What is Green Syndicalism?

Green Syndicalism combines syndicalism with eco-anarchism:

• Eco-anarchism is an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian form of radical environmentalism, which emphasizes social organization and self-management.

• Syndicalism is a working class strategy based on building grassroots worker unions (and other kinds of grassroots organizations such as tenant unions) that are directly controlled by the members, and using these organizations as a means of workers controlling direct struggle against the dominating classes — building forms of working class counter-power through disruptive forms of collective struggle such as strikes, occupations, rent strikes, militant mass marches, and so on.

Green Syndicalism is based on the recognition that workers — and direct worker and community alliances — can be a force against the environmentally destructive actions of capitalist firms.

The goal of Green Syndicalism is a self-managed form of eco-socialism in which workers democratically self-manage the industries they work in. A twentieth-first century form of self-managed eco-socialism would be a horizontally federated system of production that can implement planning and coordination throughout industries and over a wide region. This would enable workers to:

• Gain control over technological development,

• Re-organize jobs and education to eliminate the bureaucratic concentration of power in the hands of managers and high-end professionals, develop worker skills, and work to integrate decision-making and conceptualization with the doing of the physical work,

• Reduce the workweek and share work responsibilities among all who can work, and

• Create a new logic of development for technology that is friendly to workers and works to reduce ecological damage from human social production.