For socialists and environmentalists there is an inevitable follow up question. Why have our social movements, including mass and militant protests around environmental issues, failed to shift this situation? For socialists involved in environmental politics there's an additional question. How do we get workers involved? Huber writes:
One of my key arguments in this book is that if we want to build a majoritarian, popular movement around climate change, it must resonate with a broad and diverse working class. More importantly, the working class is alsosubject to lower, stagnating wages and alienating, dangerous work. This poverty and insecurity give the working class a material interest in better their lives through transformative change.
Too often though, Huber argues, socialists, including "eco socialists" have failed to engage with the workers movement, and argued for abstract politics that just attack capitalism and demand a socialist society. Later he adds, in critiquing Jason W. Moore with a critique that could be aimed at others on the left, that because "much of what is important ecologically is 'outside' value and production.... [this] reinforces the idea that class politics is separate from ecological politics - and a focus on production is separate from the external world of ecological 'conditions'."
The socialist tradition I am part of does not, I hope, fall into this trap. But we are very much a minority within the larger environmental movement and the politics that dominates that movement is shaped, Huber argues, by ideas and forces that cannot conceive of a challenge to the capitalist system and is "nowhere near achieving the revolution in the structuring logics of production". One key argument he makes is that this is because the climate movement is dominated by a "minority of the population", the "professional class". These professionals, "reproduce a capitalist ideology of meritocracy that tends to supplement the domination and exploitation of the majority of society (the working class)". Some of the fault, according to Huber, lies with "science communicators" who, he says are often scientists and believe the problem is "a lack of awareness" and who believe that "if the masses truly understood the science, action would follow." Such approaches lead to a technocratic solution to environmental issues and hence an attempt to work within the system.
More problematic, Huber says, is the way that that professional classes are shaped by their collective guilt over their own position in society and their own impact on the world. Let's look at how Huber argues this in regard to "carbon guilt".
At the heart of the flying less campaign is guilt over one's high carbon lifestyle... this guilt emerges from a contradiction at the heart of professional-class formation. One the one hand, the enture class project aims to use credentials to acive the salary and material security of a middle-class lifestyle. On the other hand professional-class lifestyles relate to massive levels of ecological degradation and waste. This realisation creates inward feelings of guilt or complicity... But carbon guilt leads one to think it is actually professional, middle-class consumers themselves who are most priviledged in a climate change world. Carbon guilt confuses material privilege - a level of comfort and security - with the power to control the material organisation of energy production.
Out of this guilt comes, Huber argues a series of strategies that see a minority of the population - in this case the professional class - arguing for a series of demands (eg degrowth) that are about asking the majority of the population (to consume less). Such austerity like policies can neither solve the climate crisis, as they don't challenge the fundamental driver of climate crisis - capitalist production; nor can they appeal to the workers who have already been told they must tighten their belts for decades.
There is much to agree with here. But I felt uneasy with the direct link between what Huber calls the professional class and carbon guilt. On the one hand, he cites two scientists James Hansen and Rachel Carson as sitting in the "lack of awareness camp". There are problems with these scientists approach to the system - Hansen for instance does advocate for the solutions that Huber critiques. But both of them were more radical that he credits. Hansen has taken part in direct action. Carson was a critic of capitalism and had she lived to see these decades would I think have gone much further.
On the other, I am less convinced about his argument around climate policy arising simply out of the class position of the professional class. One reason is practical - the types of workers he describes, scientists, university professors, medical doctors etc - have become increasingly proletarianised in the West. They have made up some of the biggest and more militant pickets in recent strikes in the UK. Another is where these politics come from. I think the bigger problem is the decline of revolutionary socialist politics and the way that Marxism in academia has become increasingly divorced from its revolutionary strategy. Environmental politics has been dominated by individualist approaches because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry (BP's carbon footprint) and NGOs. So while I do agree there's some truth to Huber's approach I found it inadequate.
However Huber adds a second qualification which I think is right. He points out that the working class feels limited in its ability to respond to the environment crisis, because of the nature of that crisis and because of the limitations of workers' power at the current time. Huber writes:
The working class not only lacks control over what it needs as individuals, but also over the larger sociaoecological "metabolism". This lack of control over material production itself is what leads to the specific experience of powerlessness over the ecological crisis today, of watching an unfolding disaster caused by seemingly distant and uncontrollable forces. Whether we see these as abstract "market" forces or the corporate elite, the lack of control over the processes of ecologica ldegradation creates feelings of helplessness in the face of planetary crisis.
This is absolutely right. The problem is not that workers are unaware or unconcerned about ecological questions - quite the contrary, they are often the most enthusastic about environmental issues - but workers feel powerless to change the status quo, or challenge the dominance of fossil fuel corporations. This is often acknowledged - "I'm recycling my paper, but whats the point if water companies just dump shit in the rivers". But the only solutions offered are individual, or corporate. This is also, it should be said, perpetuated by many trade union and labour movement "leaders" who, because of their ties to the system, form a class who have a vested interest in holding back struggle.
This refreshing and insightful material aside, I was disappointed by Huber's political conclusions. Here he tends to reject the idea of a revolutionary insurrection led by a revolutionary party. In "advanced capitalist societies, the working class faces a far more thoroughly armed state" and this (he quotes Eric Blanc), means "too much armed strength for an insurrectionary approach to be realistic". He instead hopes for a working class alternative, which by "sheer numbers, there is a possibility to stitch together a mass, working-class electoral colaition to win state power trhrough campaisn powered not only by masses of working-class votes but also by small donations that free up candidates from the more typical wealthy donors".
For those of us who recently lived through the Your Party debacle in the UK, I don't hold out much hope for this. Indeed, I'm concerned of the seeming dubordination of working class power through its ability to withdraw labour to electoral processes. This is not to say that workers cannot or should not, try to win elections and use parliament. But Marx did warn us that workers' cannot readily seize the capitalist state machinery and wield it for their interests. It needs to be smashed as its a weapon of the capitalist class itself.
Further Huber argues that we cannot rebuild workers' power quickly enough to give it the strength to challenge fossil fuel capitalism across the board. So he argues for a selective tactic based on workers in the energy industry. Again there is some interesting material here. But I'm more of the belief that its possible to develop workers' combativity much quicker, and that requires fighting for campaigns that link economic and politics issues. Two examples strike me - the Italian strikes over Palestine and the workers in London buses who are striking over AC and heat in their vehicles. Both demonstrate the potential for industrial action that links wider questions of imperialism and climate with economic struggles. Both also have the potential to link into much wider networks of solidarity.
Huber doesnt agree with the Climate Jobs strategy in the UK (disclosure, I am part of that campaign) because he suggests it (quoting Stegania Barca) sees "workers not as political subjects of an ecological revolution, but as potential victims of climate policies". I would turn this upsidedown and suggest that workers who are, or will be such victims, can be part of an ecological revolution through a process of struggle. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that properly articulated, a climate jobs strategy can lead to a wider generalisation of struggle. But that requires grassroots and rank and file radicals pushing for that outcome, rather than a passive top down approach.
Much of this review will seem like a major disagreement with the author. It is, of course, true that I do have disagreements. But they are tactical, rather than strategic. To illustrate this, I'd like to quote from Huber's conclusion:
We do not need better environmental policy ideas to solve climate change; we need a stronger working class. As long as we are losing the larger class struggle, we are also losing the climate struggle.
This is an absolutely correct conclusion. The key issue, as Huber repeatedly argues, is how to shift to a winning struggle. So while I have my own disagreements, I do encourage socialists to engage with Climate Change as Class War. Too few such books discuss workers at all, never mind their active struggles and the need for revolution. Matthew T. Huber's book does and this makes it worth the read.
Related Reviews
McGuire - The Fate of the World: A history & future of the climate crisis
Ramana - Nuclear is Not the Solution: The folly of atomic power in the age of climate change
Glynn & Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue
Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature
Crawford - Charleston: Race, water & the coming storm
No comments:
Post a Comment