Your book opens with the frank assessment that we are “still losing” the climate struggle—not due to a lack of science or awareness, but because of a failure to confront the question of power. What made you decide to write this book at this particular moment, and why do you believe a class-based analysis of production is crucial to understanding both the roots of the crisis and the path toward a just transition?
Many reasons. First, and I’m afraid the situation has not improved since the book’s publication, we are still losing the climate struggle (emissions hit yet another record in 2024, and probably will again in 2025). Despite the dire situation, however, I did not see many in the climate movement engaging in serious internal self-criticism or debates on strategy. Quite the opposite, it seemed many climate activists inhabit a sense of moral righteousness uninterested in thinking about what it would take to actually build the political base and social power necessary to confront the situation. So I tried to invoke a tradition of what might be called “Marxist polemics” to subject the existing climate movement to a “ruthless critique” in an effort to better explain the movement’s political inefficacy. I must also admit this polemic came out of feelings of anger partially rooted in the fact I also became a Father 2015. Suddenly the stakes of the climate crisis become much more real (my daughter will reach retirement age in the year 2080).
Second, I will expand on this in the answer to #2 below, but suffice it to say, I felt like (a) most climate politics did not talk about ‘class’ at all and instead tended to focus more on questions of ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ (particular in territorial terms where the main villains were countries and regions like the ‘Global North’ rather than specific classes or fractions of capital) and (b) Most climate change analysis that did focus on questions of class inequality, subscribed to highly liberal understanding where ‘class’ simply meant someone’s income or consumption practices. It seemed to me very few were analyzing the climate problem in terms of a Marxist understanding of class rooted in relations of ownership, power and the means of production.
You argue for a return to a Marxist understanding of class—grounded not in income, identity, or lifestyle, but in the material relationship to production and ownership. What does this perspective reveal about the climate crisis that more mainstream or moralistic approaches fail to see? And how does it reshape what counts as “climate politics”?
Related to the moralist politics mentioned above, I felt climate discourse had become infused with an disproportionate fixation on questions of lifestyle, consumption and carbon footprints. Even left-wing analyses of class inequality and climate would only talk about rich lifestyles as the prime driver of climate change. In my view, this discourse was both politically self-defeating (leading masses of working people to believe ‘climate politics’ meant a moral and economic targeting of their own behaviour and consumption), but also simply empirically wrong since (as I try to show) most emissions are actually rooted in how material production is organized (my book should have mentioned ‘production’ includes agriculture, forestry and other land-based forms of production – when we include those with industrial and electricity production, it encompasses over 2/3 of all global emissions). Moreover, under capitalism production and consumption are organized by fundamentally different logics. The former is organized by capital with the narrow goal of gaining a return on investment (profit, or M-C-M’), whereas the latter is guided toward the provision of social needs (trading labor/skills for money which can acquire commodities needed to survive, or C-M-C). So, if most emissions are rooted in production, and most production is organized by capital, it is obvious the real culprit is capital itself. Most of us, on the other hand, are definitely not capitalists. We do not spend our lives investing money with the hopes of profit. It seems there is an entire carbon footprint ideology that is constructed to mystify these core aspects of the problem.
A major theme of your book is the differing ways in which the capitalist class, professional-managerial class, and working class perceive the climate crisis. How do these class positions shape dominant climate narratives today—and why, in your view, must working-class power, not technocratic expertise, be the strategic center of any effective ecological politics?
Well, answering this would require reading the whole book, but let me try to answer in a pithy way. I would say the capitalist class is indifferent to the climate crisis and is happy to continue to invest in fossil fuel-based infrastructure so long as it generates profits for their shareholders. The professional class is largely convinced the problem can be solved without confronting the power of the capitalist class directly (despite their role in causing it). They either believe its about believing the science or truth of climate change, or put their faith in technocratic schemes like carbon pricing that could allow the market to solve it via the price mechanism. The “anti-system radicals” in the professional class often also subscribe to small-scale alternatives like cooperatives or decentralized ‘community owned’ energy – sometimes called ‘prefigurative politics’ or ‘nowtopias’ – that do not threaten capital one iota. Finally, the working-class represents the only source of social power in capitalist society that has proven historically to effectively challenge the power of capital (see the early-to-mid 20th century tradition of militant trad unionism combined with labor and social democratic parties winning political power). The problem my book seeks to confront is that the climate movement is almost entirely composed of people in the professional class who espouse a politics that either leaves most working-class people either angry or indifferent about climate as a political issue (and in fact it’s clear in Europe that actually existing climate policies have pushed many working-class voters to the right).
Despite the oft-repeated and correct insight that the Global South is bearing a disproportionate share of climate impacts and disasters, it doesn’t seem to me climate has become a political issue with any kind of broad, popular resonance among masses of working people. So, in some ways, the challenge of building a mass, majoritarian climate politics is just as much if not more of a challenge in the Global South.
While your book focuses on the United States and other core capitalist countries, its insights on fossil capital, class power, and the politics of production raise important questions for the Global South. How do you see your framework applying to countries that are structurally subordinated within global capitalism, yet also pursuing carbon-intensive development paths of their own? What challenges or adaptations does this pose for a class-based climate politics beyond the core?
Well, first, I don’t begrudge Global South countries for pursuing carbon-intensive development paths (the paths that have enriched the imperialist core). A fundamental problem with capitalism is technology – ‘the means of production’ – is controlled by capital. And, so far, there is no universal ‘green’ energy technological path available to countries of the Global South. The path available is forged by ‘fossil capital’ itself. Therefore I agree with many global climate justice advocates that our politics must center ‘technology transfer’ from North to South in terms of making decarbonized technologies available on a planetary scale. What is interesting is that, currently, the countries developing such technology are not in the West, but in East Asia – namely China. And, I don’t just mean solar, wind and batteries, but China is also subsidizing on a massive scale more ‘cutting edge’ decarbonizing technologies needed to green industry (like steel and cement) involving hydrogen and carbon capture and/or removal. It’s no secret that China is attempting to enhance its global standing via infrastructure investments the world over. It remains to be seen whether or not that might someday include decarbonized infrastructure (so far it’s been the opposite, as, for example, the Belt and Road Initiative is littered with fossil fuel infrastructure most notably coal-fired power plants).
But, more directly, I think my book does speak to a certain impasse for climate movements in the Global South. It seems to me that much climate advocacy – the kind you see every year at COP – is also driven by the same kinds of professional class NGOs as in the Global North. Despite the oft-repeated and correct insight that the Global South is bearing a disproportionate share of climate impacts and disasters, it doesn’t seem to me climate has become a political issue with any kind of broad, popular resonance among masses of working people. So, in some ways, the challenge of building a mass, majoritarian climate politics is just as much if not more of a challenge in the Global South. The world over I think it requires linking climate investments with direct material improvements in people’s lives. It’s convenient that the main things we need to decarbonize – energy, transport, housing, and food/agriculture – are actually those very basic material needs working people struggle to access.
In much of the Global South, green transitions are being shaped by foreign investment, debt-driven infrastructure, and export-led strategies in sectors like battery production, rare earths, or green hydrogen. From your perspective, how should socialists in these contexts engage with such “green” development models? Can green industrialization become part of a class-struggle project—or do these models risk reinforcing existing hierarchies of ownership, labor exploitation, and ecological extraction under a new, green guise?
You’re right that under global capitalist hegemony these kinds of ‘green’ capitalists projects will definitely reinforce existing power relations. But, I think leftists today tend to think about this in narrow and zero-sum ways. The idea is that ‘green’ industrial development in the South must inherently be exploitative and destructive. This is not how socialists and anti-colonial movement of the early-to-mid 20th century viewed resource extraction or industrial development. Rather, these movements decried how capitalists and imperialists states in the core subverted their sovereignty over their own resources and economic development. Such movements wanted to assert political power over their own lands and resources to affirm sovereign control over their own development (and more radical proposes like the New International Economic Order imagined a more internationalist approach to this view). So, in my view, it is more productive for the global Left to speak in terms of economic sovereignty against capital – so the poor countries of the Global South can not only build basic infrastructure like electricity grids and water sanitation services, but also decarbonized technology that must underpin it all. The core problem with capitalism is not ‘growth’ or ‘extraction’ itself, but our profound lack of democratic control over investment and production.
In countries like Türkiye—a semi-peripheral economy geographically and politically proximate to core capitalist regions such as the European Union—the energy sector is dominated by a fossil fuel–dependent bourgeoisie, closely tied to construction conglomerates, public-private partnerships, and authoritarian-clientelist state structures. How might your call for building working-class power in production confront such a capitalist bloc, where fossil capital is tightly fused with state power and framed through nationalist development narratives?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our theories of imperialism need to foreground our theories of the capitalist state. And, I think the phenomenon of the ‘authoritarian-clientelist’ state aligned with fossil capital is a very common global trend. I’m absolutely no expert on Turkey, but it seems to me the challenge of building an effect working-class opposition to capital is the same in most capitalist countries (Lately I’ve been repeated Adolph Reed Jr.’s line that, “neoliberalism is just capitalism without a working-class opposition.”) We just don’t have many other historical examples of the unique combination of militant trade unions and broad working-class political parties that have the capacity to build what John K. Galbraith called ‘countervailing power.’ But, I’ve come to think this kind of power will not emerge from a ‘climate-specific’ movement – targeting any particular sector of production. Rather it must be a broad-based movement against austerity and for a massive investment in public goods. Such a public goods agenda could easily include ‘climate’ investments in electricity, transit, housing and more, but would need to include much else like health care, education and childcare. And, it seems to me, the only hope in developing such a broad-based and powerful movement lies in rebuilding the labor movement.
Your book emphasizes public ownership and democratic planning as central to a socialist climate strategy. In Global South contexts where industrial capacity has been eroded by decades of neoliberal globalization, what role—if any—can industrial policy play in rebuilding working-class power under ecological constraints?
Yes, this relates to what I said above. There is a tradition of import-substitution and developmentalist state policies that were geared toward the project of building public infrastructure and economic sovereignty. Of course, I understand these efforts collapsed – partially due to their own internal contractions and problems. It is more important to recognize they were crushed by global neoliberalism and U.S. economic imperialism (aka ‘the Washington Consensus’). But, it’s worth remembering many of those efforts were themselves spurred by socialist and labor parties and militant trade union movements of their own. In the absence of formidable power from below like that, Global South states too often will try and hoard the crumbs of global capital flows to themselves and their ‘clientele’ (to put it in your terms).
So, the reality is we have no other option but to organize an internationalist movement. What I find inspiring is that Marxism provides a model for precisely this.
Your book reflects on how the triumph of global capitalism—especially since the 1990s—has deepened the climate crisis, with half of all cumulative emissions produced since the so-called “end of history.” How do you think socialist climate politics should reckon with the legacy of neoliberal globalization and its disempowerment of the global working class? Can we still speak of a coherent internationalist strategy under these conditions?
There are small anecdotes (I often talk to my students about networks of solidarity between garment factory workers in Bangladesh and the Walmart workers who sell the clothing, or networks of McDonalds workers that span the entire globe). But, beyond fleeting (and often NGO-organized) efforts like this, there is no organized international working-class movement to speak of. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same for capital. Neoliberalism could also be defined as the political and economic organization of the capitalist class on a global scale. To make matters worse, there is no escaping the ecological crisis is a global or planetary crisis that requires a source of social power at that scale (I’ve begun to write about understanding both globalized production systems and their planetary ecological effects as requiring a theorization of a ‘planetary mode of production”). This is the problem with purely ‘localist’ solutions I mention above (which could be very successful at a local scale alone and allow global capitalism to continue undisturbed). So, the reality is we have no other option but to organize an internationalist movement. What I find inspiring is that Marxism provides a model for precisely this. Marx and Engels specifically argued the proletariat represented the ‘last class’ with the potential to liberate humanity as a whole – it’s a politics for the species as a whole (this has obvious ecological implications). But, more to the point, actually existing Marxism provides historical examples of internationalist forms of political organization and power (the first, second, third internationals were concrete expressions of this). There have been efforts to build something like this in the neoliberal era (the World Social Forum comes to mind), but in my opinion such efforts were too dedicated to the post-1960s ‘movementism’ that rejected the centrality of the working-class to left strategy. The result was a highly fragmented global ‘movement of movements’ with no clear strategic direction. The problem is, of course, the working-class is very weak the world over, and it might be necessary for working-class organizations to rebuild their power at the national scale first. But, the severity of crises of a global nature might make international organization more an obvious starting point.
You discuss how “green capitalism” is emerging through financial markets, corporate-led decarbonization, and state-subsidized clean tech investments—especially in the U.S. via the Inflation Reduction Act. How do you see these dynamics shaping the global political economy? Does the concept of green imperialism help us understand the new hierarchies and dependencies that might emerge from this transition?
As it happens, this summer I’m actually working on a new essay on the relationship between ecology and imperialism. To make a long story short, I think the Marxist left has only analyzed this in terms of ‘unequal ecological exchange’ which does not allow us to grasp the central role of the capitalist state in general, and the US state in particular to imperialism in the postwar era. But, at the moment, I don’t really see the Inflation Reduction Act as central to this story. Rather, I see the US role as the world’s largest arms dealer and the US military as the world’s largest emitter as much more important (For example, in my essay I drawn on journalistic sources to detail how the US sent approximately 50,000 tons of weaponry to Israel in only the year after October 7, 2023. To be clear, this is has been central to the ecological devastation of Gaza and Palestine more broadly. Bloomberg did an analysis showing how the Israeli bombardment has created a staggering 42 million tons of rubble – and that was only as of August 2024). I also would note the role of the US in overseeing a more economic form of imperialism overseeing global relations of trade and debt. I argue, in the Global South, it is often ‘rentier’ or ‘landlord’ states – or ‘authoritarian-clientelist’ we spoke of above! – who invite global capital to invest in their territories in exchange for ‘rents’ – money that is then used to service debts and purchase weapons from the US.
But, in any event, to answer your question more directly. The Inflation Reduction Act was a much too tepid attempt at ‘industrial policy’ using the imperial fiscal largess of the US state – a state that can run deficits like no other because of the dollar’s central role in the global financial system – to subsidize private capital and middle class consumers to make ‘green’ market choices. And, now, of course, much of its ambition is threatened to be dismantled by the new Trump administration (a lot hinges on the so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ making its way through Congress).
In your conclusion, you argue that the planetary nature of climate change demands a planetary response—not a return to localism, but a conscious, collective coordination of global production. What would it mean to democratize or socialize global supply chains under these conditions? How might working-class politics scale to meet the international character of the climate crisis?
Well, Marx would argue it is capital that socializes production (in its search for ‘relative surplus-value’, Marx shows how capital deploys more cooperative and collective forms of labor – including more complex divisions of labor). Since Marx wrote Capital, of course, capital has socialized production at a planetary scale (the pandemic taught us how reliant we all are on these global supply chains, or more concretely, the thousands of workers scattered across the globe who provision global commodity flows and the social reproduction of millions of lives). Thus, Marx argued the task of the global proletariat was to turn already socialized production systems under private control into ‘social property’ managed by the ‘associated producers.’ This does not mean the productive forces and technologies of capital are ‘readymade’ for socialism. But it also does not mean they must be discarded entirely. They must be repurposed and reconfigured toward social needs rather than private profit. In sum, there exist intensely social and collective forms of production that underly capitalism itself, and socialism would entail building upon these material conditions.
One interesting example I recently learned about is the Chinese Communist Party wants to set up what they call the ‘Global Energy Interconnection’, or a kind of integrated planetary electricity grid. Any electricity grid is an inherently socialized technology: Soviet-style planning is required to balance supply with predicted demand at all times. I really don’t know enough about China or the CCP to weigh in on whether or not they represent the ambitions of a truly Marxist or proletarian revolution, but I will say electricity is the most important technology to solving climate, and the idea of a globally managed grid sounds pretty cool to me. That kind of thing would make Lenin very happy who, of course, famously said “Communism is soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.”
This is the first time your book is being introduced to a Turkish-speaking audience. What would you most like to say to left movements, trade unions, and working-class organizers in Türkiye, who are navigating ecological breakdown, inflation, authoritarian governance, and external economic dependency?
Well, that feels like a lot of pressure for someone who doesn’t know much about the Turkish context (!), but I would say the key to everything is organization. The historical lesson of the 20th century in my view is the only effective counterweight to capital came from mass organizations like unions and parties. These organizations were deeply embedded in working-class communities and lives – not just political outlets, but cultural ones organizing local art, intellectual and leisure activities. Starting in the 1960s there has been (often for good reason) a turn away from political organization because of the hierarchies it implies. The left has become much more anarchist in spirit enamoured with horizontalist forms of ‘grassroots’ organizing. Some, like John Holloway, even claimed we could “Change the world without taking power.” Moreover, since the height of working-class power, society has become much more atomized – Anton Jäger suggests we’ve gone from “Bowling Alone to Posting Alone.” Derek Thompson calls it the “Anti-Social Century” that started with mass suburbanization made possible by privatized automobility, television, and exploding with the rise of smartphones and social media. We can trace this atomization of the masses to the decline of working-class power almost exactly. I actually think social media and new technologies can help the left. I’m writing this on a day where a Democratic Socialists (Zohran Mamdani) just won the mayoral primary in New York City in no small part because of his amazing use of short video content on social media. But, there is no substitute for organizing IRL (‘in real life’) to build lasting, durable political infrastructure in working-class neighborhoods and workplaces.
The last thing I’d say is I think the Left needs to be laser focused on the more basic material interests of the working-class centered on the cost of living (Mamdani’s campaign is a wonderful model for that). As I’ve argued, solving climate change also requires transforming these same sectors like energy, housing, transport, and more. In many ways the Left has become quite fragmented with a proliferation of ‘single issue’ movements and politics. There’s value to what Benajamin Fong calls a “socialist minimalism” in building a real political base for majoritarian politics.
*This interview with Matt Huber was conducted via email.
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