RISE ecosocialist summer camp 2023 plenary [Credit: Nicole McCarthy]
[Transcript of talk given by a NYC DSA member to the 2024 RISE ecosocialist camp in Ireland. The subject of the plenary was the backlash to environmental regulations in Europe.]
I’m here today as a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. I’m a public sector worker and a shop steward in my union. I also organize with a tenant union in my neighborhood and in a group called City Workers for Palestine. The good news is that we don’t have a huge backlash against recently passed environmental regulations, the bad news is we already have very few and our supreme court has made many of those illegal.
I want to talk about the need to bridge workplace and community struggles in environmentalism.
Biden passed something called the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA, which I gather means something different here.and the Left pinned their hopes on an insider strategy of getting climate policy added into it . This push hit the brick wall of our undemocratic political system, and a single senator was able to strip most of the good stuff out, leaving us with a bill committed to a green capitalist vision of developing green industries to compete with China. The failure of an insider strategy “from above” and the ongoing green industrial transition both raise a need for ecosocialists to become active in rank and file working class struggles – in the workplace and in the community.
I work for New York City’s Parks Department. The Parks in New York were one of the first city agencies to unionize back in the 50s. My union, AFSCME DC37, led a huge demonstration outside of the parks headquarters, a castle in Central Park named the Arsenal. Later in the 70s, the fiscal crisis saw the parks budget slashed in half. While the rest of the city’s parks suffered, the rich funded private conservancies to take care of the city’s flagship parks (and their property value). As the private conservancies’s stature grew, the union’s faded, with successive corruption investigations and budget cuts leaving neoliberals a free hand in shaping work in the parks to make as few people as possible do as much work as possible for as little pay as possible.
Over the years in parks I started to meet and connect with other radicals. We shared values about the need for public space, talking about how the city never seemed to find money for us but always had room for some shiny new toy for the cops. But we needed a space to think. We faced a dual task of rebuilding our unions – which don’t have much of a living presence in our workplace - but also of defining what a “union issue” was. For a lot of my coworkers, the union was just their dental plan, or someone they call to complain at. Something external to them. And the union didn’t work very hard to correct that perception. But the union’s relative lack of a presence in our workplace gave us the opening to work to give an alternative definition.
From the beginning we wanted to make sure that we didn’t organize strictly around traditionally defined “workplace” issues like wages, benefits, etc. Our workplace is the world, and work isn’t just production, but reproduction, the work that oftentimes happens unwaged, or informally, in the community instead of in an office. We will never transcend the false choice between jobs or the environment if we don’t link workplace struggles to community struggles, and vice versa. Similarly, defining the working class as stereotypically waged workers acting through workplace organization leaves us placing struggles of wageless or precarious work outside of the labor movement.
(I might add that the right does well to link a broader community’s interests to a continued reliance on an extractive industry, even one that employs less and less people, like the coal industry in Appalachia)
In April of last year, an entire shift of the NYC Parks police was deployed to evict a long running street market from a park in Brooklyn. The corporate vendors the parks contract with routinely pressured the agency to harass immigrant vendors. We saw this policing as the opposite of what should go on in public space, tied to a wave of reaction against migrants. So, we decided to act. We opened up awkward conversations with our coworkers, got over a hundred of them to sign a letter in protest, and even got the commissioner to (passive aggressively) reply. It was a small action without much success, but it broke the ice on talking about work at work. We have started contesting union leadership, serving as stewards, organizing coworkers to go to rallies against austerity and for Palestine, as well as building out a space to contest public space.
Machines, technologies, work, and the environment produced are not neutral in capitalism. As ecosocialist scholars like Andreas Malm and Jason Moore have shown, the struggle between workers and capital can be seen lying beneath technological and ecological development. Not merely an anthropocene, but a capitalocene, a plantationcene. Part of the work of being an ecosocialist in a “Green” job is investigating, unearthing how capitalism has reshaped our web of life.
Lately, we have started gathering together this in bits and pieces in a Zine called Clippings. We have noticed how our jobs push us to compete against each other for scarce promotions, how our bodies ache after doing the work of two full-time staff on a seasonal salary. How we are pushed to blame migrants, not politicians for the mayor’s budget cuts, to see the street vendors sharing our space as problems to be pushed out. How to think about the history of our city, how it’s shaped our job and our environment, and how to spread that awareness to the world of people making life in the parks.
We began our first issue this way (in my comrade’s words):
“Last year a group of us came together in response to the policing of Plaza Tonatiuh in Sunset Park. We were angered and disgusted by the force used by Parks Enforcement Patrol and the NYPD, and as park workers we wanted to fight alongside migrant communities for their right to gather and make life in the city’s parks.
What do we mean by making life? We mean celebrating culture, making art, growing intimacy and connection, playing games, engaging in movement, sharing ideas, enjoying food. Everything that builds our capacities to turn towards each other for the task of world-making.
We started this newsletter because we want to connect with you: the people who make life in NYC’s parks. We hope to publish these monthly as a way to exchange notes on all the dimensions in which this life happens. Please send us your poems, photos, collages, park conversations, essays, playlists, dreams, jokes, eulogies, missives, stories. Send us feedback, critiques, love letters. Join our “editorial board” if you dare… We want to hear from you, and we want these newsletters to be a reflection of the life we’re all making together.
Yours in labor and in solidarity,
The Clippings crew”
Notice we said “the people who make life.” Who’s the we?
In the public sector in NYC, our consciousness is a double edged sword. We work with the public every day, but oftentimes we are pitted against the public as the face of a state shaped by 50 years of austerity. Narrowly looking out for our own interests only works to reproduce this division. On the other hand, radical public sector unions of the past used to organize the community they served alongside the workplace – teachers organizing with students and parents, social service workers organizing welfare recipients – an approach now called “bargaining for the common good.” Democracy not just for the workplace, but for all of our world. This is what the scholar Ernest Wamba dia Wamba said was the starting point of emancipatory politics – that everyone can think. In our world right now property matters more than democracy. To fight this, to put the planet and people in front of profit we need to build alternative spaces of real power, real democracy, of working class protagonism. I’m an ecosocialist because I think everyone can think, and that we should all be able to breathe too.