Oral Presentation by Daniel Roose¹
¹ Universität Innsbruck, Austria
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 3
Session: 3
Abstract
The ecological devastation that has become a defining feature of the multiple crises of contemporary capitalism, driven by the imperative of capital accumulation, as well as workers’ resistance to environmental policies, have both contributed to the recent revival of research on worker consciousness. Labour remains the principal mediator of society’s metabolism with nature and therefore constitutes a strategic source of power for democratizing control over societal reproduction. Workers may possess this structural capacity—but are they willing to exercise it? This conceptual contribution examines psychoanalytic approaches that may help to answer this question. It argues that a gap exists between, on the one hand, studies of subject development within the labour process and, on the other, studies of workers’ political and societal consciousness. The latter tend to rely on rather speculative and system-functionalist assumptions while remaining empirically underdeveloped and largely indifferent to the concrete processes of socialization both within and beyond the workplace. Conversely, psychoanalytic studies of workplace socialization rarely extended their analysis to the cognitive and affective structures that shape workers’ orientations toward broader political and societal issues beyond the firm. The paper concludes by outlining propositions for a theoretical framework capable of bridging this divide. Such a framework would guide empirical research on the formation of psychic structures in the labour process and their implications for workers’ extra-workplace political orientations, thereby trying to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of worker consciousness amid ecological devastation.