Change this system that is killing people!
Change this system that is killing people! an interview with Stefania Barca
Stefania Barca in conversation with Natasha Walter
Stefania Barca is a feminist and environmental historian. Her new book, Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change, draws together explorations of various historical struggles to shed new light on the connections between environmentalism, feminism and labour movements. Barca is also the author of Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene and of Enclosing Water: Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley, which was awarded the Turku Environmental History Book Prize. She is currently Distinguished Researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela and on the steering committee of the Interuniversity Research Center on Atlantic Landscapes and Cultures (CISPAC). Natasha Walter, caught up with Stefania last week to discuss these key connections between feminism, class and environmental justice.
NW: Your new book really spoke to me in the way that it connects feminism with environmental justice and labour struggles. I felt, reading it, that it is infused with a very particular point of view and I wanted to know more about you and how you developed these political ideas. Can you say something about your own background and how you first came to take an interest in left or feminist or environmental politics?
SB: I grew up in a working-class area in East Naples in Italy, an area that would be familiar to readers of Elena Ferrante, since my father was born and raised in the very same neighbourhood that is described in My Brilliant Friend. It was an industrial area, lots of workshops, factories. It was a very working-class place. I remember the trucks that crossed through this area all the time, all day long, the noise of the trucks, and the poor quality of the air. It was also a very masculine environment. So for me, it wasn’t easy to walk those streets by myself. I had this experience of coming from a working-class neighbourhood, and then, gradually, the industry was shutting down. Throughout the eighties there was this sense of decadence, of losing jobs, losing population, people, moving away. I was very happy when we moved out when I was 14. I didn’t like living there. I had a very, very clear sense of class distinction in the sense that when I when I started to go to middle school, I went to a different neighbourhood, and people were looking at me with this sense that I didn’t belong there, that I came from another place. So class was central for me as I was growing up. Then in my history degree I started to investigate the history of the Communist Party in Naples back in the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s. And when I was doing my PhD I came across environmental history and political ecology. I became aware that there was this area of environmental studies that was also concerned with class and labour and with social issues. So I started to connect the dots. I looked at the tradition of medical studies and occupational health studies that connected the need for environmental protections with labour justice. At first, I wasn’t connecting this with gender, but then I realised that where these groundbreaking struggles were taking place, the women were the first to mobilise. And I realised that we have to look at these connections too. I still think there isn’t enough attention paid to such connections. I see that environmental issues are still very marginal to the feminist movement and that there is still a hostility to ecofeminism. But in my research, I find a lot of women in working class and peasant communities taking up environmental struggles, because these struggles are related to domestic work and to care work, so there is a material nexus.
NW: It’s interesting that you focus on those material, grassroots connections between environmental, feminist and labour struggles. These are becoming more and more important to me and I found some of the historical examples that you use fascinating, including the example that you explore from Britain with the Wages for Housework campaign. You examine this moment when women connect the discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear energy to what it would cost women in terms of their care work. Could say something about that historical moment, and are there particular lessons that you feel that story has for us as feminists today?
SB: I was in touch with the Global Women’s Strike since 2019, because I was involved in an initiative that aimed to put together a blueprint for a just transition with a number of activists and scholars from eco-socialist and degrowth and environmental justice perspectives. One of the policy proposals was the care income, a basic income that would recognize the social relevance of all kinds of care work. The Global Women’s Strike came in saying that they were interested in this idea, but their proposal was that the care income should not be universal, but for those who did most of the unpaid care work. That’s where we started to have a conversation and I found myself so much in line with their perspective. So I looked more deeply into their campaigns in Britain, where they’ve been part of various struggles, particularly on Wages for Housework, but also against the nuclear industry and nuclear energy and the nuclear arms race. And one of the issues that they have taken up was anti-nuclear mobilisation from the perspective of women and specifically of the working class and immigrant women living in inner city Bristol. It was so interesting to explore how they brought arguments about the burden of care work carried by working class women into the campaign against Hinckley C power station. They describe themselves as part of a broader movement of women against militarism, pollution and extractivism, against everything that impacts women’s health and wellbeing and also environmental health and wellbeing. So even though Wages for Housework never described themselves as an ecofeminist movement, I realised that they were part of this ecofeminist movement in its broadest sense. Again, these connections really spoke to me.
NW: Can you say a bit more about ecofeminism and what you understand by that term, and why – as you have said – you feel that there is still some hostility to ecofeminism both in the environmental movement and the feminist movement?
SB: There are different kinds of ecofeminism, there is liberal ecofeminism, socialist or materialist ecofeminism, and also cultural or spiritual ecofeminism, and each of these traditions elaborates in its own way around this nexus between the female sex or gender, and earth or the environment. Each of these different traditions is related to different political positions. I’m not interested in determining which ecofeminism is correct. In the Marxist field we spend a lot of time and energy in determining which theory is better than the other. I’ve never been engaged in that game. I don’t think it’s particularly useful. At this point in the history of the planet, we need to converge and ally and coalesce and build working class power against the powers that are destroying us and the planet. My entry point is that I see the expression ‘women’ as a generalisation of something that is concrete. It’s the same as when the labour movement talks about workers. In some ways that’s an abstraction, but it’s an abstraction that captures something that is very concrete. Coming at these arguments from an ecofeminist perspective enables us to see that there are some specific forms of of labour, the labour of reproduction and care, which historically and socially are for the large part assigned to women. The sexual division of labour is very concrete.
NW: I was also very struck by the story in chapter four, where you’re looking at links between the human and natural world in the Amazon forest. Often in writing about environmentalism, even to this day, there is a separation between human and nature, and as if humans can only ever be despoilers of nature. And in Britain, we I think we’re seeing even a resurgence of that at the moment, with the rewilding movement, and this idea that humans must leave for nature to regenerate. But here you are exploring the fertile idea of how the human and more than human can thrive together, which you call interspecies commoning. Could you just say something about why that’s important to you as we face this planetary crisis?
SB: The subject of this chapter came to me from learning about the story of these people that are struggling in the Amazon forest and also in other ecosystems in agroforestry projects. These projects and these territories are so important because they tell us that there is a way of protecting non-human nature that is, at the same time a form of protection of humans themselves. That’s a very important story. We Western people have difficulties in truly understanding this because we come from a culture that is so profoundly dualistic. This dualism is so inscribed in in what we are, how we think, how we talk, our politics. Everything about us is dualistic. But what I found in the way these people talk about themselves is that they see non-human nature, and specifically the chestnut tree and the chestnut forest, as part of their identity, because they have been chestnut collectors since they were born, and always lived in communities of chestnut collectors who made their living from this nut. This nut supported the life and development of entire populations of indigenous people in the first place, and they disseminated this nut across the region by moving around and taking the seeds with them. So the nature we’re talking about here has never been separated from humanity, and the nut is part of their culture and identity. Of course we should be careful not to essentialise how they see this relationship. That’s very important, and the way to bypass this essentialisation is to talk about movements rather than people. If we look at indigenous movements and the politics that they have created since the late 1970s, these are struggles to protect a different relationship between human and non-human. Organisations and leadership, the people who choose to live in the agroforestry project, are taking a stance, and it’s important to remember that they could do different things, they could move to a city, look for a job, they could aspire to become landowners themselves, they have different choices. Those who form part of these community projects are making a choice to preserve and continue this way of life.
NW: How are you feeling about this struggle right now? We are talking in the aftermath of the American election, and the floods in Europe… Do you feel grief and anxiety as you look at what is happening now?
SB: A little bit, yes, of course, there isn’t much that is hopeful around us now. I was a bit more hopeful a few years back when the Fridays for Future movement was starting and more mobilisation and convergences seemed to be possible. Now, things are not going well in any sense. The way I see it now is that we have to combine two kinds of ways forward. First, being within the system, and trying to make as many changes to the system as possible, that could facilitate more radical change. For instance, I work on the climate jobs campaign and the just transition framework with other people to push towards an appropriate valuation of care work. It looks like a small thing. But it is also close to real people’s needs. People need jobs, people need money, to go on in life. So I think it’s important to be in the system, and also, at the same time resisting. There will never be a perfect society, not the perfect socialist world, where everybody’s happy and there is no oppression. It will never exist. there will always be struggle and conflict, and there will always be people wanting to dominate other people, even in a socialist style state, as we well know from history. So I think it is important that we preserve our capacity to resist power, to organize collectively, to build grassroots resistance, grassroots power, grassroots counter power. We need to build counter power from below that will allow us to protect ourselves and life in general, and our communities and our territories and other than human nature through this resistance.
NW: Thank you so much. We are talking in the aftermath of the American election when a lot of people have been wondering how to keep going, so I think that remembering that we can both resist and work for reform is important. Is there anything else on your mind right now?
SB: The Valencia disaster. I feel very touched by this, not because this is the worst that has happened, much worse things have happened climatically in other places. It’s simply because I’ve been to Valencia. I feel a personal attachment to Valencia. Last year, I was invited by a group of trade unionists and comrades in the Spanish Communist Party, to talk in a workshop on how to build working class environmental politics. I was so happy that such a thing was happening and that they had invited me to contribute. And I met such wonderful people there, and I don’t even know if they’re all okay at this point. Also I hear that a big part of the tragedy is that the regional government is a right wing government that cut funding for flood prevention and that was a huge part of the problem, because relief just wasn’t there. Most of the affected areas are still under water and mud, after so many days. And at the same time, the regional government is climate denialist and didn’t want to make a proper alert. So the employers asked people to go to work, and people had to go to work. Many people died on the way back from work because the waters rose in rush hour, and they met the flood on the way back home. What I would say is the system doesn’t change because the climate is changing. And this system unchanged is killing people. This is the way I would put it.