With every season that passes, edging closer to potential climate and ecological breakdown, is there a more urgent contradiction? Between the profits of the capitalists and the knowledge of the scientists, how is this crisis to be addressed and by whom? Or, what is to be done and who is the historical agent with the capacity to wage this struggle? The capitalists have inexorable interests in intensifying the exploitation of people and planet and, defying all logic except that of accumulation, are investing in further extraction. The scientists have issued warnings and called for change, but make no claims about political strategy. The climate movement has managed to put the emergency onto the global agenda but has thus far been unable to force those in power to change course. In Climate Change as Class War, Matt Huber goes back to Marx and convincingly argues for the central and indispensable role of the working class in the struggle, offering a lucid starting point for a strategy that can reverse our current trajectory.

　　Huber makes three propositions about the need for a class analysis in our understanding of the crisis. First, the primary focus must be production, the point at which workers have power over capital, not consumption. Second, the climate movement needs to appeal to the working-class majority in society, not the professional and middle classes, as it does currently. Third, only mass popular movements constituted by the working class will be capable of transforming capitalist production. The theoretical emphasis on production is vital for defining the strategy and tactics of a mass movement that has any chance of defeating those in power, and the central strategy for the climate movement must be finding common cause with the labour movement, explicitly integrating the demands of working-class people into the climate movement. A radical Green New Deal is the concrete opening for that project, which would both improve the lives of working people in material terms and build a ‘working-class climate consciousness’ (p. 40) that also builds the working class itself. The tactic of building popular, inclusive, democratic mass movements must dominate—those that can take on the power of the state and corporations. Working-class agency is core to this analysis. On account of their objective structural power, workers have the capacity to take action in the immediate. We need not rely on waiting for governments to legislate against fossil fuel extraction or waiting for corporations to cease further exploration; so long as they are reaping profits from these pursuits, they are structurally incapable of doing so. Ultimately, the liberation of labour and nature, exploited in equal measure under capitalism, can only be realised by the conscious, purposeful dismantling of relations of ownership and control. Given that nature lacks agency (Malm, 2018), working-class agency is overwhelmingly our chief weapon for this task.

　　Foundational to Huber’s polemic is precisely this Marxist understanding of class. If class is not essentially about income, wealth or subjective questions of taste, but rather the relationship one has to the means of production, then consumption, lifestyle, greed and so on are secondary questions when it comes to addressing the climate. Succinctly put, class ‘is about how you generate the money that makes consumption possible’ (p. 20). The core problem, therefore, isn’t even the consumption patterns of the rich, but rather the way production is organised: a system of competitive accumulation driven by a global capitalist class that must prioritise profit above all else. Its nemesis is the international working class. Huber draws on classical Marxism to argue that the working class is powerful because it occupies a strategic location in the process of production such that it can stop production by collectively withdrawing its labour. Because it suffers wage exploitation and insecurity, the working class has a material, objective interest in overturning current relations of production. And because it constitutes the vast majority in society, any fundamental change has to involve the working class.

　　There are a number of complexities related to the degree of control one has in the class structure of a given society, who exactly constitutes the working class and how it has changed (Moody, 2017), and how gender, sexuality, race, citizenship, disability and other identities intersect with and structure class power. By virtue of being separated from the land as a direct source of livelihood and forced to survive under the vagaries of the market, the working class is made up of those people who lack access to ‘the ecological means of life itself’ (p. 46). The climate and ecological crisis is only intensifying this alienation from nature by forcing people to migrate and by becoming a driver of proletarianisation around the world. The sheer scale of the working class on a global level, whose incessant growth includes the informal proletariat, petty producers, traders and so on, also makes for being the most diverse class in terms of gender, race and so on. Objectively, it remains that only the working class, in the broadest sense, has the capacity to bring about relations that are not exploitative and alienated and, through this struggle, bring an end to emissions and chart a path out of potential catastrophe.

　　From: Critical Sociology 2023 49 (7-8)

　　Editor: Wang Yi