Working-class Ecology: Exposing the “Hidden Abode” of Capitalist Production

Book Review | Climate Change as Class War: Two Main Strengths and Weaknesses of Matthew Huber’s New Book

By Brandon Madsen

The urgency of the threat posed by climate change has never been clearer. As I write these lines, deadly heat waves are sweeping across much of Europe. Despite the increasing availability of green and renewable energy sources, yearly global carbon dioxide emissions have resumed their steady rise after the temporary pandemic-induced downward blip in 2020.

Polls continue to show that the Green New Deal has majority support in the US, yet the environmental movement here seems as far as ever from gaining real political power and winning meaningful transformative victories. How can this be? What can socialists do about it?

Enter Matthew Huber’s new book, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Huber, a professor at Syracuse University and member of Syracuse DSA, has attempted to tackle these questions based on a materialist class analysis of the social and political forces at play. Though not without its shortcomings, on the whole it is interesting, thought-provoking, useful, and well worth a read for any socialist who finds themselves grappling with the questions above. It deserves serious and critical engagement.

In that spirit, this review attempts to draw out two of the most important strengths and weaknesses of the book.

Strength #1: Unapologetically bases itself on the power of the working class

Climate Change as Class War never wavers from the idea that Earth’s only salvation lies in the power of the working class. It correctly identifies all problems of ecology as inherently linked to what Marx once called the “hidden abode of production” and its domination by capital. The biggest single contributor to both carbon emissions and total energy consumption, both in the US and worldwide, is industrial production.

“To defeat the entrenched power of the capitalist class, we will need a mass popular movement” that “only the working class has the capacity to achieve.”

In 2015 “the industrial sector consumed more of the world’s energy (54.8 percent) than the commercial (7 percent), residential (12.6 percent), and transportation (25.5 percent) sectors combined.” And that’s just the direct energy usage; the interests of “the industrial sector” (corporations) also have a large influence on the way transportation, housing, etc., are organized. Chapter 1 is filled with these types of statistics, which clash glaringly with the bourgeois media’s focus on individual lifestyles and consumer habits. “To defeat the entrenched power of the capitalist class,” as Huber writes in the introduction, “we will need a mass popular movement” that “only the working class has the capacity to achieve.”

Huber’s case for the centrality of the working class rests on three main points. First, since workers constitute an absolute majority within developed capitalist societies, it is impossible to build a genuinely democratic or majoritarian movement without winning a decisive chunk of the working class to the project. Second, workers collectively have a unique strategic advantage in any struggle against capital because of their central role in both commodity production specifically and the smooth running of society in general, which in turn means structural power over capitalists’ ability to make profits. This linchpin role grants the working class an unparalleled capacity for disrupting and undermining “business as usual.” Finally, given its disenfranchisement from ownership in the means of production under the rule of capital, the working class has “a fundamental material interest in transformations in the relations of production” – a material interest, that is, in socialist revolution.

This working-class approach is explicitly counterposed to an approach based on following the lead of the “most oppressed” layers of society or those “directly affected” by environmental devastation, such as the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the small island nations whose very existence is threatened by rising sea levels, or the poor communities routinely used as dumping grounds for toxic industrial waste. There is an obvious moral appeal within calls for this most-oppressed-first type of policy. The problem, however, as Huber correctly points out, is that these layers on their own do not constitute a powerful enough social force for winning out against capital; they represent a small minority of the US and world population, and do not as a group have any special levers of economic or social power that would help ensure victory. Undoubtedly, it would be the moral and political obligation of any environmental or workers’ movement to take up the core demands and struggles of these layers, but that is altogether different from seeing in the most directly affected communities a solid strategic basis for winning a battle against the entrenched power of capital.

Strength #2: Stands firmly against the “politics of less”

The main political trends in the environmental movement today are all, in one way or another, burdened by what Huber succinctly and accurately calls a “politics of less.” Whether it be regressive carbon taxes or left-wing theories of “degrowth,” Huber correctly argues that these politics stand in stark contrast to building the type of broad-based working-class movement that is necessary.

The market-based variant. On the market-based, individualistic wing of the movement, these politics manifest as additional money costs that must be imposed to “correct” the functioning of the market in such a way that the real environmental and economic costs of fossil fuel use and production are taken into account on the corporate balance sheets. This might be as straightforward as a carbon tax or as roundabout as a cap-and-trade scheme.

Whether costs are imposed directly or indirectly, the ones to bear them in the final analysis are individual consumers, who are understood in this framework to be the core drivers of climate change. NGOs and think tanks spend millions of dollars commissioning intricate scientific studies to try to calculate the exact amount of carbon emissions associated with each private activity of each private individual – one’s so-called “carbon footprint.”

Working people are already sick to death of being told to make do with less, and any environmental program that smacks of this will be a complete non-starter.

As a general rule of scientific inquiry, if you ask wrong questions you’ll get wrong answers. Asking about individual carbon footprints is a perfect example of this rule in action. As Huber writes in the introduction:

The theory of consumer sovereignty assumes that producers are captive to the demands of consumers, indeed that they are simply responding to the latter – rather than what is in fact the case: production constrains consumption choices. Much consumption (like driving) is not a “choice” but a necessity of social reproduction (getting to work). Moreover, when we choose commodities, we can only choose those that are profitable to produce in the first place.

The overwhelming majority of carbon emissions take place in the spheres of industrial production and transport, whose modes of operation exist prior to and largely independent of consumption. Just as a worker can only apply to the jobs already on offer, a consumer can only purchase products already on the market, and only what they can afford. There is no built-in mechanism for decision-making by workers or consumers about what types of work are to be done, what types of products are to be produced, and so on. The influence of purchasing decisions can only operate at the margins of the existing framework, and consumer-based strategies are innately incapable of driving the type of fundamental transformation needed for putting the brakes on environmental devastation.

Given all of the above, together with the collective nature of most production in today’s world, there is no meaningful sense in which a given quantity of emissions can be traced back to the decision of an individual consumer. The starting point for all consumption lies in the “hidden abode of production,” which capital goes to great lengths to discourage us from investigating, because this abode also houses the rotten center of capitalism itself. Inside the churning reactor core of the capitalist system is the ruthless exploitation of both humanity and nature, without which the system could not function.

The radical left variant. To its credit, the radical left wing of the environmental movement does not fall into this same trap. It correctly focuses on the processes of collective production rather than individual consumption. But it still stumbles into the politics of less in the form of “degrowth” – the idea that a continually expanding economy is not environmentally sustainable, and so, even on the basis of a democratically planned decarbonization of production, it would still be necessary to cut back on total energy usage and material throughput compared to the current trajectory. Often cited in support of this idea are the non-renewable, rare-earth elements currently used for harnessing otherwise green and renewable energy (solar panels, wind farms, batteries, electric vehicle motors, etc.) and also in the manufacture of popular consumer electronics such as cell phones. The negative environmental impact of extracting such materials also frequently comes up in this context.

If the market-oriented right wing of the movement misses the forest for the trees, the degrowth-oriented left wing misses the forest for the continent: it shifts the focus so far toward the aggregate production of society that the class divisions so central to the solution of the problem become blurred. As Huber outlines very well in Chapter 4:

[I]t is clear that this kind of politics will not attract the masses of working-class people in an increasingly unequal economy. Due to wage stagnation, debt, and the evisceration of social services, most have already given up on the idea of “affluence” and live hand-to-mouth, struggling to afford the basics of life.

The burning question on the minds of most working-class people is not what will happen to the economy in aggregate, in terms of GDP, but what will happen to their own standard of living, and that of their friends, family, and neighbors. Any environmental program that is not unambiguously centered around an increase in working-class prosperity is politically dead as a tool for organizing and mobilizing a mass working-class movement. The ones who should have to tighten their belts are the wealthy elites, while the overwhelming majority of society sees immediate, tangible, material benefit. Regardless of any technical limitations a workers’ state might run into on the question of environmentally sustainable production, this economic starting point of improved living standards for the masses is non-negotiable if we ever hope for workers to take power in the first place.

One of the strongest and most convincing points in the whole book is that most working people are not going to be mobilized because they are convinced in the abstract of the scientific necessity of combating climate change, and they certainly are not going to spend their time and energy fighting for something that sounds like more austerity. Working people are already sick to death of being told to make do with less, and any environmental program that smacks of this will be a complete non-starter. What can mobilize workers is a bold program linking the necessary overhaul in production and transport to good, secure jobs and universal public services that make their lives easier. This is the main strength of the Green New Deal framework, and how it was able to garner such widespread popularity in such a short period of time, despite being sidelined by the political establishment of both parties.

Weakness #1: Attributes too much explanatory power to “the professional class”

Climate Change as Class War is divided into three parts. The first third focuses on the capitalist class, the last third on the working class. The middle third of the book is devoted to what Huber terms “the professional class,” which he makes clear is meant to refer to the same social grouping as Barbara and John Ehrenreichs’ “professional-managerial class” (PMC) and Erik Olin Wright’s “contradictory class locations,” among other formulations. He makes clear that he considers this a mostly new class that only came to represent a significant force in society during the post-WWII economic boom.

Despite the apparent centrality of the professional class to the overall narrative, nowhere do we find in this book a consistent definition of what it is. At first, it is identified with the “unproductive intellectual laborers” formula of Hal Draper, referring to wage- and salary-earners whose work is primarily mental and not linked to surplus-value production. A page or two later, it is defined in terms of its relatively autonomous conditions of work, relatively secure positions, and ample opportunities for careerism, identified with what Nicos Poulantzas called the “new petty bourgeoisie.” Then within a couple more pages, it is again redefined in terms of educational credentials (“educated wage earners” à la Barbara and John Ehrenreich): those whose jobs require a bachelor’s degree or higher, essentially. Nowhere is it clarified which or how many of these criteria are required or sufficient for demarcating a group of employees as belonging to the professional class.

In choosing to call this chunk of society a “class,” Huber deviates from the scientific Marxist definition of class that he announces he is adopting at the beginning of the book. Ever since the beginning of bourgeois society, there have always been certain layers of workers whose jobs required special education, certification, or other formal credentials, and who were comparatively privileged relative to other layers of workers in terms of pay, working conditions, autonomy, or other factors. Traditional craft unionism was based on precisely these layers of workers. But up until now, Marxists have never considered these workers to be of a different class.

By his own passing admission, this layer does not constitute a class in the proper Marxist sense of the word, because it does not have its own distinct relationship to the means of production. Furthermore, it can be imbued with either bourgeois or working-class politics depending on its subjective outlook. But, he says, it’s just “snappier” to talk about it in class terms – and so he then continues treating it like a class throughout the rest of the book. To justify doing so, he suddenly pivots to say, partially quoting the Ehrenreichs, that:

Marxists cannot solely understand class as an objective relationship to the means of production. Class is also ‘characterized by a coherent social and cultural existence; members of a class share a common life style, educational background, kinship networks, consumption patterns, work habits, beliefs.’

This is not simply a matter of terminological nitpicking. According to Huber, this professional class is the progenitor of essentially all the problematic ideas in the environmental movement, which flow from its nature as a social class: guilt surrounding its comparatively high level of consumption and a proclivity as a knowledge-work class to frame the foundations of the climate struggle in terms of abstract knowledge, convincing others of the science, etc., rather than in terms of material interests.

The biggest problem with this conception is not its theoretical inconsistency surrounding the “professional class” itself but the fact that it bleeds over into an underestimation of the role of the capitalist class. The dead-end ideas that abound in the “professional” NGO and think tank sections of the climate movement have their roots in the pressure exerted by the bourgeoisie and its politicians, who disproportionately fund the grants and make the donations that are the main lifeblood of professional scientists and activists – and this is only the most blatant among the countless subtle ways that capitalist pressure can be brought to bear. In Chapter 3, Huber himself quotes the following passage from Hal Draper, but seemingly passes over the main inference about the capitalist class that Draper is alluding to:

‘Contributions to the symphony orchestra, university, church, or opera association come out of the same fund as expenditures for butlers, yachts, private chefs, or fashionable paintings and also … prison wardens, generals, politicians, lawyers, judges, Boy Scout leaders, or asylum-keepers.’

The bureaucracy of the nonprofit-industrial complex, much like the labor union bureaucracy, acts as a transmitting medium for capitalist pressures. The working class of course exerts its pressure as well, but this is currently much weaker and therefore tends to affect mainly the language in which policies are presented, rarely their fundamental content. This role of certain professional layers as a medium for exerting political pressure onto social movements stands in contrast to the position of a class unto itself, acting in accordance with its own historic class mission and unique class interests.

In the first third of the book, the capitalist class is discussed only in terms of its economic concerns for profit-making. Profitability is, to be sure, its top priority at all times, but that doesn’t mean it is unaware of or unconcerned with other issues, such as the climate crisis, that could threaten the overall stability of its profit-making system as a whole. The most farsighted sections of the bourgeoisie are deeply concerned with exactly these types of structural problems. Huber takes capitalists in high-carbon and direct-extraction industries – who genuinely do tend to be quite unconcerned with environmental issues – as representative of the class as a whole, but the real picture is more complicated.

The perennial international climate summits, where bourgeois politicians from around the world converge to seek agreements on climate policy, are not simply cynical conspiratorial maneuvers to dupe the public into thinking their rulers are actually doing something. They reflect a genuine recognition of the problem by the bourgeoisie of the world and a sincere attempt to get it under control – without questioning the capitalist system. The repeated failure of one summit after another to reverse the global emissions trend reflects the insurmountable barriers to progress imposed by the logic of the market and the nation-state. The bourgeois inability to go beyond the capitalist framework dooms these summits to failure from the very start – but the more farsighted representatives of that system still try to take action, however futile it may be.

The tinkering, dead-end ideas that bourgeois politicians bring into their climate summits (carbon taxes, green energy subsidies to corporations, cap-and-trade schemes, pollution fines, recycling, energy-efficiency standards, consumer-education policies, etc.) are largely the same ones being pushed onto the movement by the “respectable” environmental organizations. This is not primarily because the capitalists were pressured by the movement to take these positions (or at least pander to them publicly); quite the opposite, it is because the movement was pressured by the capitalists via the medium of the NGO bureaucracy and their ilk.

Weakness #2: “Socialism in One Sector”

Throughout the majority of the book, Huber systematically builds a strong case that nothing short of a broad-based movement, armed with a rounded-out, working-class program and drawing in the majority of society, stands any real chance at solving the climate crisis. So, when the conclusion he presents in the last few chapters turns out to be a much more narrow and partial “socialism in one sector” approach, as a reader one experiences a certain sense of vertigo or whiplash.

The argument goes like this: since the taking of power by the working class is still far off in the abstract and distant future, while the climate crisis is immediate and pressing, we need a shortcut that allows us to deal with the climate crisis even before labor as a whole has decisively defeated capital. Therefore, we should lean on the disproportionate disruptive and productive power in the hands of energy-sector workers to force nationalizations in that industry under democratic worker control, which would then be used to carry out a worker-friendly Green New Deal-style decarbonization.

Suddenly, it turns out that we don’t need a majority of workers at all, but only the five to six percent of them who are employed in energy production. According to Huber, their ability to shut down society as a whole through the threat of mass blackouts is the type of power that can bring the capitalist class to its knees and force bourgeois politicians to accept or carry out nationalizations under democratic worker control. And winning the energy workers to this program is primarily a matter of putting sufficient organizing resources into building a radical left-wing caucus in the energy sector unions.

“Socialism in one sector” is the phrase coined and used by Huber himself in the book. It is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to Stalin’s abandonment of Bolshevist internationalism under the slogan “socialism in one country,” as if to acknowledge with a sense of self-conscious irony and nervous laughter how much friction there is between this formulation and the theory he had been building up in the hundreds of preceding pages. The comparison is more apt than the author likely intended. Even the stated motivations are similar: Stalin deemed international proletarian revolution too unrealistic in the short term to be useful as the basis for the solution of Russia’s crises, so he grasped for a theory that painted the issues and their solutions in simpler, easier, and narrower terms.

To be fair, Huber does not paint this as a substitute for a broader taking of power by the working class, only as a stepping stone to get there – one that prioritizes tackling the environmental crisis first and foremost but continuing to build from there toward all-out workers’ power in society generally. Nonetheless, the whole concept seems out of step with the living dynamics of real social movements.

The problems with “socialism in one sector” fall into two main categories.

First, it’s not really a viable shortcut. The workers’ movement cannot be simply a collection of individual workplace or industry-based groupings, each pursuing its own policy disconnected from the wider struggle. This is a hundred times truer still when it comes to extremely militant tactics (like threatening large-scale blackouts) linked to bold fighting demands (like nationalizations of industry). It is extremely unlikely that the mass of workers in a given sector would be willing to pursue this type of militant policy unless they felt the support and confidence of the wider working class firmly at their backs. And if they attempted it without wider support, they could be isolated, defeated, fired, and replaced with relative ease.

Second, it underestimates the immediate relevance of socialist revolution. If, in the foreseeable future, we can build a working-class movement strong enough to force nationalizations of entire industries, then a socialist transformation of society cannot be viewed as something far off in the abstract and distant future. The very thing that would compel the ruling class to nationalize a significant chunk of the economy is if they perceive a revolutionary threat to their power. Once they see a movement strong enough to carry out nationalizations, they would likely act to pre-empt and cut the legs out from under that movement by carrying out the nationalizations themselves, under the terms most favorable to themselves that they could get away with. In doing so, their goal would be to split away important bases of support from the movement by painting it as no longer necessary. The nationalizations would be under bureaucratic control by capitalist politicians, not democratic workers’ control, and thus would likely be administered in a way that continues to pit worker prosperity against the environment in a zero-sum game. They may also attempt to reprivatize these industries once they judge the worst of the political crisis has passed.

The role of Marxists should be to safeguard the future of the movement in the present – among other things, by warning of and attempting to inoculate against the demobilizing effects of these types of maneuvers, and consistently advocating the necessity of the working class as a whole taking political power into its hands.

Still, I highly recommend that other socialists read Climate Change as Class War and use the tremendous insights provided there to build and radicalize the environmental movement, striving to imbue it with a solid, working-class outlook and approach.