Green Syndicalism
An Alternative Red/Green vision
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: Syracuse University Press
Preface
By now it is generally recognized that the burdens of ecological destruction are borne disproportionately by working class and poor people and their communities. These impacts include disease, illness, and personal health effects, as well as lost income because of sick days and the costs of family care. It is not only that the damaging effects of harms such as pollution, toxic contamination...
Acknowledgments
This work has developed over the course of years. It owes its development to conversations, debates, and discussions with a diversity of people who have generously taken the time to engage with the ideas have resulted in Green Syndicalism. Far from being a strictly academic project, it is a work rooted in real ongoing struggles, movements, and organizing efforts in defense of...
Introduction
Contemporary alternative globalization networks are not refl ective of a coherent movement and are produced by and productive of a variety of social, political, cultural, and geographic fault lines and ruptures. These networks are at times overlapping, at times confl icted, often resonant, and sometimes competing (Williams 2010). The character of global capitalist expansion has...
1. Class Struggles
What have been called the global justice or alternative globalization movements have been identifi ed by numerous commentators as the most signifi cant development in anticapitalist or antisystemic politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism (see Routledge and Cumbers 2010). Especially since the events of Seattle in 1999 (but dating at least to the Zapatista uprising...
2. Radical Ecology and Class
Radical ecology has emerged as a potential point for linkage, or the nodal point, of a wide plurality of antisystemic struggles. Indeed, many have long expected that the “nature-society” question will provide the most likely focus for a coalescence of new social movements into a broadened counterhegemonic movement (see Olofsson 1988, 15). However, one problem persists...
3. The Feminization of Earth First!
Commentators Larry Martel and John-Henry Harter identify the loss of union power in the woods of the West Coast of North America as the primary factor behind the recent crises in the forests. Martel argues that getting there requires nothing less than “a vast union machine in the woods” to ensure that workers “can no longer be blackmailed by the companies into trading off job and livelihood security for ancient-growth preservation” (1997...
4. Green Syndicalism
The greening of syndicalist discourses and practices is signifi cant not only in offering practical examples of rank-and-fi le organizing and alliance building between union members and environmental activists. It also raises a number of interesting possibilities and questions regarding anarcho-syndicalism and ecology, indeed questions about the possibilities for a radical convergence of social movement organizing. While most attempts to form...
5. Green Syndicalism and Mainstream Unions
The decreased demand for labor, within cybernetized capital relations, means that corporations are less compelled to deal with mainstream trade unions as under the Keynesian arrangement.1 If unions are to have any infl uence, it can only come through active efforts to disrupt the labor process. These disruptive efforts may include increased militancy within workplace...
E-ISBN-13: 9780815651888
E-ISBN-10: 0815651880
Print-ISBN-13: 9780815633075
Print-ISBN-10: 0815633076
Page Count: 280
Publication Year: 2012
OCLC Number: 847549932
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Green Syndicalism
