Critical engagements with “Climate Change as Class War”—concepts of class

Abstract

Although I am highly critical of Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, I share with him a conviction of the centrality of class in any analysis of climate change. I engage with the argument that Matthew Huber develops under two headings: first, his conceptualization of class, working-class interests, and working-class politics, and second, what the analytic of socioecological reproduction could contribute to thinking on class and climate crisis. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

Keywords:

• class
• climate change
• commons
• Matthew Huber
• politics
• social reproduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This does not pertain only to Huber’s depiction of degrowth as an unqualified politics of less—a lot of degrowth thinking in fact articulates what to have more of in a degrowth future (and the architecture of an anticapitalist economy based on needs, contrary to Huber’s assertion). I find equally troubling his equation of any problematization of consumption or of the exclusive centrality of the industrial working class (or its subjectivity) with siding with neoliberalism, of reconstructions of Marxism that complicate class analysis with retreating from class, and of advocating relocalization of food and energy systems with not having a planetary vision of transformation.

2 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 21.

3 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 29.

4 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development; Read, “Primitive Accumulation.”

5 Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class.

6 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 42.

7 Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Fraser, “Climates of Capital”; Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation.

8 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation; Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics.

9 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 35.

10 Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics.

11 Here, I also have in mind others who theorize such forms, such as Harvey, The New Imperialism, 143–4, and Fraser, “Expropriation and Exploitation,” 166–9.

12 Federici and Caffentzis, “Commons Against and Beyond.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bengi Akbulut

Bengi Akbulut teaches in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.