Introduction
Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022) was welcomed by many on the Left as a useful and urgent corrective to three of the most enduring patterns in public discussions about climate change, even as it also sparked heated criticism from many corners. First, Huber tackles the tendency to focus on consumer behaviour, which both individualizes what must be a collective response to a planetary threat, and overestimates the significance of individual consumer choices—to fly or not to fly, for example—while leaving unchallenged the activity in the production sphere that is not only responsible for a far greater share of carbon emissions, but also shapes the downstream “choices” available to consumers. Second, Huber confronts the longstanding tendency to diagnose inaction on climate change as a “non-partisan” knowledge or awareness problem, rather than as a problem of power, and, specifically, a problem of class power—too much on the part of the international capitalist class and too little on the part of the working-class people whose subsistence is threatened by capitalist exploitation and expropriation, as well as by rising seas, wildfires, and extreme weather. Third, Huber contests the idea that the existing climate movement has what it takes to build the power that will be necessary to engage meaningfully in a struggle over the “relations that underpin our social and ecological relationship with nature and the climate itself.” In doing so, he moves from diagnosis to prescription, outlining an ambitious plan of action oriented around the potential class power of unionized electrical grid workers in the United States—both to link climate action to working-class people’s energy and subsistence needs and to exert meaningful checks on capitalist-led energy priorities.
Huber describes Climate Change as Class War as a polemic, a provocation intended to shake up a discourse that, paradoxically, has become more urgent and more stale as climate change effects accelerate and intensify around us. SPE’s special theme coverage of Huber’s book takes this provocation seriously. It features a range of interventions that survey the merits and limits of Huber’s arguments in a variety of perspectives.
Our coverage is collected under the title “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War’” and is spread across three issues of the journal. In issue 104.2, SPE editor Ryan Katz-Rosene interviews Huber about his vision for a “socialist ecomodernism.” In issue 104.3, six critics respond to Huber’s book. Bengi Akbulut considers Huber’s concept of class, arguing that the productivism of his analysis of class power eclipses other actual/potential sites of class confrontation. Emilie Cameron observes a gap between Huber’s stated interest in an ecological understanding of class—which would locate the struggles of both waged and unwaged workers on shared experiential and strategic terrain—and his tendency to return to the conventional dramatis personae of the class struggle (waged, unionized, and male). Catherine Liu takes up Huber’s focus on “proletarian ecology,” putting it into conversation with D.W. Winnicott’s concept of “environmental provision” to consider what it means to be “held” by society. Peter Ikeler raises questions about Huber’s theory of the state as it pertains to energy transition, while highlighting the book’s “generative class analysis and promising strategic proposals.” Annie Shattuck highlights Huber’s focus on the need for a strong and powerful working-class base in the role of transformation but raises various concerns, including what she calls Huber’s “caricature” of the politics of degrowth. Ryan Katz-Rosene echoes these concerns and asks if the analytic bifurcation of degrowth and ecomodernism is overdrawn. In issue 105.1 (the first issue of 2024), Huber responds to these interventions.
With Climate Change as Class War, Huber has stuck out his political neck and proposed the broad contours of a plan to challenge the rule of fossil capital in the United States and beyond. It is, of course, always easy to find fault with prescription, so we appreciate Huber’s sober attempt to advance our political conversations about the threat posed by climate change.