Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

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Verso Books, May 10, 2022 - Political Science - 320 pages
How to build a movement to confront climate change

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change.

Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.
 

Contents

Climate Change as Class War
1
Industrial Capital and Climate Responsibility
51
How the Nitrogen
79
THE PROFESSIONAL CLASS
106
Privatized Ecologies
143
THE WORKING CLASS
149
Working Class Interests
179
History and Strategy
257
Species Solidarity at
283
Acknowledgments
297
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About the author (2022)

Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

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