Greening the International Confederation of Labour

An essay advocating for the International Confederation of Labour to focus more on the agricultural, forestry, horticultural and environmental professions.

Steff Brenner (Wolf Meyer) || Often in our movement, with regard to direct action, it is said: “What are a thousand demonstrators compared to a thousand strikers?” I am tempted to reply: “But what are a thousand hungry and freezing strikers compared to 900 strikers with 100 farm and forestry workers behind them?” That is ultimately what this article is about. The following text is addressed to the trade unionists of the International Confederation of Labour. It is a plea for a more intensive engagement with workers in the “green trades.” In this text, I include among these workers those in agricultural, forestry, and horticultural businesses, as well as those working in environmental and nature conservation and the corresponding research institutions.

Background: An organization in the green industries

In the summer of 2022, agricultural workers and landscape gardeners (GaLa-Bau) within the FAU (Free Workers’ Union) began an organizing process. Nationwide communication channels were established, an analysis of the sectors was initiated, and the first local working group of the “Green Trades” was formed in Dresden. Through critical yet supportive interventions, this Green Trades initiative gained nationwide recognition in January 2024 through various media appearances. The Italian sister union USI had already founded its own “Unione Contadina,” a syndicalist farmers’ association, in 2019. Similar efforts are underway within the CNT-F ⁽ National Council of Farmers ), affiliated initiatives in Brazil, and Spanish regional organizations.

Why is a strong presence in the green industries so important?

Anarcho-syndicalist unions pursue a dual strategy: On the one hand, they aim to provide an effective union response to the problems of workers in the here and now. On the other hand, they also seek to create the foundations for a form of society beyond the logic of profit, the exploitation of people and nature, and political alienation—that is, structures for a solidarity-based, grassroots-democratic, and sustainable needs-based economy. In between, anarcho-syndicalist unions see themselves as the backbone of the population in large-scale, materially driven conflicts, such as political general strikes (as repeatedly seen in France or in Argentina in January 2024), but also as an emergency structure for catastrophes in which the capitalist system collapses (e.g., during natural disasters, war, or economic crises). The fact that this last aspect is particularly topical and highly relevant has become acutely apparent to many workers in Europe and the USA with the economic upheavals caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. There are many indications that these supply crises will increase in the future, even in the more privileged countries – where the ICL is currently primarily located – if they are not already a reality for large segments of the population, as is the case in the USA and South America.

The supply of food and timber is essential for providing emergency aid to the population during crises or periods of conflict. And conscious food sovereignty also plays a significant role in whether people consider social change ^. Particularly in parts of Europe and the USA, substantial segments of the population today have no knowledge of, nor any connection to, how and where their food is produced. As consumers, these workers are dependent on opaque food production and global supply chains. The thought of a disruption to their daily capitalist routine will therefore trigger one thing above all in most of our colleagues: naked, existential fear. The alienation of a revolutionary potential—primarily urban today—from their global class comrades in the forest and fields thus drastically diminishes their willingness to fight and their revolutionary self-confidence. Who wants to saw off the branch they’re sitting on?

For this reason, revolution, as well as the resilience of the population in times of crisis, cannot be conceived without the struggle for a well-organized, emancipatory, local, and ecological agricultural movement. Anarcho-syndicalist movements worldwide must therefore engage with the agricultural movements of their countries, grapple with their class composition, their social problems, and their struggles, and derive from this a role for our trade union movement. Above all, trade unions should strive to establish food sovereignty for at least their own members. A concept that is gaining increasing popularity worldwide is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) ^.

A piece of anarcho-syndicalism? Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

The principle of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is that consumers and producers share the risks of production and the necessary investments. Consumers guarantee sales and, in return, are involved in production planning. Intermediaries are eliminated. Currently, CSAs appear to be a successful model; their numbers are growing rapidly in many parts of the world, and in some countries, they have always been a widespread economic form. A CSA is not automatically an emancipatory concept. However, in many cases, it implements a “bottom-up planned economy.” The concept lends itself to the establishment of collective enterprises and breaks with the competition of the free market. In CSAs, production is generally local and organic. Consumers—unlike in many other collective enterprise models—are an independent political and collective force, thus creating negotiation and participation processes between consumers and producers—a fundamental prerequisite for a vibrant, needs-based economy.

Certainly, wherever one looks, there will be many negative examples of CSAs; many will find the concepts do not go far enough. ⁵ Yet, CSAs are ahead of many other collective economic experiments – at least in Germany – in several aspects: grassroots democratic planned economy, cooperative economic forms on the scale of an entire industry, needs-based economy, consumer power, practical implementation of a climate-friendly economic transformation – all of this is not a given and has more than just a few similarities with anarcho-syndicalist economic strategies.

Of particular note is the fact that the consumer-supported economic model of CSAs, at least in Germany, manages to achieve significantly better wages and working conditions than comparable farms in other organic agriculture sectors. This is all the more remarkable because many CSAs, through solidarity-based payment models, succeed in making organically produced food accessible to segments of the working class who would otherwise never be able to afford it.

The role of anarcho-syndicalist trade union federations should consist of various aspects:

a) develop, together with the collective CSAs, grassroots-democratic and class-struggle-oriented guidelines for employment relationships, legal ownership, training, retirement provisions, occupational safety, etc., advise companies on implementation and, if necessary, award them a trade union label.

b) Raise awareness among its own membership about the importance of food sovereignty and ensure this, at least for the syndicate’s base, through collective consumption. Where there are not enough class-conscious CSAs, syndicalist farmers, gardeners, and fruit growers should be supported in establishing their own.

c) Trade unions should participate in all struggles against land sealing, soil destruction and land speculation and fight locally for the possibility of establishing more revolutionary CSAs.

d) The trade unions should enable a strong organic connection of anarcho-syndicalist CSAs to the rest of the movement, e.g. within the framework of workplace federations within the local federations.

e) Together with the CSAs, the expansion of the CSAs beyond vegetable farming and agriculture should be discussed, so that they can expand into crisis-proof village structures with timber harvesting and processing, craft businesses, food processing, etc., and ultimately form the basis for anarcho-syndicalist villages as a supply backbone in any crisis or revolt.

It should also be noted that the more capital tends towards monopolies and the acquisition of agricultural land, and the more the working class resists through collectivization in the form of CSAs, the better the conditions for revolutionary situations are created. While historically it was often difficult to reach agreements with the petty bourgeoisie and purely local elites on collective economic practices or redistribution, this problem is playing an increasingly minor role in many places today. The conflict of tomorrow will, in many places, play out between collective, solidarity-based farmers and large-scale agricultural investors.

It is the six farmers who are leading the way!

Although it is not widely discussed in anarcho-syndicalist theoretical and strategic literature, at least in Germany, it is not particularly new that it was peasants and agricultural workers, rather than industrial workers, who were more prone to anarchist-inspired uprisings. Since such revolts were essentially driven by workers, these workers themselves had often only recently been displaced from the countryside. This fact certainly has many different causes, but one is likely that artisanal peasants, in particular, are still very aware of their inherent autonomy: essentially, peasants need a piece of land with suitable soil, a few crates of seeds, and good community to survive. They therefore have every reason to be self-confident.

Moreover, they unfortunately have very little to lose, both now and in the past. Approximately 80% of the world’s hungry are farmers and fishermen.⁸ Even in Northern and Central Europe, the situation remains extreme; in 2021, for example, an average of two farmers per day in France alone took their own lives, with the suicide rate 50% higher than the national average.⁹ There are no figures for Germany, but various agencies report an extremely high number of burnout and depression cases. This, incidentally, does not lead to these psychological reactions being recognized as occupational diseases, nor does it mean that those affected receive appropriate medical or social assistance. ¹⁰ Farmers are disproportionately affected by the economic dimensions, but also by the raw violence, of war. 70% of people working in agriculture are women.

Ultimately, farmers, along with other green trades, are at the center of the political issues of the time: famines, food shortages, wars, climate catastrophe, forest conversion, forest fires, agricultural transformation, environmental destruction, atomization of society in the cities, capitalist alienation, imperialist dominance.

In the villages and on the fields, several things come together: the capacity for relative autonomy, partly the political awareness of several centuries of rebellion, often functioning social communities on the one hand, social hardship on the other, and finally, involvement in the most pressing political issues of the world.

The fact that this not only theoretically offers enormous potential for social movements is impressively demonstrated by the worldwide organization “La Via Campesina” ¹¹(meaning “the peasant way”). With over 80 member organizations and, according to its own figures, 200 million members, it is often described as the world’s largest political movement.¹² With its goals of a decentralized, needs-based, and environmentally sustainable economy and food sovereignty, it opposes the capitalist economic order, sometimes implicitly, but also repeatedly explicitly. Its ranks include quite moderate associations, often led by leaders, but also radical agricultural workers’ and landless workers’ associations such as the MST from Brazil ¹³ and the SAT from Spain.

As a worldwide anarcho- and revolutionary-syndicalist movement, we must take note of this movement, learn about its positions and structures, and determine our relationship to it.

The chances of the ICL

The agricultural proletariat and small-scale farmers appear, due to the factors mentioned above, to be disproportionately politicized and radicalized in many regions of the world. In many cases, these developments take reactionary directions, ¹⁴ yet there is also, at least as often, an emancipatory, anti-capitalist wing within the sector. Where this wing is located varies considerably from region to region, much like the agricultural conditions themselves. In the consumer countries of the “Northwest,” we will likely often find it in the organic and artisanal sector; in countries with a high degree of self-sufficiency, perhaps more frequently among small-scale farmers; and certainly in many places also among Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities.¹⁵

Green Trades (hereinafter referred to as GC) sections within the ICL should therefore network effectively. Federations within the ICL without such sections should consult with existing GC sections to explore the situation in their regions and identify potential points of contact. Furthermore, existing GC sections should provide support for the establishment of GC sections in other countries.

The ICL as a whole should also take seriously the fact that village-based, collective agricultural communities sometimes develop different forms of organization. They often focus more strongly on communitarian organizational approaches, which in anarcho-syndicalist theory we can best compare to the concept of labor exchanges. ¹⁶ As a result, trade unions often do not exist in such regions. A well-known example for many might be the Zapatista movement ¹⁷ in Chiapas, Mexico. The ICL must find ways to maintain continuous exchange, consultation, and support with these movements—otherwise, our internationalism will forever have gaps on the map.

Should our federations establish stable GG sections and collective CSAs within the ICL, then:

a) By achieving at least limited food sovereignty, we increase the attractiveness of our organization on another level and strengthen our role as protective organizations of the working class.

b) Are our humble voices in conversation with 200 million new workers and farmers?

c) We will significantly expand our know-how, but also our power to shape the future in the area of ecologically and climatically sustainable economic transformation.

d) Do we have good starting points to expand our experience with the organization of grassroots democratic consumer power?

What do our unions offer our colleagues?

Due to the comparatively high degree of organization and politicization in many parts of the industry, the impression could arise that the ICL needs the agricultural workers, but the agricultural workers do not necessarily need the ICL, as they create their own structures.

However, this is only partially true. On the one hand, particularly in industrialized and consumer nations, the class gap between agricultural workers and small farmers is considerable. In some countries, La Via Campesina tends to represent the lower middle class rather than the rural proletariat. ¹⁸ The Basic Law sections of our trade unions will therefore often still be necessary to conduct regular, workplace-based class struggles. At the international level, one of the most important tasks is to develop effective forms of organization for internationally mobile agricultural workers, who everywhere are most affected by exploitation and even slave-like conditions. In many countries, such as the USA, ¹⁹ child labor in agriculture is also still a major issue and, accordingly, a necessary battleground for the ICL.

And it is precisely these potential, transnational class struggles that can make the ICL so interesting for agricultural workers. Not only when it comes to migrant labor, but also in the case of farmers’ protests. These often shake several countries simultaneously, as happened in Europe at the beginning of 2024. In that case, this was because the entire EU-wide peasantry is heavily affected by common EU laws and funding guidelines. Elsewhere, cross-border free trade agreements, international crises, or wars can lead to simultaneous, transnational struggles. As already mentioned, Via Campesina often lacks a clear class standpoint in these situations; international central trade union federations also sometimes lack one, and sometimes they also have a significant lack of internationalism. The ICL has a good chance of initially forming a news and communication network in these struggles, and later a coordinated platform for struggle in order to find and strengthen the voice of workers and collectivists in these conflicts.

The ICL can enrich the struggles of the agricultural sector with something that is mostly denied to purely peasant-based forms of organization: an organic connection with a class-conscious and militant consumer base. This consumer base can, on the one hand, carry the understanding of the struggles into the cities, and on the other hand, also use the waves of struggle to initiate new, revolutionary CSAs, to connect struggles across sectors, or to expand boycotts.

In calmer times, ICL unions can support collectivist farmworkers in winning land, for example through fundraising campaigns, field occupations, and expropriation campaigns. Here, too, the value of a shared revolutionary trade union federation becomes apparent, as urban tenants and consumers and landless collectivists often face similar adversaries. For instance, in Germany, urban demands for expropriation against the real estate company Deutsche Wohnen attracted considerable attention, while at the same time, farmworkers also made demands for expropriation due to land grabbing, yet the two movements have not yet managed to effectively unite. This direction also demonstrates that the ICL must engage in intensive dialogue about concepts of expropriation and socialization beyond nationalization in order to be effective in this area.

Following on from this, ICL unions can and should play a crucial role when it comes to collective economic activity within capitalism, because capitalism itself is an attempt to do right within wrong, a squaring of the circle. Businesses that try to establish a collective, common-good-oriented cooperative economy within the individualistic, profit-driven competitive economy are all too quickly crushed by the contradictions they create. The entirety of revolutionary workers across all sectors will only be able to resolve these contradictions to a limited extent, but they can negotiate how to deal with them collectively, share knowledge, set and monitor standards, and make them transparent for consumers through labeling. This is a win-win situation for collectively owned businesses and their workers, but also for the ICL unions, which can gain a wealth of experience that will be valuable in more revolutionary times. Last but not least, individual collectives and trade union federations thus arrive at a practice in which industries are deliberately designed in such a way as to prepare them for revolutionary or crisis-ridden times.

And therein lies another point where farmworkers will quickly realize the need for an organization like the powerful ICL. For many farmworkers, the awareness that capitalism and its economic logic represent a fundamental obstacle to securing the foundations of human life arises from their daily experiences, without them ever having read Marx or Rocker ^21. It will be immediately clear to everyone that organizing beyond their own sector and country is necessary to solve this problem. Therefore, the more seriously the ICL commits to overcoming capitalism, the more plausible organizing will appear to many farmworkers.

Conclusion: A revolutionary agriculture

What a revolutionary agriculture should look like cannot yet be said. Asking questions about the transformation of an industry is inspiring, leads to a concrete utopia, and thus makes revolutionary movements more tangible and meaningful. At the same time, this requires a diversity of voices, which we are only just beginning to acquire. It requires not only the diverse experiences of the industry’s workers, but also, of course, the perspectives of consumers and the many related trades—on the one hand, gardeners, forestry workers, and environmental professionals, but also those in water management, energy, construction, the food industry, distribution, logistics, and so on. Last but not least, a global economy also requires a global discourse among workers. If this is not taken into account, if it is not developed in a comprehensive dialogue, we quickly run the risk of falling prey to particular interests or even myths within our own industries and national discourses, without critically examining them. Above all, learning this dialogue is also a basic condition for a societal change in the political and economic conditions in general.

Nevertheless, it is clear that a revolutionary transformation of agriculture will undoubtedly pursue certain interests. It will play a significant role in reconciling humanity’s way of life with stable environmental cycles. It must rebuild and permanently protect the soil, water resources, and natural habitats.

It will have to learn to work more with, rather than against, natural processes, to manage its resources less invasively and intensively, while simultaneously ensuring the basic needs of humanity are met.

As in many other sectors, there will undoubtedly be a debate between a craft-based and an industrial vision. Both visions were characteristic of anarcho-syndicalism throughout its history, as well as of the labor movement as a whole. Do we see the future in an agriculture where many heavy tasks are performed by automated machines, or in a revival and modern development of manual labor?

Personally, I see several arguments in favor of focusing on traditional craftsmanship. The utopia of an automated “space communism” often stems from the notion that the tasks to be automated are generally unpleasant and can be overcome. However, many agricultural workers genuinely love their craft. It is factors such as bureaucratization, industrialization, heavy physical strain due to understaffing, and intensive monoculture farming that make the work less meaningful, more draining, and more arduous.

An agriculture that not only plunders the land, but also sees itself as a food producer, landscape designer (in the better sense) and as a preserver of natural resources, species and habitats, would be a profoundly meaningful and diverse field of work.

Artisanal, organic farming remains local and regional, thus becoming a pillar of relative regional autonomy. Regional agriculture, in turn, fosters a greater interest among communities in harmonizing environmental protection with food production. These farming methods are often based on extensive management, meaning methods that minimize labor-intensive work, integrate habitats, natural areas, and agricultural land, and require little energy or scarce resources.

Similar things can be said for the other sectors of the green trades. Landscape construction, forestry, and landscape planning could take on the task of constructively reconciling habitats and settlements, improving the local climate, creating healthy living and mobility spaces for wildlife, and protecting and utilizing local genetic diversity in flora. Together with wildlife biology, urban planning, the construction industry, and the green trades could create new foundations for the human-wildlife relationship and, not least, open up new philosophical perspectives for the utopian future of humanity (although the industrialized West would, of course, also have a great deal to learn from its comrades with indigenous backgrounds).

A gardener from a century-old forest garden cooperative once expressed the idea in an interview that “agriculture should create landscapes through which we enjoy walking, in which we enjoy living, and where we experience ourselves as part of, not in opposition to, nature.” This ideal, extended to our urban spaces, could become an inspiring vision for a utopian workers’ movement. There is much to discuss and many struggles to wage – globally. Let’s make the ICL the platform for this!

Cover image: FAU Dresden

And I must apologize at this point to all my colleagues in landscaping, environmental professions, and forestry for having very little industry experience in your fields and therefore refraining from making statements about them in the text. [ ↩ ]
News about this can be found here: https://usi-cit.org/?s=Unione+Contadina [ ↩ ]
So, local, secure access to land and seeds, and the ability of farms to maintain food supplies even under adverse conditions. This also includes preserving traditional craft techniques and relative independence from, for example, large machinery, seed, and fertilizer manufacturers. This is distinct from food security, which refers to emergency supplies, for example, through aid deliveries. See: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernährungssouveränität [ ↩ ]
In Germany, it is primarily represented by the Solidarity Agriculture (SoLaWi) network [ ↩ ]
For example, most CSAs operate more or less as individual farms, thus potentially competing for harvest sharers, while at the same time many also purchase shared production resources or research agricultural concepts across farms. [ ↩ ]
German is a very ambiguous language for discussing this topic. In Germany, agricultural corporations, large-scale farmers, small-scale farmers, farm laborers, and sometimes even seasonal workers are referred to as “farmers,” while elsewhere the distinctions are much more precise. This conceptual confusion was evident, among other things, in the 2023/24 protests in Germany. This text focuses on small-scale farmers, subsistence farmers, farm laborers, day laborers, and the landless. [ ↩ ]
Examples include: the Zapatista movement (Mexico, 1910), the Makhnovshchina (Ukraine, 1919), the Kronstadt Revolt (Russia, 1921), the Patagonian peasant uprising (1922, Argentina), the Spanish Revolution (1936), the neo-Zapatista movement (1994), the Syrian Revolution (2011), and the Sudanese Revolution (2018) [ ↩ ]
Julia Bar-Tal, Chairwoman of AbL Nordost, in her lecture on food sovereignty, Ludwigstein Youth Castle, October 2023 [ ↩ ]
Dr. Olaf Zinke – Farmer suicides, Agrar Heute, 14.9.21 https://www.agrarheute.com/management/betriebsfuehrung/selbstmorde-landwirten-nehmen-krisenzeiten-585274 accessed on 22.10.23 [ ↩ ]
See the topic page of Agrar Heute [ ↩ ]
Here’s the link to the monthly newsletter: https://viacampesina.org/en/media-and-publications/our-newsletter/ [ ↩ ]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Via_Campesina [ ↩ ]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bewegung_der_Landarbeiter_ohne_Boden [ ↩ ]
This will often be the case when dealing with small, family-run businesses with strong religious ties. [ ↩ ]
In addition, there are frustrated professionals from the environmental sector who are disillusioned with the political system – and certainly also from the landscaping and related professions, at least in the “Northwest”. [ ↩ ]
From the author’s perspective, these concepts have remained rather slogan-like, at least in German-language discourse, and unfortunately play only a very minor role in the current theory and practice at FAU. [ ↩ ]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatistas [ ↩ ]
For example, the German member organization Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (AbL) is clearly dominated by owners of small and medium-sized farms. Only in the youth organization (jAbL) are trainees, students, and workers more influential, but even here the thematic focus is often on starting a business, which (so far) is rarely considered collectively. [ ↩ ]
Episode on this topic in the “Last Week Tonight” format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41vETgarh_8 [ ↩ ]
On this topic, we highly recommend the highly worthwhile contribution with jAbL activist Gesine Langlotz: https://podcast.dissenspodcast.de/b11-enteignung [ ↩ ]
A “necessity” that I generally question very much. [ ↩ ]