From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: ecology work? ecology workers?
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 12:00:32 -0500


Hey Michael,

Um, going to an Ivy League School does not automatically make you bourgeois.
It just makes it a lot more likely :)

More seriously, have you been investigating Judi Bari's work?  Her
relationship to class politics was complicated but worth working through,
especially since she was involved in confrontations with people more
normally described as workers, the timber workers.

Also, for what it is worth, you may want to look into Murray Bookchin's
Social Ecology stuff, though it strikes me and many others as pretty
limited.  He has a co-worker who also might be interesting, Cindy Milstein.
She is a pretty sharp cookie and I personally find what little of her I have
read more interesting than Bookchin.

Benton's The Greening of Marxism may not be exactly what you are looking
for, but it might have some useful references.

There is also the aspect of workers who's struggles are necessarily
'ecological' in some sense, such as Native American fights against certain
types of mining.

Anyway, maybe you should just go back and read Engels.  ROTFLMAO.  Sorry,
feeling like a smart ass today, compensating for my son having a 102 degree
fever.

On a 'methodological' note, you might want to consider that attemtping to
define 'ecological workers' is itself a kind of hopeless task.  One tendency
on this list, such as myself, feels that sort of sociological defining of
'working class' as a membership category, is actually anathema to Marx's
notion of class, and more importantly, to any rigorous notion of class which
is revolutionary.  So it may be worth thinking about how such a inversion of
view might help you as well.  Then again, maybe it just wrecks everything,
itself not always bad.

Cheers,
Chris

PS  Welcome to the list!

----- Original Message -----
From: <Michael_E_Jackson-AT-brown.edu>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 11:30 PM
Subject: AUT: ecology work? ecology workers?


> I was wondering if anyone can help direct me towards useful
ideas/resources on a project I've been curious about these last few days.
>
> First, the requisite intro to the list: as indicated by my email account,
yes, I am an undergrad at an actual Ivy League School, which according to
the recent discussion almost definitely qualifies me as actively, currently
capitalist-class... though I work for wages 20-30 hrs in a given week on top
of my classes and thesis work, and though I'll have loans to pay and not
much of a practical headstart in any job market when I get out of here.
Disclaimer disclaimer, believe what you must, etc, but I'm in this for the
long haul (as far as I can tell at age 20).
>
> Right now I'm attempting to finish concentration work on crisis theory and
flexible accumulation and stuff; I'm becoming increasingly interested in
autonomia; reading this list daily for the past few months has been helpful.
(And, in case you're cynically wondering, my interest began with Midnight
Notes and Harry Cleaver, not Hardt/Negri.) On to my question...
>
> I've been trying to assemble the elements of a useful description of the
"ecology worker." The two major approaches to ecological struggle, at least
in North America, have been deeply problematic. On the one hand, there is an
"environmentalist" faction of the ruling class that advocates a more total
ecological management, usually on the part of the state as collective
capitalist but more recently in a recuperative push towards "green
capitalism" amongst private industrialists. On the other, there is
increasingly a movement of "environmental justice"-minded people who share
some level of awareness that capital unevenly externalizes environmental
costs. For the most part (in NA at least) these folks seem to either submit
themselves to exploitation in the nonprofit sector, or adopt a partially
declassed (?) scavenger lifestyle as a vangaurd representing the interests
of "nature" (and even those people viewed as "closer" to it) against capital
as a whole. (Some are against industry or "civilization" too.)
>
> The situation is enough to send anyone with a strong class analysis
skittering away from action around environmental concerns--myself included.
I was wondering, though, if it would be possible to understand "ecology
work" as an aspect of social work. This would encompass all work (except
managerial?) performed on the basis of ecological knowledge (of any degree
of formality and particularity) and with the intended consequence of
maintaining a biological environment which fosters social reproduction.
>
> Ecology workers would therefore be, variously, (a) those whose wage (or
other form of compensation from capital) is formally linked to ecological
performance; (b) those whose wage ('') is linked to productivity which
happens to depend on ecological performance; and (c) those whose ecological
performance does not determine their wage ('') but is nevertheless carried
out and is imposed by capital (for example, if it counteracts the material
side-effects of capitalist production on their own well-being).
>
> Ecology work would encompass: much "housework" (food selection, cleaning);
jobs in sanitation and waste disposal; tasks within most workdays that
involve cleaning and disposal; agricultural labor; street-bureaucratic work
around health and urban pollution issues; voluntary direct defense of biota
*perhaps* (but certainly not conservationist real-estate accumulation);
grassroots community activism against toxic dumping; work in construction
and landscaping; and possibly certain types of intellectual labor that
pertain directly to this work as such.
>
> The key elements of this project would be:
> --to uncover the diverse forms of ecological knowledge that most of us (as
ecology workers) have developed; but
> --to understand how this knowledge is developed to fulfill work that is
created and imposed by capital; and
> --to recognize that ecology work is inherently social work.
>
> The goal, finally, would be to understand ecology work as a category of
work under capital, in a way that allows for workers to make ecological
demands directly in the context of a more general circulation of struggles.
>
> That's the gist of it.
>
> Some immediate concerns:
> 1) Where is the line between ecology work and work in healthcare? There is
a continuum of relevant biological knowledge.
> 2) Are owner-managers of small farms ecology workers?
> 3) Ecological knowledge on a small scale is highly diverse and specific,
tending to vary with locality. Would increasingly succesful circulation of
consciousness about ecology work tend to correspond with an increasingly
abstract conception of "ecology" itself? Would this more closely mirror the
("instrumental") capitalist perspective on environmental dynamics (and hence
be more susceptible to recuperation by capital/the state)?
> 4) Could unified struggles based on "ecology work" really circulate
between urban and rural populations? Or does capital impose qualitatively
different types of strain on urban environments and rural ecosystems?
>
> That's about the extent of my musings. If anyone can offer a
critique--specifically either to shoot down the endeavor entirely, or to
push it towards coherence--I'd really appreciate it. I'm new at this stuff,
and if this is a topic that's long since been settled on I'd love to know.
>
> Also, I realize that variations on this analysis have already been put
forth: the better ecofeminists have discussed the uneven imposition of
ecology work, in terms of the "externalization of costs" disproportionately
onto oppressed strata; and the "social ecology" tendency suggests that one
of the benefits of radically participatory control over production will be
the incorporation of all these special ecological demands into the
decision-making process (the end of ecology work as a separate sphere?). But
I'm more interested in the autonomous activity of ecology workers, in a
manner that fosters c. of s.'s with other (overlapping) sectors of the w.c.
Any suggestions? (If anyone just points me to Engels, I'll scream.)
>
> Thanks,
> MJ
>
>
>
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