Written by John Bellamy Foster and first published at Rebel
The idea of a “just transition” is
appearing everywhere these days, most notably in the preamble of the 2015 Paris
Climate Agreement, which refers to the need to take “into account the
imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent
work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development
priorities.” 1
Superfund for Workers
Just transition first arose as a guiding principle
in the labour movement in the 1970s-1990s during the leadership of Tony
Mazzocchi within the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union
(OCAW), which pioneered in the creation of the labour-environmental movement.
Mazzocchi sought to find a way around the “job blackmail”in which
workers were constantly told that if they supported environmental measures,
they would lose their jobs. In response, he helped popularise the notion of a
just transition and proposed a “Superfund for workers.”
This was meant to compensate workers for the costs
of environmental transition, providing financial support and higher-education
opportunities for displaced workers. In Mazzocchi’s words, “There is a
Superfund for dirt. There ought to be one for workers.” Yet, all
efforts to create a Superfund for workers (in contrast to the Superfund for
corporations) was blocked at every point by the dominant capitalist
interests. 2
The labour-environmental cause and the idea of a
just transition were to be carried forward in the early 1990s principally by
the United Steel Workers (USW). The USW’s environmental policy statement,
adopted in 1990 under the title Our Children’s World: Steelworkers and
the Environment, declared that “we believe that the greatest threat to
our children’s future may lie in the destruction of their environment.” Human
beings now had “the power to alter our environment irreversibly.” On
global warming the report stated:
The burning of fossil fuels like petroleum and coal
generates billions of tons of carbon dioxide every year. This gas and others
trap heat in the atmosphere. The resulting global warming could melt the ice
caps, flood our coastal cities, and turn huge agricultural areas into deserts.
The problem is made worse by the widespread destruction of our forests, which
help to absorb excess carbon dioxide. The loss of forests and other habitats
threatens many species of plants and animals with extinction. Even our oceans
are at risk from toxic runoff, oil spills and waste dumping at sea. Added
together, these problems may threaten the ultimate capability of our resources
to sustain civilization…. We believe the greatest threat to our children’s
future may lie in the destruction of their environment. 3
In perhaps its most memorable observation on the
nature of the just transition, the USW’s 1990 report added: “In the
long run, the real choice is not jobs or environment. It’s both or neither.” 4
Looking back at the original Our Children’s
Future report, in its 2006 environmental report, Securing Our
Children’s World, the USW observed: “Our original report identified
global warming as the single most important environmental issue of our lifetime
and warned about the risks of doing nothing.”5 The chief enemies, the USW
underscored, were multinational corporations.
The concept of just transition spread globally in
the present century, and was adopted by the International Trade Union
Confederation (ITUC), while also receiving backing from the International
Labour Organisation. For the ITUC, the just transition could be conceived,
as “a tool the trade union movement shares with the international
community, aimed at smoothing the shift towards a more sustainable society and
providing hope for the capacity of a green economy to sustain decent jobs and
livelihoods for all.”6
Most importantly, it was necessary in the ITUC’s
view, to face up to the realities of global environmental inequality reflected
in the simultaneous existence of carbon-intensive developed countries,
increasingly carbon-intensive emerging economies, and low-carbon, highly
climate-vulnerable developing countries. 7 No solution was possible without
recognising the differentials in how labour was placed globally in the face of
climate change and energy needs.
Green New Deal?
The concept of just transition, meanwhile, has
spread far beyond labour, and is seen today as also encompassing issues of
Indigenous rights and environmental justice. For the Indigenous Environmental
Network, based primarily in the United States, a just transition must
confront “a legacy of exploitation, ecocide, and environmental, energy,
climate, and economic injustice.” Hence, it must encompass “the
recognition of Indigenous rights and the rights of Mother Earth.” Further, “a
just transition calls for the rejection of all market-based mechanisms that
allow the quantification and commodification of Mother Earth’s natural
resources and processes, rebranded as ‘ecosystem services,’ carbon trading,
carbon offsets, conservation and biodiversity offsets, and financialization of
Nature.” 8
The Climate Justice Alliance
meanwhile emphasises that a just transition must deal with environmental
injustices, such as environmental racism, deeply embedded in present-day
society. 9
The main current proposal for a Green New
Deal—associated with democratic [Democratic Party] socialist Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez—includes the recognition of the need for a just transition, in
the sense of recognising the needs of labour, Indigenous peoples, and the
environmental justice movement. But it is precisely the more radical notions of
a just transition that are coming under attack and are in most danger of being
negotiated away at the outset in attempts to mainstream the Green New Deal in
capitalist society.
It was for this reason that the newly re-emerged
Science for the People has issued its Peoples’ New Deal Campaign,
dedicated to underscoring the idea that nothing can be accomplished without a
struggle that incorporates the demands of labour, people of color, Indigenous
populations, women, LGBTQ people, and the populations in the global South.
Moreover, this must start with opposition to militarism and imperialism. This
also means the rejection of eco-techno fixes such as nuclear power,
geoengineering, and other false and destructive “alternatives.” 10
System Change
Yet, it is precisely when the call for a just
transition becomes universalised, taking into account the needs of the world
populations, future generations, and the diversity of life on earth itself,
that it becomes obvious that any such transition is impossible under capitalism.
Indeed, it represents the concrete negation of capitalism. Here the message of
the ecosocialist movement, embodied in organisations like System Change
Not Climate Change in the United States, are indispensable. 11
A just transition, if it is to be more than words,
demands another mode of production altogether, one no longer based in the logic
of “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”12 It is thus necessarily
intertwined with the class struggle, while intersecting with struggles over
social reproduction, racial capitalism, and militarism and imperialism—all of
which question the very foundations of capitalism. If we are to save our
children’s world, we will have to be more revolutionary than at any
time in human history, directing our efforts at sustainable human development,
i.e., complete socialism, encompassing the needs of the entire chain of human generations,
as well as the protection of the earth itself. In the end, there can be no
other meaning to a just transition.
- United Nations, Paris Agreement (2015),
2
- Samantha Harvey, “Leave No Worker
Behind,” Earth Island Journal (Summer 2018), http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/leave_no_worker_behind/;
Jeremy Brecher, “A Superfund for Workers,” Dollars &
Sense (November-December 2018), http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2015/1115brecher.html.
- United Steel Workers Environmental Task
Force, Our Children’s World (Fall 1991), reprinted
in New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational
Policy 2, no. 2 (1992), quoted in United Steel Workers, Securing
Our Children’s World (2006), 4, 9 (correction made by present
author to conform to original document), http://assets.usw.org/resources/hse/Resources/securingourchildrensworld.pdf.
- United Steel Workers, Our Children’s World,
quoted in David Foster, “BlueGreen Alliance,” International Journal of
Labor Research 2, no. 2 (2010): 234.
- United Steel Workers, Securing Our Children’s
Future, 5.
- International Trade Union
Cofederation, A Just Tranistion: A Fair Pathway to Protect the
Planet (2009) , quoted in Anabella Rosemberg, “Building a Just
Transition,” International Journal of Labour Research 2,
no. 2 (2010): 141. [vii] Rosemberg, “Builiding a Just Tranistion,” 145-48.
- Rosemberg, “Builiding a Just Tranistion,”
145-48.
- Indigenous Environmental Network, “Indigenous
Principles of a Just Transition,” https://www.ienearth.org/justtransition/,
accessed June 20, 2019.
- Climate Justice Alliance, “Just
Transition,” https://climatejusticealliance.org/just-transition/,
accessed June 20, 2019.
- Zach Zill, “Nine Ways Scientists Can Support a
People’s Green New Deal,” Science for the People 22, no. 1
(Spring 2019), https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/nine-ways-scientists-can-support-peoples-green-new-deal/;
“People’s Green New Deal,” Science for the People, https://scienceforthepeople.org/peoples-green-new-deal/,
accessed June 20, 209.
- See https://systemchangenotclimatechange.org
- Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1976), 742.
John Bellamy Foster is a
renowned environmental sociologist and editor of Monthly Review
I have my doubts that a just transition is likely, given the history and current state of the green movement. Said movement has always been composed almost entirely by white, middle-class professionals. They seem to have little concern for the lives of people on low incomes or working-class people in hard, physical jobs that nevertheless pay fairly well and, at least in the past, had unions and security. Consequently, the greens never tried to build a mass movement of such people as Labour, Communists and socialists did across the world. No, their approach is instead state-led and very much top-down.
ReplyDeleteAn example is the August 2019 suggestion by Caroline Lucas MP of the Green party that a committee of middle-class, professional female politicians chosen by her should replace the elected government as a Cabinet so as to prevent the UK leaving the EU, in contravention of the will of the people as expressed in the referendum.
So what do people like her know about a hard working life and the need for a job to support a family? The vague, ambiguous references in the Green New Deal over in the USA and similar suggestions here to 'just transition' fail to give any reassurance to the many people working in roles closely dependent on the extractive industries that their lives wouldn't be disastrously affected by a move to end the era of fossil fuels.