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The exploitation of labor and the exploitation of land under capitalism have always been integrally connected – one does not occur without the other. From the violence of enclosures of commons, expanded across the globe through colonialism – ongoing acts that are the bedrock of capitalist property relations. Through the dispossession, displacement, and social control of the enclosed upon, in the service of capitalist property and labor markets. Violent expropriation of land, and the means of the sustenance of life, are the very conditions for forced production for profit. Labor is rendered exploitable by destruction of its conditions of autonomous survival. The connected character of the exploitation of land and labor is shown forcefully in the fact that the industries most directly destructive of nature are also those which have been most dangerous and deadly for workers and for Indigenous people. Logging, mining, fishing, farming. Ending the exploitation of one is not possible without ending the exploitation of the other. And yes, this includes landback for Indigenous peoples. Ownership of the earth in the pursuit of profit is the condition driving the destruction of nature and the destruction of planetary (including of course human) life. People are rendered as labor for sale and purchase when nature, their means of survival is. A fundamental position of green syndicalism is that those working class, those exploited by capital in re/production and distribution and forced to survive through the labor market are crucially placed to end the dual exploitation of land and labor. This is so for a few key reasons.
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