Book Review: Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

With Climate Change as Class War Matthew T. Huber has provided a highly important contribution to the debate on how socialists should approach the climate crisis. In refreshingly clear language, he proposes a realistic strategy for how to stop capital’s apocalyptic drive towards ecological disaster. Given the weak standing of the working class today, Huber suggests a limited but effective goal: full socialization and decarbonization of the electricity sector. The road to what he calls ‘socialism in one sector’ consists of radicalizing the electricity unions from the inside and providing political education to electricity workers, but also rediscovering the power of strike militancy. Based on Huber’s rich knowledge of labour history, the book informs us of the possibilities we have right now.

Huber does not just attack the capitalist class’ obviously faulty market approaches to the climate crisis. More innovatively and perhaps provokingly, he spends many pages criticizing the obsession with science by what he calls the professional class – a class mainly consisting of academics and scientists and thus one that Huber himself belongs to. He strongly and convincingly argues that the professional class’ imploration to ‘listen to the science’ will not be sufficient to appeal to a global working class that is struggling to make ends meet. Unless climate action is accompanied with real material benefits for the mass of people who are reliant on markets for survival, Huber argues, climate action will never succeed. We need a climate politics for the working class. In other words, climate action must be a politics of more, not a politics of less. This insight leads Huber to criticize also the most radical and anti-capitalist segment of the professional class: the degrowth movement which argues for a controlled scale-down of GDP growth.

As a degrowth sympathizer, I find Huber’s arguments remarkably satisfying and frustrating at the same time.

Let’s start with the satisfaction. The source of this joy can be found in the book’s title, Climate Change as Class War. Huber rightfully criticizes the degrowth movement of ignoring class. While no degrowther calls for a universal reduction of production and consumption, they have a strong tendency to understand climate justice as a regional question rather than a class question. More to the point, the degrowth movement generally argues that, given its historical CO2 emissions, the ‘global north’ should degrow, while the historically low-emission ‘global south’ should be given allowances to grow. This argument is not wrong on a macro-level, but, as Huber importantly points out, it ignores the class compositions of our societies. It is the capitalists, particularly the fossil capitalists, who should bear the brunt of responsibility and cost, in the north as well as in the south. Asking struggling working-class families in the ‘global north’ to make sacrifices because of their region’s historical CO2 emissions is both unreasonable and poor strategy. If climate change policy is perceived as unfair by the working class – a majority in all developed countries – it is bound to fail. The Yellow Vest movement in France is a perfect example of that. Although Huber would do well to acknowledge that leading degrowthers, such as Jason Hickel, have become much more cognizant of class in recent years, his class-based criticism against the professionalized degrowth movement is right on target.

The frustrating part about Huber’s book from a degrowth perspective is that it never addresses degrowth’s main concern: unsustainable resource use. Degrowthers do not call for a reduction of GDP for eccentric reasons. It has been proven over and over that economic growth is intrinsically tied to resource use. We cannot grow our economies without an ever-increasing use of resources. Even if we replace fossil fuels with renewables, growth still would require more timber, land, meat, fish, metals, minerals and so on. While climate change theoretically could be avoided with a switch to renewables, the inevitable overuse of the above-mentioned resources will result in a host of other ecological disasters such as ecosystem destruction, species extinction, pollution, microplastics and ocean acidification. Taken together, these are also potentially civilization-threatening problems. Although it has almost become a cliché, the degrowth mantra is still true: infinite economic growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources. This is something Huber never seriously addresses. That is also why the characterization of degrowthers in the book feels a bit strawman-like at times, especially when he repeatedly attributes their concerns to their own ‘carbon guilt’.

Huber is absolutely right to forefront class and stress the need for a positive message that can appeal to the working class. However, if resource finality prevents this positive message from being infinite economic growth, it needs to be a fairer distribution of already-existing wealth. In other words, class struggle. There is therefore a strong potential compatibility between degrowth and Huber’s own call for class struggle, but unfortunately, he chooses to ignore this potential in the same way as he ignores degrowth’s primary concern about resource overuse.

This notwithstanding, Huber’s convincing introduction of class into the realm of climate strategy makes Climate Change as Class War one of the most important socialist works on climate change to date.