green 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.

By Adelita - Unity and Struggle, May 11, 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.

Unions’ power is in decay and lately have been resorting to more creative methods in order to remain relevant. We’ve seen the Democrats putting their money behind the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Fight For $15 in Houston at the same time attempting to “turn Texas blue.” But this dependency of unions like SEIU and the United Steel Workers (USW) on the Democratic Party means they are severely limited in what they are willing to do in the realm of tactics. This along with union density being sharply in decline, as well as union power being undermined by Right-to-Work spreading to states like Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, means the unions are not up for waging anything close to a class struggle. Instead unions like the USW maintain their position as representing only certain interests and timidly bargaining around them.

Texas, like other Right-to-Work states, has a working class that is almost entirely disconnected with their own fighting traditions. There is no real culture of workers resistance, union or not, nor is there any historical memory of fighting strikes. However, recently in Houston we have seen a few significant developments unfolding in labor starting with the immigrant rights movement and detention center hunger and labor strikes, the Maximus Coffee strike and lockout at the end of 2013, the ongoing Fight For $15 “movement” and its semi-annual spectacles, and the most recent and equally significant, the USW refinery strikes. These developments are very exciting for Houston not simply because of the lack of historical memory of struggle to draw from, but also due to the high density of industry in Houston which is unlike most of the country.  This makes Houston a critical choke point for US capital and thus pivotal for workers struggle nationally.

Houston’s remarkably large industrial sector provides a lot of semi-skilled labor opportunities and has been instrumental in Houston’s ability to float the crisis better than most of the country. This and the extremely low levels of reproduction of the class, especially of black and immigrant people who make up the unskilled, low-wage, and casualized sectors of the economy. This leaves refinery work to be primarily composed of white and US-born Latino workers.

When the USW strike started it was the first strike the refineries and their workers saw in 30 years. Yet the USW was unable to carry out a successful strike nationally or locally. This is due to union decline mentioned above, but also because one-third of the oil industry is unorganized (many of which are contract workers). Also, the relationship between the USW and the Obama administration impacted the overall strategy of the strike. Only 5,000 workers were pulled out, a mere ten percent of all union workers, while local union leaders claimed this was part of their strategy. Overall this affected only about 20% of production which is pretty insignificant and we realized quickly that most workers had little to no information about the strike or negotiations. Locally the USW’s timidness looked like a handful of workers carrying signs at each gate while being unable to block scabs from crossing, or from even standing or parking on company property. The international didn’t even use their massive treasury to support their striking members.  It was clear that the USW was not in a position to be able to wage a political struggle against oil because they are beholden to the ruling party.