Critical engagements with “Climate Change as Class War”—class critical ecomodernism

Abstract

This essay considers the import and originality of Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. It identifies class critique and skillful application of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) concept to contemporary environmental movements as the book’s most substantive contributions, culminating in a reflective reassertion of Marxian modernism with regard to capitalist-induced climate change. It also finds lacunae in Huber’s underdeveloped theory of the state as it pertains to energy transition and in his connection (or lack thereof) between specific policy demands and working-class agency. These issues pose questions for further debate and elaboration, yet fail to overshadow the book’s generative class analysis and promising strategic proposals, which deserve widespread discussion on the activist Left. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Keywords:

• climate change
• environment
• Marxism
• Matthew Huber
• modernism
• Professional-Managerial Class (PMC
• )
• social class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kardashev, “Transmission of Information,” 217–21.

2 Althusser, For Marx, 14.

3 Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” 5–45.

4 Ikeler and Limonic. “Middle Class Decline?” 549–70.

5 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 124.

6 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 39.

7 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 38.

8 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 52.

9 Liu, Virtue Hoarders.

10 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 208–18.

11 Soulèvements de la Terre, “Press Release.”

12 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 199.

13 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 51.

14 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 241.

15 Camfield, “First and Third World Ecosocialisms”; Levien, “White Energy Workers.”

16 For example, see McNally, Blood and Money.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Ikeler

Peter Ikeler teaches in the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Old Westbury in Old Westbury, New York, USA.