclusion. I do absolutely agree with you about strategy implying the assessment of situational potentials. One research area I hope to engage soon is the (possible) transformation of batshit jobs-related class identities. My impression, in fact, is that ‘fossil subjectifications’ on the part of the working class are much weaker now than they were when the growth paradigm was hegemonic. In other terms, the hypothesis I’d like to test is that workers’ support for heavy industry and impactful sectors may be declining because the promise of social inclusion they used to be based upon hasn’t been kept. During my fieldwork in Taranto (part of which has been published in the pieces I co-wrote with Stefania Barca[7]) the difference in perspective between retired workers who were active in the State-owned steel plant and young workers currently employed in the private factory is striking. While the former often complained about their own ‘indifference’ towards noxiousness (but were well aware of what they got in return, namely social inclusion in the form of high wages and protection/security in a typical ‘risk monetization’ framework), the latter were disenchanted about their compensation for being exposed to deadly pollution: precarious jobs, relatively low-paid—slightly better than unemployment or even more insecurity, but certainly nothing to be particularly proud of. Pride, or rather the lack thereof, is important here as it may mark a key discontinuity: in Taranto, young steelers’ subjective investments in the betterment of their lives, their communities, their society at large was quite simply non-existent.
Our discussion gave me new instruments to frame more precisely this kind of problem (so: thank you!).
Nick: At the end of this—for me, at least—very illuminating conversation, I would like to go back to Bue’s remark that “degrowth is unlikely to get mass support without communist measures” and to Lele’s observation about the importance of the inclusion of social inequality in the 2019 climate strikes. These are both comments I strongly agree with. We have been discussing how degrowth can be composed with communism. But many people around the world are experiencing what we might call “capitalist degrowth”—that is, a situation where, while GNP expands, even if more slowly than in the 20th century, most benefits go the top 1%, and to their professional and managerial servitors, while those further down the class ladders experience no or slow or very slow improvement in their economic conditions, sometimes an absolute decline, and certainly a massive increase in relative immiseration vis-à-vis their super-rich rulers, manifesting in issues of exclusion from metropolitan housing and the dilapidation of public services and infrastructures. Some aspects of this pattern have been disturbed by the post-pandemic inflationary situation, but it is extremely unlikely that this on its own is going to shift the pattern of runaway of plutocratic accumulation. In this situation a combination of urgent ecological rescue with strong equalitarian measures—an “equalogical” program putting communism into degrowth, and degrowth into communism, in the ways you have been discussing here—might prove widely attractive, even in quarters where it would previously have been unthinkable. Thank you both for your work to this end!
Notes
[1] For Marx's distinction between concrete and abstract labour see Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 992, for the notion of labour as a "form-giving fire" see Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), The Pelican Marx Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 361.
[2] Katharina Bohnenberger, “Is it a green or brown job? A Taxonomy of Sustainable Employment”, Ecological Economics, Volume 200, 2022. See also Alyssa Battistoni, “Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor,” Political Theory 45, no. 1 (2017): 5–31; Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Nancy Folbre, Leila Gautham, and Kristin Smith, “Essential Workers and Care Penalties in the United States,” Feminist Economics 27, no. 1–2 (2021): 173–87; A. Saleh, “Sustainability and Meta-Industrial Labour: Building a Synergistic Politics,” The Commoner 9 (2004): 1–13.
[3] I have developed this problem-centred conception of class in “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation,” Viewpoint Magazine, no. 5 (October 2015), https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/surplus-population-social-reproduction-and-the-problem-of-class-formation/.
[4] François Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy, 2004, University of Hawai’i Press.
[5] IPCC Special Report 15 - on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-1
[6] Better than the current state of the world, and the catastrophe it is drifting into, but not necessarily good in any utopian sense of the world. Or we may say that in the age of ecosystem crisis, utopia becomes biotopia - the dream of a liveable world.
[7] Barca S., Leonardi E. (2016). Working-Class Communities and Ecology: Reframing Environmental Justice around the ILVA Steel Plant in Taranto (Apulia, Italy). In: Shaw M. e Mayo M., a cura di, Class, Inequality and Community Development. Bristol: Policy Press. Barca S., Leonardi E. (2018). Working-Class Ecology and Union Politics: a Conceptual Topology. Globalizations. 15(4): 487-503.
References
Graeber, David (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster.
