It's not about messaging and getting people the right ideas, and it's not about some moral superiority that the working class has. It's that they're the majority of society and do the work , so that when they withdraw their labor, they can create a crisis and force elites to respond.
Under capitalism, it sort of deprives the majority of people the basics for a good life. So, they have material interest in real transformation. So, these sort of material objective aspects of working class give them potential power to actually take on capital, which is what we need to do. But the problem is that for the last several decades, capital has just basically crushed that working class power. What we have called neoliberalism since 1980, Adolph Reed says is just capitalism without a working-class opposition. And, you know, we've seen in history that if the working class gets organized, that that there's a lot of you can really erode the power of capital in a variety of ways. It doesn't have to be a full-on revolution. You know, there are historical examples of massive programs of redistribution and public investment and public programs that were really won by working class power.
So, Climate Change as Class War argues that we would really need to rebuild the institutions of working-class power. And, in terms of where to start, we tried to do what I would call a shortcut to working class power, which is a class struggle, run a socialist candidate to the presidency, just skyrocket up to the highest office. And that was the Bernie Sanders campaign. And, of course, that did not work out, because that's typically not how power [goes] in terms of building that working class organization. It has to be built much more on the ground through durable types of institutions.
So, in terms of where to start, right now, I really think it's in the basics of the labor movement, and I think we're starting to see signs of a revived labor movement. And whether it be the union winning their election at Amazon on Staten Island, or, [in general], the wave of organizing, not just at Starbucks, but last year there was a record number of organizing drives of just union elections, a record number. And there's potentially going to be a massive strike and battle with the Teamsters and UPS this summer, which could have 350,000 Teamster drivers go on strike. So that could potentially be a real sort of pivot point and kind of reawakening of the labor movement to the power that they [already] have. Again, you saw with Biden that just the mere threat of rail workers going on strike sent him into a tizzy, and he was doing everything he could to prevent this.
To be honest, the ruling class is quite scared of workers actually relearning what their power is, because it's been decades since strike activity fell off a cliff and workers don't even understand the power that they have. So, the more that they can relearn that power, the more they can start again to force politicians and capital to actually bend to a set of demands. They haven't been forced to bend for decades. So that's where I would start.
I think it has to start with building a fighting labor movement. And as you build that, you can start to build the types of institutions that can start to make bigger demands and bigger claims. And, obviously, for climate change, that would involve things like large scale public investment in not just a new energy system, but public transit, public housing, and rebuilding the entire infrastructure of life itself, which is what we need to do for climate change. But you don't get big public investment without a labor movement that's able to contest power and actually force a massive redistribution of wealth -- taxes on the rich to fund new investment programs. So, we've got a long way to go to rebuild, but that's sort of strategically the only avenue I see that could build that kind of large-scale transformational power we need to solve climate change.
Hawkins:
I was just reading in the news that 52% of the 2024 discretionary budget is going to be going to the military, which is staggering. It's going to go directly to the military which is already so overstuffed with budgetary money. And little accountability. So, I'm just wondering if there is any possibility of reining in the Pentagon. First? Can we force them to explain why they need 52% of the budget?
Huber:
Dwight Eisenhower warned about this long ago. The Military Industrial Complex creates a whole set of vested interests. And that includes, unfortunately, a lot of politicians also who see those types of investments as benefiting their constituents with jobs and economic development. That was a lot of what the De'fense Investment complex was about, you know, setting up aerospace, and other manufacturing, in the Sunbelt. And so, when the whole region's economies rely on this kind of this kind of gravy train continuing, it becomes more complicated. And not to get too conspiratorial, but I think we do know that that 52% really thrives on their always being a geopolitical enemy of some kind that justifies these expenses.
A lot of people saw 9/11 and the renewal of a war-like mentality and the war on terror to justify expansion of the defense budget. It's interesting to me that when Biden withdraws from Afghanistan in the summer of '21 -- almost, what, like four months later, five months later, we get this Russian invasion. It's like now the floodgates are open again in terms of the need for defense. [There's] a new geopolitical problem. And now there's talk of a new Cold War with China. So, there's always got to be this enemy that legitimizes the perceived need for this ridiculous amount of money. And it's capitalism, pure and simple. It's these private defense contractors who whose whole profit business model is based on government contracts.
Hawkins:
At the beginning of Chapter 5 in Climate Change as Class War, you reference a podcast exchange between Jason Bordoff, the director of the Center of Global Energy Policy, and Rhianna Gunn-Wright, one of the founders of the Green New Deal. You write that Gunn-Wright's key strategy "is to appeal to basic material interests and build popular support." And you continue,
Bordoff's core assumption is that environmental politics are less visible to people. This is an entrenched idea that assumes climate change is an abstract global biogeochemical process with dispersed effects in space and time, and that reducing emissions would somehow go unrecognized. People would not notice the lack of catastrophic floods, hurricanes and fires should we succeed with a mass decarbonization program?
That sounds very interesting. Do you want to elaborate on that?
Huber:
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