We are reposting this article by Matt T. Huber
from Jacobin’s theoretical journal Catalyst because
I think it’s one of the best discussions I’ve come across of the political
problems facing the environmental movement. The gist of Huber’s argument is
that “climate change is class struggle”, as the title of a follow-up article by
him puts it. The more urgent the climate crisis becomes, the more essential it
is to grasp that basic truth and organize around it. As Huber rightly argues,
only the working class has the social leverage capable of rescuing the planet
from ecological catastrophe.
But this is far from how the environmental movement
has been doing politics. It is overwhelmingly a middle class movement that “is
often directly antagonistic to working-class interests.” Perhaps the best thing
in Huber’s article is his analytical breakdown of that movement. He
distinguishes two strands: what he calls “lifestyle environmentalism” which
amounts to a moral condemnation of consumerism, and an offshoot from this that
he calls “livelihood environmentalism” which fetishizes a supposedly direct
relation to the environment by poor and racially marginalized
communities.
Basic to both strands is “ecological footprint
analysis”, which ties consumption to ecological impacts, and has become a
staple of political discussions about the climate crisis, often devolving into
an exercise in making people in general (which is to say, mostly working class
people) feel guilty for driving a car or eating in a restaurant or flying on an
airplane. Here Huber asks exactly the right question: “Is an individual
consumer’s ‘footprint’ all their own? The difference between humans and other
organisms is that no other organism monopolizes the means of production and
forces some of those organisms to work for money.”
I’ll leave off any further summary but I want to
raise a couple of concerns. First, an obvious gap in Huber’s analysis is any
discussion of Green Party politics. We’ve now had more than a generation of
Green parties in the so-called Western democracies. While they began in the
Seventies as upstart political movements, they have since become pillars of the
political establishment in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia, and smaller but
well-established players in France, Canada, Britain etc. (In the US the Greens
are marginal players politically, which may explain Huber’s ignoring of the
issue.) In Austria the Greens just brokered a deal with the right-wing People’s
Party to become junior partners in a coalition government. Tellingly, they are
in effect stepping in to replace the neo-fascist Freedom Party, whose coalition
with the People’s Party broke down because of a corruption scandal. This is a
stark but by no means unique example of how Green parties function as props for
capitalism – and how this fatally undermines their reason for existence.
My second concern is about politics as well, but this
time working class politics. Huber wants, as the title of the essay states, to
create an “ecological politics for the working class”, but the latter is hardly
a blank slate politically speaking. The essay contains some useful discussion
of the Green New Deal, but nothing about the stranglehold of the duopoly that
dominates American mainstream politics. In a follow-up review of an essay
collection by Naomi Klein, Huber delves somewhat deeper into the issue, noting
the inadequacy of a ‘movement of movements’ approach that figures like Klein
favored in the past, and how class has to be the central axis of the climate
change fight, not just one of a list of ‘isms’. There is some discussion of
fissures in the trade unions over climate change policy but it is superficial.
It isn’t just that the building trades are opposed to climate action while
those in the education and service sectors are supportive – this makes it seem
as if the problem is with the workers themselves. Unions have their own deep
class contradictions, expressed most clearly by the role of their bureaucratic
leaderships, often corrupt (e.g. the UAW) and almost uniformly committed to
capitalism. Shortly after Huber’s article was posted, Jacobin ran a report on
how AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka and the (seemingly eternal) head of the AFT,
Randi Weingarten, were undermining the fight for Medicare for All. If union
bureaucrats are bridling even about that reform, how conceivable is it that
they will ever be on side for the mammoth effort to head off climate
catastrophe? An “ecological politics of the working class” means not pulling
any punches with workers: only revolutionary political change is adequate to
meeting the gravity of the climate crisis.
Frank Brenner
Ecological Politics for the Working
Class
By Matt Huber
The climate and ecological crisis is dire and there’s little
time to address it. In just over a generation (since 1988), we have
emitted half of all historic emissions.1 In
this same period the carbon load in the atmosphere has risen from around
350 parts per million to over 410 — the highest level in 800,000
years (the historic preindustrial average was around 278).2 Human
civilization only emerged in a rare 12,000 year period of
climate stability — this period of stability is ending fast. The recent
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report suggests we have a mere
twelve years to drastically lower emissions to avoid 1.5 C warming — a
level that will only dramatically increase the spikes in extreme superstorms,
droughts, wildfires, and deadly heat waves (to say nothing of sea-level rise).3 New
studies show changing rainfall patterns will threaten grain production like
wheat, corn, and rice within twenty years.4 A
series of three studies suggest as early as 2070, half a billion people will,
“experience humid heat waves that will kill even healthy people in the shade
within 6 hours.”5
You don’t have to be a socialist to believe the time frame
of the required changes will necessitate a revolution of sorts. The IPCC flatly
said we must immediately institute “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented
changes in all aspects of society.”6 The
noted climate scientist Kevin Anderson said, “… when you really look at the
numbers behind the report, look at the numbers the science comes out with, then
we’re talking about a complete revolution in our energy system. And that is
going to beg very fundamental questions about how we run our economies.”7
The radical climate movement has long coalesced around the
slogan “system change, not climate change.” The movement has a good
understanding that capitalism is the main barrier to solving the climate
crisis. Yet sometimes the notion of “system change” is vague on how systems
change. The dilemma of the climate crisis is not as simple as just replacing
one system with another — it requires a confrontation with some of the
wealthiest and most powerful sectors of capital in world history. This includes
a mere 100 companies responsible for 71 percent of the emissions since
1988.8 The
fossil fuel industry and other carbon-intensive sectors of capital (steel, chemicals,
cement, etc.) will not sit by and allow the revolutionary changes that make
their business models obsolete.
Like all other such battles, this confrontation will take a
highly organized social movement with a mass base behind it to force capital and
the state to bend to the changes needed. Yet, as Naomi Klein argues, this is
really “bad timing” because over the last several decades it is capital who has
built formidable power to neutralize their main challenges like a regulatory
state, progressive tax structures, and viable trade unions.9 The
history of the nineteenth and twentieth century shows that the largest
challenge to the rule of capital has come from organized working-class
movements grounded in what Adaner Usmani calls “disruptive capacity” —
particularly strikes and union organizing. 10 It
is the working class that not only constitutes the vast majority of society,
but also has the strategic leverage to shut down capital’s profits from the
inside.11
Yet, herein lies the main dilemma. A movement up to the task
of bringing about the changes needed will not only have to be massive in size,
but have a substantial base in the working class. In its current form, however,
environmental politics has little chance of succeeding in this. Its ideological
and strategic orientation reflects the worldview of what Barbara and John
Ehrenreich called the “professional managerial class” that centers educational
credentials and “knowledge” of the reality of environmental crisis at its core.12 This
is not simply a problem of the kind of people involved. Middle-class
environmental politics is often directly antagonistic to working-class
interests. It grounds its theories of ecological responsibility in ideas of
“ecological” or “carbon” footprints that blame consumers (and workers) for
driving ecological degradation. This approach centers on the appeal that we
need to live simply and “consume less” — a recommendation that is hardly
likely to appeal to a working class whose wages and living standards have
stagnated for almost two generations.13 When
seeking examples of emancipatory environmental politics, radical academics
imagine real environmental politics as a form of direct livelihood struggles
over natural “use values” like land, resources, and the body itself. While
livelihood struggles are very important, professional-class environmentalism
sidesteps how such a politics could appeal to the tens of millions of workers
who do not directly access nature in “use value” form. In this essay, I argue
for a working-class ecological politics14 aimed
at mobilizing the mass of workers to confront the source of the crisis —
capital. In order to build this kind of politics, we needs to appeal to the
mass of the working class who has no ecological means of survival apart from
access to money and commodities. This politics centers on two major planks.
First, it offers a much different story of class responsibility for
the ecological crisis. Rather than blame “all of us” consumers and our
footprints, it aims its focus on the capitalist class. This kind of politics
can channel already existing anger and resentment workers have toward their
boss and the wealthy in general to explain yet one more reason why those
antagonists are making their lives worse.
Second, it offers a political program meant to directly
appeal to the material interest of the working class. It is relatively
straightforward to insert ecologically beneficial policies within the already
existing movements around the decommodification of basic needs like “Medicare
for All” or “Housing for All.” The climate crisis in particular is centered
upon sectors absolutely vital to working-class life — food, energy,
transport. The goal should be to use this scientifically declared emergency to
build a movement to take these critical sectors under public ownership to at
once decarbonize and decommodify them. The emergent politics of the Green New
Deal, although far from perfect, does exactly this. It not only offers a
solution at the scale of the problem — aiming to revolutionize the energy
and economic system — but also offers clear and direct benefits to the
mass of the working class (e.g., a federal job guarantee). Although there is
much consternation about the anti-environmentalism amongst established building
trade unions and fossil fuel industrial workers, a working-class
environmentalism could better align with rising militancy in more low-carbon care
sectors like health and education. These campaigns’ focus on anti-austerity
politics and “bargaining for the common good” can also address the expansion of
a public response to ecological breakdown.15
Part 1. From Lifestyle
to Livelihood: The Limits of Environmentalism
The environmental
movement in its current form is dominated by middle-class professionals. Along
with the expansion of higher education, this class exploded during the
post-WWII boom — itself a product of mass working-class struggle and union
victories in the 1930s and 1940s. Out of these historical conditions emerges
what I will call “lifestyle environmentalism,” the essence of which is to seek
better outcomes through individual consumer choices.16 Yet this desire comes from a deeper source of anxiety
about the forms of mass commodity consumption wherein middle-class security is
equated with a private home, automobile, meat consumption, and a whole set of
resource- and energy-intensive commodities. As such, lifestyle environmentalism
sees modern lifestyles — or what is sometimes called “our way of life”17 — as the primary driver of ecological problems. This, of
course, makes a politics of material gains inherently ecologically damaging.
Since lifestyle environmentalism blames commodity consumption — and the
vast majority of society (i.e., the working class) depends on commodities for
survival — it only appeals to a very narrow base of affluent people who
not only live relatively comfortable middle-class lives but simultaneously feel
guilty doing so. Under neoliberalism especially, the bulk of the population
does not feel guilty or complicit in their consumption, but constrained by
severe limits on access to the basics of survival.
Lifestyle
environmentalism also produces an offshoot, a distinct and seemingly more
radical alternative vision of ecological politics prevalent in academic
scholarship. This form of scholarship accepts the premise of
lifestyle environmentalism that modern “consumer lifestyles” are inherently
damaging to the environment. As such, radical ecological scholars look to the
margins of society for a more authentic basis for environmental politics. This
is what I will call “livelihood environmentalism,”18 or what is sometimes called “the environmentalism of the
poor.”19 This form of scholarship argued the proper basis for
environmental mobilization was a direct lived experience of the environment. I
will cover two critical fields. First, political ecology broadly
seeks examples of struggles over direct “use value” reliance upon land or
resources for subsistence among often peasant, indigenous, or other
marginalized communities (usually in the Global South). As such, this
scholarship often romanticizes what are seen as anti-modern subsistence
livelihoods on the margins of global capitalism. Second, environmental
justice focuses more on the uneven effects of pollution and toxic
waste as deadly threats to livelihood in racialized marginalized communities
(usually in the Global North). Often critical of mainstream environmentalism’s
focus on wilderness or wildlife preservation, environmental justice scholars
bring to light how poor and racially marginalized communities make
“environment” a question of survival. Yet, again, those struggling directly
against the poisoning of local communities are often on the margins of society
as a whole. Struggles like this (e.g., the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil
or the struggle for clean water in Flint, Michigan) are obviously important
matters of survival for those involved. Yet the strategic question of how to
translate local livelihood concerns into a broader mass environmental movement
able to take on capital remains unclear.
Livelihood
environmentalism is often seen as the opposite of lifestyle environmentalism,
but its academic focus emerges from the foundations of the latter. It is the
disaffection with the mass commodity society that sends the radical academic’s
gaze to the margins of society looking for “real” environmental struggle.
Livelihood environmentalism is indeed a much more attractive form of politics
rooted in the material interests of specific groups. By fetishizing the direct
lived relation to what is seen as the real environment (land, resources,
pollution), it sidesteps how we might build an environmental politics for the
majority of society already dispossessed of land and dependent on money and
commodities for survival…
