In Europe, almost no one on what passes for the Left has paid any attention to labour relations in offshore wind. Hopefully this article can point those studying "green capitalism" to the need to speak with and learn from the workers who are actively organizing a largely unorganized wind industry.

To your point about the building trades unions in the Northeastern USA, I think one of the many reasons the national Republican Party and its many think tanks are opposed to offshore wind is that it necessitates the growing socialization of labor in states with higher than average union density.

Indeed, one of the arguments is that the degree of the socialization is much deeper in offshore wind than in onshore wind or solar, and not only because of the linkages with equipment manufacturing, but because of the material specificity and challenges of offshore construction and maintenance.

oh and I guess this qualifies as new Danish Marxism 😂 @dkmarxsoc.bsky.social

Unfortunately, it's not open access, but get in touch if you'd like to read it and don't have institutional access!

A few of these cases are explored in the article, with a focus on the North Sea, where offshore wind has been developing for the longest. I hope the article spurs similar investigations in China, where the industry has become even larger, and in the Baltic Sea, where it is expanding more and more.

As offshore wind farms get larger, these power plants start to resemble the coal and nuclear power plants where organized workers have long built collective power. As the scale of investment and production grows, new vulnerabilities arise that workers are starting to leverage to improve conditions.

The piece is written in conversation with @matthuber.bsky.social on the growth of renewable energy as a “desocialization” of production. This argument is very compelling, but it also has its limits, as the coercive force of competition always compels capital to socialize production at new scales.

It’s easy to simply denounce renewable energy as another capitalist industry. The real challenge is to understand how the increasing socialization of labour within the industry creates some of the conditions for the reconstitution of the working class as a political subject.

We’re already seeing this structural power developed and tested through recent industrial actions in Germany and Denmark, where workers are organizing into trade unions and taking strike action in both the construction and operations and maintenance (O&M) of large-scale offshore wind farms.

It looks at how the natural conditions of offshore wind power production and the development of the productive forces necessitate the organization of highly socialized labour regimes, giving rise to new forms of structural power on the part of maritime workers.

🚨NEWS: I recorded my lectures on Volume 1 in 2023. Imo, I think they're pretty good! (And different from Harvey, etc). It was my 5th time teaching the book, and I think I finally "got" a lot of stuff.

So I put them all on Youtube as a playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOFe...

Sean Sweeney from @tuedglobal.bsky.social has done much of the work in charting the path forward.

Read his excellent report from 2024 here: