Review: Lorenzo Feltrin, ‘Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within’
Review of Lorenzo Feltrin’s Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within
(Verso Books, 2026) 223 pages
Abstract
Lorenzo Feltrin’s Workers and the World explores the challenges and opportunities for working-class contestation of the ecological crisis under contemporary capitalism. By analyzing deindustrialization processes across the world, Feltrin shows that contemporary capitalism is unable to halt environmental decline by itself and explores the chances for workers to organize for ecosocialism. He takes inspiration from workerist struggles against nocività in 1960s Italy to show that workers and local residents can mobilize together against polluting factories if they articulate their actions in concert. However, the global decline in manufacturing without a concomitant fall in environmental pollution from these industries has weakened the working class. This condition renders it difficult to simply repeat 1960s working-class environmentalism.
Reviewed by Tim Christiaens
In the 2000s, post-workerist Marxism took the world by storm. Sporting a global cyclone on its cover, Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire laid the blueprint for a generation of activists living at the end of history. It inspired the alterglobalization movement, the tute bianche, and Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Postworkerism drew a compelling picture of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union and the deindustrialization of the Global North. Capitalism had been propelled into a new post-Fordist phase with a new revolutionary subject, the multitude. Technological automation and offshoring had allegedly altered the world of work to create space for cognitive and emotional “immaterial labor”. The old working class had dissipated together with its factories, as highly educated yet precarious knowledge and service workers occupied the eye of the storm. This multitude would use the horizontalist communication methods of immaterial labor to establish absolute democracy from below. The picture fitted well with the self-image of OWS protesters, who were not suffering under factory exploitation but contested a life of precarious underemployment crippled by debt and the neoliberal self-improvement pressures.
Yet in 2026 the post-workerist storm coming from Zuccotti Park seems to have passed without causing too much damage to the status quo. Empire’s metaphorical storm has literalized itself with climate catastrophe endangering human civilization and reactionary politicians flaming up disgruntled rural workers with the promise to “bring back coal” and stop the woke multitudes coming from the city’s liberal elites. In this new political conjuncture, Lorenzo Feltrin reinvents workerist Marxism. He takes inspiration from the workerist activists around Porto Marghera, where workers and local residents together fought against industrial pollution in the 1960s. Contrary to the prejudice of middle-class environmentalists battling politically regressive workers fearing for their jobs, the Veneto workerists found convergence between workers and neighborhoods to struggle together against industrial “noxiousness” (nocività). Pollution affected workers who were chronically exposed to toxic substances in their labor, but also the local neighborhoods where these workers and their families lived. They fought for worktime reduction and a qualitative shift towards sustainable production methods decades before the green turn of contemporary capitalism. Can we repeat this radical gesture in today’s age of climate catastrophe?
Feltrin starts from the same observation of deindustrialization that informed Negri and Hardt more than 25 years ago, but traces a different genealogy from that point in history. Negri and Hardt emphasize the growth of the tertiary sector, but Feltrin notes that this growth failed to absorb the even faster decline of employment in manufacturing. The Global North’s deindustrialization has hence created many left-behind post-industrial factory towns where the companies have downsized, jobs have disappeared, and the local populations have been abandoned. Feltrin calls this process “noxious employment deindustrialization”: manufacturing jobs disappear because factories automate or move elsewhere, but environmental decline continues unabatedly. Factories rarely close entirely, but rather shift the composition of their workforce through automation and replacing local workers with a combination of highly educated middle-class engineers and precariously subcontracted labor migrants. This new workforce rarely lives close to the factories, which shields them from the collateral damage of capitalist pollution.
Grangemouth, for example, was once a thriving industrial town in Scotland. In the 1950s and 60s, the petrochemical sector grew a booming community around its factories through an implicit Fordist social contract. Local communities would accept the petrochemical industry’s environmental side-effects in exchange for jobs, high wages, and social services. Pollution was considerable as carcinogenic toxins spread across the area and ominous lights came from the factory buildings even in the middle of night. But unions would monetize these risks into negotiated wage premiums that made life comfortable for workers and their families. Yet when younger generations started rejecting the Fordist social contract and neoliberal government policies pushed for privatizing the petrochemical sector, Grangemouth entered an era of decline. Local workers were laid off and replaced by machines, while the remaining jobs went to highly educated workers living elsewhere and precarious workers hired through subcontracting firms. The local population suffered from endemic unemployment while environmental pollution stayed. Contrary to Negri and Hardt’s predictions of a vibrant multitude, deindustrialization has, for Feltrin, primarily produced a demobilized working class struggling to stay afloat in a storm of adversities. When these populations try to organize, they often find themselves divided between local residents who want the factories to close, since they pollute the area without offering any benefits to the town, and workers who justifiably fear for their jobs.
According to Feltrin, the story of noxious deindustrialization is not just a local affair for some factory towns in the Global North. The same outcomes emerge everywhere on the globe through different processes. Not only does the downsizing of manufacturing produce un(der)employed surplus populations in the Global North, but also “dispossession by accumulation” in the Global South generates precarious working classes suffering a similar fate. The imperative of capitalist growth pushes corporations and governments to extract more and more natural resources from the Global South. Not only does contemporary extractivism add to global environmental decline, but it also dispossesses local populations of their livelihoods and pushes them to the cities, where they struggle to find employment in already tight labor markets. The global working class is hence becoming superfluous from two sides: industrial workers in the Global North are losing their jobs, while subsistence farmers in the Global South are migrating to take the few jobs left.
But would the industrialization of the Global South not make up for these challenges? Negri and Hardt already mentioned the rise of a new industrial working class in the tiger economies of China, Vietnam, or Brazil, but Feltrin denies the possibility for any return to old-school industrial politics. These more recent industrializations rarely match the previous levels reached in the Global North under Fordism. They peak much earlier and deindustrialize faster due to competition from other low-cost countries. The tiger economies often depend on technology transfers from the Global North and deploy inferior technologies overall – with the exception of China, which has recently built its own tech sector to match the US’s. The Global South’s growth model relies less on generating relative surplus value through technological innovation and more on absolute surplus value by having workers labor long hours under tight disciplining. Productivity-per-worker remains low, but many workers are mobilized under sweatshop conditions to maximize profits. The latter are subsequently channeled back to corporations in the Global North rather than reinvested in factories themselves. Such countries can only keep themselves plugged into the global capitalist economy by keeping local workers poor and precarious, while tolerating environmental noxiousness as a given. If mass working-class organization does not force factories to innovate the production process, industrial growth does not match its full potential. Rather than building capital in the Global South itself, contemporary industrialization feeds capital in the Global North with the absolute surplus value extracted from sweatshop workers. Moreover, several Global South countries fail to industrialize because they rely on natural resource extractions that generate so much ground rent for economic and political elites that they do not feel the need for building up industrial capacity.
Feltrin’s book ends on a political challenge: how to articulate working-class environmentalism in an age of climate-catastrophic counterrevolution? Despite deindustrialization, the global working class is only becoming bigger. Subsistence farmers are pushed off their lands across the Global South and finding a way into the middle class is becoming impossible in the Global North. Yet on environmental politics, the working class often finds itself split. Workers are afraid of losing their jobs, while the rest wants to combat environmental pollution without a plan for alternative job growth. That much of the global environmentalist movements aligns more with the middle and upper classes, and pushes for a “green transition from above” does not help. According to Feltrin, attempts to engineer a green transition from governmental and corporate action are futile because they fail to tackle the underlying dynamic that pushes capitalist noxiousness. As long as capital must grow, any saving on energy or reduction of polluting emissions will only result in more capitalist enterprise and hence … more noxiousness. As economist Willian Stanley Jevons already showed in the early 20 th century, saving on polluting resources like coal through, for instance, more energy-efficient new technologies does not automatically reduce noxiousness. It rather induces lower demand for coal, lower prices and hence an incentive to scale up production until the same or even more coal is used. The so-called “Jevons Paradox” explains why techno-fixes engineered from above have so far failed to reduce environmental pollution, like CO 2 -emissions. As long as the growth imperative of capitalism remains untouched, any “solution” to capitalism’s negative side-effects will only result in more capitalist growth.
But a green transition from below requires mobilizing a fractured and immobilized global working class. Inspiration can here be sought in the 1960s workerist experiments in the struggle against nocività. Not only did they mobilize both workers and local residents in a united front, but they also offered a program for genuine change. They advocated for worktime reduction without loss of pay, which would reduce workers’ exposure to damaging work environments as well as reducing factories’ overall productivity and noxious side-effects. Together with measures like universal basic income, such policies would render workers less dependent on wage-labor and hence more capable of politically aligning themselves with radical environmentalists. But the workerists also demanded worker takeovers of the factories. Deep qualitative change in the production process would require workers themselves to take control over factory management. They would not only wrest the choices of how labor is organized, what is being made, or how much is being produced, but also change the course of technological development. Worker-owners would, as both workers and local residents, have an active interest in changing the production process to reduce environmental decline, and they would also shift the aims of technological innovation. Engineers would have to create technologies that respond to worker needs rather than capitalist profit imperatives.
In my view, Feltrin’s book cannot be read as a blueprint for working-class environmentalist politics today, even if this was the explicit aim of the book. The workerist struggles against nocività cannot be repeated for the reasons Feltrin discusses. His book mainly shows what struggles could create the conditions of possibility for a genuine green transition from below. Workplace democracy or income security outside of waged employment will not directly install ecosocialism, but they are preconditions for generating a working class willing and able to fight for ecosocialism. The times have changed, after all. As Feltrin shows, the global working class is split and demobilized. While localized experiments in worker cooperatives and factory recuperations are hopeful, we are a long time away from challenging the capitalist mode of production. Political work is needed to make socialist politics possible at all. No working classes are storming the bastions of capitalism. In the 2000s, Negri and Hardt encountered a condition of revolutionary potential. They put a raging cyclone on the cover of Empire to symbolize the global multitude’s promise. In the late 2020s, counterrevolution sets the stage. While Workers and the World offers a compelling analysis of the objective conditions of contemporary capitalism, it does not convincingly identify the subjective markers of capitalism’s gravediggers in the making. A storm is coming but it does not call forth a world of promise.
Tim Christiaens is assistant professor of economic ethics and philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. They study critical theory of technology and Italian political thought with books on ‘Digital Working Lives’ (2022) and ‘An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought’ (2026).
Email: t.christiaens@tilburguniversity.edu
Bluesky handle: @timchristiaens.bsky.social
