“Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology, and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change”: An Interview with Stefania Barca
“Climate politics need cross-sectoral and international alliances between industrial and metal-industrial workers.”
“Working-class people know better, as occupational and environmental risk have been part and parcel of their own history for centuries,” Stefania Barca writes in her new book, Workers of the Earth: labour, ecology and reproduction in the age of climate change (Pluto Press 2024). “They have made a living out of daily negotiations with all sorts of hazards and with death itself.”
Such a sentiment permeates Barca’s text as she examines the role of labor environmentalism both historically and in the present day in order, as she told me, to show that “alliances are not only theoretically possible but successfully practiced.” The book is wide-ranging, but focused on how the labor and environmental movements might remedy tense relations. Their goal, she suggests, should be a postcapitalist ecology where industrial and meta-industrial labor - that of provisioning and caring for people and planet - serve as ecological agents for social transformation. Readers, activists, and militant academics interested in topics such as degrowth and ecomodernism, care work, environmental justice, and arguably most importantly reclaiming the labor movement to usher in an ecosocialist society will find Workers of the Earth invaluable.
In addition to Workers of the Earth, Barca is the author of books such as Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and of Enclosing Water: Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley (White Horse Press, 2010), which was awarded the Turku Environmental History Book Prize. She is a professor of environmental and gender history at the University of Santiago de Compostela (ES). Andrew Ahern is an ecosocialist writer and activist based in New England. Their discussion has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and readability.
AA: Your book comes at an important time for climate politics, and especially labor and environmentalism more broadly. What was the impetus for writing the book? What questions were you looking to answer or gaps do you want to fill?
SB: The most important point from the book is that labor matters to climate change. Not just waged labor or industrial labor, but that unwaged, meta-industrial labor are also important to take into account when talking about climate change and climate politics. Before writing Workers of the Earth, I was concerned by the fact that the mainstream representation of the climate crisis and ecological crisis treated labor as absent. We are constantly presented with data about the global consumption of resources, of the impacts of production into the atmosphere and biosphere, which is obviously important, but I am concerned that this data does not take into account the human beings who are instrumental to these modes of production and reproduction.
What the book does is put together research I have been doing for the last decade which was not even initially motivated by climate change. I am a historian by trade—I was investigating the history of environmental change from a labor point of view, looking at how workers were affected by environmental change. I was initially interested in industrial workers including how they develop an environmental consciousness, for example. But my research showed me that labor is not just blue collar or industrial workers. It’s broader and by broadening our understanding of labor we can strengthen and broaden our understanding of working class climate politics.
AA: One thing I appreciate about Workers of the Earth was how you deconstruct some of the supposed binaries and antagonisms in labor-environmental politics. I am thinking about some of the tensions between, say, environmental justice and unions, or reproductive labor and industrial labor, or rank and file workers and scientific experts, and so on. Can you speak on some of these tensions, real or fake, and how you suggest we go about thinking of and through them?
SB: This question is an important one because we know how significant it has been in developing a common sense of understanding between labor and environmental movements and how much these binaries have been conditioned by these tensions. These tensions are real, but the point that the book makes is that these are not the only realities. There are other aspects and dimensions that need to be taken into account to have a fuller picture of labor-environmental history. The stories I tell, especially in the history section, are stories of alliance and unity. This is an important story to tell, that these alliances are not only theoretically possible but have been successfully practiced.
In chapter 2, I tell a story of an alliance between medical doctors of the Italian Left (mostly medical students and radical doctors) allied with workers and workers unions during the period of Italy’s industrial expansion in the late 1960s and 70s. This alliance was productive in that it led to significant reforms in Italy including the Labor Statute of 1970, which gave workers rights over environmental health and safety at the shop floor level. In chapter 4, I tell the story of an alliance in Brazil between Indigenous communities and the union of rubber tappers. This was important because it helped pass the most significant piece of environmental legislation in Brazil, that involving so-called extractive reserves. This was a revolutionary kind of conservation when it was approved in the 1990s. These are examples of successful struggles and alliances. My understanding from these examples is that environmental and climate politics are more effective when they involve different groups, and not simply individuals or stakeholder groups but different movements - Indigenous, student, women, workers movements, coming together. When these organizations achieve union in struggle, that is really powerful. This is one of the messages we need to reclaim away from the jobs versus environment narrative, or ecomodernist approach, that is largely dominant in labor unions and parties, and the left more broadly. Social movements also need to get away from the obsession with grant making, the need for funding and “the funding machine” that conditions so much of the action of social movements. We need these movements to be tools for social struggle. This is relevant to climate struggle, which is the most important form of class struggle in the twenty-first century.
Another important message I try to provide in the book is about the need for unity and alliances between waged and unwaged workers. One important step in this direction would be to address the entrenchment of labor movements with patriarchy, by which I mean the assumption that housework and subsistence work are socially, economically and politically irrelevant. This is how I understand patriarchy from a labor and materialist point of view. If we don’t challenge this vision between what is relevant and not relevant politically within labor, we will not be able to build a working class unity that includes productive and reproductive labor.
AA: You make a sympathetic critique of degrowth regarding their lack of working class engagement in getting working people to support the degrowth program. Can you speak to that critique? Do you see any positive changes in the right direction since you wrote that original essay?
SB: The essay was published in 2017. Since then, I believe a few important steps have been taken. For example, I am part of a network of degrowth communism, counting more than 100 people in a number of countries, which testifies to a growing interest for this convergence to happen. The group includes Kohei Saito whose work has been significant for pushing degrowthers towards a communist vision of the world.We are yet to see the impacts on grassroots and labor movements. But still, the success of Saito’s book is a good sign.
AA: In chapter two, “Bread and Poison”, you build on this concept of workers “embodying” industrial capitalism's ecological destruction. Can you explain this concept and how it might help mobilize the labor movement to fully realize itself as ecological agents for social and ecological transformation?
SB: Chapter two tells the story of blue-collar workers in the aftermath of the industrial expansion in Italy (1960s) that could be described as an example of what Jim O’Connor called the second contradiction of capitalism, that of capital versus nature. Workers experienced that contradiction in their bodies in terms of their own health and the health of their families and communities who were also impacted by the industrial growth, including industrial accidents and daily problems of air and water pollution. They felt this in their own bodies. This helped them form their own ecological consciousness that was distinct from the middle class, consumerist ecological consciousness that was emerging during the same time. This was a starting point on my entire journey exploring the relationship between labor and the environment. This had to do with ecology as not just about the biosphere but human bodies as a part of nature. This was a lesson I discovered that had been advanced by some thinkers like the biologist Rachel Carson and, in Italy, Laura Conti. Everyone knows about Carson’s thoughts on birds and insects but what I found out about her was that her entry point for environmental issues was the effects of pesticides and petrochemicals specifically on workers.
This was an awareness that also came through by the Communist politician and medical doctor Lauri Conti who developed an ecological consciousness in Italy. Both women were making a similar point about labor mediating the relationship between humans and nonhumans. That is where the concept of “embodiment” comes into question. What I also realized through some of these examples was that capital had to fight really hard to take away that working class ecological consciousness that formed with the workers. Capital did this in a number of ways, first of all via corporate policies of course, but also furthering the narrative that there is a quasi-natural trade-off between jobs and environmental regulation. The truth is that the trade-off, like most of what happens in the market, is due to political choices. Funding and disseminating this idiotic discourse has been a powerful tool for preventing labor movements to consider environmental issues as their own.
In the book, I make the additional point that it was not enough for industrial workers to fight for health and safety in the workplace. What was also important was connecting that with the struggles of housework and subsistence work. But this alliance never happened. That is why the story ended with a missed opportunity for the Italian working class and labor movement to develop their own ecological politics from a labor point of view. This was the most important lesson I learned from that particular story.
AA: Chapter six describes what you call Labor’s Ecomodernism based on a previous article called Labour and the Ecological Crisis: the eco-modernist dilemma in western Marxism(s) (1970-2000s). This is especially relevant since writers and thinkers associated with Jacobin Magazine are endorsing ecomodernism and coalescing with capitalists like the Breakthrough Institute. Speaking personally, this was my first introduction to your writing and I love it to this day. I think it’s a very strong and fair argument. How did labor come to embrace ecomodernism? How might they break free from it?
SB: I also love this article. It wasn’t easy for me to put it together. I had to try and convince multiple reviewers to finally publish it. They were sympathetic to the argument in different grades, but also critical of it. Let me also say that my argument is of interest to labor in general, but my analysis is limited to some labor organizations in Western Europe in the 1970s up until the end of the century, and especially in Italy, the UK, Germany, and France, which are represented in the article because of the four intellectuals featured in the essay - all of whom had influence over the left. While this is theoretically relevant, I know there is more to the history of the labor movement in different contexts and periods. In the case of Western Europe,, labor and Western Europe. The point I make is that there were, in the 1970s and 1980s, different visions of ecology that were partly overlapping and partly diverging. By the end of the century, these different visions had come to be reduced to one dominant vision within labor which is the ecomodernist (or ecological modernization) vision.
The point of the ecomodernist turn was that the interests of the working classes could somehow be safe guarded by creating new technologies and that these new technologies would create new clean jobs in energy or infrastructure through a new wave of capital investment in these industries. I am simplifying, of course, but the reason why I find it reductive is that it only considers a very limited idea of the working class, one that doesn’t challenge patriarchal culture because it privileges industrial, high-tech blue collar work as the most important social sector. It does not question this hierarchy of value, nor other forms of labor which are relevant. Labor movements embraced this vision of ecology and climate politics because they never converged with the feminist, and especially eco-feminist, strands of working class climate politics. This has been a missed opportunity. The socialist-ecofeminist movement, represented by one of the four thinkers explored in chapter 6, Maria Mies, was not reductively interested in gender equality in the neoliberal sense of the term. It was more materialist and interested in reproductive work—not just in domestic labor but provisioning and subsistence work, including that of peasants—that is work that has historically been assigned to women like producing and sustaining life, and that is absent from the ecomodernist vision. This lack of consideration was the main opportunity I saw missing between the 1970s and the turn of the century.
So, how might we break free from ecomodernism? Well, I don’t have the answer to that question. It depends on who is “we” here. For the moment, it might be enough to look at the alliances and convergences between industrial and meta-industrial labor, including subsistence and landless workers movements, and house and care work, that have happened already. This can help us break free from ecomodernism as the only horizon available to working-class climate politics. These are the directions we need for a labor-driven climate politics that is truly inclusive and powerful.
AA: You end the book with a strategic reform for the Climate Jobs Campaign to center reproduction work in their platform and campaigns. Why this suggestion and what might it look like? Beyond that, what do you see as strategic reforms amongst the ecology and labor movements? For you, what is the ultimate medium or long-term horizon that we need to build towards?
SB: This is a key question. The quick answer about the long-term is that convergence and alliance between different anticapitalist movements is the most important thing for the climate. That said, the labor movement is not homogenous. We cannot assume the entire labor movement is anti capitalist. As it stands, they don’t have a clear sense of the alternative to capitalism. I agree with a postcapitalist approach of making capitalism obsolete by expanding the already existing alternatives that exist in capitalism. I know there is debate on this question but I don’t find it particularly productive. It is mostly a theoretical discussion. I tend to think we don’t need to fight over the correct ideology, but rather connect the different struggles people are waging in different contexts to build this unity. What we really need, in my opinion, is revolutionary love, in the sense of caring for each other across movements, across struggles, a love that seeks for the fulfillment of each other's needs.
Recognizing each other's needs allows us to acknowledge that the working class is divided across different conditions. Solidarity has been criticized as a limited concept, but I think we do not need to supersede solidarity, but think of it in new terms. I would call it caring across movements, about different struggles across geographies: this has political relevance because it is not just an individual attitude. Caring can be a revolutionary principle in that it can make us aware of global inequalities and allow us to fight such inequality. Anti-racist, anti-ableist, decolonial movements are examples of these revolutionary care movements. We need to see that we need each other and build alliances of unity of struggle. Indigenous movements and waged workers in the Amazon, for example, had a history of being pitted against each other by capital and land owners, often in violent ways. The alliance of forest people is a hopeful example of how these divisions can be overcome. We can learn from these struggles. We do not need to start from scratch. We are not just discovering these divisions.
In the neoliberal era, we have been convinced that workers are not a class but at best individuals and stakeholders. One of the most important divisions has been between workers movements and environmentalists as if environmentalists are not human beings who are also workers (or workers to be). This division and narrative has made us weak. We need to build worker power to protect life.
AA: Care and reproductive work is often neglected, undervalued and treated as passive, both in paid and unpaid labor. You make the argument for centering reproductive care work and seeing such sectors, in and outside the home, as key agents for ecological and social transformation. Can you speak to some of the examples you provide in the book about how reproductive work has previously driven social-ecological change?
SB: Let me give you a definition of reproductive work first. It is a broad concept that includes all the life-making work. That includes producing life itself like mothering, nurturing, raising children, but also lifemaking is provisioning for human beings including the essential bodily needs of humans, including food and the biophysical environment. My understanding of reproductive work is somehow different from that of social reproduction theory in that mine includes the ecological sphere centered around the human body as a part of the biophysical world, as connected to it. Caring for the soil, air, water and other species is all reproductive work. It recognizes the interdependence of humans with nature. It is not just work spent in rural environments but urban ones as well.
Chapter two not only includes industrial workers but housewives in Italy who struggled to get recognition of the damage from a chemical plant in their community. These included wives of workers who worked in the plant. This movement still exists today, and fights for participatory monitoring of public health in the area even after the chemical plant has been shut down. They want the community to be the leading actor in monitoring and decision making in environmental planning in the urban environment they live in. This movement has kept alive the public memory of petrochemical contamination, and in doing so has kept alive the ecological consciousness of the Italian working class.
Chapter three discusses the anti-nuclear movement of women from the Wages for Housework in the UK in the 1980s. This story is about working class and racialized mothers who saw nuclear energy as threatening to life and overburdening their own work in caring for the people in their families and communities. And of course chapter four, as I mentioned before, talks about the forest people who fought to protect the Amazon. And they won. Those are important examples of how reproductive labor, especially when organized, can be an ecological subject.
In the epilogue, I suggest ways in which reproductive work can be included in existing climate struggles that focus on labor, such as the global Climate Jobs Campaign. My point is not that reproductive and caring workers are the only true ecological subjects, but rather that climate politics need cross-sectoral and also international alliances between industrial and metal-industrial workers, because this is the only way to overcome the ecomodernist impasse and build the kind of workers’ power that we need to change the system.