Antagonism: Environmental Defense vs. Employment Defense

Abstract

In this article, and from the sociology of work, we argue that the recurring antagonisms between sectors that defend the environment and those who defend the jobs are a political fiction. We base this argument on an ontological and epistemological thinking, through which we unveil a chain of hierarchies, inequalities, domination and exploitation, legitimated in the modern ideology of development and unlimited progress. An ideology under whose axis emerges a fictitious community of interests in which labor and capital share similar desires of progress and success. A fiction which happens to be a political and ideological strategy to portray environment´s advocates as antagonistic to job creation and development, as we can see in the salmon industry in southern Chile, approached here only as a “witness” case. A political strategy that acquires its full meaning in countries like Chile, where there is a double and growing process of precarization of nature and naturalization of job precariousness.