Zachary Calhoun | Book Review of Matthew T. Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022).
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Matthew T. Huber’s climate politics manifesto, Climate Change as Class War (2022), opens by satirizing other recent books about climate change: “Most books like this would start by laying out the terrifying science of climate change: the hotter temperatures, Arctic melting, and intensifying droughts. I will not begin like this.” His book does repeatedly inform readers about the many material consequences of anthropogenic climate change, but he refuses to open with a long laundry list of science—as nearly every climate politics book predictably does—because Huber’s book explicitly intends to counter the merely knowledge-based environmentalism of the professional class. Instead, he hopes to determine what it would take to build enough power to change the material trajectory of our warming planet, and to secure a livable future for humanity. As a result, in his opening pages Huber claims he will take science as a given, but he then turns immediately to the question of power: to the current failures of the climate justice movement, the lack of progress in environmental policy, and the still-worsening rates of new fossil fuel projects.
Huber’s goal is nothing less than to articulate a material plan to change these dark tides. Doing so means questioning the praxis of currently-existing environmentalist movements, which Huber criticizes for being too dependent on professional-class values and the levers of power within currently-existing capitalism. But because Huber’s book identifies capitalism as the primary driver of the climate crisis, his alternative vision of climate justice is one that emphasizes power, material change, and a tangible improvement in living conditions for the wretched of the earth.
Huber’s Introduction is among the best I have read. With relative concision, he shows that “this particular power struggle,” the struggle to resist the kinds of environmental injustice that drive the climate crisis, “is a class struggle over relations that underpin our social and ecological relationship with nature and the climate itself: ownership and control of production.” After pointing out that “the entire human relationship to the natural world is, at its core, a relationship of production—how we produce the food, energy, housing, and other basics of life,” he swiftly concludes that “we need to focus our organizing energy against the particular class fraction of the capitalist class that controls the production of energy from fossil fuels and other industrial carbon-intensive industries like steel, cement, and nitrogen fertilizer.”
In other words, Huber hopes to organize worker power in the site of industrial production, which is, as he crucially points out, the site where the vast majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions actually originate. In his Introduction, he paves the way for a strong critique of professional-class environmentalism, which focuses on the guilt that professionals feel about their personal “carbon footprint” (a PR concept that British Petroleum invented to, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “blame us for their greed”) even though individual lifestyle choices produce few emissions compared to the vast emissions produced at the site of industrial production. Huber argues instead for a mass popular movement to overthrow our ecocidal economy, insisting: “only the working class has the capacity to achieve this kind of mass movement.” He argues that the working class is uniquely fit for leading the climate justice struggle for three reasons above all: first, it is the vast majority of the planet; second, it lives and works at the actual site of industrial production, a proximity that “gives it structural power over the source of capital’s profits,” especially when the working class utilizes work stoppage strikes; and third, “because economic insecurity defines working-class life, they have a fundamental material interest in transformations in the relations of production.”
Contrast this grounded interest in improving the material world with the interests of capitalists. In a recent GND Media podcast interview, Huber emphasized that the capitalist class controls our relationship to nature—controlling our connection even to food, energy, and water—but “the real catch is that they control it with one goal in mind: profit.” So, “even though they’re the ones right there at the center of that relationship to nature, they have this indifference to the natural world.” Because of their myopic concern for extracting surplus value, “the material content” of what they profit from—coal vs green energy, for example—”doesn’t really matter to them.” In addition, Huber cites studies in his book to the effect that even in the United States—the heart of the Global North and the imperial core—78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, over 30% of employed workers live below the official poverty line, and workers frequently lack access to healthcare, nutritious food, emergency services, and nature. Workers have no autonomy over their lives or the sustainability of their shared future, despite having a material interest in safeguarding that future. Meanwhile, the capitalist class (not simply through personal greed, but through adherence to the organizing logic of the capitalist society that raised them) is motivated only by the organizing logics of surplus value and market competition, which force capitalists to outcompete other capitalists by extracting surplus value from workers and nature at increasingly cheap and precarious margins. Capitalists are structurally incentivized to keep workers separated from their own future and from nature; that is what the logic of capital requires them to do.
Huber argues for the “expropriation of fossil fuel property,” a project that includes nationalizing the energy sector. He insists that this will mean overcoming the very profit motive that drives capitalist society. As he starkly points out, “climate action requires a massive buildout of energy infrastructure that does not satisfy the ‘profit imperative’; it would mean production for the public good of a stable climate regardless of the cost.” And as he openly acknowledges, “this requires challenging the private control over energy production itself.” In brief, Huber argues that the working class should wield the tools of class war—strikes, mass unrest, and socialist movement-building—to outright seize private control away from the energy industry.
He covers all this ground in only the first 10 pages; the Introduction continues for another 38. Cumulatively, it is the kind of Introduction that I recommend all environmental humanities teachers assign alongside other excerpts from environmental humanities research, like the incredibly influential Introduction to Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, or Part I of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Huber’s text is similarly ambitious and deserves to leave a similar impact on the future visions and imaginations of actually-existing climate justice movements. Huber would be justifiably upset if I restricted my recommendation to teachers, writers, and professional-class readers; he is right to insist the primary audience for these arguments is the working class itself.
Other writers like Chad Montrie had already shown that workers always suffered most from environmental catastrophes and that working-class coalitions most often campaign for clean air, water, and energy. While building upon similar arguments, Huber develops perhaps his most original contribution of all: the outline of an “ecological definition” of the working class: “under capitalism, the working class lacks access to the means of life.” As he puts it almost two hundred pages later, the working class is defined precisely by the fact that it is “alienated from the natural conditions of life itself.” Or, back in the Introduction: “This ecological definition of the working class as a class alienated from nature and forced to survive via the market should be central in developing a working-class climate politics,” not least because “the working class is a class of people separated from the land as a source of direct livelihood,” while also being dependent for survival on a market where they have no ownership or autonomy—a market that cheapens nature while cheapening all life. To be a member of the working class, in this ecological sense, is to be alienated, against your will, from the conditions of life itself. As a result, Huber attempts to articulate “a much wider climate class-consciousness that associates decarbonization with better lives,” especially if “we leverage working-class power within the existing centralized utility system” to achieve clean and renewable energy through work strikes and property expropriation.
By reclaiming the notion of class war and class politics, Huber articulates new possibilities for environmental justice as a working-class movement that can actually unite the working masses of this planet around a shared, common aim: that of sustaining the conditions of life on this fragile planet that capitalist economics seems so hell bent on destroying. The Introduction is the most impressive part of Huber’s book because of the success of its synthesis. He achieves a complete reorientation of vision in only 48 pages. Drawing on Karl Marx’s claim in Capital that he will peer inside the veil of the factory, looking inside what Marx calls the “hidden abode of production,” Huber similarly turns to the hidden abode of production to look not merely at the surface level site of your consumerism, but at the actual site of industrial production itself: at the industrial factories, guano fields, nitrogen fertilizer extraction and production sites, construction sites, and agricultural fields and labs where capitalist production is driving environmental harm and anthropogenic climate change. Huber trains his reader’s eye to look beyond consumption to the “hidden abode” where the climate actually changes—the place where the smokestacks lie.
Huber’s argument across the rest of the book—which he divides along class lines, as Part I is called “The Capitalist Class,” Part II is called “The Professional Class,” and Part III is called “The Working Class”—is sound, as well. He argues that extractive capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis. And because capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis, resistance to capitalism should be the core of any serious climate justice movement that hopes to actually usurp power from the fossil fuel barons. Capitalism exploits the labor of workers while emitting a majority of global CO2 emissions in industrial production. It is not primarily personal action—like how you, as a worker, get to work—that destroys our planet, but rather the bosses whose management practices and adherence to market logic fuels an industrial ecocide of the earth. Corporations increasingly offshore their industrial production facilities to countries with cheaper labor markets and lax environmental standards, a process that leads to the rampant pollution and despoilation of natural environments in the sacrifice zones of the Global South, where workers live and toil in the refuse produced by industrial capitalism—even as industrial capitalism claims to represent “progress” for humanity. Everywhere it travels, capital cheapens nature, cheapens human lives, and shortens the horizons of survivability on our planet. Its effects, especially its environmental effects, are unequal. Workers bear the brunt of the climate crisis. The bosses don’t. (On this particular point I am reminded of many labor speeches to a similar effect in John Sayles’s wonderful 1987 film about suffocating coal workers struggling for power and justice: Matewan.)
Huber argues that these overwhelmingly unequal and unjust distributions of emissions, labor, and environmental consequences should inspire a revived socialist movement that will organize labor in the energy sector first and foremost. By unionizing and organizing energy utility workers, a nascent socialist movement can wield the power of work stoppage strikes to influence the energy economy and put a rapid stop to the obscene fossil fuel emissions created in the heart of the machinery of industrial production. Especially if combined with the outright nationalization of energy infrastructure, Huber’s proposal for socialist ecology would work by reanimating worker power in the “hidden abode” of capitalist production, where the same workers who power the fossil economy via labor can strike back against the workplace machinery that is killing them.
Huber’s book is an important contribution to the expanding research tradition that emphasizes the complicity of capitalist enterprise in the climate crisis. As Huber insists in his section on “The Capitalist Class,” while building a historical analysis of the chemical industry’s pursuit of nitrogen fertilizers in modern agriculture, the modern fertilizer industry further deepened the environmental crisis because the chemical and agricultural industries were motivated by a broader “drive for relative surplus value,” a drive for surplus value that led to a “cheapening of nitrogen inputs to agriculture,” alongside the cheapening of nature generally, and of food and everything connected to human metabolism in general. This cheapening process also cheapened labor. Fewer workers worked in agriculture across the 20th century because increased nitrogen fertilizer and mechanized farming cheapened the labor required to extract food from the earth. Huber roots these processes in Karl Marx’s observations that the cheapening of commodities “cheapens the workers themselves,” a trend Huber sees exemplified in the “the rise of processed food increasingly devoid of nutritional content,” a cheap food trend that “led workers to rely more and more on cheap ‘fast’ or other convenient processed food, so as to not interfere with a frantic balancing act between work in the workplace and the work of social reproduction in the increasingly privatized household unit.” As capitalism increased its stranglehold on workers everywhere, our metabolic relationship with the earth was gradually and violently shattered.
As other scholars like John Bellamy Foster have already shown, the socialist ecology tradition began when Karl Marx drew upon the soil ecology of Justus von Liebig to demonstrate the development of this very same “metabolic rift” of capitalist agriculture. Nineteenth-century capitalism separated town and country: it sent industrial workers to the city, while extracting their sustenance from outlying farmlands. Before this, there had previously been a closed, sustainable nitrogen loop in agriculture, as human and animal waste was integrated back into the fertility of the fields. But Liebig’s soil ecology showed that capitalist agriculture broke down the longstanding sustainability of the agricultural process. As Marx insisted in Volume 3 of Capital, “Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”
These same imbalances in the social metabolism of human relationships with nature also caused profound environmental issues like the phenomenon of gulf hypoxia. Excess nitrogen from farms is drained into rivers, which leads into lakes and oceans, where the excess nitrogen kills aquatic life. The Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is a direct result of gulf hypoxia caused by excess nitrogen used in the heartland of American agriculture: the Midwest. Profit-driven monoculture agriculture in Iowa alone—the state where I live—is disproportionately responsible for 29% of the entire nitrate load of the Upper Mississippi Basin. This nitrate loading process has gradually grown worse across recent decades despite frequent activist interventions and new sustainable farming programs, because the only programs that currently exist to improve water quality are voluntary: farms can choose, of their own accord, to introduce more sustainable practices—but most don’t. Voluntary ag compliance won’t work if the cheapening of agriculture is profitable.
As Huber notes, “Despite industry pronouncements on teaching farmers to apply nitrogen more efficiently, the uncomfortable fact is nitrogen producers profit from these wasteful dynamics.” The entire contemporary capitalist economy depends on this violent cheapening of nature via the drive to extract surplus value out of anything that capitalists find in nature. As Huber points out: “Most attention on regulation focuses on the overapplication of nitrogen by ‘wasteful’ farmers, but few consider regulating the source of industrial production itself.” The deeper motors of industrial production power this metabolic imbalance, yet there have not been many serious public proposals for addressing these environmental inequalities through policies capable of actually upsetting the core processes underlying environmental injustices. Really striking at the core of the problem would mean striking at the heart of capitalism itself. In addition to causing gulf hypoxia, the current overreliance on harmful nitrogen fertilizer is a direct contributor to anthropogenic climate change. After all, as Huber reminds us, “nitrogen fertilizer today constitutes 2.5 percent of global GHG emissions,” a figure that the International Fertilizer Association revealed at the UN Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh in 2016.
When Huber spoke in person with fertilizer industry leaders and the spokespeople of fertilizer industry think tanks, they all considered the prospect of being limited by carbon regulations “unfair.” In a particularly memorable passage, Huber revealed direct quotations from industry leaders, arguing against carbon regulation, who almost verbatim repeated Marx’s summary of arguments given by nineteenth-century capitalists who resisted the regulation of child labor.
Huber’s book considers several other industries that impact global emissions trends, finding again and again that the processes of cheapening labor and cheapening nature work in tandem. The surplus value-seeking, extractivist logic of the capitalist economy is the primary cause of the climate crisis, which is produced not by individual consumers, but by industrial production.
To overcome this crisis—as Huber powerfully argues in the conclusion of his argument about the capitalist class—overcoming climate change “requires overcoming the structural logic that compels all forms of production under capitalism: the logic of surplus value.” Decarbonization currently only happens in practice, within the currently-existing capitalist economy, where it is motivated by profit—which means it barely happens at all. What Huber proposes is a “revolution in the structuring logics of production,” which would “require a mass social movement with the kind of social power to take on the relatively few who control the productive resources in society.” However, as Huber quickly notes, “the climate movement is overwhelming the purview of a minority of the population—the professional class.” So, he then turns to the professional class to investigate its profound, systemic shortcomings as representatives of climate justice.
Huber’s problems with professional-class environmentalism is that the professional class, with its basis in think tanks, NGOs, and industry, typically only pursues either market-driven reforms and tweaks to fossil capital, or individual lifestyle shifts to reduce personal GHG emissions. As he articulates the issue, “For this brand of policy technocrat, the climate struggle is not a power struggle over material production, but a struggle over ideas and logical policy designs.” But because none of those “logical policy designs” ever involve challenging the profit motive that actively incentivizes the cheapening extraction of nature, they are almost universally toothless.
Without a robust foundation in class politics, in other words, environmentalism has no chance of changing current trends in the global climate crisis. There is no way that a professional-class proposal will result in corporations choosing to decarbonize, especially not on account of ethics or morals. Capitalist markets seek surplus value, not life. Moderate reforms to that market drive can at best make the ecocide of the climate emergency work at a slower pace, so that its material impacts on global ecology are somewhat less cartoonishly extreme. But in practice, this isn’t working. Huber’s book was published in 2022. Since then, the prognostications he outlines in detail have already grown much worse. Recent headlines from AP, Reuters, and other news organizations have revealed, among other things, that oil and energy companies have minimal green energy transition plans; that oil companies are currently pursuing a “greener image” in their PR marketing while simultaneously pursuing “accelerated growth” in profits from GHG markets; and that big oil profits are still skyrocketing, having reached record high levels in 2022.
Maybe most alarming of all, last year, global fossil fuel subsidies passed $7 trillion for the first time in history. New subsidies for new fossil fuel leases and extraction projects are still actively rising, with consequences that will extend decades into the future. The environmental politics of the professional class has for decades assumed that spreading knowledge and rational market solutions would solve the climate crisis. Instead, after decades of environmentalist energy spent on professional-class solutions, the prospects of our planetary future are worse than ever before.
When Huber says we need a true mass movement capable of impacting the material flows of power that violently drive this crisis—a mass movement rooted in class politics, people power, and dramatic interruptions of business as usual—he is clearly, even unambiguously correct. The currently-existing constellation of NGOs, academic departments, science outreach programs, legal firms, and “experts” has not yet made any ground. Huber, as usual, finds precedence for this failure in the prognostications of Marx, who also wrote at length about the problems with reformist intellectuals who operate within the apparatus of capitalism. The professionalization of climate science occurred in the postwar period of neoliberal capitalist consolidation, and as Huber notes, “the ecology movement places scientific credentials at the center of ecological politics.” Importantly, what bothers Huber is not science itself. He draws extensively and thoughtfully on science throughout his book and he aims to develop a scientific socialism. Instead, what bothers Huber is the lack of class politics in professionalized environmentalism, which has historically been restricted to credentialed experts and affluent, degreed professionals, who hope they “can deploy knowledge toward making the world better.” Basing environmental politics on credentialed expertise means expelling working-class populations from the climate justice movement, privileging only market-driven reforms, not the mass movements of the people who actually spend their lives laboring and suffering in the hidden abode of production.
Crucially, the kind of politics that workers propose tends to be extremely different from the kind of politics professionals propose. “At the center of most conversations of climate politics” among professionals “is the question of belief or denial.” In that “debate,” as Huber shows by drawing on recent books that examine the sources of climate denialism in the United States, “science” is generally presented as fundamentally in conflict with “politics.” To be “scientific,” “rational,” or “objective” is to push climate politics aside and to focus instead on mere debates about facts. The professional class expels politics from its ranks, privileging only science that is “pure.” But Huber notes that the climate crisis is fundamentally political. The scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change is by now unambiguous and clear. In one of his most striking turns of phrase, Huber argues that it is actually “another form of denial to suggest that this crisis can be adjudicated purely through truth and science.” Such a denial neuters the climate movement of any potential for achieving material change of the sort we desperately need to save real lives.
Huber’s book then investigates the neoliberal privatization of energy markets and the ascendancy of capitalist power in the Global North, where environmental regulations are rare and tepid. He does not give as much emphasis to the parallel ascendancy of capitalist power in the Global South, where attempts to nationalize energy infrastructure often lead to violent US-backed coups, sanctions, and embargoes that overthrow socialist attempts to put energy in the hands of workers. Already for decades, there has been a global, material class war waged over energy nationalization. That war is generally ignored in the imperial core—it was even largely ignored by Huber’s book—but that global class war involved opening up natural resource extraction markets and cheap labor pools for capitalists to exploit from the comfort of the imperial core.
In concert with that more nefarious progress of global imperialism is the abundance of NGOs and groups in the United States, like the Citizens Carbon Lobby, that propose inoffensive market solutions like carbon fees and carbon pricing. As Huber observes, such organizations claim to be “nonpartisan” as they ignore the global class politics driving climate change, but their “entire strategy cedes politics to the right.” This, too, seems unambiguously true: any climate justice organization that ignores the imperialist and neocolonial power struggles against energy grid nationalization in the Global South is necessarily ceding politics to the right, especially if their explicit policy aim is to introduce new pricing controls for carbon market dynamics. When the status quo is far right, any refusal to acknowledge or fight against it only reinforces its power. What is at stake is power itself. Huber again: “Science communicators act as if climate denial is the major barrier to decarbonization, and not entrenched political and economic power over our energy systems.” As he shows, the political and economic power of capitalism is the real culprit.
After his twofold evisceration of capitalists themselves and those who refuse to acknowledge capitalism in their professional-class environmentalism, Huber turns to a relatively surprising conclusion. He spends most of Chapter 4 arguing against any “degrowth” ideology, since a “politics of less” can never be a winning strategy in the persuasive rhetoric of class politics.
At the start of this argument is a fascinating historical reminder that the dense concentration of workers in industrial cities led to worker associations and a revolutionizing tendency among the working class. Later projects like the New Deal intentionally dispersed the working class, splitting them apart, and atomizing families into separate “nuclear family” households. This is the primary driver behind the significant emissions of Global North consumers: an intentional decision to spread out workers, increase reliance on single-family households, and develop a car-dependent society. This vestige of Cold War anti-communism is one of the primary drivers of our overly consumptive society in the United States, especially. As Huber notes, “Giving working-class white urbanites the capacity to move out of the city and live in a privatized single-family home was a way to spur the economy and neutralize working-class power.” He cites Herbert Hoover, the architects of New Deal public works projects, and racist redlining technocrats to develop a historically-grounded argument about the design of our solitary, alienated lives today. For Huber, the solution we need to pursue is not only a reduction of cars or aircraft, but a much more fundamental reorganization of society that once again privileges the importance of community and worker associations, while rejecting the extractivist, privatizing calculus that created our car-dependent world of profit-seeking industrial production in the first place.
This is why Huber rejects degrowth ideology. He also documents a trend: degrowth advocates are typically highly-educated, white, professional-class intellectuals who perpetuate the politics of “austerity” and who blame “affluence,” or “affluent lifestyles,” for environmental injustice. But as Huber has already repeated at length by this point in the book, the affluence of individuals is hardly the root cause of climate change. What must be overthrown is the profit motive itself. Advocates for degrowth are usually those who base their politics on “the anxiety that besets the professional-class consumer worried about their own participation in privatized provisioning.” It is a movement based in feelings of guilt and the anxiety of complicity or shame. But this narcissistic obsession with guilt ignores the deeper industrial basis of the material crisis.
Huber observes that “the politics of growth or degrowth has little to do with antagonistic struggles within these systems.” The emphasis on degrowth in professional-class environmentalism ignores the fact that, as Huber insists, “we actually do want to grow health and education. Such a politics [of degrowth] is incapable of articulating how some things really do need to grow (such as clean energy), while some need to degrow (such as the military). More to the point, a class politics would articulate a confrontational approach where the capitalist class must degrow so that the working class can see growth in material security and basic human freedom.” Even where degrowth advocates recognize the split between the Global North and the Global South, they tend to articulate it in terms of the “overconsumption of the Global North,” rather than in terms of the drive for profit or surplus value—the degrowth of which would actually lead to decarbonization—because “professional-class politics is fixated on, and guilt-ridden over, the role of consumers in driving” ecological breakdown.
What Huber proposes is a class-centered approach that “cuts across national territories and recognizes the existence of a globally integrated capitalist class, and of a global working class.” The goal is not merely a new knowledge economy or a new way to assuage guilt, but instead a concrete proposal to build class power and overthrow the capitalist class as it simultaneously exploits the global working class and the global climate. In a world on fire, a politics of power and justice is necessary. Without real, material change, nothing we think or say can help us.
After all, environmental justice exists to improve the material living conditions of the people and animals on this planet. While reading, I thought about how, when the water in Flint, Michigan was poisoned with lead in 2014, exposing over 100,000 people to lead contamination, the solution advocated by environmental justice advocates was not to reduce the public’s reliance on water (which is precisely what the villain Immortan Joe declared in Mad Max: Fury Road, while blaming the subjects over whom he ruled for being “addicted to water”). Instead, the solution was to fix the material problem by finding new water sources, to tangibly improve lives, and to hold those responsible accountable for their actions. (On Halloween 2023, the Michigan attorney general’s office said the state prosecution of Governor Rick Snyder and other responsible public officials had ended. The officials suffered no legal consequences.) Similarly, the goal of the climate justice movement should be to tangibly improve living conditions for the global poor, the global working class, and the plant and animal biodiversity everywhere on the earth. This is similar to what Rob Nixon had in mind when he wrote that the “environmentalism of the poor” is different from professional-class environmentalism. The environmentalism of the poor, which recognizes and actively fights against the “slow violence” of environmental crisis, necessarily involves fighting for better living conditions. It is an environmentalism of material resistance that struggles to create the conditions for a world with better living conditions and ecological health.
The problem with capitalism, in other words, isn’t that it has led us to live lives that are “too good.” The problem with capitalism is precisely that it has destroyed the conditions of life, that it has led to a vicious overabundance of violence in the world, that it has destroyed the ecological balance of social metabolism, that it has created what Huber calls “gilded” levels of inequality, such that the capitalist class benefits materially from the overt robbing of the global majority. You don’t fight back against such a system by asking for less. “More” is precisely what socialists fight for. The question is simply how to achieve more for everyone—how to live sustainably on this planet while securing autonomy and power for ourselves and everyone else on earth. That “everyone” includes the nonhuman world. It also includes the global working class. The way we achieve that goal is primarily by rejecting the capitalist drive for surplus value, which extracts and exploits value, labor, and living conditions from everyone—and everything—that it touches.
Huber ends his book by outlining his vision of “proletarian ecology,” which he positions as an answer to the question: “What would a climate politics of more, aligned with the material interests of the working class, look like?” To summarize every detail of his vision, at the end of this already long review, would belabor the point. I encourage everyone to read his book to discover this answer for themselves. I will quote only one line from this final section to indicate the sort of vision Huber has in mind: “The challenge is to convince masses of people that they have a material interest in restructuring production to make possible a livable planetary future.”
Nobody should end with this book. I strongly encourage readers to supplement Huber’s project by reading, for example, The Salvage Collective’s The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene, a fascinating and vital book about climate change as class war that does align more toward degrowth ideology, but with the explicitly socialist, proletarian aim of reorganizing material production in a way that contradicts the drive for surplus value in capitalist society. I also suggest that anyone who reads Huber also reads The Red Nation’s The Red Deal, an environmentalist critique of the Green New Deal that contrasts with Huber’s defense; The Red Deal outlines an anti-colonial vision of internationalism and Indigenous solidarity, while drawing on Indigenous knowledge, not as a supplement to professional-class knowledge, but as a counter-hegemonic vision of a world that prioritizes life itself rather than the pursuit of surplus value.
Huber’s book does have shortcomings along those lines. For a self-professed radical vision of socialist environmental politics, his book insufficiently explores crucial imperatives like Indigenous internationalism, while largely ignoring the networks of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist resistance struggles that are fighting against the extractivist motor of capitalist production on a global scale. Those are the resistance networks where most of the world’s land defenders and water protectors are being killed and martyred. Those martyrs are workers resisting capitalism, and it is unfortunate that Huber does not give them—or wider debates around what praxis looks like in an imperialist world of neocolonial resource extractivism—the emphasis they deserve.
Even so, Huber’s book is essential reading. His argument is provocative and it will undoubtedly challenge those who might be the most likely to read it: the very professionals he describes. The book is extremely well-grounded and researched, it is thoughtfully structured, and it articulates a bold vision of class politics with a clear target and a clear message. His book feels refreshingly unambiguous and actionable in a sea of dire books with only indeterminate plans for living well. Even his title is brilliant: Climate Change as Class War has the catchy nature of a protest chant, one that calls to mind the actual protest chant: System Change Not Climate Change. Huber’s book is organized, beginning to end, with this kind of actionable, tangible impact in mind.
Read his book. Then organize your workplace. But don’t stop there—not when there’s a planet to win.
Zachary Calhoun is the Book Review Editor of Flyway, a Faculty Steward of the Everett Casey Nature Center & Reserve, and an emerging fiction writer from New Mexico. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in Philosophy from Tulane University. He was the 2018 recipient of the Aristotle Prize and the 2022 Writer-in-Residence at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. His work has appeared in From Sac, After the Pause, The Review of Metaphysics, and Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. He teaches creative writing, film studies, and environmental literature, politics, and philosophy at Iowa State University.
