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Commoning Labour, Labouring the Commons: Centring the Commons in Environmental Labour Studies

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The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies

Abstract

This chapter mobilises a commons lens to understand environmental labour issues in ongoing struggles for post-capitalist socioecological transformations. Drawing on the ‘working-class community ecologies’ framework, grounded in a discussion on climate justice and just transition movements in Puerto Rico, it is argued that a commons lens is central to expanding the conception of the working class and labour and of working-class resistance and alternatives for a just transition.

I deeply thank the editors of this volume for their thoughtful, critical engagement and revisions with my text, which significantly improved its final version.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A notable exception is South Africa; there is also emerging research in Taiwan and South Korea (Stevis et al. 2018), and Brazil, India, Kenya and Tanzania (JTRC 2018).

  2. 2.

    I am inspired here by the work of David Bollier and Silke Helfrich and their call to think, learn and act as a commoner.

  3. 3.

    Hardt and Negri (2009) define ‘immaterial commons’ as ‘the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships’, and propose that these are the basis of a postcapitalist transformation. This has been challenged by others who emphasise the material-ecological basis of commons (Tola 2015).

  4. 4.

    For instance, the reproductive household labour facilitates the productive wage labour, the labour in electric and waterinfrastructure or in growing food allows everyone else to carry out their work.

  5. 5.

    Common senses refer to dominant ways of perceiving and understanding the world, which emerge through existing relational practices (Gramsci, in Garcia-Lopez et al. 2017). Commoning, by changing everyday practices, can be a key to counter and generating new common senses which are materially and symbolically articulated around commons.

  6. 6.

    Comunalidad refers to ‘a way of being in which the communal condition, the “us,” forms the first layer of the meaning of our existence’ (Esteva 2014).

  7. 7.

    http://unionsforenergydemocracy.org/unions-in-argentina-call-for-referendum-on-defense-of-the-commons/.

  8. 8.

    There are different visions of JT/CJ, concerning the nature of the changes needed, the agents of such change, and the centrality of social justice concerns (see Chatterton et al. 2013; Giacomini and Turner 2015; JTRC 2018). Here I focus on the more radical/transformative, working-class and community-centred approach.

  9. 9.

    Here we can see a clear connection to scholars such as Vercellone (2015), who centres on ‘the democratic reappropriation of the welfare state and the re-socialization of money’ as the central aspects of the common.

  10. 10.

    See also: http://www.pactoecosocialdelsur.com/.

  11. 11.

    Puerto Rico has the second largest per-area concentration of transgenic seed production in USterritories, after Hawaii.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Stimulus Program for Scientific Endeavors of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), under contract CEECIND / 04850/2017 / CP1402 / CT0010.

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  1. Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Gustavo A. García-López

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  1. Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Nora Räthzel

  2. Department of Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Dimitris Stevis

  3. School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    David Uzzell

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García-López, G.A. (2021). Commoning Labour, Labouring the Commons: Centring the Commons in Environmental Labour Studies. In: Räthzel, N., Stevis, D., Uzzell, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71909-8_17

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