class struggle

By Michael Levien - Historical Materialism, March 2023

Review of Matthew Huber, (2022) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, London: Verso.

The year-long American saga that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored the difference between two ways of mitigating climate change at the national level. The first is elite climate policy in which wonks and technocrats come up with the smartest policies to incentivise private capital to invest in the right technologies. This is, ultimately, what we got with the IRA, which has been accurately characterised as the triumph of ‘green industrial policy’.¹ The second is popular climate politics which seeks to build a broad political coalition for decarbonisation by tying it to social programmes that directly improve people’s lives. This is the idea behind the Green New Deal, which to a surprising extent made its way into the initial Build Back Better bill before Joe Manchin got his hands on it. Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War provides a powerful critique of the first while advancing a labour-centred version of the second.

Huber lands many good punches against what he calls professional-class climate politics. Building on the Ehrenreichs’ concept of the professional managerial class (PMC),² Huber argues that PMC climate politics characteristically over-emphasises that class’ stock-in-trade: education and credentials. In their hands, climate politics thus becomes a matter of knowledge (communicating the science) more than one of power (tackling the class power of the fossil-fuel industry). PMC policy technocrats further internalise neoliberal logic with their obsession with pricing carbon – a policy that ultimately balances the carbon budget on the backs of working-class consumers. In its more radical manifestations, PMC environmentalism – degrowth being the main target here – espouses an ascetic ‘politics of less’ that has no resonance with working-class people who already do not have enough. This type of environmental politics, Huber argues, explains why the right has been able to mobilise the working class against the environment.

By way of alternative, Huber advances a theory of working-class climate politics which he dubs ‘proletarian ecology’. The starting point, developed over Chapters 1 and 2, is to recognise that industrial fossil capital is responsible for the vast majority of emissions. As Huber sketches with discussions of the cement and fertiliser industries – for the latter, Huber draws on some interviews with managers of a fertiliser plant in Louisiana – their carbon intensity is not a matter of greed but of the structural imperative to produce surplus value, and therefore will not be halted (as opposed to greenwashed) by any amount of shaming. Thus, ‘Climate change requires an antagonistic approach towards owners of capital in the “hidden abode” of production’ (p. 106). The problem is that ‘the climate movement today – made up of professional class activists and the most marginalized victims of climate change – is too narrowly constructed to constitute a real threat to the power of industrial capital’ (p. 69).

This brings us to the bold and controversial claim of Climate Change as Class War: it is the working class (and organised labour in particular) that must be the main agent of radical climate politics, not the diverse coalitions of ‘marginalised groups’ – which includes Indigenous movements against pipelines and Black-led environmental justice organisations – who are currently the vanguard of the climate justice movement. What Huber calls ‘livelihood environmentalism’ only sees the working class as having environmental interests when their communities’ land, water or health are directly threatened (p. 195). Huber’s theory of proletarian ecology, by contrast, proceeds from the broader recognition that ‘a defining feature of working-class life under capitalism is profound alienation from the ecological conditions of life itself’ (p. 188). Thus ‘a working-class interest in ecology will emerge not from the experience of environmental threats, but from a profound separation from nature and the means of subsistence’ (pp. 181–2). Rather than defending bodies or landscapes, it will focus on the working class’s material interest in decommodifying the means of subsistence (p. 196).

By Union Jake and Adam - Valley Labor Report, March 1, 2023

By anonymous - leaflet, March 2023

For a decade now, VIOME has been the only self-managed factory in Greece, where workers control the production process. It is a node in the ongoing global struggle for rebellious dignity against the capitalist onslaught that sweeps across the planet: from Rojava to Chiapas, from the Yellow Vests in France to Black Lives Matter in the USA, from the occupied factories in Argentina to the landless movements in Brazil and South Africa, from the uprisings in Iran and Chile to struggles everywhere against the privatization of the commons and the pillaging of nature.

Ten years ago, VIOME workers started producing eco-friendly cleaning products in the factory that their bosses had abandoned. Against the attacks of the state and capital, VIOME fought back and survived thanks to the support of a huge wave of solidarity that was expressed on a global scale.

The occupied factory became a crucial space for struggle, creation, and culture: autonomous markets, worker coordination from recovered factories, and cooperative projects from all over the world, the first workers' clinic in Greece, festivals, visual interventions, theatrical performances, film screenings, concerts, political discussions, solidarity actions for refugees and immigrants.

By Yuri Samoilov - Workers Voice, February 28, 2023

Yuri Samoilov, president of the Independent Trade Union of Miners and the Kryvyi Rih regional sector of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU), is taking part in a series of meetings in eight European cities, at the invitation of the International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggle. His first presentation took place on Feb. 21 in Warsaw and was organized by the Polish trade union Inicjatywa Pracownicza. Check the report here. Major excerpts from his speech follow below.

This talk took place on the same day that President Joe Biden attended a meeting with leaders of NATO countries in Warsaw. Despite many words of support, Biden failed to deliver the tanks and the Patriot anti-aircraft batteries promised in December. In Moscow, Putin played the victim and said he would continue the war to annex the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in addition to Crimea, annexed in 2014. Faced with these facts, it is urgent and necessary to strengthen the international workers’ solidarity.

The Workers’ Aid campaign for Ukraine was launched at the fourth meeting of the International Labour Network for Solidarity and Struggles in the French city of Dijon in April 2022: https://litci.org/en/ilnss-4th-meeting-gathers-around-200-activists-and-celebrates-an-important-advancement/

In the same month, the first workers’ aid convoy was sent to Ukraine, where the “Dimensions of War” Conference was held on May 1 together with the Ukrainian organization Sotsyalnyi Ruh. The 800 kilograms of food, first aid kits and generators were handed over to the Kryvyi Rih Miners and Metalworkers Union: https://litci.org/en/may-day-in-ukraine-celebrates-workers-international-solidarity/

At the end of September, the Labour Network sent the second workers’ aid convoy with a ton of first aid kits and power generators to the town of Kryvyi Rih where they met with local unionists and activists. See the photo report: https://litci.org/pt/2022/10/14/sindicalistas-realizam-o-Segundo-comboio-de-ajuda-operaria-a-ucrania/ On December 17, the International Conference of the Workers’ Aid to Ukraine Campaign was held, with the participation of more than 200 activists from 23 countries. On this occasion, an international crowd-funding campaign was launched to help workers during the winter. Watch the video about the activity here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu5XQpVZXVY

Here are major portions of Yuri Samoilov’s speech at the meeting in Warsaw:

By Union Jake and Adam - Valley Labor Report, February 27, 2023

By Union Jake, and David Story - Valley Labor Report, February 22, 2023

By Hamilton Nolan - In These Times, February 20, 2023

Web editor's note: the author repeats the debatable claim that working class voters have gravitated towards Trumpism and the Republican Party, but in actual fact, it's white, rural, (mostly male) residents who earn less than $70,000 US annually without college degrees that have made this shift, but such voters do not represent the majority of the working class, and many of them are not actualy working class at all, so this shift is vastly overstated. That said, the condemnation of the Democratic Party us well deserved anyway:

Political strategists seem content to cede red states to Republicans, and thereby confirm for the working people living in those states that their belief that Democrats don't really care about them is justified.

After almost two years on the picket line, the hundreds of United Mine Workers of America members who have been on strike at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama have offered to go back to work. They still do not have the fair contract they have sacrificed so much for. Their negotiations will continue, but they did not win this strike—and that is tragic. The company and its private equity owners bear the most direct responsibility for precipitating this heartless, inhuman struggle. But if you are looking for a meaningful place to focus your rage over the way that this strike has turned out, look directly at the Democratic Party.

Imagine, hypothetically, that we were living in a period of history in which inequality has soared for a half-century, thanks in large part to the decline of unions and working-class bargaining power; in which the American Dream has been hollowed out, and decades of economic gains have flowed almost exclusively to the rich; in which poorly designed free trade policies supported by Democrats have sucked middle America dry of once-abundant blue-collar jobs; in which the obvious failures of neoliberalism to rectify this situation have soured millions of once-reliable blue voters on the Democratic Party, and tempted them into a Republican Party that offers easy scapegoats for systemic problems; in which this toxic lack of opportunity paved the way for a xenophobic, lying narcissist to spend four years in the White House on the strength of racist fables about making America great again. Imagine, further, that after those dark four years, Democrats were back in power; that they had a leader who proclaimed himself the most pro-union president of our lifetimes; and that he led a party that fretted continuously about how to win back working-class voters from the clutches of Trumpism.

Then imagine that there was a long, grinding strike. By coal miners. In Alabama. Who were fighting against the predations of the sort of ultra-insulated capitalist financiers who are accelerating the inequality crisis. Imagine that walkout became the longest major strike in America, dragging on well past the point when most people would have given up, with the strikers assaulted by oppressive police and court rulings. And yet, for month after month, these workers persevered, held the line, and sacrificed greatly in order to fight for dignity and the fundamental ability for working people to be treated fairly by the faceless forces of capital.

By Jake Johnson - Common Dreams, February 17, 2023

"The railroads, their CEOs, and the hedge fund robber barons will not listen, but railroad workers have the solution to managing and operating critical railroad infrastructure."

An alliance representing rail workers across the United States published an open letter late Thursday urging all of organized labor to support the nationalization of the country's railroad system, arguing that the private and inadequately regulated industry has "shown itself incapable of doing the job."

"In face of the degeneration of the rail system in the last decade, and after more than a decade of discussion and debate on the question, Railroad Workers United (RWU) has taken a position in support of public ownership of the rail system in the United States," reads the letter, which was published as the small town of East Palestine, Ohio is attempting to recover from the toxic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train two weeks ago.

"We ask you to consider doing the same, and announce your organization's support for rail public ownership," continues the letter, which was addressed to unions as well as environmental, transportation justice, and workers' rights organizations. "While the rail industry has been incapable of expansion in the last generation and has become more and more fixated on the operating ratio to the detriment of all other metrics of success, precision scheduled railroading (PSR) has escalated this irresponsible trajectory to the detriment of shippers, passengers, commuters, trackside communities, and workers."