autogestion

By Teddy Ostrow, Barry Eidlin, and Ruby Walsh - The Upsurge, November 10, 2023

By Lorenzo Feltrin - Berliner Gazette, October 16, 2023

Lorenzo Feltrin · Convergence of Struggles from Berliner Gazette on Vimeo.

By Lukas Ferrari and Julia Kaiser - Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, January 11, 2023

Over the last two years, Italian autoworkers have built a broad and inspiring alliance for ecological transformation:

Imagine a climate strike in which 40,000 industrial workers, climate activists, pacifists, and other non-politically active people are brought together. In their speeches, they denounce the shutdown of an automotive supply factory. They all agree that what is needed is a conversion of production instead of layoffs. The bloc right at the front of the demonstration is made up of workers from the affected factory, and behind them are masses of militant climate activists and spontaneous demonstrators.

The workers of the plant join forces with scientists to develop a conversion plan together and, based on their skills and the latest research in environmental sciences, a vision emerges of producing components for hydrogen-powered buses. More and more people agree: we need production centred on people instead of profits!

This vision — one that would not be at all out of place in an ecosocialist manifesto — became a reality in Tuscany, Italy. After the 422 employees and approximately 80 agency workers of the automotive supplier GKN Driveline received an email on 9 July 2021 informing them that they didn’t need to come to work next Monday, they occupied their plant in Campi Bisenzio, on the outskirts of Florence.

The strategic centre of the occupation and the wave of mobilization that developed around it came to be known collectively as the Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN, which operates autonomously from but closely with official trade union structures. The majority of the more than 500 workers, including the workers’ councils organized within the Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici (FIOM), the Italian metalworkers’ union, identify as part of the collective, which meets outside of working hours.

GKN is an automotive supplier with more than 50 production plants worldwide. Up until the production halt in summer 2021 the plant in Campi Bisenzio mainly produced axle shafts for Fiat (Ducato), Maserati, and Ferrari. The plant has changed ownership many times over the last decades. Once under the property of Fiat, in 1994 it was bought by the company GKN, which in turn was bought by the British investment fund Melrose Industries in 2018 for 8 billion pounds. Only three years later management announced the shutdown of the plant in Campi Bisenzio and the layoff of all its employees, days after the Italian government lifted the ban on dismissals it imposed during the pandemic.

By Simon Pirani - The Ecologist, May 7, 2021

Climate breakdown is driven by industrial production, production by machines controlled by people. But can those very people demand a new, low carbon production?

Are the technologies developed by giant capitalist corporations – Walmart’s logistics or Elon Musk’s driverless cars – the foundation on which a post-capitalist society can be built? No way, argues Gavin Mueller in his latest book, Breaking Things At Work: the Luddites were right about why you hate your job (Verso, 2021).

He challenges “Marxist theoreticians” who see “the capitalist development of technology as the means for creating both abundance and leisure”, to be “realised once the masses finally [take] the reins of government and industry”.

Against these technocratic illusions, Mueller proposes “a decelerationist politics: of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organisation and cultivating militancy”.

By Dr James Muldoon - Verso Books, April 26, 2021

Gavin Mueller wants us to hit the brakes. Tech companies have amassed enormous financial and ideological power and are driving society towards a future of surveillance and algorithmic management. We are enthralled by a vision of technological progress that has blinded us to the reality that new technology in the workplace is often implemented to control workers, rather than to make our lives easier. In his new book, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Mueller revives the misunderstood legacy of the Luddites in the service of a new decelerationist politics, one which calls bullshit on the promises of automation. Inspired by the history of workers’ struggles against scientific management and factory discipline, the book offers a vision of how we could develop a militant opposition to new technological interventions in the workplace that threaten workers’ autonomy.

The book is part of a growing movement on the Left that is critical of the idea that the ideas and practices of Silicon Valley could simply be adopted for progressive ends. Read alongside Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work and Jason E. Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work, we can see the tide turning on a techno-optimist tendency which sees the glimmers of a communist future in the “sharing” economy and Amazon’s capacity for central planning. Mueller “wants to make Marxists into Luddites” and has this segment of the pro-tech Left squarely in his sights.

Before we invent the future, Mueller calls on us to rethink the past. Marxists, he claims, “have not been critical of technology, even when that technology is deployed in the workplace in ways that seem detrimental for workers.” Technology is too often seen by the Left as a neutral force that could be reclaimed and used for emancipatory purposes. For Mueller, many Marxists – from Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin and the Bolsheviks – fall prey to an economic determinism and fatalism that views the development of capitalist production and organisation as leading inevitably to a socialist society. This view of technology carries on into the twentieth-century’s organised labour movements, and from there to contemporary post-work theorists. In light of these failings, the book turns to previous workers’ struggles and “heretical strains of Marxism” for a profound reconceptualistion of the role of technology in a post-capitalist future.

By Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler - Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, August 18, 2020

By Stefania Barca - Geoforum, January 2019

The article offers an intellectual critique of Marxist political ecology as developed in western Europe between the 1970s and 2000s, focusing on the labour/ecology nexus. My critique is based on the intersection of two levels of analysis: 1) the historical evolution of labour environmentalism, focusing on what I will call the eco-modernist dilemma of labour; 2) the meaning of class politics in relation to the politics of the environment, with a special focus on the production/reproduction dialectic.

Focusing on the work of four Marxist intellectuals whose ideas resonated with various social movements across the Left spectrum (labour, environmentalism, feminism and degrowth), the article shows how the current entrenchment of labour within the politics of eco-modernization hides a number of internal fractures and alternative visions of ecology that need to be spelled out in order to open the terrain for a rethinking of ecological politics in class terms today.

Read the text (PDF).

By Manuela Pellarin - Labournet TV, 2004