Rev Left Radio - Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. His new book, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, is out from Verso Books in 2022. Professor Huber joins Breht to discuss the politics of climate change and how to build an effective socialist movement, rooted in the working class and militant labor unions, to confront the challenges of the climate crisis.   Get Climate Change as Class War here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3973-climate-change-as-class-war   Follow Prof. Huber on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Matthuber78   Outro music: 'Highwomen' by The Highwomen Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Professor Matt Huber to talk about his newest book, Climate Change as Class War. This is a really crucial dive into the Marxist class-based perspective on the climate crisis and how best to address it. We talk about unions, we talk about NGOs, we talk about. about certain strata in the working class and what they represent. We talk about a lot of fascinating, essential stuff to the issue of climate change. And we're sitting here in June when we're recording this. You know, very quickly, we're already on some places and are going to increasingly be in the drought and wildfire season,

which every year rages more and more out of control. I sometimes think that winters in the Northern Hemisphere give people a recess a little bit. from having to think about climate change, because sometimes it can be out of the news and people can move on to other topics, as we've seen, very quickly. But with the reemergence of summer every year, it's sort of like recesses over. Remember what's happening in the background this whole time? Maybe we should start fucking addressing it. And so, you know, starting off the summer, I wanted to make sure that we covered climate change once again,

and we'll continue to do that because obviously it's a huge focus of this show. I also wanted to give a shout out to the friends over at Left Reckoning, another good left-wing podcast who also had Matt Huber on for an interview with him as well. So if you listen to this interview, you enjoy it. There's more interviews out there, including over at Left Reckoning, where you can go hear more. And of course, the book itself is definitely worth buying if you're interested at all in these topics. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Matt Huber on his book, Climate Change as Class War. My name is Matt Huber. I'm a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.

My Marxist, I've been studying Marxism for over 20 years and excited to talk about the book. Absolutely, and the book is Climate Change as Class War. very, very in-depth dive into the issues and the importance of a socialist movement rooted in working-class concerns that can really deal with the problem and not these, as we'll get into, these half-ass solutions or these solutions geared toward a green capitalism or, you know, solutions geared towards individual consumption patterns, et cetera. So I'm really excited to get into it. And maybe the first question to ask, which I always like to do for listeners out there that might not have obviously read the book because it is new. Why did you write this book? And what is its central

thesis or argument? Well, like I said, I've kind of been, you know, grappling with Marxism for a while. I come out of like this kind of school of Marxist geography, but sort of led by David Harvey. And for many years, you know, what Marxist geography really was about was kind of like reading our capital and developing really sophisticated. critiques of capitalism and sort of, you know, having this kind of anti-capitalist posture. But basically, as you know, around 2014, 2015, you know, the politics started to shift in a way where finally, in this kind of, there is no alternative many decades neoliberal era, finally people we're talking again about socialism and actually advocating for an alternative to capitalism

instead of just saying we're anti-capitalist. And so, you know, I got really excited about the socialist movement and started thinking about how, how to, and I've always been kind of environmentally focused and into environmental politics. And I started thinking about the climate movement, the environmental movement, and started to really see a big, gap in the way in which this emergent socialist politics was talking about working class power and class struggle and class war and the fact that this kind of analysis and this kind of class focus was pretty absent in the climate movement. And so I thought, you know, there's a, there was a need to write a book like this that just goes back to basics and takes this very

standard Marxist approach to class, which is really relevant, I think, to that. to the climate crisis, as I can expand on later, I guess. Yeah, we'll definitely expand on that idea further in this conversation. So I guess, you know, I really love this core argument. I love the overall thesis and the way the book does these deep dives into the problem. And, you know, I've studied this issue. I've talked to many, many people on this issue. And I learned a lot of new, interesting things from your tech.

So really encourage people to get out there and get it. I think it's over 300 pages. So, you know, we're only going to be able to touch on some of the broad swaths. the text in this interview, as is usually the case. But definitely go check it out if you haven't already. And if you're interested in this issue, which I know my audience is. So let's go ahead and move in this direction, which is why should, I mean, this might answer itself for many listeners, but it's still worth asking because I like how you articulate this stuff. Why should climate activists focus on the means of production and the social relations of production as central

to the climate struggle? Yeah. So once I started thinking about this problem as a class problem, I started to notice that there was a lot of analysis of the climate crisis as a problem of inequality or as a problem of rich people. But what you notice is that a lot of that analysis, whether it be like Thomas Pickety or Oxfam International, did this famous study on what they called extreme carbon inequality. They tend to focus on the problem with rich people is how they consume. It's they eat too much steak, they have yachts, they fly a lot, they drive SUVs, whatever it is. And this analysis, which you can get pretty sophisticated, that focuses on carbon footprints, shows, you know, rich people have higher consumption, have higher consumption-based carbon footprints.

And therefore, it leads to this kind of what I would call shallow class analysis that is really just based on income and consumption practices. and does not really, does not focus at all on production, which, again, as you were suggesting, Marxist definition of class is sort of foundationally about production, it's about your relationship to the means of production. And, you know, there's a lot of ways in which the climate crisis is centrally about that. I mean, you can just do some basic data analysis and find that the largest source of emissions is actually industrial production, you know, for as much concern we have about what we do in our homes and our everyday lives, like a huge bulk of global emissions and over a third are coming from industrial production, you know, like some

sectors like steel and cement alone are responsible for something like 15 to 20 percent of global emissions. And then when you start sort of diving into this carbon footprint ideology and analysis, you start to realize that even when we are consuming things, when we are, you know, driving a car and we're belching out emissions from our car, we bought the gasoline. We have to realize that other capitalists sold us that gasoline. There's oil companies who produce that oil, and they're making a profit off that transaction. And carbon footprint analysis says we should be responsible for 100% of those emissions when it just sort of erases the power and the profits of those that control production.

And, you know, the other thing is that this way of thinking about carbon responsibility really just focuses, again, on rich people's consumption, but does not ask, how did these rich people become rich in the first place? How are they generating the money that allows them to eat steak or fly a private jet or whatever it is? And if you looked at that activity, how they actually make their money, how they make their profit, you would probably find that has way more carbon impact than their consumption actions. So, and you could, you know, like take a CEO of a fossil fuel company who spends eight to 12

hours a day organizing like a global network of fossil fuel extraction and spends an hour driving in a SUV and eating a steak. And for whatever reason, everyone wants to just focus on that steak in the SUV and they just completely ignore his role as a sort of capitalist tycoon of fossil capital. And so it's just very, it's very weird. And this way of analyzing the problem could actually say that like there's like Brad Pitt has a higher carbon footprint than a fossil fuel executive than Brad Pitt somehow more responsible for climate change because the fossil fuel executive might take public transit or something like that. So it's just completely erases production. And so this,

again, very kind of basic Marxist analysis of class as rooted in production seemed like something no one was talking about, to be quite honest. Even socialists who analyzed the climate crisis in terms of class would rely on these like consumption-based carbon footprints. And so it just seemed like someone needs to really focus back to basics, right? Back to production. And it's really useful. I got to be honest, like I developed this argument while teaching volume one of capital by Marx. And it really just hit me over the head because in Marx, too, he, you know, starts not to get too deep in the weeds, but he starts the book in the realm of exchange and commodities and money.

But the biggest shift in the book is where he says to understand really where these profits come from, we have to go into the hidden abode of production. And we have to get away from the surface, what he calls the surface of the economy in exchange, and in market prices, and we have to actually go into production to see the source of profits, which is the brutal exploitation of workers in this zone of production. And I think there's a similar problem with climate politics. You know, if people aren't, you know, harping on people's consumption patterns, they're often saying we can solve this somehow in the realm of market exchange,

like in prices and carbon taxes, we'll just get the prices right. And, you know, when you start to look away from that surface market approach, you see this class power of a small group of people that control global networks of production and who are really hell-bent on maintaining that control, maintaining the profits on these investments that they're expecting for decades to come. And that's kind of where the source of the climate crisis is, and that's who has the power to prevent us from solving it. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very well said. I love that reference to Marx's quote about the hidden abode of production and how that's often obscured, even on the socialist left, this focus on the, as you said, the income and consumption patterns of the rich, as opposed to their domination over the point of production, and that being the real generator of the crisis and of inequality more broadly. Now, you mentioned some of the things that the mainstream climate activism, for want of a better term, focuses on instead of, you know, the capitalist mode of production and the social relations of production. You go into a great depth about the carbon footprint and sort of the mythology and the individualism around that and how it obscures the real corporate power. You also touch on a couple other things like consumer sovereignty theory or I think even in passing you mentioned anti-natalism. That's something that I hear a lot as well.

like even people on like liberal progressives, you know, almost now taking a posture of shaming people for literally having children because that is seen as, you know, this undue burden that you're placing on the environment. And it's like a thing, it's almost replicating the idea that we used to hear all the time, like from libertarians and stuff. Like, if you can't afford to have a kid, don't have a kid. Like, like, it's almost like a repackaging of that argument where it's like, yeah, if you have enough money, if you're rich, you can have this, you can have this human experience of giving life and raising a child. But if you don't have that, the implication being that your character is somehow less than ideal, then you don't deserve

to even have a fucking child on this planet. So could you talk about just some of these ideas and sort of how they take the eye off the ball, as it were? Yeah. So you're reminding me just this past weekend, the liberal New York Times columnist, Ezra Klein, had to write an article that basically argues, yes, you can have children. Yeah, I read that. And it's like, like, this is where we're at, where you actually have to argue, like, yes, having actual humans is okay. But it really hit me over the head. In 2018, there was a study that got a huge amount of media attention.

And it essentially tried to do it, again, using this carbon footprint methodology, it tried to do this kind of quantitative analysis. of the actions you can take to help with the climate crisis and tried to rank those options that you have, you know, drive less, fly less, eat, become a vegetarian, all the different options. And it found that the number one thing you can do to solve the climate crisis is to not have children. And the numbers that they found were just ridiculous. Like it was number one and it was at something like you would save like 70 tons of carbon per year. And the next best option is driving, not driving a car, and that's like two tons. So it was like 70 to two. And the reason is because they calculate the emissions that your precious baby is going to emit for their lifetime.

And then they also said that the baby will likely have other babies. And so you've got to calculate that. It's just an absolute insanity. And this got taken up by very liberal media outlets as kind of. of like, this is, I remember it was a Guardian article. Like, if you want to solve the climate crisis, don't have children. So it's just, it's very anti-human. It's very, you know, it's obviously flirting with this kind of Malthusian discourses.

But it's very, you know, coming out of that same framework that I talked about before, which is carbon footprint analogy, ideology, I should say. And carbon footprint ideology really fundamentally believes that climate crisis is a product of diffuse behaviors, millions of different people making decisions about their lives, about what to eat, what to drive, how to heat your home. And this kind of theory of distributed responsibility for the climate crisis really does map perfectly onto neoliberal theory of consumer sovereignty, which is very popular and just mainstream neoclassical economics that basically argues that, you know, like an economic capitalist market system is a system that's

ultimately driven by the sovereignty of consumers who make the choices, you know, Milton Friedman, the famous neoliberal wrote a book called Free to Choose. And it's, it's really about this diffuse consumers, decentralized choices of consumers are what drive the market, are what drive demand and demand is what drives production. And whenever you get into these arguments with people, they'll often say, well, the fossil fuel companies didn't, ask these consumers to buy this, that, you know, they're just delivering something that people want. And so this kind of theory of the economy is one that's driven by the diffuse decisions of

consumers is sort of a bedrock of neoliberal ideology. So what's really confusing is that when people on the climate left sort of invoke this kind of consumption-based theory of carbon responsibility and not really put the attention on the owners of production, who have, again, if you're a leftist, you should say that these people have way more power over the economy, you know, than just everyday consumers. It's not diffuse consumers that drive the economy. It's the concentrated power of corporations and their ownership and their profits that really are driving things. And that's where we need to put our attention. Yeah. And these individual lifestylesist, you know, prescriptions for how

to help the crisis obviously obscures the real cause and puts way too much pressure on regular working people just literally trying to survive day to day. And you can kind of see this neoliberal approach and all the wreckage that it causes in like the yellow vest movement where for those that don't know is basically this attempt to put attacks on gas to ostensibly help address the climate crisis, but it disproportionately impacts particularly the rural French who depend on, you know, cheap energy to live their lives and get by. And so this neoliberal attempt to solve the problem was so disassociated from everyday struggles of working class people that it immediately gave rise to this immense backlash, really across the political spectrum because it was more class-based than ideological. And I think that is a wonderful lesson on what happens when you take this liberal individualist approach to the problem that.

that wrinkles out class, you get a class backlash, and you don't solve the problem, which is class-based. Yeah, one thing I think I say in the book at some point is that everyday consumers aren't like capitalists. Capitalists are different. You know, literally, we are just trying to survive and meet our needs. You know, we are working for a wage and trying to use that money to sort of secure our basic needs, right? Whereas a capitalist, they're under, they're under a very different kind of logic,

which is obviously profit. And as Marx put it, you know, they're investing money into commodities and they're expecting to get more money out at the end of the day. So this MCM prime logic means that that is kind of the driving force of capital. And that's very different than just everyday people trying to just get by, trying to get to work, and to make all the, the, the, focus on people just meeting their needs. And again, even rich people just meeting their needs are not the same as rich people who are seeking profits in their ownership capacities, right? So there's just a fundamental kind of confusion of really the different roles that we play in the capitalist economy. Absolutely. Yeah, and just as an aside, before we move on really quickly,

just worth saying, you know, I had to fill up my tank. to come to work today and the prices are absolutely insane here in the Nebraska it's like at five dollars I know in other places it's even worse than that and all the while BP Chevron Exxon have the first quarterly reports have come out and they are making huge profits record profits right now on the backs of everyday working class people just trying to get to and fro and they they chalk it up to inflation or say we're sticking it to Putin but really they're just stuffing cash into their pockets loving it. And I forgot to mention this, but literally the idea of a carbon footprint was

invented by British Petroleum in 2004 as part of their Beyond Petroleum campaign, which they, as you, they have not gotten beyond. And that was the campaign they launched before they spilled, you know, however many trillion of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico. So there's been systematic analysis of the oil and gas industry has fundamentally, like, proactively promoted this narrative that the climate crisis is about individual carbon footprints and you should sort of figure out how you can pitch in. And they tweet this stuff out. And they, and so this is a very conscious strategy on the part of these capitalists to kind of focus all the attention on us and consumers and not on them.

Absolutely. Yeah. And the fact that it's a conscious strategy really needs to be emphasize. It's not just contingent or accidental. It's very much thought out. The capitalist class plots according to their class interests much more systematically than I think the American working class has, at least for the last several decades. But in your book, you make this interesting assertion. You assert that the professional class in particular has disproportionately led and shaped the mainstream climate movement and its activism. So can you talk about this professional class? Who makes it up? Kind of the three archetypes you use to describe them because I think that's interesting. And just in general, how their over-representation in the

movement shapes the overall approach to the issue. Right. So it is getting in dicey territory in a Marxist framework to talk about the professional class. And as you're probably aware, there's been this, I proposed this book in 2017. And since then, there's been this incredibly polarizing debate over the professional managerial class, a concept that was coined by Barbara and John Aaron Reichen, but I really wanted to stick with it because I do think it really shapes a lot of what is happening in the climate politics. And even if you want to take a sort of more broad and all-encompassing definition of the working class is just everyone who has to work for a wage or an income or a salary is working class. and that does include the people I'm calling the professional class. And it might be more accurate to actually talk about the professional class as a stratum

within the working class or whatever. But in any case, with that prelude, you know, what I argue is that the professional class isn't actually, it has a material existence that we need to, if we're materialist, if we're Marxist, we need to kind of think about this in materialist terms. And I argue that they basically use credentials, whether that be degrees or licenses or whatever, to carve out advantages in the labor market. And also in a labor market that's becoming increasingly barbaric and unequal and, you know, the sort of gilded age level of inequality. And so it does create this kind of, these sort of, I should add, like shrinking little zones of privilege among these credit. classes who are able to work in kind of knowledge economy professions and in what Marxists

what often used to call sort of this difference between mental labor and manual labor and this kind of distinction that that really puts a wedge between different types of workers in the capitalist system. And the other thing worth pointing out is that because these people are concentrated in the so-called knowledge economy, they are materially separated from production. in ways that are important, right? So there's a way in which the deindustrialization of the United States has come part and parcel with the expansion of the kind of so-called post-industrial knowledge economy.

And so like in the old days, Marxist, socialist movements were very much of this kind of industrial working class that was in the system of production organizing to take control or to seize the means of production. but for the professional class, there's this kind of distance from industrial production where in many times this professional class politics really kind of treats industrial production as just something that's out there and doing bad things to the environment that we need to kind of study and analyze.

But they're not in it. They're separated from it in this kind of material way. So, again, a long intro, but the main thing I want to say is that when you look around the people who are really driving climate policy advocacy and really just the climate movement more at large, you're basically going to see people from this class or stratum or whatever you want to call them. So journalists, scientists, academics like myself, I've become more convinced that the role of NGOs and NGO staffers and heavily professionalized NGOs are really driving this discussion.

And so in the book, I try to, in a very kind of schematic way, try to kind of break up the professional class into three different types. And one thing I want to make clear is that there's really nothing wrong with professional class people doing politics or doing environmental politics or doing working class or socialist politics. The problem is if they express a policy. that is hostile to the masses of working people, that's the problem I want to identify. And that's what I suggest is the case with all of these different forms of professional class climate politics.

So the first one I call the science communicators. And these are more the natural climate scientist. And also there's a lot of journalists who kind of do science journalists who become extremely invested in the problem of climate change is one of belief or denial of the science. And this kind of politics of truth, of, you know, science, you know, there was during the Trump years, all this outrage over the war on facts. And we had a march for science, which if you kind of look back at the, at who was involved in the march for science, it could be seen as like a mass action of the professional class. And so this obviously, you know, I want to acknowledge like climate change is, in fact, you know, something. that we have discovered through science and the scientific consensus on it is super important. But obviously, like, making the politics all about belief and denial and science is not exactly

speaking to the direct material needs of the masses of people. You know, like when you name your movement 350, well, not to name names, but Bill McKibbon's climate justice organization was called 350.org and it made like this number that James Hansen James Hanson came up with 350 as the sort of crucial thing we're organized in around, which is the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere that we need to really reach. It's a very wonky and scientific way of expressing the struggle that is not really going to speak to lots of people who have much more immediate and dire life concerns on their plate. And so, you know, I'm sure a lot of working class people do understand

the climate science and understand things like the greenhouse effect, but it's not exactly a way to reach the masses of people. The second type I identify is what I call the policy technocrat, and these are more people in like legal professions or academic policy analysis professions or think tanks or NGOs who are trying to design basically elegant policy fixes to the climate crisis. And these people really exploded during the kind of neoliberal era, where it was just sort of conceded that we live in this kind of world in which free market ideas and the right have taken over. So let's try to come up with really smart solutions that just seed all that terrain that says, like, we're not going to solve this with government. We're not going to solve it

with any kind of conscious public intervention. We're just going to try to create a policy that would allow the market to solve it by itself. And so you get all these developments of carbon tax policies and cap and trade, these really complicated technocratic policies that try to kind of basically internalize is how the economists talk about,

internalizing the cost of emissions into the prices of commodities so that entrepreneurs and, consumers can kind of see those prices go up and make their decisions accordingly and change their ways. And then the market will seamlessly transition into clean energy and climate change will be solved. And so one of the organizations I profile in the book is one called the Citizens Climate Lobby. And they really promote something called a carbon fee and dividend policy, which tries to do this. And again, they think that they're going to somehow win over the right

and win over Republicans to their policy. So they make the policy what they call revenue neutral so that it won't, quote, grow government. So they make sure the fee is not going to, like, go into government programs. It will just be distributed to households through this dividend program. And I think they're going to win Republican support and, like, create this kind of bipartisan climate solution through this, which is, like, totally delusional if you can look around the Republican Party. The Democratic Party delusion. Yeah.

And so, yeah, this just sort of moral fixation on bipartisanship is just insane. Truly. And so, but the key thing is with these policy technocrats, I mean, almost all of them are trying to enact these policies that are in some way or another sort of aiming to raise the price of energy. And again, internalize the emissions cost into the prices. And as you mentioned before, like the, you. see what happens when when when these policies are tried to be enacted like in France you know the

yellow vest movement had this slogan like politicians care about the end of the world and we just care about the end of the month like this is this idea that we're going to solve climate change by raising the price of something that people rely on every day in their lives it's just is insane and it also plays into the right wing resistance climate action because it's people I cite in the book like the Koch brothers are the people who are saying that climate action is going to make the working class life worse. It's going to make poor people worse off. And when we advocate these policies that actually do advocate raising the price of energy through these kind of complicated policy fixes, that's what is, you know, we basically say you're right to the

right wing resistance. And again, the people advocating this are typically professional class, people who have carved out some degree of material security for themselves and sort of like the idea of paying more for energy and consuming less energy because they are already themselves have a relative degree of material comfort. And so finally, the third group I focus on is what I call the anti-system radicals. And these are the group that I'm most familiar with and surrounded by academia and, you know, activist networks, not just in NGOs, but also sort of just in, let's be honest, like a lot of left socialist movements. And these people, I think, sort of had become radicalized rightly by the horrific ecological and climate crisis we're facing, but kind of

because of their professional class location, tend to kind of focus on the system as a whole as a problem and something that we need to sort of reduce and de-grow or decrease as a whole at the aggregate level. And there's this kind of focus on, again, because of the professional class location, there's this really fixation not on production, but on consumption, and it's really the overconsumption of the rich that's causing the problem. We need to consume less. And again, this sort of somewhat moralistic focus on consumption and really not much focus at all at production.

And there's a real lack in these networks of class analysis. Again, it's not that we need to reduce the aggregate system. It's that we need to reduce the power of the capitalist class so we can increase the power of the, working class. And so this kind of conflictual class struggle approach is not emphasized. It's kind of this system change or climate, not climate change approach that doesn't really make clear that it's actually a class of people whose power we need to overcome. And the other thing with these anti-system radicals is they often advocate kind of niche small scale types of solutions like like whatever, like communal kitchens, urban gardens and bike sharing, these kind of things

that, you know, might be more popular amongst sort of anarchist currents. But again, these types of small scale solutions don't really have an answer for how we're going to take on the power of the capitalist class and actually build a global decarbonization movement that can solve this crisis in the few decades we have left to really solve it. So all in all, this kind of anti-system radicalism really is also not really invoking, a politics that really can appeal to the masses of regular working people, working class people in not only countries like the United States, but everywhere around the world. We're really struggling to get by and need a kind of vision of improvement, right?

A vision of this is, we're going to advocate a politics that's all about making your life better and not about sort of, you know, again, reductions and degrowth and less. politics of less and all that stuff. Right. And that's a huge argument overall is like in order to activate the working class, you need to frame and understand and communicate the problem in such a way that it relates to the actual needs of everyday working class people. And whether it's the science commentator, the policy technocrat, or the anti-system radical, they all fail to do that in their own way, in part because they have these certain, often unexamined premises and assumptions that come from their relatively privileged layer of the class hierarchy that dictates

certain, yeah, just blind spots and inability to actually experience the day-to-day depravities of working-class people in this country. And when you do that, you do lots of things, including, I think, and we saw this with the Yellow Vest movement to some extent. We see this broadly with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the United States, is that when you fuck over working class people or don't really think about their perspective in these articulations of the problems and their solutions, you end up betraying them and thus seating ground, at least rhetorically, for the right wing to claim to be the true representatives. And we see that with the Republicans today because the Democrats have

completely abandoned the working class. The right uses cultural grievances, not to meet their material needs, but to then say in rhetoric at least that we are actually the party of the working class people. So this has downstream effects that are incredibly negative in a bunch of different ways. And so, yeah, would you basically agree with that summary? Yeah, I just thank you for saying that really clearly. That was great. The other thing I'd mention is that there is actually something going on that a lot of, you know,

more wonky political science commentators have identified. And essentially it's this process that people have labeled educational polarization. And essentially those, you know, a rough way of thinking about the professional class is just people with a college degree, right? And you might, a lot of people, I think, are surprised to learn that United States, about two-thirds of adults don't have a college degree. So if you want to talk about how to reach the working class masses, you might start, of course, we're Marxists, We're not going to equate education with class, but it's pretty clear that that two-thirds of society that doesn't have a college degree is disproportionately going to be in a very Marxist definition of the working class. And so what we've seen in the United States, but also in Europe, is the educated classes are sort of fleeing to these left or center-left parties. and a lot of non-college educated and working-class voters are going to the right, right?

And so you have this process where the working class, again, if you want to include these sort of more educated parts of the working class, the working class in classic fashions being divided amongst the educated and non-educated, where increasingly the educated strata are voting for the, let's say, in the United States, the Democrats. and more and more working class. And I should mention, if we look at the results in 2020, more and more black and brown working class people are voting for the right, right? And so that's one reason I think we do need to take this kind of, sometimes it is somewhat cultural differences between educated

and non-college educated folks in the working class. We need to take this seriously because this is actually having a material effect on political shifts and power and political movements. And, you know, if we look around a lot of the left movements that we're a part of, we see that it is also just sort of disproportionately made up of educated folks, right? And a lot of them are, of course, like being rapidly proletarianized and totally struggling as well. But there's this real problem where we're not really, finding a way to reach the broader masses of the working class

because of these kind of cultural sorting mechanisms that sort our movements and our organizing spaces. So, yeah, it's a big problem. And we need to, again, I think the starting point is to really think reflexively about it and be a little more aware of these privileges that come in these certain kind of educated contexts. and start to really think more reflectively about how we can actually evoke a politics that can meet the masses of people where they're at and in the broader working class.

Yeah, I think that's really important. And that phenomenon of the downward pressure on people with college degrees is, you know, it has many manifestations. You know, one of them is like, for me, for example, you know, I was. the first in my family to go to college. I decided, you know, sort of as a relatively naive 19-something that I was going to actually just pursue what I really loved. And I wasn't going to do anything for a job. I was going to pursue what I cared about. And that ended up being philosophy. And, you know, I came from a low working class background, worked shitty jobs since I was 15, got this degree. And I still didn't, I came out and, you know, I had this fantasy that I was

going to be a philosophy professor at some point in the future. But when I had, I had multiple children by the time I got out with my bachelor's degree, and I was like, this is just not feasible. for me to go to grad school. And so I dropped out. But philosophy equipped me with certain abilities to think and articulate and argue in ways that are appealing to people. And I also am married to the fact that I am just working class and was kicked right back into the working class and became, you know, as many people are, as you see with

the Starbucks unions, for example, sort of rabble-rousers. And so while there are some of these premises that are carried over that are negative or isolate and alienate the working class, there is also. this broad movement of pushing people that have some education and maybe some understanding of the world around them put back into low-wage jobs to mingle with people who now share a material sort of goal of uplifting themselves and their family. So this is like a complicated thing with good, bad, ugly, and neutral manifestations. Yeah. And one thing I wanted to mention before is that, you know, when the working class and socialist movements were at their strongest,

they always had these layers of professional, educated, intellectual people. I mean, Marx himself, Lenin, you know. Castro, Che. Yeah, all of them. You know, like, you're always going to have these layers in a broad working class movement. But the key is to make sure that those layers are sort of orienting towards that broader working class politics and not what I think is going on with the climate politics is very insular.

It's very inward looking. And it very much appeals to the people in it, but it's not looking outward. It's not looking to actually organize masses of people who don't think about the world in the way that these professional class people do. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And working class people really don't like being talked down to. So if you're a 35-year-old electrician or something and you have a 20-year-old bright-eyed bushytail

just out of college telling you that you and your values and your way of life are you know somehow worse or shitty or contributing to all this thing like that also puts a lot of right word pressure on elements of the working class is like I'm being talked down to by these assholes who don't have any of the lived experience of actually working and having to pay bills and raising a family and they're telling me that my entire way of viewing the world is reactionary or backward that's not that's not a good way to build bridges that's the way to burn them yeah I think the the foundation of organizing is listening so if you're going to talk the working class people, you should not tell them that they're bad and they need to change,

you should ask them, what are your concerns? What are your problems? And that should be the starting point, yeah. Absolutely. So you argue that instead of this, you know, NGO, professional managerial approach to the climate struggle, a mass popular movement centered on the working class needs to be cultivated instead. And we've obviously been getting at that in so many different ways and directions, but can you talk about why the working class is central to the climate fight? and what its relationship is to the, as you call them, ecological means of life, which I really enjoyed. Yeah. So in a more basic sense, you know, like I'm really just trying to make a sort of maybe sometimes naive, like democratic or even that if we really want to build a mass movement and build the kind of power, and we actually need a politics that is popular with the majority of people. And, you know, so I think that it's sort of, you know, Marxists have always said one of, one of the things that capitalism does is that sort of, it proletarianizes as much of the population so that the working class becomes the majority of society.

And that's, that can be a political benefit to the movement that you have the masses, you have the majority on your side. So, but what's really striking when you look at climate. politics is how little, especially the climate technocrats, like how little they seem to be concerned about developing popular policy proposals. So, again, even if we're going to somehow, I think we're going to need a lot of the professional class on the side of climate politics, but even if you take them out, you know, like I rely on Kim Moody does these sort of kind of, and also Michael's week has this great book called the working class majority where you know if you take out a lot of the professional occupations you're

still looking at like 63% of the workforce is you know working class and so that's the masses that's the majority and that's where you can build the power and the masses so I want to try to develop this kind of majoritarian approach to climate politics that can reach those masses but but I also wanted to kind of go back to basics in terms of thinking about does the working class have an interest in climate action because we're often told that you know that there's this sort of tension between working class people and climate action because you know some unions have come up against like or have been supportive of like the Keystone XL pipeline and and you do see this kind of working class resistance in places like France and other other places so what I try to do is

go back to basics go back to Marx's definition of the working class. class as fundamentally a class of people that are torn from the means of life and particularly the land. And Marx makes very clear. And I really think he has an ecological definition of class as proletarianization is really about tearing the mass of the population from any secure means of making a living so that you're torn from the means of subsistence. You can't access the land that humans for millennia have relied on to meet their needs. And so all you can do is sell your labor power on a market for a wage. And that's what really creates the capitalist systems working class,

this pool of wage workers who have nothing to sell, who are separated from the means of production. And I think we really need to reflect on how weird that is and historically and how new that is in human history. You know, humans have always made a living directly through nature, through the land, and through direct relationship with the land. And what capitalism has done is torn the mass of people from the land and force them to rely on this weird fictional stuff called money to survive and in commodities. And so this kind of proletarianization creates what I argue is like an actually proletarian ecology, where for people's lives, for their ecological existence, they have a really insecure access to the means of life

where they have to access this stuff through the market. And as you were hinting at earlier, we're just seeing like how stressful it is right now to try to access our means of life through the market when you get rapid inflation, where you get gas prices at $5 a gallon, where you get rent skyrocketing. You know, in many ways,

working class peoples like our basic needs are subject to these. the volatility of these markets and these commodity prices, and it's very stressful. Baby formula. Oh, my God, Jesus. I have a six-month-old, so it's brutal. Oh, I'm so sorry. That sounds so terrifying. Yeah, I thought there were only shortages in communist countries.

I've heard that somewhere. Right. So it's just, so basically, though, you can look at a very basic level under capitalism. working class people have this sort of fundamental proletarian insecurity and meeting their basic needs. And even in the richest country on Earth, that is true in this country. You know, some stats say that 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. About two-thirds struggle to access health care. I've looked at some stats that are out of date and probably much worse now that showed a third of Americans struggle to pay their energy bills or utility bills.

And so there's just masses of people who are really making, you know, heartbreaking decisions about putting food on the table, paying your heating bill, paying your rent. This is sort of the, this is the way of life of the working class under capitalism. It's defined by this proletarian insecurity. And that, that I think does create a kind of ecological interest in that working class people want more secure access. to those needs. And so what I argue in the book is that this can very simply overlap with climate politics because the very sectors that we need to decarbonize rapidly are like energy and agriculture and food.

And we know we need to totally revamp the housing stock to make it use energy more efficiently and we need green housing and all that stuff. We know that we need to completely revolutionize how we move our bodies around and transportation systems. So it's very simple to think about there could be a working class climate program that offers more secure access to food, energy, and obviously socialist would dream about decommodified access to things like electricity as a human rights or, you know, there's actual movements right now that are calling for housing as a human right. Obviously, we've heard about health care as a human right, Medicare for all. So these kind of movements to decommodify our basic

needs can very easily be linked to a climate politics if the strategy is to offer mass improvement and access to these basic needs to the working class alongside complete restructuring of these sectors toward decarbonization that needs to happen. But again, unfortunately, because most of the kind of policy wonks who control the narrative, they often think that we're not going to really solve this without, it's going to. going to cost a lot, right? So it's going to cost a lot of money. And so someone's got to pay for it. And I guess it's just going to be through taxes and carbon taxes and everyone's going to have to pay their share. But, you know, we we have examples in history of just massive rollouts of

public goods and decommodifying sectors that that offer masses of people better access to this stuff. And so that to me is like the way to kind of reach the working class masses through climate politics is through this kind of meeting people, meeting their basic material needs. Yeah. Like an entire political project centered at tackling the crisis that weaves in a bunch of other policies addressing every level of life that is in the material interest of, as you say, the vast majority of people in the country and in the planet, the working class. And so instead of making the transition to more renewables and a more sustainable way of life, synonymous with, you know, depriving working people of what little they have and try to hold on to, you should

flip that and say anything that is going to be meaningful and going to rally the necessary amount of people to our cause to fix the climate crisis will have to be married to a robust set of policies that actually improve their material existence so that they have a material stake, not an abstract intellectual or moral stake, but a material stake in solving the climate crisis. And I think that's essential. Absolutely. Well said again. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking, and this is probably true for all working people and even, you know, people up in the professional managerial class, anybody that doesn't have their complete material lives taken care of, right? Like the only the really, the really rich have is how much of our mental life is centered on our financial anxieties.

Like when I think about how much bandwidth I dedicate every day to just this background noise of concern over how am I going to make, you know, rent next month. month. What if I lose my job? What if people stop supporting the show? What am I going to do for a second job? These concerns that they're so they're so sort of innocuous. They're so ubiquitous that people don't really examine them for what they are, which is a kind of like a sort of mental assault that capitalism, you know, performs on the psychology of working people, this constant state of precarity, this notion that there's no real safety net. And the rug can be pulled out from underneath you at any moment, as we've learned through the pandemic and a million other cases of this. So, yeah, it's just absolutely brutal.

You know, for decades, you know, no one would say that those anxieties and that mental assault is ecological, right? They would just say that it's, you know, economic, right? It's an economic concern. But what we are anxious about and what we are concerned about in those moments, is being able to put food on the table. It's being able to actually, like, you know, feed living ecological beings, which is what we are as humans, right?

And so we've definitely, like you said, we've kind of abstracted environment as this kind of abstract problem that's out there that we need to save it somehow or we need to do things out there to protect it or, you know, create a wilderness zone. But if you kind of break apart that kind of do, of nature and society and realize that we humans, we work in class people are ecological beings and we need to live and we need material security just like, I don't know, a beaver does

when they need a river system to make their dams or whatever. Like then you can start to see that this anxiety that we feel is part of an ecological anxiety and that we can build an ecological politics that's about making life secure for the masses of people. Amen. Amen. So what working class institutions need to be built or expanded to assist us in this fight? So I think, you know, like obviously it's clear in the book that I was inspired by the Green New Deal idea as kind of like this attempt to kind of like attach a political program. program around climate and improvement of working class lives under the banner of the Green New Deal. But it was a very kind of high level, as you know, a high level kind of rhetorical vision of the Green New Deal is,

you know, put into a congressional resolution that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put through Congress. And there was a lot of think tanks that sort of laid out policy documents and stuff like that. But it wasn't attached to, as you said, like organization or institutions that actually could start to deliver these things to people in their lives. It was attached to, let's be clear, basically like the electoral cycle of 2020. Like they basically came up with this idea, something that the 2020 candidates were going to campaign around. And that's what happened. You know, Bernie Sanders did become like the Green New Deal candidate. The sunrise movement got behind him.

But then we lost, right? Joe Biden was literally the candidate who disavowed the Green New Deal and rejected it. And he did this once it became a general election with Trump. But, and he won, right. So, so that was, that was not a gambit that was really backed up by a lot of working class organization and institutions. So ultimately, like, as we know, like, that's what you actually need for the, for the working class to become powerful. again. I mean, we've been living through these decades where the working class has just been demobilized, it's been atomized, it's been utterly defeated, and capital has been just triumphant

for decades, right? But if we look at history, the way to kind of beat this back is to actually develop a forms of organization that can counter that power. And traditionally, obviously, those are things like trade unions and things like political parties. And obviously in the United States. We don't even have like a labor party or a working class party. But we need things like that, like institutions that are folded into people's everyday lives that start to deliver these material benefits because you can say until the cows come home that like, hey, Green New Deal is going to give you cheaper electricity or it's going to decommodify health care. But if you don't actually deliver these material games, working class people are rightly going to be

completely cynical about these politics and cynical about the capacity of your movement to actually deliver on these promises. And that's pretty much, I think, what happened in that 2020 cycles. A lot of people might have said like, yeah, Bernie, I love your Medicare for all idea. I love this idea of taking on the billionaires, but you can't really do it because they control everything. There's this kind of cynicism, right, built in to a lot of people where They feel like the system's rigged and there's really not much we can do to change it. And you can promise all you want, but it's, you really got to start delivering. Yeah.

And so it's typically this, you build up the working class organization in these kind of institutions like unions and parties. And then you might see electoral manifestations of that down the line. But it's not typical in history that you're going to have an electoral victory first and then build the institutions. Exactly. So, you know, after that really high-level gambit at state power lost, I think there's really no shortcuts, as Jean McAleague would put it. There's no really other alternative. We have to start building organization parties and union power

and building that working class power in places. You know, we're starting to see the pretty exciting movements of unionization and Starbucks and Amazon and other places. So that's kind of where we have to put our energy now. And I think once you start to build the organization and start delivering material gains, you might build more confidence among the working class that they might want to join a movement

that they could see results from. But unless you deliver, you're just going to get, if you don't deliver, I should say, you're just going to get more cynicism and more sort of resignation that there's really nothing that can be done to take on that billionaire class to take on the capitalists.

Yeah, exactly. And I would really love to see the, as you say, it's going to be, it's going to have to be tied to like unions and other formations, but the rise of even just an electoral working class party that challenges both of the two major political parties that centers and really puts forward the economic agenda over a culture war ephemera while not throwing oppressed people under the bus, because that's one of the errors that you can sometimes see on the right side of left wing movements, which is, hey, we're not appealing. to working class people, so we actually have to tail the chauvinism and the racism and the misogyny of the most reactionary members of the working class, or we're never going to win them over to our side. And you don't want to fall prey to that right wing error either. So that's certainly something to keep in mind. But I just wanted to say, like, you know, even if Bernie would have won and, you know, perhaps in a fair system where Obama and the centrist didn't do everything they fucking can behind the scenes to make sure that he lost, could have probably. one. I think we would have been shown not the successes of what an individual in the executive

branch can do, although he could have used the bully pulpit quite forcefully, but he actually would have been attacked by his own party, the opposing party, and capital in general, and actually would have been kneecapped such that he really couldn't have done anything except executive orders and rhetoric from the bully pulpit. And so we would have found ourselves, I think, back in this place, even if he had one, which is exactly what we were. We would have found ourselves, I think, what you're saying. It needs to come from the bottom up. There's not just elect one politician and then they bestow on us working class movements. It works the exact opposite way. And in some ways, I think it might have been better that he ultimately lost so we didn't have to go through

four years of having people's hopes up, watching him be dismantled, and then leaving people even more disoriented and pessimistic, you know? Yeah. And hard to say, hard to say. No, no, it's, I would have been on the side of seeing what he could do. But I agree, like, he basically, all he could have done would be executive orders, but it's actually quite shocking how much you can do with that and how little Biden has done. And Bernie, of course, had this, let's be like, honest, it was kind of naive idea that, you know, people would ask him on the campaign trail, like, what are you going to do about Joe Manchin, right?

What are you going to do about these right-wing Democrats who won't want to pass Medicare for all on your agenda? And he would say he's going to basically hold a rally in West Virginia and bring out masses of unions and working class people to rally for Medicare for all or whatever. And, you know, that would have been pretty cool. But he was very much saying what you're alluding to, which is that he's going to get elected and then he's going to somehow conjure this kind of mass. rallies and mass movements to actually create the pressure because he would actually consistently say that on the campaign trail that he can't do anything as president it's going to take millions of people standing up and fighting you know and and and so he he's you know he's an old socialist like he kind of understands power and how it works and and it would it would take it would

take that kind of mass movement in the streets but uh whether or not he could conjure that through the presidency is a real dicey and very unclear question. And I agree it's very unlikely that that could just be conjured from thin air. Yeah. And if I was running for office and somebody asked me what I would do about Joe Manchin, I would just say, you know, punch him in the face and set fire to his Maserati. But I don't think I would get elected on that, on that platform. So expropriate the expropriator. Absolutely. All right. Well, I do want to, I want to be a mindful of your time. We have about 10, 15 more minutes here. A couple more questions. Kind of drilling into some of the details of the text while knowing that we're not going to get to everything. What is your sectoral strategy,

as you called it, that you outlined in the book? And what is your three-pronged union strategy for the electricity sector? I ask this because a lot of my friends from high school, all are in unions now, right? They didn't take the college route. They took the trade school route. They come from families of union folks, a lot of steam fitters, insulators, but also a lot of electricians as well. And so I have friends that are literally in the electrician union. I hear a lot of the internals of union politics, which I think is interesting. But yeah, this touches home for me and this is something I'm interested in. So can you kind of talk about that sectoral strategy and the electricity sector in particular?

Yeah, thanks. So the first thing is, you know, as I laid out before, like you can have like the kind of Green New Deal, like mass public goods that reach all the working class. And that's one strategy. But you also, you actually, if you're a socialist, you also want to have a strategy that's grounded. in the labor movement and the union movement and actual workers who are doing the work in the very sectors that we need to transform. So for that, you know, like we actually can look at a lot of history

of working class organization and find that essentially like militant socialist organizers and trade union movement people, I've really recognized that if you want to build the labor movement, it's pretty smart to kind of pick strategic sectors to organize in. In the 1930s, you know, it was. communist party people that really focused on like we're going to focus on steel. We're going to focus on autos. We're going to focus on coal as these kind of important choke points in this industrial economy that it makes sense to kind of build up strategic capacity for your movement.

And so a lot of people on the socialist left now have been thinking about, okay, we need to build the labor movement, but how and we need to think about strategic sectors to organize in. Jane McAlevy has famously identified basically education, health care, and logistics as these kind of really, for a variety of reasons, these sectors that can, you can build up militant working class power and it can start to build the labor movement as a whole. And, you know, we did see that a lot with the teacher strikes in 2018 and stuff like that. What I argue is that, you know, for the climate movement, if we want to kind of align a union movement, movement with the climate movement, we have to think strategically about, well, what matters in the climate struggle. And here's me kind of actually relying on kind of the wonky kind of energy analysis, which basically shows that if you want to decarbonize the economy, it goes

to the electricity sector. You have to first clean up the electricity sector so that you're getting all your electricity from zero carbon sources. And then you can start to the strategy is called electrify everything. You can start electrifying, like, our transport, you know, hopefully a lot of it public, but, you know, you can even do electric cars and stuff like that. But you can also electify your residential heating. You know, you can replace natural gas furnaces with heat pumps. And there's a lot of ways to electrify certain industrial applications that I talked about earlier. And so really, we often talk about the climate The crisis is just this massive thing.

It's impossible to solve. We have to change everything to solve it. It's actually quite simple. You have to decarbonize electricity and then electrify everything. And that's the core of the struggle. So I started to think, like, why don't we think about that sector as strategic sector from a kind of climate and labor organizing perspective? And when I started looking into it, I was actually quite surprised to learn that, like, oh, wow, the electricity sector, as you were, we're talking about before, it's actually one of the most unionized sectors of our entire economy already, right? And so there's, there's already a lot of organization, you know, institutional power of the labor movement for what's left of it. Let's be clear. A lot of that is already in the electricity sector. So this is an opportunity, right, for the, for I think more radical climate activist.

and socialist activists to actually basically say we're going to organize with these unions as a strategic partner. And also we, you know, maybe you should get into these unions and organize within them as a kind of strategic path towards building power over this energy system that we need to transform so rapidly. Right. And, you know, I want to be clear, as you've probably learned from your friends. These unions are pretty conservative, right? They're very much aligned with the bosses, if you will. They practice what many socialists would call business unionism, right? So it's an uphill battle to try to win over these unions and move them in the right direction. But to be fair, like a lot of people act like solving climate change is revolutionizing all of society. And what I

argue is like, you know, revolutionizing just this one sector or this one union, it might be a little less daunting, actually. So I have this three-prong strategy. The first, you know, you may have been familiar with this sort of rank-and-file strategy that I think is a pamphlet that Ken Moody wrote. And he was one of the kind of original international socialists that advocated socialists should actually get union jobs in strategic sectors and try to organize. Now, they tried to do this at the nadir of the working class movement in the 1970s, and so it didn't go great. It was bad timing.

Reagan came in and just crushed all unions and all power in these sectors. So, but, you know, a lot of socialists now are thinking about how can we actually have socialists get jobs in these unions. And so, you know, DSA has promoted this strategy and they have this pamphlet, you know, like DSA, like, why you should become a teacher, right? You should get a union job. You should become a teacher. And to be honest, like, I went to the DSA convention in 2019. And I found it quite stunning, actually, to find, to see all these kids who are like 18, 19 years old who are saying, like, what I want to do with my life is become a militant trade unionist.

hell yeah which which is like you know when i was in college no one thought about that like no one you know it's all like what are you going to do for your life or career it was not like how are you going to like channel your work uh life into kind of militant social change so anyway you know there's no reason why we can't get jobs in these in the electric sector in these unions and they're international brotherhood of electrical workers utility workers union of america and try to build up a more radical um politics within these unions Right. And I actually think climate activists, even if they're not getting jobs in these unions, I think we can make a good pitch to these unions that they actually need to be more proactive about the energy transition that's coming. Because right now, if you look around, the basically the renewable energy industry is basically owned by Wall Street. It's a very private capitalist industry. And actually, the renewable sector is quite anti-union, right? Whereas, like I was saying before, much of the existing electricity sector is quite unionized. Renewables are very

low union presence. And it's actually a lot of the work in renewables is quite transient, quite dispersed across the landscape. You know, you go from one job to another. It's really hard to organize unions in these kinds of industries. So we can make the case to these unions that if they aren't proactive and they aren't thinking strategically, they're going to lose and they're going to have their unions and their membership eviscerated by this kind of Wall Street-led green capitalist energy transition. And so that's one movement. The second leg, if you will, is that I think sometimes the rank-and-file strategy makes it seem like, you know, it's always just going to be at the rank-and-file and the grassroots level of these militant activists that kind of build

up rank-and-file activism from below. But I think we should recognize that, that unions also are these enormous institutions that have a lot of resources and money and power already, and that if we actually have visionary leadership, we can actually channel those institutions in ways that can actually achieve huge political goals really quickly. And so I say we need like a larger political education strategy coming from, you know, I think eventually we'd have

to win over the union leadership to do this kind of thing. And I really was inspired by the case of Tony Mazaki, who was this environmentalist slash trade union leader in the oil chemical and atomic workers union, who basically used his leadership to build a mass movement for occupational health and safety in his union. And he went on a nationwide tour going from local to local. He brought scientists and all these experts to try to tell the workers that you are being poisoned by your bosses. You're being poisoned by these chemical capitalist firms. And you should fight back, right? And he kind of built up this mass movement from the unions themselves and actually

got like all these union members to flood Congress with letters and to give congressional testimony. And then he basically this movement helped pass what we now know is the occupational health and safety administration, OSHA. Right. And so this kind of this kind of Union leadership political education strategy, again, if we can win over the leadership, should be explored because it can really pay dividends if you kind of enact this large-scale movement. And then the final leg is obviously we know as socialist that like workers, their ultimate power is their power over the point of production and their power over withdrawing their labor. And they and when they withdraw their labor, it can immediately create

by going on strike, it immediately create a crisis that forces elites to respond to a set of demands much faster than any of these kind of electoral routes were we discussing earlier. Like, it's quite amazing when you look at the West Virginia teachers, they went on strike, they shut down the entire state school system, and they won their demands within a couple weeks. And think about how long it would have taken them to do that through traditional, like, lobbying, and electoral, getting the right people elected. And so we should also explore that the fact that the electricity workers and the unions,

they actually have power by they have literal power where they can shut down electricity networks and they can go on strike and they can force a set of radical solutions to the climate crisis. Now, I think there's very some dicey things that you need to consider when you talk about shutting down electricity systems because you don't want to shut off power to hospitals and to like life-sustaining services. But I think there's a number, and I don't want to go into all the details, but there's a number of ways in which electricity workers could use their power at the workplace to kind of force bosses

and also political leaders to listen to a set of demands. And I actually started looking around because there's a lot of strikes in electricity in the United States. A lot of times it's not really going to shut down the entire system because our deregulated electricity system can always find power from other producers. But there's been a lot of strikes. And so there are ways in which these unions have used the strike weapon to try to build power and do this stuff. But I actually had to look internationally to find some pretty amazing examples

like French utility workers shut off electricity to Amazon warehouses during the height of the holiday shopping season. And they didn't do this just because they hated Amazon, which they do. They did it because McCrone was trying to push through this pension reform at the time that was going to eviscerate the very good pension systems that these workers benefit from. And not just these workers, but the whole working class of France really relies on these pensions. And so they strategically use their electricity-powered shut-off power to Amazon. And so, like, there are cases where you can use that power strategically, and we should

explore that. So that's the third leg. And so, but more than anything else, I just think I've actually been dealing with this recently, there's been a lot of public power activism in New York State that I've been organizing on and involved with. But one frustration I've come across is that this public power campaigns are, and even if they're run by DSA chapters and they've basically aligned themselves completely with the environmental NGOs

and they basically have very little union engagement or union support from the very electricity sector that we're trying to completely transform, right? And so there's just like this disconnect where we're socialist but we're not really working with the actual workers in the sector who not only have knowledge of how these electrical systems work far better than any of us that don't. I mean, electricity is really dangerous and really complex. But a lot of these workers, as I'm sure you know, like they take a lot of pride in delivering this vital life service, electricity, to the masses of people and doing a good job.

Like when the power goes out, they'll be there to get it back on as quick as possible. So there's a lot of knowledge. There's a lot of experience that these workers have. have in this very sector that we need to transform. So I think we really need to, again, orient our politics outward, away from the professional NGOs and toward the workers who actually do the work in this sector and try to build solidarity with them and try to build a movement that puts them in the driver's seat, puts them at the core of our demands and our policy proposals and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I love that argument. I think it's absolutely crucial.

I think it's spot on. It aligns with everything I know about unions and, you know, friends and family, step dead actually spearheaded a successful unionization effort at his his dairy plant here locally and he actually would he would ask me on some rhetorical strategies to help him with his pitch to fellow workers and stuff so i was it was nice to be on the ground floor and see that that effort become successful even with all of the the messiness of those efforts and and how hard it is to build and maintain a union but i will say this generally and this is echoing something that that you said, I myself have flirted deeply with trying to join the IBEW and get into the trades. I have applications I've filled out. It's just a matter of trying to find the time and

then how do I balance what I do now and all this other stuff. But I do say to young people, and I know there's young people that listen to this show, if you're at that crossroads coming out of high school or trying to find something to do with your life even well past high school, you look at college debt. You do not want to get 50, 60, 70K in debt for a degree that might not pay off anyway, a wonderful thing you can do is enter the trades, join a union, become part of the IBEW, or if you're mentoring younger kids, you maybe have a niece or nephew, that's 1718, and you know that they probably won't do great in college and won't benefit from it. Here's another route you can push them towards, just as a life choice in general, but specifically

for those young people who are interested in left-wing politics, are interested in changing the world, entering into one of these unions and having one more person with more revolutionary-minded worldview and politics is helpful. And eventually, you know, quantity builds up and turns into a qualitative shift. So these are things that people should definitely think very hard about instead of just sort of blindly going along the path of going to college, because that's what you've been told. We now know enough about college and tuition prices and how it actually cashes out in the economy to kind of dampen some of those more optimistic 90s ideas of like as long as you go to college you'll be fine we know that's not the case but if you're in a union your chances of being

fine are much much higher than the average persons for sure yeah so just food for thought no I love that and I actually put a line in the book that I often have young people mostly college students right because that's who I teach who asked me like oh I'm so concerned about the climate crisis what do I do? What can I do to help? And, you know, oftentimes they think, like, should I consume in a different way or whatever? But I say that we should start telling these kids join a union. Because, like, we need to build the power of the working class because that's, you know, if we're going to take on the capitalist class, we don't have much evidence that there's any force in society that has power like the working class.

So we have to rebuild that movement and build organizations. And even if you don't join a union, you know, if you can organize in your everyday life, that's going to be way better than worrying about the carbon footprint of this or that choice you make at the supermarket, right? Exactly right. Absolutely. All right. Well, you've been very generous with your time.

Matt. Thank you again. The book is Climate Change as Class War. Can you just, before I let you go, please let listeners know where they can find you and your book online. So the book is on Verso's site. I think if you Google Climate Change as Class War, should come right up.

I'm probably, unfortunately, on Twitter at Matt Huber 78, I think is the handle. And yeah, I have a sort of web page under at the Maxwell School at Syracuse, where I work, where you can find kind of the articles. If any of them are paywalled, I'd be happy to PDF people free articles because we live in this horrific academic corporate publishing world where they paywall are. our labor. But anyway, yeah, thank you so much. It's really great to talk to you,

really great conversation. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book, really emphasized that people should go out and get it if they're at all interested in any of this stuff. And I would love to have you back on the show sometime, Matt, to chop it up a little bit more. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Awesome, Brett. Thank you again. I was a high woman and a mother from my youth. For my children I did what I had to do My family left Honduras

When they killed the Sandinistas We followed our coyote Through the dust of Mexico Every one of them Except for me survived And I am still alive I am still alive I was gifted as a girl

I laid hands upon the world someone saw me sleeping naked in the noon sun I heard witchcraft in the whispers and I knew my time had come the bastards hung me at the salem I was here but I am living still

I was a freedom rider When we thought the South had won Virginia in the spring of 61 I sat down on the greyhound That was bound for Mississippi My mother asked me if that ride was worth my life And when the shots rang out I never heard the sound

But I am still around Now take that right again And again and again and again And again and again I was a preacher My heart broke for all the world But teaching was a righteous for a girl In the summer I was baptized in the mighty Colorado

In the winter I heard the hounds And I knew I had been found And in my Savior's name I laid my weapons down But I am still around We're the high woman A single story's still untold We carry the sons you can only hold.

We are the daughters of the silent generations. You send our hearts to die alone in foreign nations. It may return to us as tiny drops a rain, but we will still remain. And we'll come back again and again, and again, and again. again and again we'll come back again and again and again and again and again and again

again I don't know. Thank you. Thank you.