A labour–nature alliance for a social-ecological transformation

Europe’s current multiple social, ecological and geopolitical crises reveal an urgent need for change. Underlying these crises is a capital accumulation regime focused on generating profits from increased exploitation of labour and extraction from nature, thus threatening our biosphere and undermining our society (Spash, 2021a). Unless urgent action is taken, climate breakdown will bring about a future of untold human suffering, as the recent IPCC (2022a) report underlined. In any case, ecological limits are increasingly constraining human activities, with dramatic consequences of the kind illustrated by recent extreme weather events. In order to maintain the pursuit of economic growth under these conditions, extraction and exploitation will have to become more extreme. But this will only exacerbate the social crisis epitomised by the cost-of-living crisis. In order to avoid this there is a need, as the IPCC (2022b: TS/99) argues, to shift from a ‘GDP growthoriented economy’ to a ‘low-carbon energy-services, well-being, and equity-oriented economy’. A ‘labour–nature alliance’ will be indispensable in enabling such a social-ecological transformation. This article will highlight potentials for a labour–nature alliance in the current circumstances and provide a brief list of recommendations for action. Trade unionists and ecologists have not always seen eye to eye. There have been various historical battles in which they were on opposing sides of the so-called ‘jobs/environment dilemma’ (Räthzel and Uzzell, 2011), for example, in Austria, with the conflicts over Zwentendorf nuclear power station or the hydropower plant in what would become Donau-Auen National Park (Brand and Niedermoser, 2017: 34, 36–39, 134–135; Soder et al., 2018: 529–530). Both organised labour and ecological movements are relatively weak on their own in comparison with organised capital, however. Under current social circumstances it is likely that both will fail in satisfactorily resolving the crises they aim to address. To illustrate this dynamic, I put forward a schematic of possible alliances between three forces: labour, capital and nature (Figure 1). This schematic was developed in my thesis (Nitsche-Whitfield, 2022) and informed by the work of Brand and Wissen (2018) and Laurent and Pochet (2015: 15–27). With the aim of reducing exploitation, at least in the Global North, trade unions are currently in a dominant alliance with capital. This produces a ‘brown’, extractive form of capitalism. On the other hand, the dominant alliance of the environmentalist movement (nature) is focused on working with green capital. This produces a green capitalism that aims to reduce the impacts of extractivist practices. Hence, current alliances are organised around the focal point of capital, thereby bestowing even more power on capital. However, both coalitions with capital are leading to catastrophic consequences for labour and nature, albeit to different degrees, while a bottom-up alliance between labour and nature has the power to be truly transformative (Kalt, 2022: 4–5). Hence, this triangle is not to be read as a classic economic trilemma, as these are not equal options. The triangle is rather an explanatory tool highlighting the abstract choices that capital, labour and nature face. In the following I will characterise the positions of these three actors. Currently, trade unions are stuck in an uphill battle against organised capital that has reaped the fruits of decades of neoliberal globalisation and re-regulation in favour of the interests of financial 1126633 TRS0010.1177/10242589221126633TransferNitsche-Whitfield research-article2022