Green syndicalism is, at its most basic, the convergence of radical ecology and revolutionary unionism (syndicalism). It starts from a recognition that the destruction of nature and the exploitation of nature go hand in hand—they are the twin pillars of capitalism. These foundations of capitalism are inextricably connected and essential for the system’s existence and expansion. This means, too, that ending the destruction of nature means ending the exploitation of labor and vice versa.
Green syndicalism recognizes that workers—at the site of exploitation—hold a crucial capacity for ending both the exploitation of their own labor and the exploitation of nature. Workers, by withdrawing and withholding their labor, can halt the mechanism of exploitation itself. As the old song goes, “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.”
The familiar weapons of labor struggle—strikes, sabotage, workplace occupations—can stop exploitation in its tracks—for workers and for nature. While providing a basis for reconstructing social life on an ecological basis.
Worker direct action can do more to stop destructive capitalist practices than protests, demonstrations, appeals to authority or reason, or even individual acts of sabotage outside workplaces. But this does not occur by chance. Green syndicalists must organize for it, especially in direct worker-to-worker networks. This includes overcoming the deeply socialized capitalist ideologies that undermine class consciousness and see workers and capitalists as “in it together.”
Tactically, syndicalism stresses the importance of worker self-activity toward revolutionary ends. This differs from the managerialism and contractual “partnerships” with capital pursued by mainstream trade unions (business unions).
The collective labor of the working class can reclaim commons of labor, reproduction, and production. For human and ecological need, not property or profit. For life, not the death culture of capitalism.
The creation of the working class under capitalism is itself based on the theft of commons (and its privatization)—the separation of people from their means of subsistence. Survival then becomes dependent on the sale of labor power on a capitalist labor market. This is expanded through colonialism and imperialism—the spread of exploitation and ecological domination. Life as commodities.
Capitalism has always advanced through enclosure of commons, land theft, dispossession and displacement for original inhabitants of ecosystems. Capitalism cannot exist without these.
Green syndicalism affirms nature as commons—against capitalist property, colonialism, and imperialism. This is the basis of life for all species. Thus, it also must mean land back and Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous land defenders stop capitalist exploitation in its tracks directly at the site of extraction. Green syndicalism, then, must also mean active solidarity with Indigenous resistance. This, too, is class struggle, in ending the conditions that make capitalist class relations possible.
