Just Transitions by Morena Edouard;Krause Dunja;Stevis Dimitris;

Author:Morena, Edouard;Krause, Dunja;Stevis, Dimitris;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

WAYS AND MEANS: BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

To achieve a just transition at the local or global level, be it through the Green New Deal, the municipal government, or frontline community efforts, we must organise. Nothing can be achieved unless we organise a strong independent base to advance the transition programme we need. Without independent organisation, the epic challenge of climate change will be held hostage to forces seeking to maintain the capitalist status quo.

Organising requires simultaneous efforts at different levels and in different spaces. We have to organise a mass social movement base within the working class, particularly around the job-focused dimension of just transition. Labour unions, worker cooperatives, workers’ centres and other labour-focused groups are key to organising workers and pushing for a programme that addresses workers’ immediate and mid-term needs for jobs and stable incomes through the expansion of existing ‘green’ industries and the development of new ones. One of the initiatives that we as Cooperation Jackson are arguing for is the development of a broad ‘union-co-op’ alliance that would seek to unite different organised working-class movements in this country around what we call a ‘build and fight’ programme (Akuno, 2017).

As Cooperation Jackson, we and our allies in the environmental and climate justice community, have consistently argued, we believe in the need to organise frontline, poor and often majority Black and Latinx communities who are both the least responsible for the climate crisis and the most exposed to its consequences. And finally, we also believe in the need to connect our local and national struggles with those of other communities across the globe – especially in the Global South – by adopting an internationalist outlook and organising global networks of solidarity and resistance.

From our perspective, and as we have seen, this involves constructing new worker-owned and self-managed enterprises rooted in sustainable methods of production on the build side, and finding ways for workers to appropriate and to manage the means of production on the fight side, with the goal of transitioning workplaces and industries towards sustainable practices (or in some cases phase them out completely). We believe that this will allow us to build the independence and power we need to dictate the terms of the political struggle in the electoral arena. As was previously stated, we are convinced that in order for a transformative just transition to materialise, this mass social movement base must understand and relate to electoral politics – at the local, state and national levels – as a strategic tool, and not an end in itself.

The devastating landfall of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005 was a tragic wake-up call. Climate change and the threat that it poses to humanity and nature suddenly became a tangible and harsh reality. The creation of Cooperation Jackson and the development of a just transition plan represents our best effort thus far towards halting the looming climate catastrophe and building an ecosocialist future from the ground up. Errors have been made and a lot still needs to be done, within a very short timeframe.

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