["The way for the climate movement to start winning is to treat
climate change as a class struggle" is how reviewer Williams
characterizes this books main argument.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CLIMATE STRUGGLE  
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Casey Williams
October 1, 2022
Radical Philosophy
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_ "The way for the climate movement to start winning is to treat
climate change as a class struggle" is how reviewer Williams
characterizes this book's main argument. _

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_Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet_
Matthew T. Huber
Verso
ISBN: 9781788733885

The US Congress passed its largest ever investment in clean energy in
August – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and yet it remains
impossible to shake the feeling that, as Matthew T. Huber puts it,
‘the climate movement is losing’ in both the US and globally.
Fossil fuels still provide the vast majority of the world’s energy.
Pipeline protests and youth climate strikes, irrepressible in 2019,
have seen their momentum scotched by the pandemic. The Russian war in
Ukraine now provides a national security pretext to ‘drill, baby
drill’ in the US, UK and elsewhere, as supply shortages drive record
profits. Even the IRA represents a victory not so much for the
‘climate movement’ as for investors in ‘green capital’, who
stand to benefit most from new clean energy tax credits. Meanwhile,
climate disasters multiply, and the people who dragged the world into
planetary catastrophe still call the shots.

Given the venality of the global ruling class, content to place
scattered ‘green’ bets while sucking every last dollar out of
fossil fuels, the way for the climate movement to start winning is to
treat climate change as a class struggle, Huber argues in his new
book, _Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming
Planet_. ‘Capitalists who own and control the means of production
_produce_ climate change’, Huber writes. Only the working class has
the numbers and leverage to challenge these capitalists at ‘the
point of production’, he argues, and only a climate politics
anchored in traditional labour demands for _more_ – money, safety,
and control over production – has a chance of winning workers to the
cause. For Huber, slashing personal emissions, pricing carbon, or,
really, doing anything that does not build up the power of capital’s
primary antagonist – labour – is fiddling while the planet burns.

Reviews of _Climate Change as Class War_ have mostly focused on
Huber’s ideas about how to build a working-class climate movement in
the US. I address some of these ideas, but focus on Huber’s
theoretical points – both because Huber offers a persuasive rebuke
to liberal environmental as well as eco-Marxist thinkers and because a
coherent theory of class clarifies why a working-class climate program
is necessary not just for workers but for everyone.

Huber is hardly the first to blame climate change on capitalism. He
is, however, refreshingly specific about why capitalism is to blame.
The problem is not rich people’s SUVs, ‘growth’ in the abstract
or market inefficiencies, which might be ‘corrected’ by factoring
ecological costs into the price of carbon. The problem is the class
structure of the global economy, which concentrates power with ‘a
small minority of owners who control … the production of the energy,
food, materials and infrastructure society needs to function’, and
who use that control to extract more value from workers than they pay
in wages. Labour exploitation is bad for workers on its face. It is
bad for the climate because capitalists have come to rely on coal, oil
and gas to deepen exploitation – to squeeze more and more value out
of the workforce.

Marx observed that capitalists can squeeze workers in two ways. They
can extend the working day or use machines to increase how much
workers produce per unit of time. Because increasing worker
productivity (or, ‘relative surplus value’) has historically meant
using fossil-fuelled machines, ‘Capital’s drive for _relative
surplus value_ – that is to say, their drive to increase
_exploitation_ – ultimately entails more fossil fuel combustion and
intensification of the climate crisis’. Here Huber follows Marx’s
_Grundrisse_, as well as Andreas Malm’s argument in _Fossil
Capital_: the capitalists who built up the English factory system in
the early nineteenth century traded water mills for steam engines not
because coal was cheaper than water, but because the portability and
energy density of coal allowed them to submit workers to the rigid
discipline of urban factories running day and night. Mechanisation
also cheapens commodities churned out by the industrial system,
including food, driving down the socially necessary wage any given
capitalist must pay workers. This too increases relative surplus value
while baking carbon burn into the reproduction of everyday life.

This is not the standard eco-Marxist account. Represented by figures
like James O’Connor and Jason W. Moore, the usual eco-Marxist
critique holds that capitalism produces ecological crises because
capital plunders its ‘outsides’: ‘cheap’ labour, land and
resource frontiers, including the carbon capacity of the atmosphere,
which capital both needs and tends to destroy. It is hard to dispute
this account; from petrochemical ‘sacrifice zones’ in Louisiana to
clearcutting in the Amazon, examples of capital’s ecological
parasitism are everywhere. For Huber, though, traditional eco-Marxists
stray too far from ‘the hidden abode of production’ – a tendency
he, like Ellen Meiskins Wood, blames on neoliberalism’s scrubbing of
class struggle from the political imagination. In foregrounding the
destructive _effects_ of capitalism away from the shop floor,
eco-Marxists presumptively deprioritise the class best positioned to
address destruction’s _causes_ at the point of production: the
working class.

Crucially, class is neither an identity nor an income bracket but a
social position, defined by one’s relationship to the ‘means of
production’, as Huber stresses. If you own land, factories, mines,
apartment blocks, software patents or money for investment, you belong
to the capitalist class. If you do not – and so get what you need to
live by trading your labour for money which you then trade for food,
shelter, energy and the like – you belong to the working class. If
you work to live but your work mostly involves ideas, symbols and
images, you might belong to a segment of the working class Huber,
following Barbara Ehrenreich, calls the ‘professional class’. Each
class has firmly objective interests. Capitalists want to extract
surplus value from workers. Workers want more resources, power and
control over their lives. Capital and labour are thus at war. The
socialist view is that trying to win this war – by organising to
claw back power from the capitalists, ultimately to make the economy
serve the common good rather than private gain – is the best way to
satisfy workers’ immediate interest in material security and
_everyone’s_ long-term interest in a livable planet.

Pulled mostly from the ranks of the professional class, mainstream
climate activists have largely avoided class warfare in favour of
various forms of sacrifice – from limiting personal consumption to
campaigning for carbon pricing. Even the climate movement’s more
radical currents – fossil infrastructure saboteurs, for instance –
tend to position themselves against abstractions like growth, slipping
into a ‘politics of less’ that denies the necessity of securing
more material wealth for the majority of people. In worst case
scenarios, such a politics fuels populist anger more readily captured
by the Right than the Left, as France’s 2018 Yellow Vest protests,
sparked by a fuel tax hike, suggest. In best case scenarios, it aims
to redistribute resources from the rich to people who directly
experience worsening weather – the so-called frontline communities
routinely spotlighted by the professional-class climate movement.

These frontline communities are owed a tremendous climate debt, but,
for Huber, the climate movement’s alliance with frontline groups
(more often rhetorical than real) is a strategic mistake. People who
depend on ‘resource-based livelihoods’, especially, may be most
deserving of resources for adaptation and repair, but this does not
make them the best equipped to wrest those resources from a powerful
global ruling class. ‘While socialist politics must always assert
the right to self-determination of land-based peoples, a majoritarian
popular climate politics will not emerge from those directly
experiencing its worst effects’, Huber writes. A majoritarian
climate politics can only emerge from the majority – a broadly
conceived working class, whose relationship to capitalism is defined
not by a direct connection to the environment, but by ‘profound
_alienation_ from the ecological conditions of life itself.’

Workers’ separation from the conditions of life is the basis of what
Huber calls ‘proletarian ecology’. Echoing Italian communist Laura
Conti’s ‘ecology of class’, ‘proletarian ecology’ defines
the working class broadly: the mass of people who lack direct control
over land, housing, energy, mobility, and so on, and so must work for
money to buy commodities to live. Because workers’ access to
resources is mediated by the commodity system, the working class has
an interest in ‘decommodification’ – not just free or affordable
housing, electricity and food, but social ownership of the means of
producing what one needs to live well. Social ownership is also a
solution to climate change; the tendency to deepen exploitation for
profit is, after all, what drives accelerating combustion. For this
reason, Huber argues, appealing to working people’s interest in
decommodification – even if, at first, this simply looks like public
power or free mass transit – is key to building a climate movement
sufficiently large, committed and powerful to demand a just transition
to a non-fossil economy.

Huber’s defence of the working class as an agent of decarbonisation
and climate justice is a necessary rebuke to the view that labour is
too committed to jobs – and thus industrial growth – to lead a
movement for ecological repair. At the same time, Huber understates
the compatibility of a working-class climate politics and one emerging
from the frontlines. Labour exploitation and plundering the land are
two moments of the same process – one that involves violently
transferring ownership of the means of life from the mass of people to
a handful of capital owners, making reproduction contingent on selling
one’s labour on the market. Any movement that opposes capital’s
exclusive control of the means of life – whether made up of waged
workers, unwaged workers, land-based populations, anti-colonial
fighters, or something else – is struggling against the same enemy.
In focusing principally on how climate activists claim an alliance
with frontline communities to promote a politics of less, Huber
downplays the many examples of land-based struggles, from Standing
Rock to southwestern Bangladesh, fighting for precisely the thing
Huber suggests the labour movement also wants: popular control over
production.

Though Huber undersells it, the compatibility of working-class and
land-based struggles lends weight to one of the book’s most
important and controversial claims: the particular interests of the
working class – social ownership of the means of life – are the
interests of the human species as a whole.

Species is a loaded word. Dipesh Chakrabarty put the concept back on
the critical map in his 2009 essay ‘Climates of History’, which
argued that climate change reveals the species to be an agent of
‘geological’ change. The essay, which also popularised the
Anthropocene concept, invited a rush of critiques and awkward
neologisms: capitolocene, plantationocene, and others, all of which
observe that the species is internally stratified, with some bearing
outsized responsibility for climate change and others bearing outsized
burden. Huber inherits a version of this critique, stressing that most
planet-warming emissions trace back to a handful of capital owners who
‘have names and addresses’.

But Huber also wants to claim a universalist politics. Unlike the
bourgeois universalism of the Anthropocene, however, whose insistence
that ‘we are all in this together’ papers over actually existing
hierarchies, Huber’s socialist universalism holds that social
equality is possible only on the condition of material equality –
when no single class, by virtue of its monopoly over land and other
assets, can exert control over any other class. In this fairly
orthodox Marxist view, the working class is the ‘class to end
classes’, first, because it has a material interest in doing so and,
second, because its position in modern economies, i.e., the source of
all capitalist profits, gives workers the leverage needed to actually
pull it off.

Beyond this, the labour struggle is a struggle for universal
liberation because capital is a universalising force. Capital subsumes
difference into itself by turning human effort into a commodity
(labour power) that becomes the measure of value in general – a
means of ‘universal convertibility’ allowing qualitatively unlike
things to be exchanged. This unleashes capital’s expansionary
potential, driving capitalists to scour the Earth for anything they
can seize and sell. The universalising thrust of capitalism begins, in
other words, with the labour contract. For this reason, workers’
fight against exploitation is also a fight against capitalism’s
imperialising tendencies, including its tendency to exhaust the
capacities of ‘women, nature, and the colonies’, as Maria Mies put
it. This is what makes working class interests the species’
interests: the source of workers’ oppression – the commodification
of labour, which entails the commodification of life – is the source
of capitalism’s full gallery of horrors, including those, like
planetary heating, that appear to unfold far from the shop floor.

At the same time, labour power is the source of modernity’s
triumphs: ‘Capitalism has ushered in real historical possibilities
for human emancipation’. Yet such possibilities remain only that,
possibilities, so long as wealth produced by workers’ collective
efforts remains in private hands. Replacing capitalism with more
democratic forms of political economy is key not only to curbing
ecological destruction, but also to making the possibilities for
abundance contained in modern machinery and infrastructure serve
common rather than private ends. This is not to say that today’s
global network of factories, mines, fields, ports, wires, algorithms,
and so on should be preserved _tout court_, with workers replacing
capital’s representatives at the helm. The architecture of modern
capitalism has a tendency to degrade workers and the environment
regardless of who holds the deeds. A socialist economy has to change
not just _why_ we produce but also what and how if it is to serve
human needs into the future. The socialist wager is that a consciously
and democratically planned economy, accountable to ordinary people, is
infinitely better suited to achieving long-term human well-being than
an economy ruled by and for the few.

Bringing this vision into being requires an organised and militant
working class. As Raymond Williams put it in a 1984 lecture to the
Socialist Environment and Resources Association, building a
sustainable and democratic system of production can only be achieved
by ‘the force which is rooted in the majority interest and in the
indispensable livelihood of all the people in the society, and that,
ideally … is the labour movement.’

Looking to the US, Huber suggests first organising electricity workers
– a strategy he calls ‘socialism in one sector’. Ditching fossil
fuels will require widespread electrification under any scenario;
organisers should work with electric utilities workers, already
heavily unionised in the US, to use strikes, slowdowns and
work-to-rule campaigns to fight to nationalise electricity production,
with an eye towards improving working conditions, providing
electricity as a human right and transitioning the grid to non-fossil
sources. Building this sort of programme will require sustained
workplace organising focused on connecting workers’ interest in
workplace safety (consistently a top priority) with their positional
interest in control over the environments in which they live. If such
organising succeeds, a nationalised electricity sector might form
‘the core of a public sector-led decarbonization program’. Longer
term, the ‘disruptive capacity’ of electricity workers might
supply the muscle for working-class voting majorities persuaded to
support Green New Deal-type programs. FDR struck the New Deal under
pressure from a broad working class backed by industrial workers on
strike. Who says it can’t happen again?

There are many reasons to doubt the odds. Despite excitement around
the 2021 ‘strike wave’ and successful union drives at Starbucks
and Amazon, union density and strike activity remain at historic lows
in the US. Even if workers have a material interest in
‘decommodification and decarbonization’, the two core planks of
capitalist ideology – the free market is good; there is no
alternative – remain sturdy enough to block any quick conversion of
the US workforce into a class _for itself_. More insidiously, the
materials, machines and infrastructures that make capitalists powerful
(and heat the planet) are also the materials, machines and
infrastructures ordinary people rely on to survive. To live in a
fossil capitalist society is to live under a threat: no fossil fuels,
no work.

The hope is that labour militancy can answer this threat with its own:
no workers, no profits. More than anything else, then, building a
working-class movement for post-carbon democracy means supporting
militant labour actions, however small, that demonstrate working
people’s power to disrupt the economic and political order and
remake it in some other image. As Huber suggests, there is no better
way to get a feel for labour’s power than unionising your workplace.

* Climate
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* Working Class
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* Trade Unions
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* class struiggle
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