Eco-Syndicalism

By Nick Djinn Kappos - May 16, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

As a very ecologically minded Syndicalist, I am sympathetic to and often supportive of some of the Green and Primitivist value systems. The condition that we leave the earth in is the single most important issue facing humanity, even before egalitarian social relations and economic equality/abundance....which I also consider very important. Future generations are not going to congratulate us for acquiring great wealth and status if we leave them a toxic wasteland where they are struggling to find clean water and survive.

That said....I don't think humanity will move backwards without destroying itself. The masses will not voluntarily give up their comforts, especially in a controlled consumer environment where they control the access to food and water. People will consume what is fed to them, since the alternative inside of cities is starvation. People fortunate enough to have yards or sunlit space can grow more of their own food and we can have community gardens....total sustainability is something only the dedicated few will strive for. You could spend your whole life trying to prepare for an ecological collapse, only to find that you are not protected from drought or toxic rain as the rest of the population keeps fucking the place up. I do think that there are advantages to having autonomous communities that live closer to the land and each other. I feel like we could accomplish more to change things by being involved with the rest of society, perhaps building experimental communities just outside of smaller University towns.

Without access to technology we will not be able to put up much of a fight. They just roll over and destroy indigenous communities who lack the tools to fight back. Even just having internet and CB radio would give communities the opportunity to call for help and let the world know what is happening. Technology might be the death of us, but I also think we have an opportunity to do it better.

I won't really consider ourselves to be an evolved or enlightened society until we can produce everything we need sustainably, thinking 7 (or more) generations ahead. Cities that are too densely populated to provide their own food and water locally will inherently adopt exploitative and imperialist agendas. To maintain the import of resources and the export of waste, we must necessarily dominate and exploit the surrounding areas or foreign lands. There is no way around this until we reach a point where we can sustainably produce our own food and water and material goods locally without poisoning ourselves. We can't continue to poison our oceans, clear cut our forests, strip mind our hillsides, and not have it bite us in the ass later....probably as our children are growing up.

Consumer choice isn't really much of a choice. You are either going to pay 3x as much for some eco-friendly products that you can only afford if you are wealthy, or you are going to buy all the same crap that the corporations provide to everyone else. If a few people escape the city, the masses of people will still be stuck and continue to perpetuate the system. The only way out of this that I can personally see, short of killing ourselves, is to put the means of production back into the hands of the people while guiding and encouraging a trend towards sustainability and egalitarian social relationships. If we produced for our own communities as local communities, we could make better and more ethical decisions than would be made by mega-corporations who only care about the bottom line and do not have to live inside of the conditions they create.

I think we should acquire and control our own technology and render the old powers obsolete...and while keeping our sustainable technology, I think we should plant a lot more trees and make our living environment greener, with an emphasis on fruit bearing plants and trees that are freely available to the entire community. I think we could live better if we lived in smaller well networked pod-communities where you could easily walk to most of the places you would need to visit in a day. I envision lite rail systems that connect communities, made in a way that does not cut eco-systems in half. I think we could use a combination of common earth elements and plant resins and fibers for our building materials, instead of cutting down forests. I think we should keep the internet and make it free for everyone to access, and utilize that technology to network local communities with the larger society, and individuals with each other. I think we should get to a point where we can produce everything we need locally without reliance on imports shipped halfway across the world. I think we can reduce our need for cars and traffic, while still having a few vehicles for specialty purposes. You just wouldn't require one to do everything you need to do in a day. I think that if we are not packed like sardines into cities and if we have access to the land and means of production, that we can easily produce more than enough food for everyone and then some. I think we could easily house everyone for a lot less than we are all paying in rent if we abolished the banks and landlord control of our living areas. I think we could realistically aim for a 12 hour work week in our lifetime, and build our communities for social interaction instead of mass consumerism. I think we could have fewer stores and less pavement, and still be able to affordably produce every consumer item we would ever need.

All of these things are possible, but they will never be given to us unless we create it for ourselves.