Stefania Barca’s Workers
of the Earth
Reviewed by
Shagun Choudhary,
Ph.D. Research
Scholar,
Department of
English and Cultural Studies,
Panjab University,
Chandigarh, India.
Workers of the Earth | Non-fiction | Stefania Barca |
Pluto
Press, 2024, pp. 208, INR 2,558
ISBN 9780745343877
When one examines the widely disseminated graphs that
illustrate the ‘Great Acceleration’—the socio-economic and earth-system trends
which define our present planetary crisis—one is impressed by a deeply
unsettling lack of humanity. The lines showing global Gross Domestic Product
(GDP), foreign direct investment and carbon dioxide emissions shoot upwards in
a perfect, horrifying synchrony from the year 1950. However, there is not a
single instance in these charts where the sweating, breathing workers whose labour
made this rise possible are depicted, nor are the people who had to take in the
toxic consequences shown. In her book Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology
and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change (Pluto Press, 2024), Stefania
Barca states that this omission is not merely accidental or unimportant; it is
a ‘master’s narrative’. Because it identifies humanity with capital and ignores
the human cost of ecological extraction, the mainstream environmental discourse
has systematically eliminated the working class.
The ambitious and thoroughly researched monograph by
Barca seeks to overcome this omission. By bringing together Marxist political
economy, environmental history and materialist ecofeminism, the book challenges
the widespread opposition between ‘jobs’ and the ‘environment’. Barca’s main
argument is that the real vanguard of ecological resistance is not the green
capitalist or the well-informed consumer, but the worker—more precisely the
marginalised, frequently unpaid ‘meta-industrial’ labourer. Using careful
historical case studies, she achieves a most successful demonstration that any
transition to a post-carbon society will fail if it does not focus on the
‘dealienation’ of labour and takes care work as a crucial form of climate
action.
The text is made up of two separate yet closely linked
parts: a historical account of working-class environmentalism (Part I) and a
theoretical contribution to current political ecology (Part II). Barca’s
analysis is most effective when she investigates forgotten or misinterpreted
histories in order to show that the environment has always been a matter of
labour. She starts by rejecting the Edenic, bourgeois idea that nature is an
untouched wilderness intended for recreation. Rather, using the example of Italy’s
post-war petrochemical expansion, she proves that both the factory floor and
the working-class community are the main places where people are exposed to
toxins. By referring to the 1976 chemical disaster in Manfredonia—where 32 tons
of arsenious dioxide fell onto a local community—Barca shows that the
consequences of industrial hazards fall most heavily on the most vulnerable
groups. The tragedy in Manfredonia led to an early version of ‘labour
environmentalism’, in which militant science and the practical knowledge
possessed by workers came together to oppose corporate impunity, ultimately
resulting in a case being brought before the European Court of Human Rights.
Barca’s most notable and original contribution to
analysis is found in her discussion of reproductive labour. In Chapter 3, she
looks at the 1980s United Kingdom Wages for Housework (WFH) campaign concerning
the Hinkley C nuclear power station. In this instance, the book goes beyond
conventional blue-collar environmentalism. Barca explains how activists such as
Suzie Fleming and Wilmette Brown developed the idea of ‘nuclear housework’;
they maintained that the real cost of nuclear energy was being paid for by the
unpaid domestic labour of women, who acted as ‘shock absorbers’ with regard to
radiation risks by spending extra hours watching children for leukaemia,
changing family diets and organising community resistance. By applying an
intersectional approach that takes into account sex, race and class, Barca
shows how the WFH movement revealed the expendability of Black, immigrant and
disabled lives within the British nuclear programme. This aspect of the
analysis is important because by treating the refusal of this unpaid labour as
an ecological strike, Barca entirely changes our understanding of what counts
as environmental activism.
This redefining of environmental labour extends to the
Global South in her exploration of ‘interspecies commoning’ in the Brazilian
Amazon. Focusing on the tragic assassinations of agroforestry leaders Zé
Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo in 2011, Barca
investigates the Alliance of Forest Peoples (APF)—a historic coalition between
Indigenous groups and rubber tappers. She eloquently unpacks the concept of florestania
(forestzenship), an ontology where the forest is not a resource to be managed,
but a more-than-human community endowed with political subjectivity. For the extractivistas,
defending the Brazil-nut trees (castanheiras) was not an act of
wilderness conservation, but the defence of a living workplace and a companion
species. Barca argues that this ‘hybrid labour’ poses the ultimate threat to
capitalist modernity because it models a prosperous, life-making economy
completely divorced from the imperative of GDP growth.
In the second part of the book, Barca moves from a
historical analysis to a theoretical critique, targeting what she calls the
‘eco-modernist dilemma’ which is affecting contemporary Western Marxism and
institutional trade unionism. She launches a sharp criticism of the International
Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Labour Organization
(ILO), claiming that their widely promoted ‘Just Transition’ framework is
basically a surrender to green capitalism. By simply defining a Just Transition
as the establishment of blue-collar jobs in the field of renewable energy and
infrastructure, these organisations disregard the structural violence inherent
in the market and perpetuate the patriarchal and colonial division of labour.
As Barca points out, the shift in Brazil from fossil fuels to biofuels has
simply replaced the brutal exploitation of the canaviais (the sugarcane
plantations) with a new ‘green’ label.
In order to understand the origins of this ideological
failure, Barca provides a detailed and intellectually rigorous account of
European leftist thought, examining people such as Laura Conti, André Gorz and
Raymond Williams. She argues that although these thinkers did manage to
identify capitalism as the enemy of nature, they generally failed to take into
account the insights of materialist ecofeminists such as Maria Mies, who saw
the exploitation of women’s reproductive labour and the exploitation of nature
as being fundamentally the same process. Barca’s approach here is very
sophisticated, but at times the text gets stuck in its own historical
framework. The shift from the vivid, character-focused histories told in the
Amazon and Somerset to the abstract and factional debates of 1980s European
ecosocialism can make the narrative pace seem unbalanced. Those looking for a
purely narrative account may find Part II too academic, but for scholars of
political economy this section is an essential clarification of why modern
green politics often seems so deeply flawed.
Even though it has a high theoretical density, Workers
of the Earth is an intellectually exciting work since it does not conclude
on a note of despair. In her section on ‘degrowth’ and in her epilogue
concerning the Global Climate Jobs Campaign, Barca presents a constructive
though difficult course of action. She maintains that degrowth cannot merely be
a way of life chosen out of guilt by people in the Global North; it must be
based on the ‘dealienation’ of labour. She advocates a large-scale public
revaluation of care work—both the care of people and the ecological care of the
urban and rural commons. By insisting that jobs in healthcare, education,
agroecology and urban farming be seen as and paid for as genuine, low-carbon
‘climate jobs’, Barca puts forward a vision of sustainability which in fact
enhances the material situation of the working class.
When looking at the book as a whole, Barca’s most
significant achievement is her ability to stick to a rigorously balanced,
intersectional approach; she never romanticises poverty and she doesn’t let the
environmental movement off the hook for its past elitism. Yet a small drawback
of the book is that it sometimes depends on the state as the final guarantee of
a restructured, care-oriented economy. Although Barca supports grassroots
‘commoning’, her proposed policies—for example, a publicly funded ‘care
income’—call for a degree of state sovereignty and financial stability that has
long since been undermined by decades of neoliberal restructuring. Even though
she recognises these limitations, the gap between the radical ontology of florestania
and the bureaucratic reality of putting into practice global public wage
reforms remains a formidable chasm.
Then, who is the book aimed at? It is essential reading
for academic researchers, political ecologists, climate justice activists and
all those who are annoyed by the dry, technocratic solutions presented at the
international climate summits. People reading it should be prepared for a
rigorous and unapologetically Marxist-feminist terminology, since it requires a
good deal of intellectual effort, although the payoff is a deep paradigm shift.
Barca’s work leaves behind a strong and lasting emotional
impact. In a time marked by severe climate anxiety and eco-grief, it is easy to
see humanity as a disease affecting the planet. Barca completely rejects this
pessimistic fatalism. She achieves this by portraying working-class people—the
nurses, the single mothers, the peasant farmers and the rubber tappers—as the
vital caretakers of the biosphere, thus giving respect to human labour.
Finally, we are brought back to the images of those Great Acceleration graphs.
According to Barca, the answer to the climate crisis will not be arrived at by
making minor adjustments to the master’s charts; rather, it lies in the unseen,
unacknowledged hands that carry out the day-to-day, tiring work of reproducing
life on Earth. Workers of the Earth doesn’t merely point out our
ecological devastation; it clearly shows the people who already know how to
create a world beyond it.