Ecological (Re)Production: Socialism in the Anthropocene
Matthew T. Huber | Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet | Verso Books | 2022 | 320 Pages
With the quickening cadence of crisis over the preceding decades and a growing sense of government ineptitude, opinions on liberalism have soured. Even its champions, once bullish on its stability and propensity for perpetual progress, now seem morose about its continued prospects. Among ardent supporters such as Patrick Deneen and Francis Fukuyama, advocacy appears to have turned into lamentations that liberalism is not long for this world. As told by pundits, scholars, and public intellectuals, the reasons behind its death are diverse yet interconnected: some point to the economic shock of 2008 and its long, understated effects. Others emphasize the reemergence of nationalism, authoritarianism, and an anti-rationalist political appeal. Still others suggest that liberalism’s triumph was but an interlude in illiberalism’s inevitable reign as “the permanent fact of life.”
Others, however, contend that liberalism is not so much drawing its last breath as it is being choked off by the fumes of the Anthropocene. For these critics, the confrontation between our current geological age and prevailing liberal politics has underscored the latter’s ineptitude to meet the urgency and scale of necessary climate action. For many of those writing on climate politics from the left, however, this is not so much a cause for lamentation as it is an opportunity to renew mass mobilization around the specter of climate disaster and to reimagine what is politically possible after four decades of neoliberal dominance. This sentiment is perhaps best captured in the opening lines of Stephanie Wakefield’s Anthropocene Back Loop: “Liberalism’s old structures are unraveling. We are free to create our own.” Wakefield’s assertion, which encapsulates both the declensionist anxiety and political impetus around current climate concerns, is held by a coterie of new writers hoping to organize a progressive, ecologically-minded politics in the smoldering embers of liberalism’s burned-out remains. A new climate politics is emerging—crystalizing around newer names such as Kate Aronoff and Varshini Prakash and more established ones like Naomi Klein—that sees environmental issues as the catalyst for new forms of political life that can push beyond liberalism’s shortcomings.
A new generation of writers aiming to suture climate policies and social democratic politics is ascendent among general readers and in policy circles. But beyond their own variety of thought and opinion, they join an already crowded field of left-leaning writers whose common views may not extend far beyond a shared sense of crisis. Within this literature, there are enough flavors of climate politics to satisfy seemingly every taste and proclivity, with policy suggestions to boot. To be sure, prominent forms of liberal climate politics certainly persist, from the diehard carbon pricing and market solutions crowd to the post-Al Gore environmentalists still clinging to the emaciated husk of the Paris Agreement. But in recent years, “realist” perspectives like Gore’s have lost ground to bolder and more bombastic voices on climate politics. Green New Dealers, Sunshiners, and even Invisible Committee-style, anti-capitalist eco-terrorists have wrested attention away from liberalism’s ineffective models of climate policy and politics. These voices may not always be harmonious—infighting is a tradition of socialistic politics dating back to the internationals of the nineteenth century—but they are unified in their desire to reshape the economic and political suppositions on which liberal climate politics are founded.
Consider some of the popular climate literature that has populated bookstore shelves and online shopping carts in recent years. Many, operating in the vein of Naomi Klein’s precocious This Changes Everything, yoke the issue of climate change to the economic and political structures that have characterized the last half-century or more of American life. Books like Aronoff’s Overheated, or any of the growing list of texts on the Green New Deal, demonstrate the appeal of a systemic analysis of climate issues. Many point to the rightward shift of neoliberalism–the political-economic system that replaced the stalled bureaucracy of the New Deal state in the 1980s–as a world-historical stroke of bad luck, arriving just as a strong, state-lead response was demanded to address global warming. A similar diagnosis has emerged from the long-marginalized intellectual circle of degrowth, which, until recently, had lingered on the margins of political imagination. In recent years, however, popular accounts of degrowth have emerged, such as Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, which have turned degrowth from a pithy neologism into a more robust critique of the environmental costs of growth-driven economics.
Even fiction authors are in on the climate game. In recent decades the proliferation of climate-fiction (or cli-fi, for short) has emerged as fertile ground for novelists, from Octavia Butler’s seminal Parable of the Sower to New York literary darling Ben Lerner’s 10:04 to last year’s hit Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman. This emergent literature has captured something of the personal anxiety and frenetic environmental decline that saturate life in a warming world. However, it is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future that most directly engages in the laborious (500-plus pages) work of shoehorning speculation on climate governance and environmental politics into novel form. For Robinson—once described as a “marketplace-of-ideas liberal”—the near future of climate politics is one in which technocratic managerialism, central bank policy, geoengineering, and covert eco-terrorism might all occupy legitimate space in the fight against climate change. Despite its novelistic and somewhat disjointed structure, however, Robinson follows his non-fiction peers in grappling with the strictures of politics as-is and contemplating what kinds of climate politics and policies might grow to be.
Despite this proliferating variety, many of these works share a renewed interest in mass mobilization as a means of overcoming the shortcomings of elite-centered politics. This represents a significant break from eco-political writing and commentary of an earlier generation. Many climate activists who came to prominence in the nineties and aughts tended to focus their attention overwhelmingly on one discursive feature of their conservative opposition: denialism. Their working theory of change was this: if enough people understood the scientific consensus and appreciated what each centigrade of warming meant for the balance of earth systems and the future of human life, then a responsive political system, spurred on by a rational citizenry, would force change on global warming. The only thing blocking this path, the thinking went, was a vocal group of well-funded, fringe climate change deniers who commanded outsized attention and deference from those uneducated on the scientific consensus. Credentialed elites, therefore, needed to extinguish the dark and muddy corners of denialism with the harsh, righteous light of scientific fact. Looking back from 2022, squarely within the expert-averse, post-truth era, this approach seems hopelessly naïve. More than thirty years after the first Senate hearing on global warming in 1988, it appears that no number of Bill McKibbens, no surfeit of “inspiresting” TED Talks, will extricate us from the path of planetary warming.
The starting point for the newer generation of books on climate politics is that our current predicament is not the product of minority denialism but that of the entrenched systems of power governing our world. Denialism as both an intellectual project and rhetorical strategy is largely dead, they note. (Though in the United States, a troubling number of those polled still deny climate change’s anthropogenic origins.) Instead, fossil fuel companies and politicians have opted to rhetorically embrace the science of climate change on its face while pushing policies inimical to actual change and beneficial to business-as-usual. With these new terms of climate debate, liberals’ commitments to a personal belief in “the science,” a marketplace of ideas, rational political action, and a self-reflexive, individualistic form of carbon discipline (tracking carbon footprints, flying less, and the like) matters far less than the acquisition of actual political power. In this formation, climate politics is not a question of convincing a recalcitrant opposition of scientific objectivity, but of how to gain, maintain and wield meaningful power.
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This is the point of departure for Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Matthew Huber’s recent contribution to the social democratic strain of new climate writing. In it, Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, presents a class-based analysis of US climate politics and maps out the interlocking terrain of fossil capital, political power, and climate action. Huber’s first book, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, reads something like a diagnosis of the cultural and political roots of the US dependence on hydrocarbons; Climate Change as Class War reads something like a proposed cure.
Like other prominent books of recent years, Climate Change as Class War refutes market solutions like carbon pricing and embraces the comparatively bolder Green New Deal as table stakes for the kind of government intervention required to truly decarbonize. The novelty of Huber’s contribution, as the title suggests, comes from the disciplined class analysis that he uses to diagnose the current problems of dominant climate politics and his assertion that the only real solution to climate change lies in a mass mobilization of the working class in particular.
Huber lays out the battle lines along three major class formations, which give the book its structure: the capitalist class, the professional class that has grown in proportion since World War II, and the numerically largest working class. While a simple imperative of fossil capitalism—emit carbon, extract profit—impels the capitalist class and roots carbon emissions in processes of production, Huber’s account is best when disentangling the complex of liberal anxieties of the professional class to which he (a professor) belongs. The most formidable flaw in professional class climate politics that Huber identifies is liberalism’s emphasis on the individual, which ultimately produces a myopic focus on consumption as the site of emissions. If I fly less and eat less meat, if I reduce my carbon footprint through curbed consumption, and if the countless I’s of the world follow suit, the crisis will abate. This mindset, coupled with an orientation around knowledge and belief in science rather than actual political power, has effectively defanged professional class climate politics in Huber’s final analysis. It also, he notes, fails to appeal to a broader coalition of workers who have experienced the past four decades as one of diminishing socio-economic status, precarity, and falling consumption.
Like many of his peers, Huber envisions a political program organized around a sweeping Green New Deal, but one that derives its political energies from a working class that he sees as inherently ecological in its economic interests. Where others posit awareness raising as a prerequisite for action on the GND, Huber attempts to “extend the notion of material interests into a broader ecological framework.” His goal is to reframe the struggle of the worker—which is ultimately a struggle over economic production and social reproduction—as a struggle that is innately ecological. Given this inherent ecological nature of (re)production, politicians and organizers need not worry about raising climate awareness; they need only name those new social and economic policies popular among the working class “as measures taken to address the climate crisis.” Doing so creates a positive association with climate policies; where technocratic liberalism’s obsession with personal carbon austerity alienates most people, a Green New Deal-style of climate-driven social spending would underscore the benefits of a government climate response program.
Huber’s book, beyond doing what many have done in proffering a political program to both fight climate change and build a broad, working-class coalition, does the intellectual work of resurrecting what can feel like stale Marxian class analysis and retrofitting it for a frightful new era of ecological decline. Staking out the class-based interests in the climate battle, schematizing it in his tripartite fashion, disentangles the power politics of climate change and presents a clear picture–in both economic and moral terms–of where responsibility rests for global warming and where the mobilization required to do something about it could come from. It is certainly a transformative vision of bottom-up mobilization, one that is deeply necessary at a moment in which the judicial rollback of the “administrative state” and the ability of agencies like the EPA to regulate may be at hand. If such a scenario comes to pass–as seems increasingly likely from a court packed with justices hellbent on spurning anything but the most violently conservative of agendas–then widespread mobilization appears to be the only path forward. Huber’s proposal is aspirational, yes, but operational—it provides a working theory of class, power, and politics that can be used as a plan of attack.
But the overwhelming focus on class and the structural eco-economic interests aligned with it, despite being the linchpin of Huber’s book, is also a source of discordance. Or, at the very least, it represents a theory of political motivation that is under question in the era of culture wars. Huber’s thinking is not far from that of the erstwhile Sanders campaigns: that true populist economic policies would reanimate the working-class majorities of the New Deal era, rousing voters to turn out in droves for a genuinely progressive candidate. This didn’t play out in 2016 or 2020, while Republicans have made mobilizing voters behind cultural grievance the engine of their political machine. Indeed, commentators on both political left and right can seemingly agree that Trump’s 2016 win and enduring popularity are largely the result of cultural issues. If we take these explanations seriously, if we concede that what lies at the heart of recent electoral cycles is the unwieldy stuff of culture, rather than structural class interests, then Huber’s argument elides a crucial dimension of realizing transformative climate policies. It also ignores the potential–noted by some of Huber’s progressive peers–that ecological concerns could be folded into the political and cultural cosmology of reactionary conservatives in ways that bolster claims of ethno-nationalism, white racial anxiety, and eco-fascism.
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Huber’s program feels both timely and, following the recent resurrection of the Inflation Reduction Act (née Build Back Better), quite contrary to current events. Timely because the United States is witnessing the largest labor mobilization in decades, compounded by a growing number of Americans who see government action on climate change as increasingly necessary. Contrary because the Biden administration’s bill, championed as the largest government investment in climate to date, seems to be the realization of mostly liberal climate policies. Where proposals for a Green New Deal and Biden’s own campaign-trail policy package assured voters of vastly more spending and a greater emphasis on working-class gains, the Inflation Reduction Act, following its brush with the coal baron cum legislator Joe Manchin, provides far less through business and investment-oriented mechanisms rather than the expansion of state services and unionized jobs in green sectors. It is a plan that falls far short of both campaign promises and what Huber envisions as necessary to stave off climate disaster; indeed, Huber has referred to the bill as a shadow of the Green New Deal and noted that its contribution to carbon emission reductions is not particularly significant.
Like Huber, even the architects of the Inflation Reduction Act concede that much more is needed to fight planetary warming. At its best, Climate Change as Class War reads as a potential roadmap for the climate politics that lies beyond liberalism’s shortcomings. His book represents the sort of thinking required to reframe climate action not simply as one point of a liberal policy platform, but an enduring form of politics in its own right. It marshals compelling case studies to animate some of Huber’s political arguments and presents a moving assessment of climate politics seemingly fit for this particular moment, in which labor mobilization and class consciousness seem to be on the rise. Trust in technocratic solutions is dissipating; the messianic zeal surrounding billionaire saviors, whose many foibles include unproven techno-optimism and extraterrestrial colonization, also seems to be fading. With interest growing in populist politics and more worldly solutions, Huber’s book has emerged at the perfect moment. Despite its conscious eschewal of cultural issues–and I’m fairly certain that Huber would contest my assessment on this count–Climate Change as Class War is heartening in its insistence that climate politics need not be a contest of austerity, but rather, that it can, in fact, create a better world to live in. Let’s hope that it serves as a constructive road map, rather than utopian speculation.