intersectionality

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 11, 2024

The principal problems of movement unity do not involve uniting the already like-minded, but drawing together those who are siloed or even antagonistic. But how do we move past such fragmentation? My observation as a historian of social movements is that a crucial reason for movements to de-silo, cooperate, and converge is from a perception of the possibility of gaining power to affect problems through greater cooperation and mutual support.

To show that such overcoming of divisions does actually happen, and that it is related to the aspiration for more effective power, let me briefly sketch four examples of de-siloing, growing cooperation, and partial convergence among movements.

Globalization from below, also known as the anti-globalization or global justice movement, brought together a highly diverse range of movements and organizations from all over the world. After gestating for years in response to “globalization from above,” globalization from below burst into public view with the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” that shut down the attempt to establish the World Trade Organization as a neoliberal economic constitution for the world. As author and activist Vandana Shiva put it in the aftermath of the Battle of Seattle, “When labor joins hands with environmentalists, when farmers from the North and farmers from the South make a common commitment to say ‘no’ to genetically engineered crops, they are not acting as special interests. They are defending the common interests and common rights of all people, everywhere.”[1] That process has continued in myriad forms, notably in the global gatherings of the World Social Forum.[2]

By Daniel Letwin, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, March 1, 2024

By Will Tucker, Union Jake and Adam Keller - The Valley Labor Report, August 3, 2023

By collective - Sabot Media, July 18, 2023

Anaculture is a method by which we can abolish the State and implement a gift economy based on self-determination, horizontality, mutual aid, and solidarity. One where people contribute what work they can, doing what they are passionate about, and share in the more mundane responsibilities of the community. As anarchist our understanding of freedom is that it is a process that people engage in together. We believe that rigid laws actually undermine our freedom, and therefore don’t aspire to the creation or worship of canonical texts.

The anarchist analysis of capitalism, reformism, patriarchy, colonialism, and the State have already proven useful to many social movements over the past several decades. Now we must offer a critique of the environmental movement in order to help it become what it could be. These movements always leave their mark on Anarchism as well, informing and influencing anarchist theory and life.

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, May 16, 2023

While the Green New Deal started as a proposed national program, some of the most impressive implementations of its principles and policies are occurring at a municipal level. Part 1 of “The Green New Deal in the Cities” provides an extended account of the Boston Green New Deal, perhaps the most comprehensive effort so far to apply Green New Deal principles in a major city. Part 2 presents Green New Deal-style programs developing in Los Angeles and Seattle, and reviews the programs and policies being adapted in cities around the country to use climate protection as a vehicle for creating jobs and challenging injustice.

Urban politics often seem to produce not so much benefit for the people as inequality, exclusion, and private gain for the wealthiest. Does it have to be that way? In cities throughout the US, new political formations, often under the banner of the Green New Deal, are creating a new form of urban politics. They pursue the Green New Deal’s core objectives of fighting climate change in ways that produce good jobs and increase equality. They are based on coalitions of impoverished urban neighborhoods, disempowered racial and ethnic groups, organized labor, and advocates for climate and the environment. They involved widespread democratic mobilization. A case in point is the Boston Green New Deal.

By staff - BWI Global Union, March 6, 2022

By Michael Levien - Historical Materialism, March 2023

Review of Matthew Huber, (2022) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, London: Verso.

The year-long American saga that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored the difference between two ways of mitigating climate change at the national level. The first is elite climate policy in which wonks and technocrats come up with the smartest policies to incentivise private capital to invest in the right technologies. This is, ultimately, what we got with the IRA, which has been accurately characterised as the triumph of ‘green industrial policy’.¹ The second is popular climate politics which seeks to build a broad political coalition for decarbonisation by tying it to social programmes that directly improve people’s lives. This is the idea behind the Green New Deal, which to a surprising extent made its way into the initial Build Back Better bill before Joe Manchin got his hands on it. Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War provides a powerful critique of the first while advancing a labour-centred version of the second.

Huber lands many good punches against what he calls professional-class climate politics. Building on the Ehrenreichs’ concept of the professional managerial class (PMC),² Huber argues that PMC climate politics characteristically over-emphasises that class’ stock-in-trade: education and credentials. In their hands, climate politics thus becomes a matter of knowledge (communicating the science) more than one of power (tackling the class power of the fossil-fuel industry). PMC policy technocrats further internalise neoliberal logic with their obsession with pricing carbon – a policy that ultimately balances the carbon budget on the backs of working-class consumers. In its more radical manifestations, PMC environmentalism – degrowth being the main target here – espouses an ascetic ‘politics of less’ that has no resonance with working-class people who already do not have enough. This type of environmental politics, Huber argues, explains why the right has been able to mobilise the working class against the environment.

By way of alternative, Huber advances a theory of working-class climate politics which he dubs ‘proletarian ecology’. The starting point, developed over Chapters 1 and 2, is to recognise that industrial fossil capital is responsible for the vast majority of emissions. As Huber sketches with discussions of the cement and fertiliser industries – for the latter, Huber draws on some interviews with managers of a fertiliser plant in Louisiana – their carbon intensity is not a matter of greed but of the structural imperative to produce surplus value, and therefore will not be halted (as opposed to greenwashed) by any amount of shaming. Thus, ‘Climate change requires an antagonistic approach towards owners of capital in the “hidden abode” of production’ (p. 106). The problem is that ‘the climate movement today – made up of professional class activists and the most marginalized victims of climate change – is too narrowly constructed to constitute a real threat to the power of industrial capital’ (p. 69).

This brings us to the bold and controversial claim of Climate Change as Class War: it is the working class (and organised labour in particular) that must be the main agent of radical climate politics, not the diverse coalitions of ‘marginalised groups’ – which includes Indigenous movements against pipelines and Black-led environmental justice organisations – who are currently the vanguard of the climate justice movement. What Huber calls ‘livelihood environmentalism’ only sees the working class as having environmental interests when their communities’ land, water or health are directly threatened (p. 195). Huber’s theory of proletarian ecology, by contrast, proceeds from the broader recognition that ‘a defining feature of working-class life under capitalism is profound alienation from the ecological conditions of life itself’ (p. 188). Thus ‘a working-class interest in ecology will emerge not from the experience of environmental threats, but from a profound separation from nature and the means of subsistence’ (pp. 181–2). Rather than defending bodies or landscapes, it will focus on the working class’s material interest in decommodifying the means of subsistence (p. 196).

By Adam Keller and Rob Burton - Valley Labor Report, January 22, 2023

By Usufruct Collective - Usufruct Collective, January 14, 2023

The following is a DIY template for a liberatory Points of Unity for social movement groups and popular organizations. The following “Points of Unity Template” is designed to be tweaked and adapted to relevant conditions and variables of groups (including but not limited to the specific kind and functions of a group you are trying to form or assist). It is not a “one size fits all” kind of document, but something designed to critically engage with and reflect upon when starting or participating within a social movement group or popular organization. 

The following “Points of Unity Template” refers to various shared practices of a group– shared practices that relate to process and goal orientation as well as form and content of a group. Such shared practices do NOT require a shared ideology among participants for participants to sufficiently agree with them in the context of group form and functions. Accepting shared qualities of a group that some ideology (or ideologies) would approve of is distinct from a group being an ideologically specific group– a group that espouses a specific ideology and that requires shared ideology among members. Additionally, such “Points of Unity for shared practices” can exist within decision making processes and bylaws of organizations in tandem with or distinct from being present in a document titled as such. Groups can structurally include the following points of unity for shared practices in varying ways. And such points of unity for shared practices, if they are to exist overtime as qualities of a group, must be sufficiently present within (and developed by) a living content and culture made by participants. 

One crucial reason for including the following points of unity is the overall coherence of the multiple points when they are combined; for they round each other out to defend against various detrimental qualities (to the extent they are actuated in form and content of course). And yet, there is significant redundancy between the following points– and there are ways to combine the various points together to make them more succinct and less numerous. And there are ways to simplify points, elaborate points, or change wording for the sake of communication as well as needs and preferences of various groups. More numerically and descriptively skeletal and simple versions of points of unity often make more sense initially until if and when more coherent practical unity has been developed within a given group (or between various groups). For example, a group that is just starting could just have the points of direct democracy and direct action for a direct action group, or direct democracy and mutual aid for a mutual aid group, or all of the above for a group that does all such functions. It is possible for “free association” to be combined with “direct democracy” in one point through a holistic notion of participatory democracy or self-management– which can even be descriptively combined with the essential features of “horizontality”! Such a way of framing those points can be very useful, as it creates a way to take in what would otherwise be multiple points of unity within a single point. Such a simplification can be important, as the points are supposed to potentially unite lots of people. However, such a lumping of qualities together into one can have a downside as well; if such a combining of qualities into one is not done well, then it is possible for the substance of one or more of the multiple points being lumped together to be obscured in the process.

The following points of unity were made with community assembly groups in the mode of struggle against hierarchical power in mind. However, the first six points can be adapted and applied to other kinds of groups such as radical unions, issue-specific movement groups, direct action collectives, and mutual aid collectives, and the like.