Fuel for Thought: Lessons from Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet by Matthew Huber
by Vince Carducci
Syracuse University geographer and DSA member Matthew Huber will discuss his new book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022) on Sunday, May 22, at 3 PM at Source Booksellers, 4240 Cass Ave, #105, Detroit. He will then meet with Metro Detroit DSA members and friends later that day at Clark Park, starting at 7 PM. Register here.
A recent survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that a substantial majority of Americans, 72 percent, believe that climate change is real with an almost equal number concerned that it will harm future generations. While the climate movement appears to be winning the war of ideas, it is losing the battle for securing the planet and time is running out. After a brief pause due to the global COVID-19 lockdown, carbon emissions are again on the upswing, having reached record levels in 2021 according to the International Energy Agency.
Matthew Huber has stepped into the breach with his new book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). Huber, a frequent contributor to Jacobin and other journals, argues that climate change is first and foremost a class issue that pits the interests of capitalists over the rest of us, sacrificing the planetary future in the process. He proposes to mobilize the working class not just in resistance but as the most viable agent of change.
To construct his argument, Huber begins with a Marxist analysis of the ecology of class and the ownership of the material means of production, from resource extraction to the centrality of carbon-based fuels in the global industrial complex whose productivity has been leveraged over the past 150 years by electrification. He then critiques the underlying assumptions of current environmentalism to set up his agenda for a broadly based working-class approach to meeting the challenges of a warming planet.
That capitalism is the primary driver of climate change has become increasingly accepted with books such as Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate topping the bestseller lists. Understanding how that works is the first step toward constructing what Huber terms a “proletarian ecology.”
Climate change, or more accurately planetary warming, is inextricably tied to the development of modern capitalism, which has consumed more and more energy to expand its industrial base and pursue greater profit. The increased emissions from industrial production are at the root of all other emissions, in that all other sectors of the capitalist economy — transportation, construction, commercial, residential, etc. — depend on industrial products for their capacity to function. Electricity is the primary power source for industrial production, and the US Energy Information Administration estimates that some 60 percent of all electricity is generated from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas and coal.
Control of this production system is in very few private hands, what Huber, following London School of Economics sociologist Leslie Sklair, identifies as “the transnational capitalist class.” Huber devotes Part I of Climate Change as Class War to several of these bad actors and the ways that the material conditions of the climate are often obscured. It makes for illuminating if sobering reading.
Given that the climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production, Huber asserts that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized. That necessitates a struggle for power against the transnational capitalist class who are reaping the rewards of environmental degradation at our collective expense. So far, efforts toward that end have not met with much success.
A major impediment is the terrain upon which the struggle is being contested. The climate dispute is currently the purview of a professional class — the credentialed beneficiaries of the postwar meritocracy — who rely on scientific knowledge, technological intervention, and “smart” policy recommendations to carry the day. There is the assumption that things will necessarily change for the better if only the “objective, scientific facts” could be properly communicated and accepted and remediating tactics put in place.
The pitfall of that strategy was succinctly summed up by Upton Sinclair more than 100 years ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Even more so, when your ability to accumulate immense wealth and power depends on blatantly ignoring facts and getting others to do the same. Communicating climate statistics or attempting to address so-called market failures through mechanisms such as carbon taxes will have limited if any effect so long as there are financial gains to be made.
Another obstacle is the “carbon guilt” also associated with the professional class. On the one hand there is the “anxiety of affluence,” a continuation of the long-standing reproach of the excesses of consumerism in American culture, and on the other the virtue-signaling of what is termed “the ecology of austerity,” the imperative to subsist on less, as summed up in the phrase: “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This latter directive is particularly troubling in the way its emphasis on individual responsibility and restraint dovetails with neoliberalism, which emerged as part of the capitalist attack on unions and the welfare state coming out of the 1960s and into the present.
Furthermore, austerity ecology has little resonance among the working class, which during the past half century has seen their share of the wealth from increased productivity stagnate and even erode while the social safety net has simultaneously been pulled out from under them. It is a lot to ask of those who are barely eking out a living to voluntarily live lower on the food chain, if that is even possible.
The remedy Huber prescribes is to mobilize workers with an appeal to material interests that expands upon the purely economic to embrace a broader ecological framework. This strategy stems from Huber’s conception of the working class as those who are alienated not just from the means of industrial production but from the very natural conditions of life itself. This comes straight out of Marx’s notion of estranged labor as presented in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.” (Emphasis original.) Nature is what capitalism, at its most fundamental level, has alienated the worker from and it is the foundation of what Huber terms the “proletarian ecology.” It affects all who derive their means of survival from their dependence on market forces.
In moving forward, it is important not to cast workers as the victims of some zero-sum game, as the climate debate has heretofore done in the false dichotomy of jobs vs. the environment. In this regard, Huber holds up the Green New Deal as a model of how we might address the twin objectives of inequality and climate action. As he notes, the Green New Deal doesn’t accept austerity as a condition of repairing the environment, but instead sets out an agenda to, as expressed in the guiding principles of DSA’s version of the Green New Deal, “decommodify survival” through a combination of economic, technological, and social initiatives that ultimately benefit workers of all stripes while moving toward a sustainable future.
Of course, Huber doesn’t expect the transnational capitalist class to go gently into that good night. Here, he takes a cue from Kim Moody’s book On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War.
In that book, Moody identifies the supply chain as a potential chokepoint where workers may organize to disrupt the flow of goods, and thereby profits, as part of a rank-and-file tactic to win their demands and foster solidarity. Huber’s tactic is to move upstream to where the capacity to produce originates: the electricity grid.
In addition to being the source of much of capitalism’s ability to produce, the electric power industry is already highly unionized when compared to other sectors of the economy. It is also already subject in many parts of the country to public oversight when not publicly owned outright. It can thus serve as the cornerstone of a strategy to socialize and decarbonize the economy. If a move toward socialization can be achieved in this crucial sector, Huber surmises the potential for working-class power to expand as victories accrue and spread to other sectors.
There are obviously many challenges to Huber’s proposition. The first is mobilizing electric power industry workers against their own union leadership, which like others in the age of diminished union power have sought to maintain relationships with owners in what some would say is a misguided at best attempt to forestall givebacks and other concessions. Then there is the single-sector strategy, which is bound to come under intense opposition on the part of owners, investors, the government, and other powers of the transnational capitalist class. One may also question the prospects of expanding solidarity into the broader working population, which has been cowed by decades of immiseration under the regime of neoliberal capital. How this might expand beyond the borders of the United States is another conundrum.
Those reservations noted, Climate Change as Class War offers a trenchant analysis of the climate crisis and its sources. It should be read by anyone who cares about the environment and our future. There is more than a world to win; there is a planet to lose the longer we wait to take action.
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