Eco-Syndicalism · EcoAxes

Definition

Eco-syndicalism, or green syndicalism, puts the anarcho-syndicalist strategy to ecological use: organising directly in the workplace and having workers run it themselves. It argues that the people who log the forests, run the mills and work the refineries are potential allies of environmentalists, not their natural enemies, and allies with a lever nobody else has. A union that controls production can refuse to produce destructively and can switch production to ecological ends.

Its goal is a society in which federations of worker and community organisations run an ecologically sound economy, with no bosses and no state.

Historical development

The best-known episode is Judi Bari’s organising in the redwood country of northern California in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bari was an Earth First! activist and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She worked to bring timber workers and environmentalists together against the companies that were liquidating the old-growth forest, arguing that the companies were the problem and the loggers were not. Her car was bombed in 1990. She survived and kept organising until her death in 1997.

Graham Purchase’s Anarchism and Environmental Survival (1994) and later writing by Jeff Shantz set out the theory. The IWW has kept up environmental organising since. Related ideas appear in “just transition” coalitions between unions and environmental groups, although those usually work through the state.

Principal claims

Capital drives ecological destruction, and labour does not. Workers in destructive industries are its victims as much as nature is.
Direct action where things are produced is the strongest lever environmentalists have.
If workers control industry, they can convert it to ecological production. The state is unnecessary and stands in the way.
Environmental and labour struggles have to be organised together, in the same unions and the same communities.

Policy implications

Eco-syndicalism does not make policy. In practice it organises unions across the divide between labour and environmentalists, takes direct action in workplaces against destructive production, demands that workers lead the conversion of industry, and builds federations of worker and community councils as the basis of an ecological society.

Internal disagreements

Eco-syndicalists disagree about the state and about electoral politics of just transition. They ask whether syndicalism’s base in industry is itself a problem for an ecology that may need less industry. They also weigh organising in the workplace against organising in the community.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics point to the long-running hostility between many resource-industry unions and environmentalists. They doubt that workers would choose to shrink their own industries, and note that the current has stayed small. Deep ecologists objected to Bari’s turning of Earth First! toward class politics.

Supporters point to the redwood campaigns and to the wider just-transition movement as proof that the alliance can work.

Relationships to other traditions

Eco-syndicalism belongs to the green anarchist family. It is close to social ecology in rejecting the state and to ecosocialism in its class analysis. It is a radical relative of the just-transition wing of ecological democratic socialism and of environmental justice organising.

References and further reading

Bari, J. (1994). Timber Wars. Common Courage Press.
Purchase, G. (1994). Anarchism and Environmental Survival. See Sharp Press.
Shantz, J. (2012). Green Syndicalism: An Alternative Red/Green Vision. Syracuse University Press.