Environmentalists Need Unions, Unions Need Environmentalists: A Review of “Climate Change as Class War”
Climate Change as Class War is a good argument for the climate movement to center production and class dynamics, but author Matt Huber’s strategy analysis is often overshadowed by his poor framing and contempt for some groups. “Going to war” with your colleagues and comrades will not help us solve climate change.
Image by stanthonys solar from Pixabay
Matt Huber’s Climate Change as Class War argues that climate politics needs to center production and appeal to the working class. But instead of building socialism, Huber is more interested in knocking down the very people integral to realizing his own vision.
The climate movement is losing. How can it win?
This question is at the core of Matthew T. Huber’s newest book, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Huber recognizes that the climate crisis is imminent and those who are proposing to fix it are largely failing. He attributes fault to the misguided strategy of the current climate movement which cannot build power to confront the producers of the climate crisis. Class War is Huber’s attempt to reorient the movement towards becoming more working class and waging war on the capitalist and professional classes.
Climate change is ultimately a problem of production, Huber tells us. Capitalists, who seek profit above all else, own the means of production. Therefore, to address climate change we need to center the means of production, and inevitably, take on its owners. The capitalist class, according to Huber, is to blame for producing the climate crisis since they own and direct the means of carbon-spewing production. The group capable of waging war on capital to meaningfully lower carbon dioxide is the working class, due to its numbers and location at the point of production. However, this class is mostly alienated from climate politics and may or may not care much about it in the first place.
Beyond just the capitalist and working classes, Huber points to a third class of people that he interchangeably refers to as the professional, credentialed, or professional managerial class (or simply “PMC”). The PMC represents a fifth to a third of the American workforce and work mainly in “post-industrial” sectors that separate them from the industrial forms of production at the heart of carbon capitalism. Huber, himself a member of this class (although he does not explicitly address it in the book), tells us the professional class does not own or control production, but has some autonomy and general economic security despite that security increasingly slipping away, especially if you are a contemporary college graduate. This is the class largely involved in the current climate movement: the network of student and environmental activists, NGO’s, academics, scientists, government staff, and others who either have the education or job security to pursue climate action.
The problem with the PMC, and thereby the climate movement, Huber tells us, is its focus on reducing consumption, their emphasis on technocratic solutions to social problems, and their faith in expertise as a tool of persuasion and progress. For Huber, such a focus will not mobilize working-class people due to its scientific abstraction and misplaced blame on consumers. As a result of that focus the PMC are and will remain alienated from the concerns of the working class. Therefore, in order to mobilize the working class, climate politics cannot be associated with consuming less or advancing technocratic policies like a Clean Electricity Standard, for instance. Instead, climate action must speak to benefitting people's material lives. Huber says he is pursuing a “polemical war” against the professional class in order to loosen their grip over the climate movement in terms of its leadership, strategy, and appeal.
How then does the climate movement shift from the current movement who cares about climate change but are incapable of truly confronting it, with a class of people who are passive about climate change but are capable of confronting it? For Huber, the Green New Deal represents this politics. With the inclusion of union jobs, universal healthcare, and housing, all through public investment, the program has the potential to mobilize a mass of working people, since it speaks directly to their material interests. To achieve a Green New Deal, Huber rejects revolution and prefers an electoral strategy to secure working class victories, even as he recognizes its limits. He highlights the Bernie Sanders election campaigns as evidence of the left trying to take shortcuts to building power, rather than having organized working class people beforehand. Speaking on FDR and what brought about the New Deal, Huber writes “The point is, this activation of a working-class electoral majority happened after, not before, a mass outbreak of independent and militant working-class actions in the form of strikes and unionization.”
Here, Huber skirts electoralism for union and non-union strikes in the name of a Green New Deal. One strategic sector he deems worth prioritizing is electricity. This is because of the necessity of electrifying everything in order to prevent carbon pollution, but also because the electrical sector already has relatively high rates of union participation. Moreover, if they went on strike, in the words of President Joe Biden, “the country would shut down.” If these unions can make a clean energy transition a major part of their demands or perform strikes in pursuit of such demands, Huber tells us, we might actually have a chance of avoiding climate collapse, and ideally, a worker-hostile “green capitalism.”
The last two chapters of the book where this strategy is outlined is Huber at his sharpest. His emphasis on the role of blue collar workers is a needed one. It is true, we should not expect the type of societal transformation required unless a massive number of people are activated and mobilized around climate action, far beyond the halls of NGOs, think tanks, and government offices. The working class, with their numbers and ability to stall production, are vital to avert collapse.
While Huber is right in this regard, his analysis and solutions at different times suffer from poor framing, sweeping claims, and theoretic oversights. For instance, Huber is right to point out the potential for electrical workers as agents of change for a clean energy transition. But he fails to consider instances of the climate movement already attempting to overcome the roadblocks with getting electrical unions fully onboard. I can speak from my own experience. During my time in one Massachusetts city, I was organizing on behalf of a building electrification program that sought to require the electrification of all new buildings in the city. Taking influence from Berkeley, California, which pursued a similar initiative, my team and I tried to engage our local electrical union to support and join our efforts, along with a labor coalition of which they were a part. The electrical union was not interested. When we attempted to present our case at coalition meetings, for instance, we were shot down.
This is partly because, as it stands, most local and national electrical unions neither support electrifying everything or the Green New Deal (although with welcomed exceptions). In contrast, many electrical unions do support fossil fuel expansion as a part of an “all of the above” energy approach. These unions see it in their interest not to create divisions and maintain relationships with other unions like pipefitters and utility workers who do not support electrifying everything. Based on conversations with local coalition members and other program participants from across the states, my team concluded it was unlikely we would pull electrical unions away from the coalition consensus and to our position any time in the near future. Rather, my team had to pursue other avenues like environmental justice communities and elected officials while we continued to try to build trust with the local building trades. Massachusetts is not unique: similar efforts were pursued in New York and San Diego, and again, unions were not generally supportive. Recently, Washington state passed an electric-heat mandate for buildings and electrical unions stayed silent on the matter. Huber himself admits that, in their current iteration, these unions are quite conservative. This is a case of working-class solidarity posing a direct challenge to decarbonization, which is a fact both Huber and the broader left will have to reconcile with any strategy that relies on labor movements to address climate and ecological crises.
If we recognize such dynamics, we can either advocate for an all of the above approach such as President Biden, the IBEW, and other building trade unions already do now (and thereby ensure we significantly increase warming), or increase our ambitions and build on Huber’s proposal with more targeted questions. How, and when does labor need to be pushed? Who is responsible for doing so? Huber clarifies that he is not advocating for the current position of either Biden or the IBEW. Rather, to push labor further, he advocates for a rank-and-file strategy based on a “militant minority” of radical union members who mobilize their fellow workers. Such a radical minority could sway their members on climate action by providing political education, appealing to planetary and worker safety, and warning them that their jobs are in jeopardy due to the lack of unionized renewable jobs.
Huber’s strategy will hopefully be found by the right union members. And where precedents exist, the climate movement should follow them. But how this emerges and what form it takes—like whether to include fossil gas and coal—Huber has only speculation and his preferred outcomes. Predicated on this rank-and-file approach is a series of hypothetical ifs and coulds, largely directed at union members who are expected to form the militant minority despite their admitted conservatism and disorganization. It would appear today's building unions need both class and climate consciousness. While a rank-and-file strategy is welcomed, and electrical unions are no doubt very important, the climate movement cannot wait for and rely on potential militancy from electrical unions. Further, it’s not entirely clear how the climate movement can influence these unions given that Huber believes they can only be radicalized from the inside, but seems uncomfortable with suggesting that climate activists become electricians. His analysis raises the question, why the unions have not taken the lead in the climate fight thus far, but rather, most often work in coalition with the professionals, NGOs, and environmental justice activists Huber derides.
Presumably, it is the climate movement itself who has so far been responsible for engaging, coalescing, and pushing labor unions on climate action, and in many ways, as attempts to further incorporate them into the movement. This fact sits awkwardly with Huber’s claim that the problem with climate politics is the professional class. If it is the case that the “we” underlying Huber’s whole strategy is actually the broad climate movement, of both educated professionals and labor unions, Huber might be happy to see a new coalition formed called the Green New Deal Champions, which includes environmental organizations, social justice groups, and labor unions, including the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) who had previously endorsed the Green New Deal and climate strikes—a fact Huber omits. The intention behind the GND Champions is not necessarily new—aside from the Green New Deal itself, PMC types have been appealing to unions for decades through initiatives such as the BlueGreen/Apollo Alliance, Labor Network for Sustainability, and Trade Unions for Energy Democracy. It would appear the climate movement is already attentive towards this key sector at both local and national levels, but Huber gives no indication that this is either happening or that he is aware. The problem we face now is not whether to engage electrical unions, but how to push them beyond a centrist position like Biden’s. While activists and movements are not above critique, we should at least recognize their attempts at an author's proposed strategy before criticizing them for failing to implement it.
Ultimately what distracts from Huber’s strategy but also weakens his overall analysis is his fixation on the professional-managerial class. Like many professional class analyses, Huber’s seems less interested in whether the PMC own or control production but the type of character they have: how they behave, what they consume (or don’t), what they do for a living, and so on—in other words, the cultural markers many Marxists tell us we should not emphasize. As the late Michael Brooks described, “PMC is a state of mind,” and not about ownership or material analysis. In any case, American unions are increasingly educated, with 46 percent of members obtaining at least a bachelor’s degree. High-profile unionization efforts such as Starbucks and REI are being driven by a proletarianized professional class. Huber also recognizes that it was largely the professional class which gave rise to Bernie Sanders and the Green New Deal. To say that the professional class is the problem, while also recognizing that it is pushing the envelope on climate action, is puzzling.
In this vein, Huber’s psychologizing of academics and activists is counterproductive. For instance, he diagnoses the PMC’s focus on overconsumption or a mention of “less” as a projection of guilt about their personal affluence and consumption. The only one who might be projecting here is actually Huber. He either underestimates the scope of the ecological crisis or does not understand that it is possible to support the working class while also recognizing that capitalism depends on wasteful and welfare-degrading forms of overproduction and overconsumption in order to sustain itself. Acknowledging this is not about blaming individual consumers, but targeting capital, institutions, and systems that perpetuate such forms of production and consumption. One might include planned obsolescence, the privatization of public goods, or car-dependent America as examples of where production and consumption systems reinforce one another, often in detrimental ways according to the choices of very few. Understanding that “the American way of life” is unsustainable and blaming capitalists is not mutually exclusive. If anything, it helps people understand how pervasive a part of life capitalism is.
While it’s reasonable to criticize the degrowth movement for not having a clear strategy to equitably reduce material and energy use, Huber does not engage with the difficult questions posed by the degrowth movement, including the broken promises of green growth or how humanity can collectively live within planetary boundaries. Among his critiques is a strategic one, mostly focusing on the messaging of degrowth (what he calls a “politics of less”). But this is facile: “less” does not necessarily mean “bad” in the minds of ordinary people. Less traffic, less war, and less animal cruelty are all good things. Does Huber seriously think we can solve our ecological problems without ever invoking “less” meat consumption, fast fashion, private vehicles, or other forms of toxic production? Further, degrowth literature has been quite explicit about increasing and expanding desirable qualities like leisure time, healthcare, and renewable energy in addition to cutting back on the harms—inequality and ecocide, for instance—produced by excess growth. Huber takes it so far as to insincerely claim degrowthers support neoliberalism, writing “if you really believe we consume too much, you ultimately agree with the neoliberal attack on wages and incomes over the last several decades.” To portray all degrowthers as anxious consumers projecting their own guilt on society, rather than serious analysts grappling with the implications of the ecological crisis, makes for bad and dishonest debate.
Huber repeatedly makes the point about how important a materialist analysis is to climate politics. Degrowth largely agrees, which is why it is fundamentally materialist. Degrowth is concerned with material throughput, or the amount of materials and energy it takes to run our growth-dependent economies. Likewise, it is concerned with securing the material necessities for everyone to live a long and healthy life, regardless of increasing GDP, including universal public services and prioritizing the use value of goods. What’s so dishonest about Huber’s degrowth analysis is that he will chastise degrowth for not emphasizing “more,” and then use examples of people lacking health care as evidence of “needing more”– the exact type of sector degrowths wants to be universal and decommodified.
But degrowthers understand that securing these necessities means allocating limited ecological space towards meeting sufficient needs for all, rather than wasting it on lavish production and consumption by a wealthy few. Degrowth-type policies are exceptionally popular, like four-day work weeks, protecting the environment over GDP, and the right to repair. Even Bernie Sanders recognizes that growth harms the environment and that the benefits are captured by the rich. These details and proposals are largely missing from Huber’s analysis, making it unclear whether he agrees with degrowth substantively. If it is any consolation, degrowth advocates don’t care if we call our ecosocial program “degrowth.” What matters is the critique, analysis, and solutions being included; hence why degrowth and a Green New Deal are compatible.
Like much of the climate movement, Huber suffers from a case of carbon tunnel vision—the idea that we only or narrowly focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions at the expense of other sustainability issues. Climate Change as Class War lacks consideration of additional ecological problems like biodiversity, animal agriculture, or other planetary boundaries—issues that in many cases demand rethinking our relationship to production, consumption, and capital. According to the United Nations International Resource Panel, for instance, 90 percent of biodiversity loss and water stress are caused by resource extraction and processing. The more growth, the more extraction, the more ecological harm. Therefore, in recognition that we are in an ecological emergency and not just a climate crisis, we need a holistic program rooted in sufficiency and strong sustainability. Huber’s analysis, while understandable for its pragmatism, is too narrow and atomized for 21st century ecological politics.
Finally, Huber’s lack of attention and analysis regarding nation states, their role in fossil fuel expansion, or colonialism throughout his book is insufficient for building socialism on a warming planet. Just as he rejects carbon footprint analyses, Huber rejects geographic analyses as well. This, despite the fact that Global South countries disproportionately bear the brunt of climate impacts, in addition to being sites of major resource conflict, all while producing far less emissions and using fewer resources than the Global North. In light of this, Huber hand-waves at these inequities and assumes that a North-South framing is an attack on Northern workers, or, again, a projection of “guilt-ridden” professionals.
While every analysis has its limitations, a North-South framework still has value and adds to our understanding of the global ecological crisis. Since Huber’s book is presumably about capitalism, it would be wise of him to understand how capitalism depends on imperialism, and in particular, a periphery to extract, exploit, and pollute. We do not have to and should not blame workers for this arrangement. Rather, we can recognize that it is the case that Northern production and consumption depends on the South’s drained labor, energy, and resources because of capitalism’s perverse matrix of incentives. Additionally, global climate commitments often take place at the national level. So, from a political standpoint, a focus on nations and the speed, scope, and scale at which they take climate action is necessary, especially since countries have “common but differentiated responsibility.” If Huber were to take these insights of decolonial scholarship and history seriously, it would enhance what can be an otherwise parochial analysis of capitalism, class, and ecology.
Climate Change as Class War is an argument for the climate movement to center production and class dynamics. Huber is at his best when he is developing strategy for building bridges between what can still be timid relationships between union workers and the environmental movement. I personally love his answer to the common question, “what can I do to save the climate?” where he responds: “join a union.” Hopefully some who work for solar companies, for instance, will hear such a message. But Huber’s strategy analysis is often overshadowed by his poor framing and contempt for the diversity of those working on different, but complementary, environmental intersections. I would argue we should direct that disdain towards the capitalist class who Huber rightly targets in the first two chapters. But “going to war” with your colleagues and comrades will not help us solve climate change. Rather, it will probably just make for awkward staff meetings.
Andrew Ahern is an ecological activist and freelance writer based in Massachusetts. You can follow him on Twitter @PoliticofNature.