Workers and the World

We all need jobs to live, yet capitalist work is destroying the planet. What are the possibilities for convergence between workplace and community struggles?

We are in the ecological crisis, and not just as victims of an environmental devastation that is unequally distributed along intersecting hierarchies of class, ‘race’ and gender. We are part of the crisis because, in our society, the vast majority of us rely on work to pay for the things we need to survive. This means we also depend on the infinite growth of commodity production that defines capitalism and drives the ecological crisis. Nonetheless, workers’ insertion in capital accumulation also has an antagonistic face, rooted in their very separation from the means of production. Therefore, labour is also a crucial collective actor against the ecological crisis.This book explores the relationship between workers and nature by bringing Italian operaismo into a dialogue with a broad range of traditions, from dependency theory to ecofeminism. Drawing on sustained research in both the Global South – Tunisia and Chile – and the Global North – the UK and Italy – it tackles four timely issues in relation to the ecological crisis: automation and deindustrialisation, employment precarity, imperialism and war, and social reproduction.