Feltrin’s
first key contribution is his development and use of the concept ‘noxiousness’,
i.e. production induced harm against human and non-human life. ‘It is the
accumulation of noxiousness that has led to today’s planetary ecological
crisis, with its well-known predicaments including global heating, biodiversity
loss, soil depletion and persistent organic pollution. Greenhouse gases
accumulate in the atmosphere, dioxins pile up in food chains, desertification
and deforestation march on, and plastics are amassed in the oceans’ (P.19). He
then extends the notion into ‘noxious deindustrialisation’, which refers to a
situation in which an increase in noxious industrialisation goes hand in hand
with job losses. ‘Noxious deindustrialisation thus does not refer to closing
factories, but to operating factories that require less living labour than they
used to, relative to material output and total employment …; under noxious
deindustrialisation, labour gets shed, but significantly noxious factories
remain open and thus pollution continues’ (P.39). New licenses for gas and oil
exploration in the North Sea as currently discussed in the UK, for example, are
not ways of creating significant new employment. As a result, rather than
decoupling GDP growth from increasing resource usage, there is a decoupling between
increasing industrial production and employment levels (P.60).
Feltrin’s
second key contribution is his tripartite differentiation of the international
division of labour in the global political economy into ‘high-tech
(capital-profit), low-tech with cheap labour (labour-wages), and low-tech with
cheap nature (land-ground-rent)’ (P.119; see also PP.129-30). While
industrialised countries of the Global North occupy the high-tech,
capital-profit location, Asian countries predominantly compete through
low-tech, cheap labour production facilities. Many countries in Africa and
Latin America are integrated into the global political economy through the
export of primary agricultural commodities and raw materials, sectors based on
low-tech cheap natures. As he indicates, people’s location in this tripartite
structure also indicates the level of environmental pollution they may have to
endure. ‘The Global North can afford stricter health and environmental
regulations relative to the Global South. In the latter, cheap-nature economies
rely on large-scale resource depletion, becoming “nature-exporting societies”,
while cheap-labour ones are characterised by unhealthy and polluting factories’
(P.131).
Moreover,
Feltrin highlights well that a solution to the ecological crisis is impossible
within capitalism. He contrasts transitions from above with transitions from
below in this respect. Programmes such as the EU’s Green Deal are not simply
instances of greenwashing. Instead, it is an example of ‘the deployment of
state planning to relaunch accumulation on new technological bases, a statist
version of the ecological transition from above’ (P.146). State planning can
ensure a more significant expansion of renewable energy. ‘Between 1971 and 2021,
the energy provided by renewables and waste (including biomass and hydro, as
well as solar and wind) has grown more than threefold, from 29.6 to 90.8
zettajoules. However, the increase of their share in the world’s total energy
supply over the same period has been underwhelming: from 12.9 to 14.7 per cent’
(P.134). Hence, state-led efforts at green capitalism can never overcome the
crisis of global ecology nor challenge capitalist exploitation.
The
capitalist mode of production with its sole focus on profit maximisation
inevitably consumes ever more cheap natures, causing further pollution. Only by
overcoming the capitalist growth imperative, is a more fundamental change of
course possible. ‘The logical conclusion is that, in the absence of a global
transition to an ecological form of socialism, it will be impossible to fully
transform production to guarantee a sustainable metabolism between human and
non-human nature’ (P.214). And in order to achieve this, we need an ecological
transition from below. ‘The ecological transition from above designates
projects for a transition in the interest of capital, a transition that does
not question the centrality of the profit imperative. Vice versa, the
ecological transition from below is a project for the transformation of
production geared towards environmental sustainability in the interest of the
working class’ (P.215).
Workers
suffer from both, exploitation at the workplace as well as environmentally
unsafe living conditions. However, their fragmentation often makes collective
resistance difficult. Within capitalism, workers depend on wage labour in order
to ensure their own social reproduction. This ‘job blackmail’ often prevents
cooperation between workers and communities. Feltrin provides the example of
Quintero-Puchuncavi in Chile. The workers employed in the noxious industries
depend on this income, while they tend to live further away from the production
sites. The fenceline communities, on the other hand, hardly benefit from the
wealth created by these noxious industries, neither in the form of jobs nor in
the form of access to quality services. ‘In 2020, 32.1 per cent of the
Puchuncavi population lacked access to basic services, compared to a national
average of 13.8 per cent. Additionally, the multidimensional poverty rate in
both Puchuncavi and Quintero was at about 27 per cent in 2017, compared to a
national average of 20.7 per cent’ (P.157). Unsurprisingly, there is a division
on how to respond to noxious industries. While workers are in favour of a
technological upgrade of production facilities to minimise pollution, the community
supports the wholescale closure of the factories (PP.159-60).
As
Feltrin makes clear, the challenge is to overcome these divisions. ‘The
convergence between workplace and community mobilisations is a critical step in
the construction of alternatives to the jobs versus environment dilemma’
(P.166). And it should be possible. After all, workers are not only wage
labourers in the workplace, but they are also part of the wider community.
Pollution affects them at the workplace and at home. In other words, there are
clear links between production and the sphere of social reproduction. ‘Working-class
environmentalism can be both workplace-centred and community-centred.
Workplace-centred environmentalist struggles demand a cleaner labour process
from the workplaces, while community-centred environmentalist struggles reclaim
a healthier and safer ecology in the neighbourhoods’ (P.173).
And
yet, Feltrin’s example of struggles against pollution in Porto Marghera/Italy
indicates that combining workplace-centred with community-centred struggles is
anything but automatic. ‘Even if both sides were sincere in their efforts to
apply the principles of working-class environmentalism, the discrepancy between
their social and technical compositions both obstructed the search for a
unified political platform and obscured the common class base of their
grievances’ (P.209). Ultimately, the unity of struggles can only be
accomplished in concrete moments of class struggle.
I
have several critical reflections as food for further thought. First, I am not
convinced by Feltrin’s definition of surplus population, which in his words is ‘more
widely known as employment precarity …; its precarity is defined by its
dependence on, but irregular access to, a monetised income’ (P.32). Capitalism
has always relied on a surplus army of labour to keep wage levels low.
Precarious, informal working conditions are globally on the rise, but they are
nothing new. Instead, especially the ecological crisis lends itself to a
different definition of ‘surplus population’. As Gargi Bhattacharyya (2018:
31) maintains, ‘the dangers posed by ecological limitation mean that not
all populations can be maintained as useful consumer markets. Instead of the
push, so long imagined and planned for, to absorb all humanity into capitalist
circuits of production, now it is clear that this over-reach cannot be
sustained.’ In other words, due to the
ecological limits, more and more people have become surplus requirement to
capitalism’s needs. They are not even useful as part of the reserve army of
labour. How else could we explain the thousands of migrant deaths in the
Mediterranean while European ships stand by? Equally, the genocide of the
Palestinian people is an expression of surplus population. They are no longer
needed as cheap labour by Israel. They are simply in the way of Israeli settler
colonialism and need to be disposed of, expelled (Robinson 2024).
I am
also sceptical of drawing on operaismo as conceptual approach. Their
tends to be a neglect of the wider capitalist structuring conditions in this
agency-focused approach. Admittedly, Feltrin is aware of this, when he points
to the danger of operaismo ‘drifting towards a voluntarism in which almost
anything is possible if the struggle is hard enough’ (P.126). Of course,
operaismo is important for the way it highlights the potential role, the agency
of workers’ in capitalist accumulation. They are never only victims of
exploitation. Nevertheless, overlooking structuring conditions within which
agency takes place implies that any findings will always be limited.
Closely
related to operaismo is this focus on technological decomposition of the
working class, highlighting the fragmentation of workers, and political re-composition
of workers in moments of struggle. ‘The dialectic of class composition entails
a permanent interplay between the movement of technical decomposition of the
working class enacted by capital to weaken workers’ power and the working
class’s movement for its political re-composition’ (Cini and Pulignano
2026: 5).
This may be analytically useful to identify the extent to which workers have
become a class-for-itself, a homogenous actor, but ultimately results in a
rather academic outside-in analysis, overlooking the concrete transformative
possibilities which may emerge in moments of struggle. Instead, as I see it,
the focus needs to be on class struggle, the moment when the internal relations
between agency and structure become revealed and potential transformations are
concretised (Bieler and Morton
2018: 49-50).
Finally,
Feltrin highlights well the potential disagreements between workers on one
hand, and the people living in the vicinity of the noxious factories, making
joint struggles against exploitation and pollution difficult. What he does not
reflect on is the even more difficult situation where noxious production such
as coal-fired power stations negatively impacts through their large amount of
greenhouse gas emissions the environment of communities living far away on the
other side of the planet. If workers find it difficult to show solidarity with
fenceline communities, how can it be possible that they show solidarity with
communities far away?
A
different, yet related case is arms manufacturing in the UK. It is known that
the arms produced in factories by RAFAEL, Elbit Systems, Leonardo or BAE
Systems are used by Israel in the genocide of the Palestinian people. And yet, in
March 2024 the General Secretary Sharon Graham of Unite, the union which
organises many workers in these companies, emphasised that the protection of
jobs always had to come first. It was then thanks to activists that this position
was overturned in July 2025 ensuring that Unite took a stance against arms
production for Israel (Red Pepper Media,
5 August 2025).
As this case shows, solidarity across geographical distances is possible, but
not automatic. Ultimately, again, this depends on dynamics of class struggle.
Despite
these minor points of conceptual and empirical criticisms, however, this is an
enormously important book with concrete implications for ongoing class
struggles against capitalist exploitation and ecological destruction. As
Feltrin argues, ‘we are now seeing, in the [West], a shift to a “white” plan of
capital. State interventionism remains, but the ambitions at an ecological
transition are dropped and, with the rise of the far right, a more explicit
white suprematism is embraced’ (PP.33-4). The rise of the far right across the
Global North is an indication of this shift and resistance to ensure survival
of humanity is more necessary than ever. Workers and the World is a must-read
for everyone interested in a transformation beyond capitalism!
Barbarism
or Eco-socialism, there is no other future!
Andreas Bieler
21 September 2026
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