Bridging labour process theory and ecological Marxism: on the potentials of socio-ecological labour process theory

What the paper says

The article explores prospects for a socio-ecological labour process theory (LPT) by engaging in a dialogue between LPT, which has long neglected ecological dimensions, and ecological Marxism, which is largely disconnected from workplaces as concrete sites of production. On the basis of an understanding of labour processes as inherently socio-ecological, in which production and social control are mediated by environmental conditions while concurrently shaping them, the ecological contradictions of capitalism emerge as a distinct dimension of the contradiction between capital and labour. Labour process analysis can hence be conceptualized as ecological crisis theory. Demonstrating how the simultaneous subsumption of labour and nature serves as means to enhance control over obstinate nature and workers in situated production processes, structuralist tendencies in ecological Marxism can be curbed. Ecologically-harmful trajectories of productive forces appear as unintended socio-ecological outcomes of workers’ resistance and managerial strategies. Moreover, the materiality of nature does not wield agency on its own, but exerts social effects through their mediation of labour processes and power resources in workplaces. Finally, the article advances conceptional proposals for a socio-ecological LPT, that conceives workplaces as contested socio-ecological orders and outlines analytical dimensions for empirical research into the mutual mediation of ecological (crisis) processes and labour relations. This approach enables attention to the ecology of labour processes, the dynamic restructuring of labour processes by ecological crisis effects, the subjectivities of workers situated in these dynamics, and thus objective and subjective entry points and barriers for environmental workers’ agency at the shop-floor level.