Here we go so the basic uh idea of this talk is to interrogate the analytic of uh inequality and equality critically since it’s Central to this summer school um and and to think about what are the limitations of this way of of of studying uh social and ecological
Problems and what can we do about those limitations um as researchers but also as political subjects um and I would say you know being a researcher is to be a political subject of a special kind uh no matter whether you take that responsibility upon yourself or
Not um anyway so I I divided my talk into four different parts um inequality exploring that Concepts a bit uh Capital as a driver of inequality labor as a ultimately the producer of capital and strategy both both how we think about strategy more broadly and how we uh use
Our research in a strategic way sadly as you as usual the good stuff is at the end and we’re probably going to focus more have more time for that in the discussion than in the Talk itself so inequality part one I don’t know whether this is supposed
To there we go okay so um first I would argue that inequality research has become a hegemonic form of critique both in the sense that it’s it’s it’s pretty dominant among people who think critically uh but also in in the sense that it plays the role in a certain
Hegemonic configuration of of the management of global capitalism that is a kind of critique that’s often quite safe the way that it’s presented um and one of the reasons why this is the case and one of the reasons why we people who think critically have to uh
We can use inequality of course but we have to think Beyond it as well is that it’s normatively theoretically and strategically inadequate to the challenges that we face all right so now I’m just going to go through a quick quick succession of examples of how inequalities is used that are mostly
Like actually I don’t have a problem with it but I want to talk about its limitations so we all know discussions of the 1% here’s a couple of graphs from Pik um we’re all familiar with that we’re probably all most of us familiar with this graph from Oxfam that shows
How the richest 10% in the world are responsible through the consumption for uh whopping 49% of CO2 emissions um and we can also look at it in terms of countries and and GE political regions uh historical emissions how uh massively uh uh the global North out out outweigh outweighs the global South
Um and China looks pretty big but if you consider the population of China it’s uh is relatively a lot smaller still than the EU or the US um and then we have something like this which talks about how as there is a relative convergence which doesn’t mean
That there is no longer very severe inequality between geopolitical regions in different countries there is a a tendency towards convergence um and which which which means that basically there is a um a tendency to in inequality within countries playing a bigger role in uh CO2 emissions than inequality between countries I would
Love to hear Max critique of that because I frankly just pulled this up as a way to illustrate how inequality is being used I don’t have a specific opinion about the solidity of this data so here we go we also have international organizations like the IMF the OCD and
The World Bank uh having special Focus sections on inequality trying to address inequality in various ways in terms of uh the pandemic and health uh in terms of uh the equilibrium and social stability of of of social formations Etc uh so they they’re saying they’re trying to do something about this and
You could say you know they’re just paying lip service to inequality but would they be able to pay lip service to class Struggle No right because inequality is a less offensive term than class struggle to take one example like it’s it’s one that is relatively less uh challenging to a
Certain way of understanding the world why is that so basically the critique of inequal inequality tends to which means not in all case it pretends to contrast facts with Norms so our Norm is that everyone should be equal but in fact they’re not okay let’s show this
Right um we it gives a lot of work to academic researchers think tanks and Jo’s to say like okay let’s do the research oh turns out there’s a lot of inequality that’s bad because we all know inequality is bad for various reasons or unjust or unfair whatever IT addresses all sorts of
Quantitative imbalances that you can measure like on income for income levels for instance or CO2 emissions or whatever but it doesn’t tend to address the causes and it’s based on a received notion of equality as as what would be fair but which notion of equality is the question
So very brief on the philosophy and history of equality I’m an intellectual historian so they don’t allow me on a stage without speaking a little bit about the the history of a concept I’m also a sociologist political ecologist so I’m going to get to that later but uh so ideas of inequality and
Equality historically emerge simultaneously uh and they have to do with uh the the the formation of hierarchies is at the same time the formation of Demands for equality as well as um govern government through equality such that you have different populations who are ruled but at least they have all
The same rights it could be within a certain class everyone in the aristocracy is equal because they all have certain Privileges and rights uh or it could be spread out toward wider part of the population but within the overall hierarchical structure of monarchy for instance uh and you have the development of
Different con concepts of equality the equality of subjects under the king uh which can be within a class or within the whole population equality of Rights equality of opportunity and the which is the more kind of more contemporary uh since the 19th century uh liberal notion of
Equality and then equality of wealth or equality of power which is the more kind of left-wing approach to equality so the philosophical form of equality in all these cases tends to be the same you have a bunch of subjects all these dos in the bottom or citizens or voters or
Whatever who are on on a Level Playing Field and they in accord in accordance with some measure which is how many rights do they have or what kind of income do they have or whatever that’s like there’s a norm and the measure and then you have you have uh you have all
The different subjects and in relation to that there’s some kind of higher uh higher um subject that’s supposed to guarantee this like The Sovereign uh that’s supposed to guarantee that all commodity owners can exchange as equals in the market like this through money in a way that’s in a
Way that’s fair and doesn’t Advantage any one over the other um so there’s a guarantee so all this is like you’ll find it that abstraction tends to be uh sorry uh the norm of equality tends to be extremely abstractive which means that it abstracts from the difference between people it abstracts from the
Connections between people and it abstracts from contradictions within the system and it abstracts from uh system itself apart from this abstract form um so I have a little quote here from Marx in the critique of the goth program which I think is useful which is right by its very nature can
Consist only in the application of an equal standard but unequal individuals and there would not be different individuals if they were not unequal which means we’re we’re different like reducing us to the same measure is an act of abstraction this um unequal indiv individuals are only measurable by an equal standards in so
Far as they brought under an equal point of view for instance money or the law a and are taken for one side only for instance in the present case uh which is he’s a critique and certain certain idea of socialism is everyone getting according to the labor contribution they’re regarded as workers
And nothing more as workers right so this is one idea of socialism he criticized every worker is equal in so far as they get the same according to one hour is worth so and so much which abstracts from everything else they are as human beings including what what
Needs they might have if they’re uh disabled or specifically gifted and they need specific instrument to exercise their gift or whatever um so just to expand on this a little bit to try to illustrate and now it’s getting a little bit uh too complicated uh perhaps um but um
Sorry you you can replicate the structure in many different levels it goes with it’s basically the commodity form if you’re a Marxist you can talk about subjects voters uh you can talk about uh Commodities you can talk about uh whatever it is that you need to equalize countries
Etc and that abstracts from a lot of other things that these are these are a lot of other things that you abstract from at the same time you abstract from the way that all these are interconnected and interdependent in complex diagrams this is just to take an example this David harv
Diagram of capital and capital reproduction totally it’s extremely complex and what happens here the equalization is only a part of that here you have a uh a diagram of social ecology I don’t remember where I took that from sorry but just to give you a sense of the kind of complex
Complexity you abstract from when you uh talk about equality inequality according to just one me uh um all this might be pretty obvious to a lot of people um but it’s still it’s still is important to speak about because we tend to easily be sucked into discussions of equality and
Inequality in a way that leaves us being merely knowledge producers and perhaps participants in a discourse about fairness which does not address all the reasons why people would want to build something like transformative power together uh and uh wait I’m going to rewind a second because I should
Like here here you have the systems that produce not just inequality but that has this process of Equalization according to the law or according to commodity exchange Etc abstracting from that you abstract from what drives the production of equality equality within the system right you don’t have a theory of what
Generates a problem you just have a notion of of the problem which turns out to be just a symptom so when you do that you can have a discursive critique of inequality uh that refers to a certain Norm the norm that we just showed before
How it works uh which is based a Norm that’s based on equivalence and this might undermine people’s consent in the way the system is working but it’s not giving any tools to think about how to challenge coercion as as a form of power nor the mute compulsion of the market
Right so in order to do that we have to talk about uh what are the drivers of inequality but also we have to to go back here we have to talk about the connections between people that are um that are uh that are abstracted from in the discourse of equality which
Is in in in the sense of the in the French terms it’s frat which is Brotherhood let’s say solidarity to be a little bit more inclusive um so if you have a notion of equality that’s based on the actual production of solidarity then you have a completely different conception of
Equality but usually because there is such poor generation of solidarity and we as social scientists don’t connect it that often what we get is this abstract separative notion of equality equality without fraternity and we’re also missing the concept of Liberty which is people wanting to break out of the system of
Submission rather than just being equal to the law freedom in his radical sense is also a certain level of autonomy to break out of this this a danger of speaking of equality without without solidarity and and freedom okay so let’s then talk about Capital as the driver of
Inequality and and how there are problems with capital beyond the production of inequality if we don’t make that uh our sole um standard of critique um so PT who’s generally under on I wouldn’t say the bad side but but the inadequate side of the critique of inequality he has this you’re
Probably familiar with this uh uh function uh that that basically describes the production of inequality which is that when the rate of return of capital r is higher than the than G which is the general growth of the economy and because this this is a normal state of capitalist
Economies which is only interrupted by uh depression war and different state measures that often initially develop in relation to depression and and and War so it’s basically the mid 20th century period where there was this severe decline in inequality in certain parts of the world
And not between parts of the world as as Max would remind us we’re talking about uh Western Europe we’re talking about uh the United States we’re talking about in a very different way uh about uh the Socialist States as well so P strategy is to achieve an equalization to uh
Decrease the rate at which capital grows in in comparison to the rate of growth in economy in general uh in order to have an equality of opportunity uh by different means building consensus working through political parties and trade unions scandalizing in this discussive way inequality and like I says quite uh
Quite quite uh honestly he is not proposing full equality there’ll be a lot of inequality but progressive taxation would make a big difference the general idea is that not only the children of wealthy parents can create companies and participate in the economy and this is often the ultimate Horizon
Of the critique of equality is simply to level the playing field to redistribute the social product of a destructive social formation as we’ll see right now so Marx he doesn’t just have a function to describe inequality he has a theory of how it happens and he says this B it’s a
Basic function of the labor process uh it’s basically the exploitation of Labor uh um the the exploitation of Labor means that there will be no labor employed unless Capital can earn a greater sum of money through the sale of the products of that labor than they had to invest in
Buying the labor in the first place according with along with the raw materials and machines needed to produce that labor the m the m the money at the end has to be bigger than the money in the in in in in the beginning and that only happens to
The extent that labor is able to produce a surplus otherwise people are not uh hired there’ll be Surplus population Max was talking about this and they will be so desperate that they will be willing to work for lower wages and then might be a situation where they can be hired
In some cases uh and profitably employed so this is very clear this is one side but it’s only one side of of the equation which is uh labor L is has to beared with the means of production means of production are ultimately products of nature it’s
It’s the energy that goes into running a machine it’s the metal of which the machine is built it’s all the raw materials that go through the machine or through the hands of Labor um and capitalism requires that this grow like capital is only invested in so far as
There is a profit at the end of the day and as an aggregate system it requires growth right Capital enters into crisis if there is not growth of capital um not necessarily growth of the social formation as a whole you can also just have growth that’s based on
Predation of the working classes for a certain period of time uh but there has to be capital accumulation or the an expanded reproduction of capitalism which is what means that capitalism spreads into more and more spheres of Life spreads to more and more parts of the globe sorry
If this is very basic but I think it’s a it’s it’s an important stepping stone for the for the kinds of arguments we have to be making so talking about the means of production is it’s as as um as a products of Nature and I’m not so happy
With the concept of nature it’s it’s kind of you know we can have another discussion of that but we’re talking about we’re talking about materials material flows we’re talking about ecologies different species we’re talking about a whole bunch of things under that heading and um and basically Capital requires the
Expanded not just exploitation of labor but the expanded uh extraction from nature which is the destruction of ecologist uh and and non-ecological material uh life and and um existence and here’s for political ecologists one or two very well-known quotes I think from uh that are worth uh
I’m just going to read the last part of the first one capitalist production only develops the uh only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original original sources of all wealth the soil and the worker so here’s a part conclusion to
This section which is that um when we document inequality we measure distribution but it doesn’t explain distribution uh capitalism is an engine of expanded exploitation of Labor and the destruction of ecosystems and three the distribution of the fruits of capitalism or taking over its productive apparatus does not per se
Eiz the way we produce and the way we reproduce ourselves so we need to address the capital labor question in a way that integrates the ecological question from the beginning and now I’m interested in how much time I spent okay so I’m going to jump to part three
Labor and I’m going to introduce a a fun concept the concept of bad work but first i’m going to say a little bit about why we need to move from abstract to conrete labor so we’ve talked about abstract labor in the sense you remember the diagram I had before all the little
Dots next to each other and they compared by means of money right that’s what happens in the process of exchange there is a de facto in practice comparison without anyone doing it a mental calculation necessarily but there is a de facto uh comparison happening whenever whenever there’s a choice where to from
The the labor of that prod that goes into the production there the labor that goes into that production there is compared and you say well this is a better deal than that which means that you you say this um you you set the standard for uh for labor um on the
Basis of what of the product you choose and there a market signal sent to the other that the labor cost were too high for instance right so you have you have a de facto comparison of Labor and Equalization this abstract labor neb um but the pandemic and climate change
Have forced us to ask a different question not abstract labor which is also questions of how much do you get paid how many hours do you work but the question of concrete labor what labor must be suspended to avoid disaster and what labor must continue what labor must be suspended to
Avoid disaster and what labor must continue right right this is not a question of equality it’s not the question of all labor is is is fine we just need to have equality no the question is some labor shouldn’t happen uh for a period of time because everyone will get sick in that work
Workplace for instance or forever because everyone including the planet will get sick if we startop if we continue pumping up oil so in the years to come the debate about green transition will continue to intensify the question of the abolition ition or transformation of carbon jobs and the character of work in an
Ecological transition so sorry to come back to Marx labor must be broken down into its two-fold form on the one hand into concrete labor in the use values of the commodity and on the other hand into socially necessary labor as calculated in exchange value so just just to expand
The uh what I was talking about just before so on the one hand you have you have quantity the abstract undiff differentiated expression in terms of money and on the other hand you have quality which has to do with the division of labor the life task of the
Workers and another concept users uh like concrete skills and which it doesn’t talk about really but like what what are the what are the materials you work with what are the toxins how do they affect the body of the worker or the environment Etc like there’s a use
Value and there is also the harm value if we can call it that of the production process of concrete labor so focusing on concrete labor is not a new thing but it’s it’s it’s a thing that we the trade unions don’t tend to do much um but there are examples of of of
People doing that throughout the history of capitalism which is for instance the struggles of artisinal workers demands for Meaningful work uh then there’s a question of workers’s pride in the social value of the work or in the in the exercise of the skills then you have feminist demands for the recognition of unpaid
Reproductive work which is this illustration here uh then you have a new discourse of knowledge work as IM material labor where you focus on the again on on a certain kind of concrete qualitive of the work and uh and the newer uh Eco feminism or materialist EOP feminist
Discour around earthcare labor as a as survivance which means survival and living beyond M survival uh in a way that’s aligned with natural ecologist uh I hope you’re you’re familiar with the work of Stefania Barka the book forces of reproduction I really recommend that on on this
Question uh if if you don’t already know it so all these examples of valorizing concr Creed living labor is Meaningful necessary and potentially liberating but of course also oppressed in various ways non-recognized uh exploited but something that needs to go on no matter if we have capitalism or not right this
Is the this is a work in excess of the abolition of Labor well or you you abolish wage labor but you still have to do this work you still have to care for one another we still have to care for the world we live in uh we still have to
Have intellectual production cultural production Etc uh or need to I don’t know but we want to probably both so badget jobs which is a which is a concept that that I’ve developed uh since a few years um is different than that badget jobs are jobs that do participate in
Labor process that do objective harm to Bod ecology environments and that also has the potential at least to produce objective disaffection shame and disgust with what what you’re participating in uh this is a picture from uh Porto Meera in the’ 70s in Italy where workers had to quickly Escape their chemical Factory
Because there was a there was um an an Surplus emission of suic acid I think which was uh meant that they had to flee and there was a lot of struggle against noxiousness in the workplace um worker poets writing about how the SE bir what’s falling from the
Sky how it affects the neighborhood next to the port and so on does this R worker struggle uh against toxicity that we can talk about so when I say bad jobs I’m ring off the concept of jobs which was developed by David Graber the Anthropologist that you probably
Familiar with this uh bull jobs is meaningless jobs pointless unnecessary pentious jobs that can’t be justified even by the employee but you just feel to you have to do this in order to make the case and pretend that it’s not badshit jobs is just you know nonsense right badshit means
Insane in in American slang these jobs are insane in the sense that in order to make a living you have to participate in undermining the conditions of life that’s insane right that if you have a job where you have to participate in undermining the condition of life in order to make a
Living and many workers are aware of this is a quote from a an ex Co Miner in West Virginia uh and I can’t do the the uh the dialect but but I’ll just read it out straight uh there’s this misconception especially with you all in the liberal media that this 90% of
People are just ignorant about climate change ignorant about the effects of mountaintop removal and all the health effects keep in mind with the ones getting caner from the coal mining practices not y so we can kind of speak on the matter um so just a very quick list of destructive
Industries and we can we can uh we can debate whether the list ever stops even if we start with a bad uh it we might never never get fully to the point of the totally unicorn Harless I don’t know but with within a capitalist economy I mean so all oil
Coal and gas mining fossil infrastructure construction the airline industry industrial agriculture ocean Freight the Auto industry construction sector the way that it’s usually carried out uh concrete based and so on marketing is a way to sell the lifestyles that go with this kind of economy training petroleum
Geologists but many other kinds of job participate in securing the expanded reproduction of capital including education right it being here together it’s pretty CO2 let’s say uh inoffensive right uh being in universities working in universities we don’t we don’t need a lot of machinery and a lot of different things we just
Have buildings that can stand for a certain number of years that need to be heated Etc but education itself doesn’t seem like a b of jum but if we’re educating people to participate in the reproduction of the fossil economy we’re reproducing the conditions of Destruction we’re part of reproducing undermining the conditions
Of life if only indirectly in order to make a living okay so we all have to ask what we’re doing in this day and age um so an ecological perspective of on um on batet job could be not just that it has to be an immediate harm but it participates in a
System of reproduction that is destructive harmful unsustainable and let’s take the case of guano mining guano is is a of birds and bats that was adopted in order to produce not just uh fertilizer in Europe in the 19th century but also gunpowder uh and it was mostly mined in
On the west coast of of South America and on different islands in that region uh and it’s a natural product right so you would think well this is totally nice and sustainable you have the birds that keep but if we take the the kind of U fantastic account
Of the guano trade by Gregory kushman he’s saying by jump starting these revolutionary Trends the exploitation of Peruvian guano and nitrates during the guano age played a supremely important role in bringing an end to the ecological old regime which was you only get the nutrients that you can get
Locally in order to grow agriculture where you’re at two new regime that was uh based on the global and colonial trade of of uh of um of uh nutrients for Crop Production um in a way that created the condition for the replacement of a new industrial order based on throughput so it creates
A situation where farmers get used to just importing nutrients and producing in a way that doesn’t think about crop rotation that doesn’t think about uh manure that doesn’t think about different ways of working organic matter into the soil locally which creates a condition for uh for basically metabolic Rift so
Even work on natural and renewable materials can be bad it if it facilitates the breaking of neutrient Cycles the widening uh of metabolic Rifts in in this case it’s neat because it’s literally bad uh that they’re mining uh and bir it so I I kind of mentioned this
Already uh dis affections the workers against noxiousness um here are some poems from the worker poet I mentioned before I’m not going to read it because I think this will no maybe it’s good with a little break uh I’ll take the the last the last answer enough with the EMAs with the
Intoxications with the systematic silent destruction enough with this atrocious war waged in the factory in the name of humanity of progress of Love Enough our blood is fed up and this speaks to some of the contradictions of bad badshit work which is there’s a war there’s a war in the world upon
Which we depend in the name of humanity progress even of love like well why do you go to work work that dist d uh destroys the the local environment well out of love with my family I have to feed my kids right it’s work of love there’s a lot of contradictions here
That we need to face uh that we can start to face if we talk about concrete labor and if we go beyond the abstractions of of abstract labor and equality inequality uh another disection right is the future I I would propose we uh think of this as the struggle of future
Workers which in many cases people self-consciously think about this in terms of they want to change the curriculum in order to use something that is learn something that’s useful and refuse to participate in in destructive jobs in the future the self-educating themselves in an full struggle and people are more and more
Seeking to uh to learn uh jobs that will be meaningful so not badshit care work uh Earth care work um political work and uh the production of other of technologies that are not or less harmful uh Etc so this is something that we as students have to learn from each
Other how do we maximize our what we do in that direction and as Educators we we need to facilitate that we need to facilitate that to the maximum which is not just designing the curric culum in the classroom to do that but also encouraging our students to go out in
The world and work with social movements and social initiatives that do this but also fight with University administrations and fight with uh ministries of Education in order to change the way education is organized and prioritized uh here’s another example of people facing off banet jobs so uh Lucas
Aerospace was a company in the 70s in the UK that was producing armaments like this tank here and they were going to be closed uh or downsized it wasn’t clear and then they started a campaign with some academics helping them to think about what else could they produce in the factory for instance
Tractors uh and and basically had a campaign for the transformation of the workplace I have a contemporary example of that in a few minutes um when we get to all these like really meaningful concrete things how are we affected with what we do how do we have cognitive dissonance when we do
Something we know is privately necessary for us to do that work but it’s also really harmful um when we think about all these concrete issues concrete harms and disaffections and effect effect forms of Effectiveness by pollution we go beyond the kind of uh quantitative abstract ideas of just transition that are often
In play which is well your workers were earning this or they were in that kind of uh Collective bargain if you close up harming workplace they have to get something equivalent right and and then some unions say we’re going to fight economic transition until you provide Justice
Which means we’re going to increase the cost of just transition for you which means well they can create an incentive for for governments or companies not to transition uh the question is like how do how do workers and how do unions become protagonists of of of transition and
That is by phasing all all these forms of harms of U of concrete labor sorry I’m just kind of jumping what Taja said there um in order to understand this I developed this uh exercise that I’ve done with with workers in in different businesses including Aviation workers in Ryan
A uh which is Japanese Self Health di self-help diagram eky guy do you know this yeah so like it’s a kind of you know how can you how can you basically it’s an ex how can you get happy but actually they’re helping you feel miserable because you realize that there
Are all these things missing in your life but that can be used critically right so the idea is if you do what you do is something you get a livelihood from pay you get paid for a livelihood be more broad it’s something you do well it’s something you want to do for
Instance because you have nice colleagues and you think the world needs it then you’re in a sweet spot right you’re happy you’re happy not in the sense of like uh frolicking around but just you have this kind of solid contentment in your life that you’re doing something good meaningful uh Etc
Right most people don’t do that uh and in order to think about how workers can not just other workers but also ourselves can challenge the way work is going on and can make claims on determining what is produced and how including what kind of education is
Produced and how we need to think about the ways that we hate work or that work doesn’t satisfy our basic needs okay uh so different conditions of uh disaffection and B of jobs uh could be um like uh so we need to degrowth employment and toxic Industries and um we need
To uh ensure sorry I’m not I’m not sure what I did here let me just think about what what I actually did here uh ah different ways of of kind of pressing ourselves and others in to face our own dis dis affections not to lie to ourselves that this is all
Fine um is that we have to face the necessity of deg growing employment in toxic Industries and we just have to also make that happen we uh have to make clear that there will be a redundancy of skill and there will have to be a redundancy of
Certain skills and and that that is a pressure to retrain we have to um to start to no longer give each other recognition or respect for doing work that we recognize as harmful and we have to create awareness of the harmful character of the work that’s not enough because then
You’re just unhappy right it’s just miserable um um and and and people attached to the work in different ways like the miners in the coal mines of of East eastn West Germany uh they are really proud and attached and dependent on the work in coal mines and here’s an nland
Activist uh I spent hours and days talking to miners in Western East Germany they hater us with a passion like people in the in the climate movement and with a good reason the problem with them is not that they work bad at jobs is that the energies and resources necessary to shift them
From active opponents to at least undecided may be far greater than that required to neutralize our position and basically what he’s saying the activist here is that some people you’re just never going to get on our side forget about it forget about it and if you have a a labor movement that
Takes seriously ecological problematics you’re going to have to say there are parts of the workforce who defend a mode of life that’s harmful to all that’s ecological scabbing sorry like we have but we have to do something to enable them to change their minds and not be miserable when what they do is
Abolished um we have to face the reactionary attachment that people have to their work right so uh I’ve already mentioned some of these like you know people might uh really fight for the work because they’re simply dependent on it and they might have a lot of resentment for that
Work being threatened and with good good reason they might have a lot of pride in the skills they might refuse to retrain I’m 60 years old I trained 40 years ago you know I I you know this is what I know I I can’t I can’t afford to
Retrain or whatever uh workers in the communities also maintain pride in harmful Industries and also they want to do they decide to do the work because it creates Community amongst workers and some might adopt nistic attitudes and selfish carelessness about the consequences of what they do um
So in order to facilitate transition we can work all this gives us a diagram also for what we can work on multi-dimensionally uh transform production lines like I mentioned with Lucas Aerospace um and develop new kinds of employment locally uh fund retraining publicly and ensure creative redeployment of
Skills also create conditions for new jobs and non-w work activities a sources of meaning pride and respect and Community which I forgot to put like the community of colleagues or other people you do things with and create access to restorative reproductive and regenerative activities and work so
Other things that you can do that are really useful and this is happening with some some places with farming that farmers you go from funding subsidizing Farmers for doing uh producing as much as possible to doing uh ecosystem Services work basically and and and and keeping uh keeping the land in a certain
State that is uh that makes it a carbon sink or whatever um so what the world needs what kind of work the world needs is a big question I don’t quite have the answer that’s the opposite of Bach job right what the world needs the way that
I approach this is rather than be like Oh I’m a I’m a I’m I’m a sociologist and political ecologist and know what the world needs and let me make a list I’m like well let’s work with people to think about what they see as needed and create discussions amongst
People who who are workers and people in the climate movement who by the way also happen to be workers in most cases with students future workers let’s create discussions where we start to think about these questions and raise them in an active way where we become capable of democratically addressing this and
Addressing it through social struggle as well so one example is this exercise that I developed uh which is basically has the idea that there are three kinds of work that the kinds of work that has have to be maintained and perhaps expanded could be like care work it could be education
For for you know for for good certain parts of Education uh then kinds of work that have to be transformed and then certain kinds of work that have to be simply abolished different people have very different answers to what belongs where but it’s a really interesting exercise and if you have
People uh bring together people from who are active in in in climate and labor movements who have really interesting discussions where people have a fight maybe but also learn a lot from each other and have to face face each other’s uh understandings of the necessity for instance to abolish certain kind of
Mining and at the same time the understanding of of like okay what we mind is actually essential to produce a certain number of goods that have use values and we need those use values right that’s a concrete discussion it’s not like oh it’s good for Capital and
Growth and profitability it’s like no we need it for some use values therefore we cannot just abolish the mining of iron oil because we need iron or whatever fine so um strategy starting to lose my breath but I have only eight minutes left which is a
Relief maybe also for you I hope not but I would understand so uh I promised a a contemporary example of workers fighting for the transformation and uh here we have it the gapa in Factory in in Florence that was about to be shut down doing parts for autop paaths they occupied the
Factory uh two three years ago and continued running it in opposition to the closure they uh they transitioned production and they connected the conen to the agroecological movement and open it to the community as a community restaurant as well and buil uh buil links to facilitate social and political
Responses to uh both Local Economic Decline and to think about what happens uh in in situations where there’s like heat waves or whatever what can we do to support each other and they work with the climate movement to discuss the abolition of fossil fuels and that like we you know we want
To produce uh parts for Electrical uh public transportation vehicles and so on um so why is this valuable as opposed to say oh there’s a norm which is that people should be more equal um why what what’s uh what’s strategic about this uh is that it doesn’t discuss it
Doesn’t start from an abstract Norm or fact it talks to the concrete needs of workers it and the concrete desires to do something meaningful something the world needs and it’s based on their experiences and expectations within a community is regrounding egalitarianism on practical live solidarity rather than uh rather than
Freedom in the sense of like uh we should all be uh free as separated individuals who are somehow equivalent like these little dots on the line right um and another thing is that it shifts from the idea of having a strategic plan like we need the green New Deal two
Here’s the situation what are the situational potentials of that situation let’s grab them and it reground reground the planning because of course it plans another kind of production plans makes uh plans for how W wider economic sectors could be transformed but it builds that on building Collective power with people around them
With other movements and understanding the tendencies that are relevant to this so uh rather than pictures of inequality going up and down let’s talk about what are the tendencies that refer to the to the kind of deeper drivers of inequality and eological harm and I see four tendencies
That are relevant and of course we can we can enumerate more there is a tendency towards transition transition away from from fossil fuels that’s totally insufficient but it is ongoing to a certain extent and there a fight over what that means there is a tendency in the sense of a subjective tendency
There a movement that fights for aition of fossil fuels um there is a tendency towards more and more disasters like we saw recently with the floods here and there’s a tendency towards economic decline inflation driven by crop failure for instance or uh lower productivity in agriculture uh economic decline driven
By the growth of uninsurable risk like imagine if if let’s say here in Slovenia this year insurance will pay I’m guessing most people but if you have these floods every year in Slovenia your insurance companies are going to crack and if even if they don’t they’re
Going to refuse to ensure a bunch of people live in in the bottom of valleys or they’re going to make it so expensive that most people can’t afford an insurance which means there will be destruction without reconstruction or at least without this kind of reconstruction right that will require another kind of
Effort so there are different all these Tendencies are intertwined in various ways I’m not going to go into details of this diagram except to say that um that the more you transition the the easier abolition becomes but at the same time you have uh you have quite problematic uh Tendencies
Which is is that as a decline economic decline advances the means to fund a plan transition become less and less becomes harder and harder to fund which means that you have an increase in disaster and uh yeah and an increased urgency of abolition but it’s an abolition without transition which is of
Course like leads to further Decline and so will create an economic shock if you abolish without transition so we’re heading into a period of like quite severe contradictions and we need to think politically from that starting point um and to think about the different strategies the different actors develop
With this this is pretty fast you know the way that I made this so we could put it together differently but this is just to illustrate this way of thinking that the state is is working on transition in a limited way through policy uh investment policy and and and
Also different kinds of regulations and tations uh but it tends to be limited by the imperative to maintain growth why does the state want to maintain growth it’s not because growth is an ideology this is where degrowth is folks are often wrong it’s because if you don’t have growth you’ll have a decline
In taxation you’ll have a decline in employment you’ll have an increase in unpaid loans you’ll have a whole series of economic problems in a capitalist economy that they’re not ready to face because there are I mean both because they’re attached to the current order things but also because there are
Not no popular movements who can facilitate at present that’s that change through an egalitarian movement based on solidarity um so the state is holding off with the abolition of fossil fuels for the most part pending transition like we only shut down coal plants when we have the
Uh renewable capacity to replace it one to one or more for instance um and then with disasters you have different forms of relief but that often end up facilitating disaster capitalism um and then you have the state is facing decline with hiking interest rates austerity and investment
But like I said the scope for investment becomes less with the client and uh with of course with interest rate hikes as well so then um Capital the transitioning in is profitable they’re not thinking about abolition as a name uh except like small cozy microc capitalists who have no real impact on
Anything then uh and then all these Tendencies towards decline create increasing tendency towards crisis in capitalism which means there will be more situations where Industries close like in Italy like the chapaa where those are chances to socialize those factories either by workers themselves or by by uh public
Authorities and then there’s a question of what do Progressive movements do whole bunch of things and the important thing about this you know organizing for a G Green New Deal not just here’s a policy from our think tank but like fighting for it the way that that different movements are
Doing uh or building transition towns or or uh doing other kinds of um uh transition measures where you can um they’re fighting for evolution so you know just stopping using fossil fuels which is like few people have the luy to do that in a radical way uh blockading fossil fuel infrastructure sabotaging it
Uh how to blow up a pipeline then there’s a disaster uh Community solidarity Mutual Aid I’m afterwards I really curious to hear how what happened with the floods here whether there was any kind of that because that often creates a situation of a different formation of opinion and
A capacity locally if people know each other support each other trust each other they can fight this claster capitalist Redevelopment and make sure that the people who lived in an area get the resources to rebuild and so on um and uh decline decline that’s all the classical strategies of unemployed workers
Organizing Collective care initiatives reproductive struggles the key here is is both that on this side here you have actual Solutions but also the strength of these will determine the direction taken here here right uh if if if if the movements are weak the state will pursue all these
Strategies in a way that’s fully aligned with capitalist strategies the movements are stronger the tendency will be to uh towards oh more equality but but that’s not the point the point is is solidarity Justice and uh and enological harm um now gone over time but I’m going to
Since I promise this in the title I’m going to mention it very quickly perspectives for research I don’t know if you heard of transformative science I just mentioned it not because it’s fantastic but because it’s a fantastic way to justify and funding proposals doing something that’s politically relevant because it’s
Something they like German funders and EU funders they picked that up as little bit of the bus word I prefer to talk about co- research militant research workers inquiries and a bunch of other things another thing we can do is to move from comparative research to connective research don’t compare the problem over
Here with the problem over there connect the people in those two locations so they can work together learn from each other why not make an experiment see what happens when they get into conversation not just what are they already thinking but what are they capable of thinking when they discuss things together
Right have a science production that is creative that is productive um produce knowledge with movements knowledge that’s relevant to movements Channel funding ethically and strategically which means if you have a conference don’t have it in a big hotel if you can have it in a space that’s built
By social movements and you help fund that space easy really easy um build social science spin-offs a lot of research projects they have like funding for 3 to 5 years two years maybe build a nice website blah blah blah lots of progressive stuff funding ends boom
Website gone right why so like in the research project that I’m in we just said okay let’s build our own website autonomously from the project and we build a social movement school and we put stuff we do in the project on that website it’s a soci science spinoff and
They do that in the stem subject all the damn time and they make a private profit we don’t but we have something that has continuity and autonomy in the future something that’s of some use great or small whatever it is probably small but but you know what I
Mean and other thing is to make your your research available don’t do if if you can I mean sometimes you have to do interviews that are uh anonymous safely put in your hard drive but sometimes you just talk about people about what is what is what are the
Problems you’re facing what are you doing what can people learn from that make a podcast don’t put the interview on your hard drive make a podcast so other people can can can listen to it and proactively share that podcast with people in other movements in the same country and other in other
Countries so they can learn from each other and connect so just some perspectives that are based on on on what I’ve been doing and I would love to hear more suggestions from the audience yeah and this is me I’m just putting it here because uh being an
Academic worker is a condition of uh constantly threatening unemployment so if there are any professors in the room who want to hire me in two years when my funding runs out this is who I am uh and thank [Applause] you
source
