The seminar will delve into the complex subjectivities that characterize global chains of production and circulation in the Anthropocene, opening up a conversation between traditional labour studies and new perspectives emerging from fields such as political ecology and environmental history.
What ecological relationships are cultivated – with the self, with other humans, and with other living beings – through the forms of labour-as-movement found in Amazon warehouses, Uber taxis and high-tech factory farms? And, excavating into the materiality of the body, how is genomics reshaping the political economy of capital accumulation on a global scale? These are two of the question that will drive the two hours seminar titled Ecologies of Labour: Rethinking Capital Accumulation and Circulant Subjectivities in the Platform Society.
More specifically, Tom Vickers will examine the multiple relations between political ecology and labour studies – which also means to examine the relationship between labour precarity and ecological interdependencies – that might help to find new horizons of politics and life.
Amedeo Policante and Erica Borg will move from the assumption that today the production of life has become an integral part of global circuits of capital accumulation, investigating the ways in which genome-editing is adapting animal bodies as living means of production employed in a number of industries.
When: 22nd March 2023
Where: Dipartimento delle Arti – Piazzetta Morandi, Bologna
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Welcome and Introduction: Mattia Frapporti (Unibo)
Speakers:
Tom Vickers (Nottingham Trent University): “Ecological Labour as Movement: From Balancing Alone to Dancing Together”
Amedeo Policante (Nova University of Lisbon) and Erica Borg (King’s College, London): “Ecologies of Labour. Genomic Capital and the Real Subsumption of Life”
Ecological Labour as Movement: From Balancing Alone to Dancing Together
Dr Tom Vickers, Nottingham Trent University, UK
This paper addresses the double impasse of contemporary environmental and labour politics, in which widespread awareness of the accelerating ecological catastrophe has so far produced little in the way of deep-seated transformation, and in which the ongoing precaritisation and immiseration of the working classes are being met with little resistance and a significant rise in populist reaction. I propose that examining the interconnections between these two arenas of struggle, and between their attendant scholarly fields of political ecology and labour studies – which also means to examine the relationship between labour precarity and ecological interdependencies – might help us to escape this impasse and find new horizons of politics and life.
I invite you to join me on a journey, in a mode of presentation that draws on Jennifer Allsopp’s reading of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. On this journey we will travel from my empirical research with precarious migrants in North East England, via a Marxist conceptualisation of labour as a way of moving – in relation with ourselves, with other humans, and with other parts of nature, leaving all transformed – toward ecological imaginings of possible futures that embody mutual nourishment, respect and flourishing, akin to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘honourable harvest’. To aid us in this journey from the precaritised present toward possible futures beyond the limits of western capitalist modernity, we will seek companionship from ideas and practices among Adivasi societies of South Asia and the First Nations of North America, in conjunction with the utopian fiction of William Morris and Marge Piercy. I argue that these engagements with non-western and artistic traditions of life and labour challenge us to recognise the importance of forms of knowledge that extend beyond what can be rationally expressed, and which include embodied forms of knowledge cultivated by our everyday mobility practices.
The paper progresses to ask what ecological relationships are cultivated – with the self, with other humans, and with other parts of nature – through the forms of labour-as-movement found in the Amazon warehouse or the Uber taxi? And, what imminent movements toward connection can be found within alienated capitalist environments, attending to the personal and interpersonal without losing sight of the systemic, which might form a basis for what Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz call a new ecological class?
I conclude by arguing for ecological class politics rooted in connection, as a counterpoint to capitalist conditions of violent precarity rooted in alienation. Such politics need to take seriously the risk of erasing human rights and welfare in the name of ecological sustainability, a risk that I argue can be responded to by using an attentiveness to human needs and sensitivities as a pathway toward each other and toward other parts of nature.
Ecologies of Labour: Genomic Capital and the Real Subsumption of Life
Amedeo Policante (Nova University of Lisbon) and Erica Borg (King’s College)
‘The concept of metabolism’, writes Marx in one of his last works, ‘suggest[s] a dialectical interaction
between nature and society’ and ‘posits both the human beings and the non-human world as active, indeed interactive agencies.’ In every process of production, in other words, human beings participate in the construction of the world together with other living organisms, which are collectively characterised by common metabolic processes that involve the constant translation of DNA into mRNA into proteins. In a process of production such as the one characterizing the cheese industry, for instance, what is mobilized is an entire ecology of labour encompassing human workers, cows and fermenting bacteria. Marx’s work stresses the ways in which the material characteristics of non-human participants in the labour process impact the temporality of production. . The production process must adapt to the metabolic rhythms of the living organisms it uses as instruments of production: the plants growing in the fields, the animals fattening in the stables and the bacteria multiplying in the fermentation tanks.
It also suggests a long-lasting tendency towards what we have conceptualized as “the real subsumption of life”: an historical process by which global “ecologies of labour” are increasingly modified in order to
accelerate, expand and secure the accumulation of capital. As we argue in Mutant Ecologies, this process of subsumption has dramatically accelerated in the last decade with the introduction of new techniques of genome engineering and synthetic biology. A long list of genetically-modified life-forms recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world: new generations of herbicide-resistant and pesticide-producing crops, fast-growing salmons (AquaBounty Technologies), heat-resistant cows (Recombinetics), Friendly Mosquitoes (Oxitec), humanised mice (GenPharm), pigs growing human organs (Revivicor). The production of life has become an integral part of global circuits of capital accumulation. In what ways has the logic of capital shaped the development of these genetic biotechnologies? And, on the other hand, how is genomics reshaping the political economy of capital accumulation on a global scale?
