In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage. In addition there will be billions of people injured, made sick, and displaced by floods, heatwaves and weather crises of all types. The vast majority of these people will be poor - both in the Global South and the developed world. A significant number of them will be working people.
The centrality of workers, and the working class, to the question of climate change and its impacts is frequently ignored or downplayed. It is important then, that some writers and activists take the question of class seriously in their analyses of the environment threat. Here in the UK I, for instance, with many other trade union and climate activists have participated in the Million Climate Job reports which discuss the role of trade unions in creating sustainable jobs and the fight for a climate service to manage a Just Transition.
Activists Sarah Glynn and John Clarke's important new book places the question of class, specifically the working class, central to its manifesto for an alternative strategy to the climate crisis. In its introduction they emphasise how workers, and their class, are not privileged in their discussion because of their increased likelihood of being victims, nor the disproportionate impact of their lives on the environment compared to the wealthy, but "because the system that exploits the planet to destruction is the same that depends on class exploitation: the system that sees everything in
terms of profit – which is what capitalism is."
As an exploited class, whose labour is central to the production process that powers capitalism, workers have the most powerful position in society when it comes to winning and enacting change.
This change, the authors argue, must be revolutionary. Capitalism has proven itself unable to enact real change. It is not able to confront the centrality of fossil fuels and the short-termism inherent to production driven by competitive accumulation. The authors write:
Survival demands revolutionary change to the economy, and the backbone of the economy is its workers. When workers take action together, including planned and strategic withdrawal of their labour, they have the power to make continuation with existing practices impossible: the power to force change. They also have knowledge and skills that can be turned towards creating a different way of doing things.
This is a crucial understanding. Workers' power is not just in their ability to stop the economy. But also in their ability to conceive and construct alternatives to the status quo. Indeed I would go further. The struggles of workers, even the shortest strike, prefigure a new way of organising society as they demonstrate the ability of workers' to control and organise their own way. The heights of revolution, as I have written elsewhere, show this a million times more as workers create new institutions of workers' power to lead their struggles and organise their world.
Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster, the authors suggest a strategy to go forward:
Foster’s book puts forward the notion of an initial ‘ecodemocratic phase’ in the struggle that would ‘demand a world of sustainable human development.’ This would then go over to a ‘more decisive, ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle’. Taking this perspective as a starting point, we can consider how we might organise and what our goals might be as the scale and intensity of the climate disaster intensifies.
They continue:
We must develop and apply the forms of mass action that can lead to the curtailing of emissions and the transition to renewable energy sources. In this regard, we are hardly starting from nowhere because a vital struggle for climate justice is already well and truly underway.
This is, obviously true. Socialists have frequently been caricatured, and often for good reason, as suggesting that humanity must "wait for the revolution" before solving environmental crisis. As Glynn and Clarke point out, there are crucial immediate struggles to be fought over mitigation and to reduce emissions. These must be fought for. But the danger I think is that we see to great a delineation between the two "phases" as suggested by Foster. The first will likely flow over into the second, and indeed contain elements of the second as the struggle ebbs and flows. Building workers' power organizationally and economically is a process, not a defined series of steps.
In addition the struggles that workers will need to engage in, may not be just over climate issues. Workers' fighting to defend climate refugees from state racism, striking to defend jobs (even in fossil fuel industries) or protesting against austerity are engaging in a struggle that will increase their confidence to resist and fight over wider and bigger issues - including climate justice.
The importance of Glynn and Clarke's analysis is, however, to argue that workers are the agency of change: "Workers are not victims needing protection, as portrayed in some writing about the ‘green transition’. They are subjects who can and must play a proactive role in building a genuinely sustainable future." This is an analysis lost on too many in the environmental movement who when faced with the power of the capitalist state lack an understanding of the force to challenge that.
This brings me to a couple of minor criticisms of Climate Change is a Class Issue. While the authors' depict a democratic and sustainable post-capitalist future I felt the book lacked any link between the struggles of today, and the revolutionary overturn of society. A couple of paragraphs that linked struggle today, with the process of workers' struggle creating revolutionary institutions that form the basis of a socialist society that can enact the fundamental changes needed would have been helpful. A couple of lines on the state as a barrier to this transition and workers' power as the strength to challenge it would have been helpful.
I also thought the authors' formulation of nature as being "exploited" by capitalism unhelpful. For Marxists "exploitation" has as specific meaning, that refers to the way that workers under capitalism sell their labour power to enable the bosses to extract surplus value. This is not the way capitalist production relates to nature. The authors argue, "Capitalism exploits nature in the same way that capitalism exploits the working class. How both are treated depends only on their potential to make money."
It is true that natural resources are embedded within the capitalist production process, but this is only in as much as they are tied to the capital-worker relationship. This is not Marxist nit-picking, but important if we are to understand precisely why workers do have the power to overthrow capitalism.
The class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival and the goal of a rational and just society. In the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.
Activists in the socialist, trade union and environmental movement would do well to get hold of a copy of this short book and read and discuss it. It's freely available for download at the authors' website here.
Related Reviews
Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Slow Down: How degrowth Communism can save the Earth
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century
Malm - How to Blow Up a Pipeline
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