Climate Change As Class War

But it didn’t take long for a mixture of overwhelming crisis, policy shifts, and above all militant upsurge from workers themselves to dramatically tilt the balance of power toward the working class between 1933 and 1936. The result was the most significant restructuring of capital-labor relations in the twentieth century, the New Deal. Of course, it was fraught with contradictions and conciliations with the capitalist class, and by 1947 the working class was once again on the retreat. But we can learn lessons from these failures if a working-class upsurge comes again in the 2020s.

But all efforts to recover a rooted and localized relation to nature ignore the very basic definition of working-class proletarian ecology: the lack of direct connection to the ecological means of life. The question becomes: what is to be done about the masses of people already torn from the land?

My students often ask me what they can do to save the climate. I imagine they’re used to hearing things about lightbulbs or electric cars. But they need to hear something different: join a union.

The RFS asserts that this process can begin only if workers learn their own power through direct confrontations with capital.

Environmentalists have long understood the power of disruption, but usually deployed it outside the workplace in ways that appear antagonistic to workers.

As one article put it, socialism is now distinctly appealing to the “well-educated and downwardly mobile millennials.”

Of course, the state under neoliberalism will never deploy this power against fossil capital. So this is where the working class comes in.

if we wish to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we cannot ignore state power

Raising class consciousness is ecological consciousness because there is a class of people who seek to maintain restricted access to the basics of life: the capitalists who control our food, energy, housing, and transport.

As Geoff Mann says, the very notion of “interest” is oriented toward the future, like the climate problem itself: “To have an interest is precisely to be concerned with something to come.”