Abstract
Matt Huber offers a powerful materialist class-based account of the notion of the interplay of nature and human life as the struggle of “proletarian ecology.” This formulation has led me to think about D.W. Winnicott’s idea of infant development and “environmental provision” in class-based terms. Winnicott’s ideas of environmental provision seem well suited to Huber’s work on environmental policy and governance. Issues of environmental provision for caretakers and children are increasingly eclipsed in a public policy sphere dominated by the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) as birthrates for high-income women and families continue to fall and birthrates for the poorest women are almost double those of their higher income counterparts. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 188 (see also 21).
2 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 161.
3 Liu, Virtue Hoarders; Phillips, Austerity Ecology.
4 Antinatalist Leftists are preaching to the choir when it comes to admonishing people to have fewer children. The professional classes are reproducing at a much lower rate than the poor. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/. Accessed July 27, 2023.
5 Marx. The German Ideology (1845).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.
Accessed July 3, 2023.
6 Marx. The German Ideology (1845)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm. Accessed July 3, 2023.
7 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 352–3.
8 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 354.
9 Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, The Politics of Child, 49.
10 Skopcol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. See also Fass, The End of American Childhood.
11 Winnicott. Babies and their Mothers. Also Winnicott, Babies and their Mothers, 31.
12 Winnicott, Oxfordshire County Council.
13 Liu, “Every Child Needs.”
14 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 229.
15 Huber, Climate Change as Class War, 21.
16 Soubramanian. “You're Not Getting.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Catherine Liu
Catherine Liu teaches in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine in Irvine, California, USA.