Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

by Matthew T. Huber

Overview

How to build a movement to confront climate change

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change.
 
Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788733892
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Climate Change as Class War 1

I The Capitalist Class

1 The Hidden Abode of the Climate Crisis: Industrial Capital and Climate Responsibility 51

2 Carbon Exploitation: How the Nitrogen Cycle became Fossil Capital 79

II The Professional Class

3 Credentialed Politics: Knowing the Climate Crisis 109

4 Carbon Guilt: Privatized Ecologies, Degrowth, and the Politics of Less 143

III The Working Class

5 Proletarian Ecology: Working Class Interests and the Struggle for a Green New Deal 179

6 Electrifying the Climate Movement: The Case for Electricity as a Strategic Sector 221

7 Power in the Union: History and Strategy in the Electric Utility Unions 257

Conclusion: Species Solidarity at the Climate Crossroads 283

Acknowledgments 297

Index 299

Editorial Reviews

Huber has written a ‘What Is To Be Done?’ for all of us who are vexed by the failure of progressive climate activism to produce a blueprint for a national action with clear strategic goals. In a blazing critique, he skewers ‘radical’ as well as liberal environmentalists who advocate market solutions to a crisis whose very cause is the cost-and-profit logic of energy markets. Equally he shows that the electoral road to a Green New Deal is a dead-end without a massive public struggle, integrally involving labor, for public ownership of the power industry. The shelves groan with books on the coming apocalypse , but here, at long last, is a concrete strategy for socialists.”
—Mike Davis

“More and more people recognize capitalism as a primary driver of climate change. Matt Huber takes the crucial next step. He powerfully demonstrates not just why working class power is indispensable to a just transition but how we build it.”
—Jodi Dean

“The most powerful missile yet hurled against bourgeois climate politics. With a laser-sharp focus, it strikes at the central fortress: the sphere of production, where one class dominates another and wrecks the planet in the process. A book for every union organiser and every climate activist and everyone who wishes for the two to join forces—to be read, studied, debated, aimed and fired.”
—Andreas Malm

“This book represents an important and timely contribution to the climate fight.”
—Jonathan Rosenblum, Jacobin

“We know we need to challenge the power of fossil capital to preserve a habitable planet—but how? Climate Change as Class War injects a necessary dose of strategic thinking into debates about the way forward, arguing for a mass climate politics rooted in the decommodification of basic needs and an organizing strategy focused on workers who can exert power at the point of electricity production. Huber’s sharp analysis and challenging arguments open up debates that climate, labor, and socialist movements badly need to have.”
—Alyssa Battistoni

“Climate Change as Class War is an audacious argument, particularly in its unabashed revitalization of Marxism.”
—Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture

From the Publisher