GKN sit-in Festival: ‘the exploiters need us, but we don’t need them’

By Hilary Horrocks

Five thousand people joined a march in Campi Bisenzio, near Florence, on Saturday evening 6 April, organised by the sacked workers at the huge GKN factory, who have been fighting for two-and-a-half years to keep their workplace open under public ownership and workers’ control.

Shop stewards from the ex-GKN workers’ collective at Campi Bisenzio, Florence, leading 5000 marchers last weekend. The large banner bears their slogan, Insorgiamo (Let Us Rise Up)

The dispute and the occupation of the factory continues, since an Italian labour court ruled against the final attempt to dismiss the 400 GKN employees just before the deadline of 1 January this year. Now, though, the workers are not receiving any wages.

The demonstration at the weekend was called by the workers’ Collective in response to an attack on the occupied factory by the management, the most likely organisers of a break-in in the early hours of the morning last week to cut off electricity to the plant.

The Collective was set up in 2017. In July 2021 Melrose, the owners of GKN, announced that they planned to shut down the factory and sell it off to property developers. Since then, the Collective has become a nucleus for a campaign that has won wide support in the climate justice movement and in the community.

The ex-GKN Collective has argued forcefully and convincingly, with the participation of academic researchers, for a just transition away from the factory’s former role of turning out car axles, towards the production of socially useful items such as cargo bikes and solar panels, vital in the battle to save the climate.

‘Capitalism is anti-us’: ex-GKN workers champion ecological transition

On 9 July 2021, Melrose Industries announced the closure of its GKN Driveline (formerly FIAT) factory at Campi di Bisenzio, near Florence in Italy, which produced axles for cars. More than 400 workers were laid off. While in many such cases the workers and unions settle for negotiating enhanced redundancy benefits, the GKN Factory Collective took over the plant and kickstarted a long struggle against its closure.

Cartoon from the factory collective’s facebook page

But what makes the ex-GKN Florence dispute really unique is the strategy adopted by the workers, who sealed an alliance with the climate justice movement by drafting a conversion plan for sustainable, public transport and demanding its adoption.

This strategy engendered a cycle of broad mobilisations – repeatedly bringing tens of thousands to the streets – so that the dispute still continues, and the permanent sit-in at the factory remains until today.

The workers were meant to be finally dismissed on 1 January 2024. The GKN  Factory Collective had thus turned New Year’s Eve into a final call to action to defend their conversion plan. Such pressure from below probably played a role in a decision by the labour court, announced on 27 December 2023, to overturn the layoffs for the second time.

The workers’ current plan is to set up a cooperative for the production of cargo bikes and solar panels, as part of a broader vision for a worker-led ecological transition. This needs material solidarity, now. A popular shareholding campaign has been started, to launch this co-operative: so far more than 600,000 euros have been collected, towards a target of one million euros.

All information on how to contribute, individually or as an organisation, can be found at the website Insorgiamo.org.

How to do away with fossil fuel consumption

By Simon Pirani

Fossil fuels are used in most of the economic processes that go on every day. Most of the technological systems all around us – electricity networks, transport systems, urban built environments, industrial and agricultural production, military systems – depend on fossil fuels.

To understand why fossil fuel consumption is frightfully high and rising, we need to understand these technological systems and the way they are embedded in social and economic systems. This understanding is a weapon in the fight to move away from fossil fuels, changing all these systems in the process.

In this article, I will (1) offer an overview of the processes through which fossil fuels are consumed, and how researchers analyse these; (2) discuss how Karl Marx’s theoretical approach might help us develop this analysis; (3) suggest ways to envisage the transition away from fossil fuels; and (4) comment on the strategies needed to hasten the transition.

The article is based on a talk I gave at the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Berlin[1] and sets out arguments made in my book Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto Press, 2018), which may be downloaded free here.

The Rosa Luxemburg foundation have published this article in German here.

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1. How consumption happens  

Putting an end to fossil fuel burning in the coming decades is one of the most pressing tasks facing humanity. Of the greenhouse gas emissions that are the main cause of global heating, at least three quarters result from fossil fuel use.

Steelmaking in the US

A growing cohort of young people understand all this only too well, turning out in their tens of thousands to block the coal mine development at Lutzerath and other fossil fuel projects. 

To have any chance of keeping global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, fossil fuel use needs to go down to zero, or near zero, by 2050. Much faster would be better. Governments’ current performance is taking us into extreme danger – warming of between 2.2°C and 3.4°C – according to scientists who monitor it. 

But this is not just about the mining of coal, oil and gas. It is also about their use – that is, about the whole economy.

Reducing fossil fuel consumption will require huge technological, social and political changes.

Understanding more clearly how consumption happens, analysing and measuring it, will help us to understand more clearly what changes are needed. But the analysis and measurement involves political judgment about the way society and the economy works.

Ukraine: war makes just energy transition more urgent

By Simon Pirani

Even in the midst of war, there is a struggle for Ukraine’s energy future.

It’s one that international allies of Ukraine’s social movements need to pay attention to, because states like the US and UK, and international organisations like the European Union, will be influential in how that tussle turns out.

War has taken its toll on energy infrastructure. Photo from Ecoaction

In almost every country in the world there is a battle for influence between partisans of renewable, decentralised energy production, and those of legacy nuclear or carbon-intensive methods, who often have deeper pockets and stronger political connections.

But in Ukraine, that struggle is intensified by the unprecedented catastrophe inflicted on its energy sector by the Russian military, and the resultant urgency to invest.

“No European power system has ever suffered, endured and withstood such large-scale destruction, including during the first and second world wars”, a report by the Energy Charter Secretariat, an inter-governmental body, stated last month.

In May this year, more than half of Ukraine’s pre-invasion electricity generation capacity (27 gigawatts or GW), was occupied or damaged. That was before the disastrous destruction of the Kakhovka dam on 6 June, likely from within. Fears of sabotage at the Zaporizhya nuclear plant, Ukraine and Europe’s largest, remain.