An Ecosocialist Labour Form

As the mega-economy brings down the complex of natural systems that sustain planetary life, sociological concepts of labour and value that evolved with industrial capital need to be re-thought. A first step in this political shift is acknowledging labour as the ontological moment that bridges human intention and the material world. This allows us to rethink the relation between productive work and reproductive or regenerative work. It certainly will not do, to accept the rhetoric of progress that runs from industrial manufacture to post-industrial dematerialisation. Moreover to build future ecosocialist alternatives with the broadest possible democratic base, a generic notion of labour is essential to integrate workers, womens, peasant, indigenous, and ecological objectives. A grassroots and global resistance to capital calls for the recognition of these 'othered' labors and the unspoken value that they catalyse. It means theorising non-monetized activities carried on in a space somewhere between economics and ecology. For it is here, that what we might call 'meta-industrial' labour anticipates future models of provisioning in a green and autonomous commons. While marxists have been moving towards an ecological socialism for several decades now, their theoretic focus has remained with 'relations of production'. By contrast, a living ecosystem is about metabolic exchanges between Earth systems - soils, plants, water, atmosphere, and the diversity of species that interact with them. This broad ecocentric perception is essential to the design of 'an ecosocialist labour form’.