Linking local services and energy in Moray
A video about local fightback against cuts and the links to energy production. Produced by Moray Trades Union Council with support from the Scottish Trade Unions Congress
Portuguese ecosocialists Climaximo argue for a strategy of rupture in the face of climate collapse. Pete Cannell reviews a new book which lays out their case.
In the last few years, the Portuguese ecosocialist collective Climaximo has been one of the most dynamic and creative parts of the European climate movement. Two years ago, the group made a sharp shift in its strategy and tactics, declaring that ‘the governments and the corporations declared war against the people and the planet’. All In: a revolutionary theory to stop climate collapse, written by two Climaximo activists, Mariana Rodrigues and Sinan Eden, is an explanation of the Climaximo approach and a call to action. It’s an unusual book. You may find parts hard to follow. You’ll almost certainly find that it includes things you disagree with. I don’t think the authors will mind that. What they are concerned to do is to win a case for their key propositions about the problems we face and what is to be done.
First the issue:
‘Everyone in the movement is more and more aware of two sets of information. The first is that the capitalist system is the root cause of the climate crisis and has absolutely no perspective of solving it. The logical consequence is that the task of any movement informed by climate justice is to dismantle capitalism. The second is the threat of runaway warming cascading to climate chaos. In other words: urgency.’
Mariana and Sinan argue that most people deal with one or other of these propositions but not both. They provide withering assessments of the movement as it is. They argue that existing climate campaigns generally end up becoming ‘every small decrease in emissions matters’ campaigns. Implicit in their assessment is a critique of NGOs who often talk about system change but whose practice is limited to demanding change within the existing system. On the other hand, they see the revolutionary left as clear about capitalism’s responsibility but failing to reflect the urgency of the crisis in their organising. It’s important to note that these judgements are made by insiders and activists not by detached academic commentators.
Underpinning the book is an assumption that whether or not there was once a pathway to a zero-carbon economy through some form of highly regulated capitalism, as global temperatures break the 1.5 degree increase set by the Paris COP and carbon emissions continue to rise, that path, if it were ever possible, is foreclosed.
The authors aim to develop a theory of change and an organisational model that can combine tackling the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism with the urgency that the climate crisis provides. They acknowledge that embracing both objectives can be daunting. They suggest that many movement organisers avoid even confronting this by focusing on limited and short-term objectives – effectively sidelining the systemic challenge that we face. They also argue that ‘not enough new generation organisers are learning from historical experience, limiting their attention to specific interpretations of specific examples’.
Taking all of this into account, the middle section of the book examines multiple historic examples of ‘successful’ movements for change, with brief descriptors and classification into different explicit or implicit theories of change. The overt aim is to develop a sense that contemporary movements have a rich history that should be engaged with. Mariana and Sinan encourage the reader to dig deeper. While I understand the reason for spending time on these examples, I found this the least convincing part of the book. In part this is down to my disagreement with the way in which some events are characterised. No distinction is made between political and social revolution. And there’s an uncritical framing of the 20th century as a period when for some decades more than half of the world was ‘socialist’. This opens serious questions. Why were these ‘socialist’ states so appalling in terms of environmental practice? If they were a new mode of production how did capitalism return? But perhaps I’m being over-critical, the authors are clear that their aim is to get activists interrogating and learning from past struggles.
‘Look, all these people were thinking about the questions we have now, and they answered them, sometimes it even worked, and many times it worked better than whatever we have done so far. If we can spark such genuine curiosity, we shall be satisfied.’
In the final part of the book the authors turn to what is to be done. Essentially, they call for organisations to take the same turn as Climaximo, recognise that we are in a situation where the capitalist class are determined to hang on to a system that is trashing the planet and then act accordingly. There are two basic propositions. Firstly, the climate crisis is a global problem.
‘Globalisation is the material process through which imperialism is integrated into a world system.’
Secondly, global capitalism has created its own gravedigger, a global working class. This is summarised as:
‘At this moment of history, there is a global working class confronting globalised capital.’
Both propositions are common currency on the left. But the conclusion that Climaximo draw, and that Mariana and Sinan develop, is not simply ‘build the revolutionary party’ although they are clear that the goal is revolution. Their proposed strategy is a brutally honest attempt to chart a path forward in a context which we wouldn’t have chosen as a starting point and where older models of ‘party’ building are inadequate. It takes for granted that there are many campaigns, movements, groups, and parties too, that could form the nucleus of the mass campaign that we need.
The core idea is the development of the ‘movement as party’. Some of the language is opaque so what follows is my interpretation. The aim is to build what Mariana and Sinan call a global movement ecosystem. What defines the parts of the ecosystem is a clear class-based focus on getting rid of capitalism. Tactics and ways of organising will vary by, and within, different locations, but following the example of Climaximo, the components of the ‘movement as party’ will have declared a climate emergency within their organisation. They will have accepted the basic propositions and most importantly they will have adapted their practice to align with them. The authors note that:
Surely, we can have many plans, contingent on various possibilities. But we need those plans, anti-capitalist plans, actually-dismantling-capitalism-in-the-short-term kind of plans. ‘System change not climate change’ is not an agitation tool anymore, it’s a directive for our generation.
They argue that:
‘… in a state of climate emergency, we need to take risks – a lot of them: political, strategic, organizational, tactical, personal and emotional risks. We cannot afford to lose everything without having really risked to win. We need to fail forward, we need to be intentional and attentive in our failures.’
They explain that:
‘By intentional failure we mean knowing what we are trying out and what risks we are taking. By attentive failure, we mean having specific collective processes in place to learn from the experience and share it.’
Climaximo’s understanding of class is based on the ecofeminist ideas of Stefania Barca which sees those involved in care work, work which contributes to social reproduction and the continuation of human life as integral to the working class. They note that:
‘Historically, marginalisation of reproductive work and metabolic work has accompanied marginalisation by gender, race and ethnicity.’
Critically this is a global working class which confronts the global issue of climate crisis. Mariana and Sinan stress that building a global movement is not an optional extra but a key part of building the ‘movement as party’. They insist that it’s not just a theoretical position but a practical one and argue that organising in a climate emergency means devoting perhaps 25 per cent of an organisation’s capacity to international work. In this respect Climaximo has an exemplary record, being central to the organisation of the Global Climate Jobs Conference in Amsterdam in 2023 and the counter-COP Earth Social Conference.
‘All In’ wrestles with questions that should be on the minds of everyone who is concerned about the state of the world we live in. What it proposes may not be ‘the answer’ but it should make you think and it concludes by setting a challenge – ‘Will we dare to win?’
Check out the All In website and order the book.
A version of this review was also published on the rs21 website.
One of the author’s Sinan spoke at a book launch co-sponsored by ScotE3
Adam Greenfield argues that the key battles over climate are lost and activists should focus on adapting to the results of that failure. Pete Cannell responds that the only possible choice is to keep fighting for social change.
A version of this review was first published on the rs21 website.
In October 2012 hurricane Sandy wrought havoc on the eastern seaboard of the US. The storm surge overwhelmed New York’s sea defences and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of many thousands of working-class New Yorkers. The response of the city authorities was slow and totally inadequate. In its place, networks built a year earlier through Occupy Wall Street stepped in to mount a huge programme of mutual aid which became known as Occupy Sandy. Adam Greenfield, the author of Lifehouse, was one of the volunteers.
2024 was the first year that global average temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.5°. Each year since 2022, global average temperatures have increased at an unprecedented rate. Year on year, global heating is matching the most extreme end of the range of possibilities predicted by climate scientists. And, while energy generated from solar and wind power increases apace, fossil fuel use is at an all-time high and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Even if there were a massive shift to a low carbon economy tomorrow, rising temperatures, extreme weather and rising sea levels are baked into the global system for decades, probably centuries, to come.
In his new book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire Greenfield responds to this scenario by arguing that attempts to mitigate climate change have failed. He makes three assumptions:
that a so-called ‘green energy transition’ will not take place in time to prevent the most consequential drivers of change from happening; that reparative ’geoengineering’ will not be attempted at the necessary scale or, if attempted, will not work as intended; and that in the time available to us, we will not invent some other technology capable of siphoning carbon from the atmosphere at the necessary scale, and rescuing ourselves that way.
Considering this, he calls on activists to redirect their efforts to adapting to the inevitable consequences of that failure. The core of the book draws on his experience of Occupy Sandy, the ideas of social theorist Murray Bookchin and other examples of collective social organisation including the Black Panthers and Rojava.
The climate movement has always included activists who have argued for a return to nature, a retreat to a rural life that would involve rejecting all aspects of modernity. Greenfield’s position is different. He recognises that most of the world’s population live in big urban centres and will likely continue to do so. Building on his Occupy Sandy experience he suggests that every area needs to develop a Lifehouse, a building or complex of buildings that would form a focus for mutual aid, care and support for the local community – a place to meet and organise, find and share skills, grow food, provide medical services and much more. In any given urban area there would be many such sites.
Greenfield expects that the deepening impact of the climate crisis will have a disrupting effect on the operation of the complex interconnected system that is 21st century capitalism. This is certainly true. He also assumes that the retreat from state provision of public services that has developed in the neo-liberal era will continue. He argues that:
if the state withdraws from [the provision of public goods] then there is only one possible response, which is for populations to self-organize to provide their own commons.
Accepting this, Greenfield then pays little attention to the state as he develops the Lifehouse concept. I think this a profound mistake for reasons which I will attempt to address in the rest of this review.
Greenfield’s articulation of Bookchin’s ideas recognises real problems with the Lighthouse model. He notes that local systems of mutual aid may well be predicated on exclusivity, racist or misogynist ideas. Clearly the survivalist movement in the US is an example of this. And in response to the cost-of-living crisis in Britain the far right was, and remains, proactive in setting up food banks and spaces where people could seek support. His response is to suggest that the Lifehouse model should include an assumption of connectedness or confederation with other Lifehouses. He also notes that Lifehouses are likely to attract hostile responses from the state or from non-state reactionary forces. Again, I think this is right. While states welcome some forms of substitution for welfare services – typically charity run food banks and other services – they are much less keen on initiatives that involve collective working-class organisation.
The Lifehouse model assumes explicitly that it is possible to organise outside the state and alongside the state. Greenfield argues that we should start building Lifehouses now. But almost everywhere that brings you up against a state that is increasingly repressive and intolerant of dissent, in a context of militarism, racism, misogyny and transphobia and the growth of the far right. If we forswear mitigation and throw all our energies into adaptation it seems to me that we are in effect surrendering the ground to reaction. Greenfield notes at one point that a dystopian future might yet include small, favoured patches of relative normality, refuges for the rich. We can be sure that such enclaves would be armed to the teeth. On the other hand, if we focus on adaptation and turn to building Lifehouses our small patches of mutual aid and cooperation would have no such defence.
I want to argue that the alternative is to take system change seriously. That means breaking and replacing the capitalist system. I’m conscious that here and now that might seem as utopian as the idea that we can remodel the world as a connected web of confederated Lifehouses. I’m open to the idea that a sustainable world might look something like Adam Greenfield’s vision. But the key challenge is surely how we can turn the world upside down and end the system which is driving us to disaster? And here socialists have a historic responsibility.
It’s clear that the climate crisis is systemic. The capitalist system has driven huge increases in material wealth through the exploitation of human labour and through commodification of the environment and material world. The system depends on continual growth and is incompatible with sustainable existence on a finite world. Revolutionary socialists have always argued that if those who labour seize the means of production, the fruits of human labour could be shared equally. We talk about a world to win that could provide comfort, leisure and security for all. Today, however, the world we inherit is one where, as a result of the environmental damage caused by two centuries of industrial capitalism, the conditions of human existence are far more inhospitable than was the case previously. The socialist revolution would necessarily apply the emergency brake to runaway climate change, but it can’t stop the damage that has already been done. The conditions for human existence in a world without capitalism will present a challenge for survival. Many of the world’s major cities will be underwater, there will be mass migration as some areas become too hot for human habitation and food production will be under huge strain in a world where extreme weather events are far more frequent.
Socialists can’t promise a future of what has been called ‘fully automated luxury communism’. But we can expose the lies and deceptions of mainstream bourgeois governments and the far-right populists who are jockeying to replace them with the promise of a return to some earlier and mythical time of comfort and security. No such promise is possible in a world on fire. Of course, exposing the lies is only possible if there are demonstrably possible alternatives and that’s our task to develop and popularise.
The wealth of the capitalist ruling class is built on the labour of generations of workers around the world and the blood and bones of the untold millions who were murdered through war and colonisation as capitalism spread around the globe. It is a system of great power and sometimes open, sometimes concealed, brutality. However, it depends for its existence on a global working class. Moreover, in this era of late capitalism it depends critically on complex systems and long global supply chains that can break if key workers withdraw their labour or under the impact of extreme weather events. It’s brittle and vulnerable. That’s why Adam Greenfield’s argument for giving up on mitigation is so wrong.
Winning political arguments about who’s to blame for the crisis and how to ensure a secure future for all is not easy. In hard times it’s necessary for the left to articulate ‘freedom dreams’. Part of the argument has to be about a new economy that provides that security. But it also needs explicit recognition that the system that puts profit before the lives of people and trashes the life chances of future generations has to end. Achieving that goal requires a compelling vision and building collective power in workplaces and communities around the world. Along the way some states may be forced to make concessions and take mitigating action – but the only sustainable end game is the overthrow of those states.
This critique of Lifehouse is not an attack on mutual aid. Practices of mutual aid are a vital and necessary part of working-class resistance – most notably in the urban centres of the global south. At times they may be essential to sustain class struggle and community survival but always against the state. To build sustainable centres for collective support and organisation requires the development of networks of resistance built through class struggle. And if we do that then we can aspire to so much more.
Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
Adam Greenfield
This article is based on a talk by Simon Pirani at the energy campaigns strategy day, organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change in Leeds on 1 February 2025. It was first published on the People and Nature blog.
The “key questions” we hope to discuss today, listed in the agenda, include “how do we cut through with our demands for a clean energy system”, “how do we create the necessary alliances” and “how do we turn the tide of right-wing weaponisation and scapegoating of climate action”.
I will comment on these questions by taking a step back, and considering some underlying issues about how we understand the world – issues that we will come back to again and again, as we are trying to develop political strategies. I hope this is useful.
Some of this will sound general, some of it some of you know better than I do, but my idea is to try to allow us all to consider the basics that underlie all the hard campaigning work.
I will comment on six points: two on politics, two on energy systems, one on technologies, and one on campaigning proposals.
The economic system that we live under has a built-in requirement to expand. Capital needs to accumulate continuously. The government’s function is to facilitate that.
And so the government’s default positions on things that matter in terms of global warming – airports, road building, regulation of the building industry, North Sea oil, and so on – are anchored in its attitude to economic policy (all about “growth”), which serves the needs of capital. Capital, in its drive to expand, undermines and sabotages all climate targets.
We, the movement, must not lose sight of how this works. This is how we end up with the chancellor of the exchequer talking nonsense about electric planes and biofuels, to justify reviving the discredited, climate-trashing Heathrow third runway proposal.
Our understanding of the relationship of capital and the government is obviously relevant to our political strategy.
Take for example the 2008 Climate Change Act, arguably the best bit of legislation we have, under which the UK carbon budgets are set, and which many of us here have used as a political lever for our arguments. Actually it is a double-edged sword. The Act is used by many politicians as a cover behind which to abandon actions that would address climate change.
A starting-point for a critique of the Act is research conducted at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and published in 2020, showing that if the UK sticks to its carbon budgets, it pours TWICE AS MUCH greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as it would under a fairly worked-out target.
The Climate Change Committee, supposedly “independent”, has always ducked the crucial question of what proportion of the global carbon budget it thinks the UK could fairly use. It considers what is “feasible”, not what is necessary.[1]
My conclusion from this is NOT that nothing can be done in the political sphere, but that we should recognise how the battlefield is actually set out. Strategies focused on convincing the government, without social movements behind them, will often fail.
In recent years it has become clearer that the oil and gas industry, and governments of fossil fuel producing countries, have to a large extent taken control of the annual conferences of the parties (COPs) through their lobbying machines.
We should not give an inch to the oil companies and their lobbyists. But, in fighting them, we should beware of the idea that the international climate talks set a standard that, without these recent changes, we could return to. That was never the case.
I am talking here about the political agreements made at the talks, not about the scientific research summed up in the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, that we should all follow as closely as we can.
(When I gave this talk, the very valid point was made in discussion that we can not just “listen to the science”, as some environmentalists say. There is not one “science”: scientific interpretations are also shaped and influenced by social forces and power relations, by the society in which scientists live.)
The international climate agreements were always based on the false premise that there could be green growth. They always combined tolerance for vast subsidies to the fossil fuel industries with the fiction of carbon trading.
And it is not only the climate talks, but all the post-1945 international political institutions, that are in crisis. The weakening of these institutions by Trump, Netanyahu, Putin and others is the outcome of a long process, not the beginning. The outrage of COP talks being run by oil company executives and oil-producing countries’ dictators needs to be seen in this context.
A very real political consequence of all this is that some activists, confronted by the horrific scale of the climate crisis, conclude that the future will inevitably be worse than the present.
These are real fears. And against the background of these fears, e.g. in Extinction Rebellion and organisations that have grown out of it, some people articulate what I call disaster environmentalism, always emphasising the worst possible outcome and minimising our own agency.
This is a very important discussion, and I do not think people active in the labour movement can cut themselves off from it.
We also need to recognise that, as the consequences of climate change become much more visible – floods, wildfires and other disasters – we will see much more civil disobedience by climate activists, and much more state repression in response.
Defending those activists, even those whose methods we might not agree with, is central, in my view.
First, let’s question the whole idea of “energy transition”. It has been poisoned, distorted beyond recognition, with misuse by the representatives of capital. In their telling, this “transition” will be led by oil companies, car manufacturing companies, “big tech” and their technofixes.
If you think I am exaggerating, look at the way it was discussed during the prime minister’s visit to Saudi Arabia just before Christmas.
A valuable perspective on this is presented in a new book by the historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: an all-consuming history of energy. He shows that previous so-called “energy transition” were actually additions: coal burning did not replace wood burning, but added to it; oil did not replace coal, but added to it.
And certainly right now in China, the world leader in building renewable electricity generation capacity, those renewables are being added to a still-expanding mountain of coal, not replacing it.
A second concept we should question is that “energy” is an undifferentiated thing, bought and sold as a commodity. Energy, like labour, has been commodified over the past several hundred years, by capitalism. But that is not a permanent or natural state of affairs.
Our movement should aspire to the decommodification of energy; we should think of it as a common good that people should have access to by right.
How do we move in that direction? How do we start to disentangle the system that currently delivers energy to people in the form of electricity, heat, or motive power? I suggest we start by considering the technological systems through which fossil fuels are burned and turned into these things that people can use.
I mean technological systems in a very wide sense: not only power stations and electricity networks that burn gas and produce electricity, or petrochemical processing, but also industrial and agricultural systems, urban built environments, transport systems – that all run predominantly on fossil fuels.
These technological systems are embedded in social and economic systems, and stopping fossil fuel use will involve transforming all of these.
Thinking about it in this way, we can identify three ways of reducing fossil fuel use.[2] Starting at the end of the process, where the energy supplies people’s needs, these three ways are:
a. Changing the way that energy is used. For example, replacing car-based transport systems with systems based on public transport and active travel. People do things differently, and better, using far smaller quantities of energy carriers (that is fuels, or electricity or heat, different forms energy takes).
b. Reducing the throughput of energy through technological systems. For example, replacing gas-fired heating with heat pumps run with electricity. The same result is achieved, keeping homes warm, using a small fraction of the fossil fuels burned previously.
c. At the start of the process, replacing fossil fuel inputs with renewable inputs. This is capital’s favourite change, because it does not imply reducing throughput or people living differently. Nevertheless, in my view, we in the labour movement also favour it. For producing electricity and heat, it is quite straightforward. As you know, for other things, such as making steel, it is much trickier.
I suggest this framework because in our campaigning work we are hit with a constant barrage of nonsense about decarbonisation, such as we heard from the chancellor this week about electric planes and biofuels. None of us have to be engineers to answer this stuff, but we need robust analytical categories to work with.
In energy researchers’ jargon, the use to which energy is put at the end of these technological processes – getting from place to place using petrol, heating a room using gas – are called “energy services”. From the 1970s, environmentalists argued that the economy should focus on delivering these services with less energy throughput.
“Energy services” is not a term I would use uncritically. But it’s worth knowing that there are piles of research showing how these energy services can be provided, with a substantially lower throughput of energy carriers.
(Three different, and I think complementary, takes on the UK economy are the Absolute Zero report produced at the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon Britain report and Shifting the Focus, published by the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions.)
Because mainstream political discourse treats energy as a commodity, it also talks about supply and demand. Actually, demand for energy is a phantom.
No-one wants energy. What people, or companies, want is energy services. These are provided by energy carriers. We want heat, or light, or we want to get from one place to the other. If the technological systems, and the social and economic systems are changed, we can get these same outcomes using far less energy.
Furthermore, energy use is differentiated. The use of energy by a pensioner to keep warm can not be compared to the use of energy at a much greater rate for a company executive to take a plane flight, or a data centre to meet increased electricity demand for crypto currencies or AI.
This should be the starting point for our political strategy. We do not want demand reduction, as our right wing opponents claim. We want to use energy differently, as part of living differently – which is surely what the labour movement has always aspired to, long before the threat of global heating loomed in front of us.
Technologies are instruments of labour, used by people in taking from nature their means of subsistence and the material basis of their culture. But those processes go on in specific sets of social relations – for the last three centuries or so, dominated by capital.
Just as labour is shaped and controlled by social forces, so are technologies. So we should beware of thinking of technologies outside of their social context.
An example is the internet. It transformed communication and access to information in ways that have changed all our lives. But we can also see how, in the hands of powerful corporations, it is being used to reinforce the most dangerous changes in society – the growth of dictatorship, the defence of genocide, and deception and lying on an industrial scale. Witness, too, the frightful expansion of energy-intensive data centres, particularly to facilitate cryptocurrency use and AI.
In the energy sector, bad or questionable technologies are supported by capital for its own reasons: those on which attention are currently concentrated are carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen, the primary social functions of which are as survival strategies for oil companies.
Technologies that have the capacity to serve humanity – I am thinking here particularly of solar, including decentralised solar – are distrusted by capital, which seeks to control them.
As a movement, we need to develop our collective understanding of these technologies and our critique of them. A great example has been set by the informal group set up by campaigners and researchers working on CCS.
My conclusion from the last several years of campaigning on climate issues is: to get beyond the small number of people who have thought through the issues, we need to focus firstly on demonstrating the potential of policies that address both global warming on one hand, and social inequality on the other.
This is the way to counter the populist right wing narrative – which has also been taken up by Labour politicians and, on the issue of North Sea oil, even by union leaders – that action on climate change will inevitably hurt ordinary people.
Some exemplary campaigning, looking at how to move away from oil production on the North Sea without repeating the disaster that was visited on coal mining communities in the 1980s, has been done in Scotland. Another good example is the Energy for All campaign, launched by Fuel Poverty Action, which now has widespread support.
An example I know at first hand is that of our campaigns around transport issues in London. A couple of years ago we had to face the fact that our long-running campaign to stop the Silvertown tunnel, which will produce more road traffic and therefore more carbon emissions, had failed. The tunnel will open in April.
In discussions about how to keep together the unity and goodwill we had built up, a number of us felt that we should become more politically ambitious, not less, and advocate policies that clearly address social inequality at the same time as addressing climate and air pollution. This brought us to the demand for free public transport and the formation of Fare Free London.
Although this is a very new campaign, we have had nothing but positive responses, from unions representing transport workers and many other organisations.
We hope that, by shouting more loudly about this, we will cut right across the demoralising political diversion, launched by the populist right at the Uxbridge by-election and shamefully latched on to by some Labour right wingers, around the Ultra Low Emission Zone.
The call for free public transport flies in the face of thirty years of neoliberalism, opens the city to all and strikes a blow for social justice, and can also help to get cars off the road and make demonstrable progress towards decarbonisation. Nothing would make us happier than to see this issue taken up in other parts of the country and to move towards a Fare Free UK campaign. SP, 12 February 2025.
[1] The CCC does not say what proportion of the global budget it thinks the UK could fairly use. Instead it makes a political judgement about what a rich country, with a long history of fossil-fuel-infused imperialism, can manage. In its own words, it starts with what it deems to be “feasible limits for ambitious but credible emissions reductions targets in the near term” (Sixth Carbon Budget report, pages 319-325)
[2] I set out this argument in more detail in a talk at the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Berlin, and in my book Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption
Sign the Energy for All petition
Scot.E3 has recently added its name to the list of organisations supporting the Energy for All manifesto.
You can add you support as an individual by signing the petition here.
These are the five points of the Energy for All Manifesto
Under Energy For All:
1. Each household will receive, free of charge, enough energy to ensure it can cover its needs. This includes for instance adequate heating, lighting, cooking, hot water, refrigeration, charging phone and digital connectivity, and where needed, hearing aids, medical equipment, stairlifts, and wheelchairs.
2. This free energy will be paid for by higher tariffs on usage exceeding what is needed, by windfall taxes on fossil fuel corporations, and by recouping the millions of pounds now spent daily on subsidising the fossil fuel industry.
3. UK housing will urgently be brought up to a standard where people are not made ill by their own homes. It is a scandal that homes in one of the world’s richest countries are the coldest and dampest in Europe. Safe, non-toxic, non-flammable insulation appropriate to the building, and sound heating systems must be installed by skilled workers in consultation with residents. All rented property must be kept in good repair. These measures will dramatically reduce the amount of energy required to meet provision number 1. They will put low income households on a par with better off neighbours who already need less energy, and it will greatly ease pressure on the NHS.
4. No household will be required to pay in advance for the energy they need by means of key or card prepayment meter in their home, or by means of a smart meter. There should be a permanent and statutory end to the installation of prepayment meters by court orders authorising intrusion in people’s homes, or remotely by smart meters set to prepayment mode. No one should be disconnected from vital supplies as a means of recovering debt.
5. There must be urgent attention to injustices in the energy pricing system. Including the relationship between pricing for electricity and for gas when renewable energy is cheaper, geographical discrepancies, exclusion of itinerant and some other communities from current benefits and provisions, unfairness in pricing for storage heaters, time of use payments and district heating, and the huge standing charges which presently penalise people who can only afford to use a little energy. Many of these issues, including the standing charge, will be resolved by Energy For All but they must be attended to while the new pricing system is brought in.
What has oil got to do with the history of the global capitalist economy? Pete Cannell reviews Adam Hanieh’s account.
Pete Cannell • January 19, 2025
What has oil got to do with the history of the global capitalist economy? Pete Cannell reviews Adam Hanieh’s account.
A version of this review was published originally on the rs21 website.
The first commercially successful oil well in California was tapped in 1876 at Pico Canyon in Los Angeles County. Oil extraction and oil profits spurred the rapid growth of the city of Los Angeles. As I write this review 150 years later, LA is on fire. Crude Capitalism – Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market charts the development of the oil industry from its early beginnings and shows how its history is intermeshed with the development of the world economy. It’s a book about oil, about the climate crisis and the environment, about economics and the dynamics of the capitalist system. The Los Angeles fires are one more instance, and not even the most destructive, of the global impact of rising temperatures and changing weather patterns. If you want to understand how oil and capitalism link events in 1876 and 2025 and the forces that shaped and continue to shape our world, then Crude Capitalism is a must read.
In 1995 the rulers of the world met in Berlin, ostensibly to tackle the threat of global warming. In the following three decades more carbon dioxide has been added to the atmosphere than in the previous two hundred years. In the same period annual methane emissions have more than tripled. This exponential increase in greenhouse emissions should not be a surprise. Hanieh begins the first chapter of the book by noting that a decade before the first COP, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) was already investigating the connection between human activities and changes to the earth’s biological, chemical, and physical systems. When their report was published in 2004, they noted that
The second half of the twentieth century is unique in the entire history of human existence on Earth. Many human activities reached take-off points sometime in the twentieth century and have accelerated sharply towards the end of the century. The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.1
Crude Capitalism sets out to explain why the mid-twentieth century was such a critical turning point and why despite decades of blah blah blah (to quote Greta Thunberg) the exponential increase in global greenhouse emissions continues.
The core of the book is a chronological account of the development of the oil industry from its early beginnings until the present day. The story begins in the United States in the late 1890s. The second chapter explains how the rapidly developing oil industry became dominated by huge vertically integrated corporations such as Standard Oil. The structure of the new industry owed a lot to the particularity of US property law. The oil majors consolidated their grip through cartels and oligopolistic structures. These modes of organisation were adopted internationally in the decades that followed. A theme that runs through the book is the way in which the oil industry has become global, growing and adapting and often acting as a trail blazer for innovation in organisation and new techniques of capitalist exploitation. An example of this, in the British context, is the privatisation of the North Sea oilfields, which was at the forefront of the neoliberal reconstruction of the British economy.
With World War I, the focus of the book moves to the Middle East and Russia. One of the great strengths of the book is the way in which it deals with imperialism and how economic and military competition ties the global oil industry and the global arms industry together in an embrace of exploitation and callous destruction of the environment and possibilities for genuine human development. World War I generated a massive increase in demand for oil. The British Navy transitioned to an oil-based fleet. Britain’s colonial activities in the Middle East and its role in dismantling the Ottoman empire were critical for Britain to meet its growing demand for oil. It met this demand by developing new oil fields in Iran and Iraq. Collaboration between US big oil and British colonial interests in this new arena of exploitation paved the way for the US majors to go global.
The real acceleration in oil production, chronicled brilliantly in the central part of this book, came after World War II, when European economies joined the developmental path already well established in the US. At this point, the use of oil as a feedstock for plastics and synthetic fertilisers took off on a mass scale. Oil’s initial success lay in its energy density – a given volume of oil provides far more energy than coal or wood – but over the course of the second half of the twentieth century the ubiquity of plastics meant that, in Hanieh’s words, ‘commodity production had become a derivative – or a by-product – of the production of energy.’ This transformation of commodity production to a system powered and based on oil remains the dominant system in the global economy. This continuing domination is the reason why greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
In the last decade the US has once again become the largest single national producer of oil and gas. Yet at the same time as the Chinese economy has grown, the centre of gravity of the global industry has shifted east to Asia and new interdependencies have grown between Asia and the Middle East. 22 years after George Bush declared victory in Iraq, the largest oilfield in that country is run by a private Chinese company. But there is also a shift in power from private to state capital: the three biggest oil firms in the world are owned by the Chinese and Saudi Arabian states.
Crude Capitalism is withering in its critique of the oil industry’s corporate greenwashing. Hanieh notes, for example, that BP’s erstwhile rebranding as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ involved spending ‘more on the corporate rebrand than it did on renewable energy.’ The rebrand was short-lived and while many of the big companies are increasing their investment in renewables the rate of increase in investment in hydrocarbons is even faster. Twelve of the biggest companies plan to spend more than $100 million a day on new hydrocarbon projects up to the end of the decade. In addition, the industry is using its power and wealth to push technofixes that are often of limited or no utility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but allow for the continuation of the infrastructure and systemic economic relations of fossil capital. In Britain the industry body Offshore UK has rebranded itself as Energy UK and its focus on Carbon Capture and Storage and Hydrogen is slavishly followed by the British government.
Adam Hanieh is absolutely clear about the obstacle that big oil continues to present:
Oil, in other words, remains at the core of our economy and our energy systems; without dislodging it from this position there is no possibility of ensuring a future for humanity.
The strength of Crude Capitalism is that it shows how the oil industry is the result of a system that always puts profit first. The final paragraph sums it up:
We cannot behave as if the problem of capitalism does not exist, or can be ignored, or as if our current rulers can be convinced to take an alternative path through the sheer force of scientific evidence. This is an irrational economic system that pits the interests of a tiny few against the vast majority, and only by taking political and economic power away from the logic of the market will it be possible to build a different and better world.
[1] Will Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure, Berlin: Springer, 2004, 81.
Briefing 18 takes a critical look at ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’ and the Westminster government’s Jet Zero plan.
Briefing 18 takes a critical look at ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’ and the Westminster government’s Jet Zero plan.
Click on the image to download the briefing
Currently almost all air travel is powered by jet fuel, a refined hydrocarbon derived from crude oil. The aviation industry accounts for between two and three per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. However, this figure is misleading because, uniquely, most of the exhaust gases from jet engines are expelled in the upper atmosphere. Research shows that because of this their effect on global warming is equivalent to around ten percent of the impact of greenhouse gases from all sources. The industry is arguing for continuing expansion of the global number of flights, greater fuel efficiency and the replacement of jet fuel by what they call Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). In this briefing we examine some of the issues around SAF, discuss whether it is sustainable, whether production can be scaled up to replace the use of fossil fuel and take a critical look at the Westminster government’s plans for ‘Jet Zero’. This briefing was written at the beginning of January 2025 – less than six months before PetroIneos propose to close Scotland’s only oil refinery at Grangemouth – and when UNITE, the main trade union at the refinery is arguing for the refinery to be repurposed to produce SAF.
So called ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’, or SAF, is jet fuel that is chemically equivalent to conventional jet fuel but manufactured in ways that avoid the use of fossil fuel feedstock. It would be more accurate to describe most of the fuels that the industry refers to as SAF as alternative jet fuels. A small amount of alternative fuel is already in use. In 2023 90% of this was biofuel manufactured from oil seed or sugar cane. UK government plans under the heading ‘Jet Zero’ are based on using hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) for fuel production – the raw material is waste oils and fats mainly from the food industry. There are plans to use other forms of waste material as feedstock. It is also technically possible to manufacture what are known as e-fuels from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. All these options – most particularly e-fuel – are energy intensive and use large amounts of electricity in the production process. The costs of production are 2 – 5 times more than jet fuel derived by refining crude oil.
We should insist that SAF is not sustainable if it uses food crops, prime agricultural land or freshwater. The rationale for describing biofuels as sustainable is that the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are equivalent to the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by the plant material from which the fuels are derived. However, even if all the energy input into the production process is from green electricity there are still multiple ways, for example transport, or the environmental impact of large-scale monoculture agriculture, that mean that all the biofuels currently in production result in a net increase of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
In Britain a “SAF mandate” has been introduced by the Westminster government, which stipulates that from next year, 2% of all jet fuel supplied must be SAF, increasing to 10% in 2030 and 22% in 2040. At the same time there are plans for continuing expansion of the aviation industry. It’s likely that under this mandate greenhouse gas emissions will be higher in 2024 than now. Jet Zero is anything but net zero. Initially most of the SAF fuel is expected to be derived from waste oil and fats. The EU has a similar mandate, although it extends to 2050 – when its target for SAF use will be 63%.
A report published in May 2024 by the Institute for Policy Studies analysed Jet Zero, aviation industry plans and other initiatives and found that there is currently “no realistic or scalable alternative” to standard kerosene-based jet fuels. Jet Zero is not about a transition to a sustainable low carbon industry, and it’s based on fanciful assumptions. There are severe limits to its scalability due to the limited supply of used cooking oil and animal fat. British airlines will be in competition for these supplies with others around the world. For example, in the EU there is only enough supply for about 2% of current demand. It’s also in competition with the production of bio diesel for road haulage which uses the same feedstock. The scale of the gap between Jet Zero and net zero is illustrated by the fact that even with current levels of flights 50% of all agricultural land in Britain would have to be devoted to the production of biofuel to eliminate the need for fossil fuel. If crop-based biofuel is ruled out and SAF were to be produced from other forms of waste as well as cooking oils, it’s estimated that if all the useable waste in the UK was converted to SAF it would still provide less than 20% of the fuel demands from outgoing flights.
UNITE’s plan for the Grangemouth oil refinery suggests that there is an assured future as a biofuel hub for Britain. As we write the details of the plan are not publicly available. We can only assume that they are based on the faulty logic of the British government’s Jet Zero report. Sadly, these figures just don’t add up. There is a powerful case for a plan to support the Grangemouth workforce into a sustainable future, but Jet Zero is an illusion. SAF is not a magic bullet. Current technologies are not capable of meeting the fuel demands of the aviation industry. E-fuels are potentially scalable, but the costs are prohibitive. We will discuss what is to be done about aviation in a future briefing.
Click the link to download Briefing 18
You might also want to look at Briefing 10 – ‘Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)’ and Briefing 17 – Net Zero
All of the ScotE3 briefings can be downloaded from this site’s resources page.
Simon Pirani reviews Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh
Review by SIMON PIRANI of Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh (Verso 2024)
Witnessing genocide can be paralysing. The horror of Israel’s onslaught on the civilian population of Gaza seeps in to the spaces in our heads, interrupting and disrupting attempts to think.
My memory keeps connecting Gaza to the Vietnam war, news about which filtered through to me as a young teenager. My sheltered world was shattered by the cruelty with which innocent people were slaughtered and tortured, on the orders of governments I had vaguely assumed should protect people. I see teenagers going through analogous thought processes now.
This post was originally published on the People and Nature blog.
How can it be that, half a century on, the grotesque “civilisation” that stalked Vietnamese villages has evolved, to produce the monstrous Netanyahu regime? What does this tell us about the many-headed hydra we are fighting, and humanity’s attempts to resist it?
Adam Hanieh’s book Crude Capitalism dissects one of the hydra’s heads – oil, and the corporations and states that use it to reinforce their wealth and power – and offers us a view on the part it plays in the whole organism. Reading it helped me to think of the horror of Gaza not as an aberration, but as a logical outcome of capital’s dominance in the twenty-first century.
Crude Capitalism tackles its big, difficult themes with precision and attention to detail. It is beautifully presented and organised.
The first part of the story Hanieh tells, of oil’s initial growth, plays out in the early twentieth century, in the US, and to a lesser extent in Iran, Azerbaijan and in Latin America. In the second part, from the mid twentieth century onwards, Middle Eastern oil resources and the battles for control of them loom large. And this is part of the background to the deluge of war crimes now being committed against Palestinians.
The connections are not direct. Regimes centred on vicious ethnic cleansing, like Netanyahu’s, are produced by capitalism; capitalism thrives on oil. But there are multiple mediations. Hanieh’s approach to these is an antidote to the simplifications that all too often circulate in radical political circles.
Physical control over oil production was crucial in the early twentieth century, but that has long ceased to be the case, Hanieh argues.
In the 1960s and 70s, against the background of powerful anti-colonialist movements, control over oil production shifted substantially from the powerful US- and European-based multinationals to state-controlled national oil companies, in the Middle East above all.
But capital and its state machines adapted. The US, which during the 1950s and 60s had superceded Britain and France as the dominant imperial power in the Middle East, established strategic and military relationships with the Gulf states and the Shah’s regime in Iran (at least, until the latter was overthrown in 1979). In the 1970s, the Saudi and Iranian monarchies were one pillar of US power in the region; Israel was the other.
Brute military force was only one aspect of imperial domination. Crucial, too, Hanieh argues, were changes in economic relationships, and in the financial system, through which control was maintained over oil revenues.
In the 1960s, oil producer countries’ governments, led by Venezuela, had forced through changes in oil pricing that disadvantaged the powerful US companies that had stakes in their oil fields. The Saudi monarchy, too, demanded a bigger slice of the cake. The US responded by changing its own tax rules so that, while more oil money flowed to Riyadh, the largest oil companies continued to earn record profits.
In the 1970s, price shocks shattered the monopolistic pricing system that had served the biggest companies. Action by the producer nations, coordinated through the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), took control of prices out of the multinationals’ hands. Crude oil prices quadrupled in 1973-74, and doubled again in 1979.
In the 1980s, there was further momentous change: oil increasingly became a traded commodity; wealth and power poured into intermediary trading firms. The oil profits that had once flowed mostly to rich-country corporations were now pouring into the Gulf states especially.
These “petro dollars”, flowing to countries outside the circle of imperialist powers in unprecedented quantities, became a big factor in financialisation (the expansion of international money markets, supercharged by computerised trading) and globalisation (the minimisation of capital controls and other trade barriers associated with neo-liberal economics).
(Forty years later, the flow is greater than ever. The Gulf states accumulated an estimated two-thirds of a trillion dollars in current account surplus in 2022, when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil prices shot up.)
“Petro dollars” became “euro dollars”, funding that gathered in markets outside the US, denominated in its currency. The dollar, the status of which as a reserve currency had been endangered when it was unhooked from the gold standard in 1971, was reinforced.
Forms of money and the rise of the euromarkets, the dollar’s position as international reserve currency, the dominance of Anglo-American financial institutions, the chains of debt and the rise of neoliberal orthodoxy – these were not the automatic outcomes of dry economic processes centred in north America and Europe, but inextricably linked to the geopolitics of oil and the US presence in the Middle East.
By focusing on these “subterranean global roots” of the new financial system, Hanieh writes, “it is possible to shift the ways that we usually think about the control of oil”.
This is not simply reducible to territorial power and the ownership of foreign oil fields – it is also a question of the control of oil’s wealth.
To understand the killing fields of Gaza, we need to think, on one hand, about US military supplies to the Gulf states and Israel and the deranged ideologies that propel Israeli soldiers to massacre – and, on the other, about these “subterranean roots” that run through the banks, financial centres, trading houses and the City of London.
We are dealing with a many-headed hydra that combines wealth, power and terror in complex ways.
These relationships belie myths, such as the idea that our enemies fight repeated wars for oil. Actually, they rarely do.
The devastating 2003 US- and UK-led invasion of Iraq, Hanieh reminds us in a footnote, was “not so much about the seizure of Iraq’s oil as about the protection of the Gulf monarchies”.
He quotes another historian of the Middle East, Toby Craig Jones, who pointed out that capturing oil and oil fields has not been part of the US’s strategic logic for war, “but protecting oil, oil producers, and the flow of oil, has been”.
Oil does not just produce cash wealth. Once out of the ground, it is transported long distances, usually by ship (itself a hellishly oil-intensive business). It is refined into products: tarmac and bitumen; fuels from petrol to aviation fuel, the supply of which has shaped military, industrial and agricultural practices, and consumer markets, for a century; and ethylene and other raw materials for petrochemical plants.
Hanieh, in contrast to other big-picture historians of oil, foregrounds this “downstream”. He shows that, from the start, the US and European oil giants’ strategy was vertical integration, i.e. control of the whole process, down to the petrol stations.
Motor cars, the ultimate consumer good that consumes so much oil, loom large in this story. So does the burning of oil in power stations. Hanieh picks out for more detailed treatment the petrochemical industry, where oil is used not as an energy carrier that can be converted into mechanical motion, heat or electricity, but as a raw material.
He traces the origins of petrochemical processing in Germany; its development (if that is the right word) during the second world war as an arm of the Nazi military machine; and the US’s post-war acquisition of German technologies by theft and expropriation. Petrochemicals, while US- and European-dominated through the late twentieth century, are expanding rapidly in the Middle East and China in the twenty-first.
Fossil-fuel-based plastics and other synthetic materials, Hanieh argues, have displaced natural materials such as wood, cotton and rubber. “By decoupling commodity production from nature, there was a radical reduction in the time taken to produce commodities, and an end to any limits on the quantity and diversity of goods produced.”
This was a qualitative transformation: petrochemicals helped capital to achieve revolutions in productivity, labour-saving technologies and mass consumption; “birthed in war and militarism, they helped constitute a US-centred world order”. Our social being is bound up with a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap and disposable petrochemicals.
I hope Hanieh’s arguments on petrochemicals are brought to the centre of discussions about the transition away from oil, and what that implies for the socialist project of confronting and defeating capitalism.
First, the flow of oil as a raw material through the petrochemical industry needs to be put in the wider context of the colossal flow through the capitalist economy of extracted materials, including metals, minerals, concrete, asphalts, and living matter such as biomass and farm animals.
A team led by Fridolin Krausmann recently estimated that the aggregate of these material flows swelled 12 times over between 1900 and 2015. Eric Pineault has attempted to draw on this work, and that of ecological economists, to develop a Marxist view of this aspect of capital’s earth-shattering drive to expand.
Second, an issue of interpretation. I do not think the petrochemical industry “decouples” production from nature: it is another way of processing, and reprocessing, materials accessed from nature. Hanieh has, though, pointed to something hugely important, and dangerous, in the way that synthetic materials corrupt and deform humanity’s relationship with nature. Pinning down exactly what should be a concern to us all.
In the final chapter of Crude Capitalism, Hanieh surveys oil companies’ response to the threat of climate change. Having spent decades funding climate science denial, they have in the last decade reversed their public stance, accepted global heating as a fact … and become “enthusiastic converts” to the concept of “net zero”, as warped by politicians, that displaces genuine greenhouse gas emissions reductions with chimerical techno-fixes, above all carbon capture.
“By appearing to transform themselves into part of the solution”, the oil companies “not only hide their ongoing centrality to the fossil economy, but aim to frame and determine the societal response to climate change”, Hanieh warns.
The companies embrace technical false solutions – biomass, electric vehicles and hydrogen – that have moved to the centre of establishment climate policy. They are betting on expansion of the synthetic consumerist dystopia underpinned by petrochemicals. And their Orwellian grip on politics, hand in hand with producing-nation dictators, is on display at the international climate talks – last year (Abu Dhabi) and this (Azerbaijan) more than ever.
Ecosocialists, who endeavour to bring together the fight to overcome humanity’s disastrous rupture with nature with the fight for social justice, must first confront the fact that energy production and infrastructure “remain solidly in the hands of the largest oil conglomerates”, Hanieh argues.
Secondly, though, we need to acknowledge that while these firms are a “major obstacle” to moving away from oil, “they are a manifestation, not a cause, of the underlying problem” of capitalist social relations.
Let’s not only recoil in horror at the genocide: let’s also dissect and better understand the many-headed hydra. This book helps.
Italian workers who occupied a GKN factory to oppose closure went on to make a plan which shows what a just transition can look like. Now it is time to support their plans to start production.
Italian workers who occupied a GKN factory to oppose closure went on to make a plan which shows what a just transition can look like. Now it is time to support their plans to start production.
Matthew Crighton reports on the latest developments.
See previous articles on this site on the workers’struggle here and here.
Workers at GKN near Florence occupied the factory against closure over 3 years ago and are still there, after winning 6 legal cases including successful challenges to the lay-offs. They have been sustained by cycles of mobilisation by supporters across Tuscany giving solidarity and practical donations.
The strong trade union organisation in the plant didn’t just oppose closure of their factory, they decided to build a case for re-opening with a plan for socially-useful production, rather than servicing the luxury car manufacturers. Pooling their expertise and reaching outwards, they now have a plan for just transition to make solar panels and cargo bikes.
I was pleased to join a UK delegation to the Solidarity Assembly at the site on 13 October and a public event on the day before about convergence between the trade union and climate movements and even got to speak at it. More of the detail of their story is covered in the articles to which there are links below so here I will just summarise the current situation which we learnt about.
About one third of the original 400 workers are still taking part, now organised into the GFF Collective. After a series of sales, neither GKN nor Melrose, the company which bought from it, are now involved and the workers’ struggle to retain employment has become focused on their plan to re-start production, not of the luxury car parts which GKN made, but products of vital importance for the transition to zero carbon – cargo bikes and solar panels, includingrefurbishment of old panels. This was prepared in consultation with the climate movement in Italy and potential users of the products and its purpose is seen as leading a switch to reindustrialisation through addressing environmental crisis.
The Regional Council of Tuscany has given this plan some support but it has not taken the key next step to provide the Collective with working capital. The most recent development has been that the factory site has been sold again to property companies and the workers fear that they intend to use if for warehousing, retail or housing. As a result, they are looking for options of other sites for their collective enterprise while not giving up on the first one.
The Collective launched an appeal for funds and in particular for the purchase of shareholdings. Two UNISON branches in Scotland have committed to do this and I was able to act for them at the Assembly and report back. The good news which we received is that the Collective has been successful in reaching its target of 1 million euros.
The worrying news was that the Tuscany Regional Council still has no timetable for passing the decision which can enable it to give the funding and support needed. In this light, the Collective’s resolution to the Assembly both set a deadline at which, if there is still not a decision, it will have to reconsider the viability of its plan; and set a target for further fundraising of another 1 million euro.
As things stand at the end of October, the workers have three demands:
The deadline which they have set is 15 November and the date of the next mobilisation and an assembly at which the situation can be re-assessed in 17 November. As the Collective says “It will be a celebration for the start of the plan or anger against an entire system”.
It was inspiring to witness workers reaching out to the climate movement and solidarity received in return. As the attendance showed this has been a rallying point for the left in Tuscany, Italy and wider in Europe.
I was able to bring our experiences in Scotland, of Friends of the Earth and STUC setting up the Just Transition Partnership, to the audience. I emphasised what each movement has learnt from the other and the need for a foundation of respect between them. I was pleased that the next day, Greta Thunberg spoke on the same theme of building a mass movement of workers who want to stop climate change and environmentalist in solidarity with workers struggles.
The ex-GKN workers need solidarity and have a call out to buy shares to raise working capital for their cooperative. The shareholding appeal remains open and also straight donations can be made – see below*. Lastly, this inspiring example and lessons from it need to be widely known. Speakers can be provided.
Here are articles about it:
Rebirth or Surrender – 14 October 2024 – in Italian but Google can translate
The Italian Workers Occupying Against Climate Crisis – 11 October 2024
The GKN Workers Fight Continues – 13 March 2024 – Red Pepper
Facebook Group: GKN Factory Occupation – UK Solidarity Network
Key Learnings:
Matthew Crighton
matthewcrighton@gmail.com
* Donations can be made by single or continuous bank transfer to the following Banca Etica current account in the name of Soms Pinerolo IBAN IT81 E050 1801 0000 0002 0000 339 BIC ETICIT22XXX
After more than 3 years in occupation, the Florence GKN workers’ fight to save jobs and develop alternative production continues as an inspiration to workers and climate campaigners everywhere.
This article by Pete Cannell was first published on the rs21 website.
COP26 in November 2021 represented a moment when the climate and workers movements in Britain converged. The process of building for the huge demonstrations in Glasgow put the idea of ‘worker-led just transition’ to a sustainable economy firmly on the agenda. But that slogan hides real issues about what should be done. And in 2024, rather than workers driving just transition plans forward, we see big job losses in Port Talbot and now confirmation from Petroineos that the Grangemouth oil refinery will be closed in 2025 with the loss of around 500 jobs.
But it doesn’t have to be this way and we no longer have to look back for inspiration to the 1970s and the Lucas Plan for alternative production. In Italy the workers at the GKN factory in Florence are waging an inspirational campaign to save jobs and establish alternative production.
Until 1994, GKN Florence was a Fiat factory. The workers, members of the CGIL union, had a tradition of organising within the factory and standing in solidarity with other struggles. Ownership passed to the British firm GKN, and by 2019 when GKN sold the factory to Melrose, a Britain-based investment company, there were more than 400 workers engaged in producing components for the car industry – including most of the big luxury brands.
The Melrose takeover was controversial and workers suspected that there were plans to asset strip. They were right and on 9 July 2021 the whole workforce were sacked by email. The workers’ response was to occupy and organise through a process which they describe as permanent assembly. Their initial demands were for the sackings to be rescinded and after a demonstration of 40,000 on 21 September the courts ruled that the sackings were inadmissible. So formally they had their jobs, but Melrose had no intention of restarting production.
Two weeks later the workers joined an even bigger Fridays for Future demonstration of 50,000 in Milan. This was the start of an intense dialogue with climate activists. What to produce and why? Over the autumn the GKN workers worked on a plan for sustainable transport, converting the factory to produce cargo bikes and solar panels. By December the plan was complete and then Melrose sold the plant to a new owner. It rapidly became clear that the change of ownership was aimed at conning the workforce. There was no new investment and by August 2022 it was clear that there was no intention of restarting production in any form. Moreover, the new owner stopped paying wages. From August 2022 to July 2023 the workers received no wages and because they were under contract they were unable to claim unemployment benefit. Some were forced to resign – at the same time a system of social mutual aid was developed to sustain those continuing the occupation.
At the end of 2023 the workers once more faced formal dismissal and yet again mass mobilisation and demonstration on New Years eve pushed back the threat.
By itself the bare narrative of events testifies to the GKN workers commitment and resolve. However, these facts miss the dynamism and creativity of their response. The engagement with the climate movement was the catalyst for developing the plan for alternative production. The workers are clear that simply reopening the factory with new products is not possible. They know that they can’t build an island of sustainable production in an ocean of capitalism. They are clear that in the end it’s not just about GKN but developing collective production models that inspire similar struggles in multiple other sites. They also understand that cargo bikes are currently a niche product – selling either to well-off individuals who can afford the high price tags or enabling the exploitation of precariously employed delivery workers. Similarly, current practices in the production of solar panels are highly centralised, and entail rotten working conditions and little consideration of recycling and waste disposal.
The workers’ response is to think about and campaign for approaches that are networked into horizontal local energy communities. They are producing prototype cargo bikes and working with local networks and campaigns to develop new models for use, and also evolving systems in which feedback from users shapes the next round of production. They’ve also pooled their practical knowledge with supportive academics from local universities who bring specialised theoretical knowledge to research and develop innovative and sustainable technical solutions driven by the social and political insights of users and workers.
In building solidarity, the workers have also placed the campaign for jobs and alternative production at the heart of wider social struggles. Their organising contributes to wider struggle and also learns from it. They have fought over migrant rights, workplace safety, anti-racism and anti-fascism. Most recently they have made common cause with the Palestine movement. In fighting for the regional government to back their plans for cooperative production under workers control, they set up an encampment outside the regional government buildings, later moving the camp to the centre of Florence.
Throughout 2024 they have campaigned for donations to a one million euro fund. This, together with political demands on the regional government and the state government, would enable production to restart. Under pressure from the support that GKN has built locally, the regional government has given ground to the workers. The Italian government under Meloni is hostile, characterising the workers as undisciplined hooligans. But if they can get cooperative production started Italian law insists that the national government should contribute. The million euro target has essentially been met. Contributors to the fund – union branches, campaign groups and others – are entitled to a vote in the assemblies which will determine the future trajectory of the plant.
Over the weekend of 11-13 October in Florence, there will be a mass demonstration led by Fridays for Future on the 11th, an open assembly in the factory on the 12th, and finally on Sunday 13th an assembly for ‘shareholders’. The objective is cooperative production under workers control, linked through democratic processes and democratic decision making to local communities, and national and international networks.
Thanks to REELNews for their reporting and their help with this post. REELnews are organising a trade union delegation to Florence for the 11-13 October demonstration and assemblies.
Employment, Energy and Environment 