immanence

Thinking further about the global climate precariat (and the ontology of climate trauma, etc.), I’ve been reading a set of books that try to articulate a “class politics” for the present eco-political conjuncture. In particular, Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022) and Bruno Latour’s and Nikolaj Schultz’s On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (Polity, 2023, Eng.) deserve to be read alongside each other as, at first blush, they seem to be about the same thing — the “class antagonism” of a world divided between climate “winners” and “losers.” On closer inspection, however, I think the two books are about different things occurring at different temporal scales, which makes them somewhat complementary. This post explains the difference and the complementarity.

Huber: Climate change as (old) class war

In his own words, Huber’s “central argument is that this particular power struggle is a class struggle over relations that underpin our social and ecological relationship with nature and the climate itself: ownership and control of production” (emphasis added; I’m not including page numbers, as my electronic copy does not follow the printed book’s pagination). This is of course Marxism in a nutshell, and here it is applied to understanding climate change.

Identifying the enemy as “fossil capital” (Andreas Malm’s term), that is, “the forms of capital that generate profit through emissions,” Huber usefully outlines exactly what this includes: “extractive capital,” “industrial capital,” “electricity capital,” “green capital” (including “renewable energy developers, carbon-offset swindlers, and an emergent field of innovation based on carbon removal [… and] geoengineering”), “finance capital,” the “rentier class,” petroleum-exporting “landlord states,” the “middle class” of “managers, supervisors, and other infantry enforcing the rule of capital,” alongside “petty-bourgeosie” small business owners and others. Not all are equally complicit, but the list of these is useful to keep in mind.

If that’s what we climate activists are up against, the question of who “we” are is less confusing for Huber. He is critical not only of “intersectional” approaches that place racism and sexism (and presumably speciesism) on the same analytical level as classism, but also of eco-socialists who downplay class in favor of “livelihood environmentalism,” and even of the climate justice movement’s foregrounding of “frontline communities,” whose lives are most directly impacted by climate change. Instead, he argues that it is the working class writ large that must be central for any climate politics to succeed. But he innovatively defines this class “ecologically” — as “a class alienated from nature and forced to survive via the market.” (And if that sounds like almost everyone in modern society, from the homeless to Wall Street executives, the crucial difference, he argues, is one of power.)

This is an important argument, as such a large swath of humanity (all of those “alienated from nature and forced to survive via the market”) cannot be left behind by any movement wanting to be popular. But I think the argument is undercut by the very difficulty of organizing this class in the current global circumstances, especially if it is to play a leading role and not simply follow a vanguard of socialist intellectuals (as has happened in the past, with mostly dismal results). This “majority of the population,” as Huber calls it, for the most part does not know itself as a class at all. If it even sees its own commonality, or its alienation or difference from “fossil capital,” these perceptions would likely be lower on a list of identity traits than, say, ethnic, national, cultural, or religious affiliations, any one of which is likely to be more deeply held than an identification as “working class.”

As with Marxisms past, then, Huber’s Marxism provides significant insights for understanding the scope, scale, and nature of the problem, but it may not be capable of building the movement that is needed to overcome the problem. The class it aims to reach is either too busy trying to survive (in the case of the global underclass) or is more identified with religious, ethno-national, racial, or other cultural affiliations than with internationalist working-class solidarity. The situation therefore calls out for a revolutionary intellectual vanguard, but that vanguard seems nowhere in sight, especially with academics being hardly capable of any mass organizing today.

Meanwhile, the global middle-class is too torn between enjoying the gifts of industrial capitalism and feeling guilty for that enjoyment. Guilt alone will not likely persuade them to join a global working class movement; and when offered a way out of their internal discomfort, they will more likely opt for partial solutions (like eco-modernization and “green virtue signaling”) than to join a working-class movement that, at this point, doesn’t exist.

Here’s where other leftists may do better. As a beautifully short distillation of the “intersectional left’s” position on Anthropocenic challenges, Stefania Barca’s Forces of Reproduction: Notes Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2020) can hardly be beat. Barca expands the struggle for change “beyond the exclusive realm of a conflict between capitalists and wage-earners who resist exploitation and the depletion of bodies, to include all those subjects of earthcare that resist value extraction and the degradation of earth-systems” (60). She writes:

Undoing the Anthropocene master’s narrative requires a critical analysis of its four levels of denial and backgrounding:

1. Colonial relations: the only civilization that matters is Western;
2. Gender relations: the only historical agency is that of the ‘forces of production’ (science, technology and industry);
3. Class relations: social inequalities and exploitation do not matter;
4. Species relations: the non-human living world does not matter.

Taken together, these different aspects of the Anthropocene master’s narrative derive from the denial and backgrounding of the forces of reproduction, that is, those agencies – racialized, feminized, waged and unwaged, human and non- human labours – that keep the world alive. (p. 18)

Latour & Schultz: Forging a new ecological class

Where Barca speaks of the “forces of reproduction,” a term that emerges from feminist analyses of unpaid labor, Latour and Schultz substitute both terms — production and reproduction — with the term “engendering” or “engenderment” (note the gendered resonance), by which they mean the maintenance of “the habitability conditions of the planet” (par. 18; all citations refer to paragraphs, which in my e-copy are numbered). Claiming that modernism’s focus — in both its liberal and socialist variants — on “production as a principle of analysis” needs to be jettisoned, Latour and Schultz wish by the same token to replace the cause of “development” with that of “envelopment,” that is, the conditions which surround and enwrap all issues of production.

All of this aims to place the nonhuman world (Barca’s fourth level of analysis) squarely in the center of their accounting of the present situation. To enlist a key term from Latour’s earlier actor-network theory, they aim to think the relationship between humans and the nonhuman more “symmetrically” than any social theory to date.

For them, this is all about a “cosmological shift” that would redefine human identities around the overlapping territories constituted in the mixture of “the world we live in,” wherein we get our civic bearings, and “the world we live off” (or “live from”), from which we get the resources we need to live. The latter accounts for the interdependencies that make our worlds habitable. These dependencies are not amenable to the growth-based logic of production or to the nation-state system that has enabled the “planet grab” (as they call it) of the last few hundred years.

Without ever using the term “ontological turn” (or for that matter “posthumanism,” the “multispecies turn,” and very rarely only “cosmopolitics”), Latour and Schultz manage to articulate exactly why this set of theoretical “turns” — which amount to recognizing the ontological difference and significance of the relationally entangled materialities best exemplified by Indigenous societies — matter politically today.

So where, then, is the “class struggle” in their writing?

In a powerful chapter entitled “The ecological class is potentially in the majority” (ch. 7), the authors outline all of its potential members and allies. They begin with the four outlined in Barca’s Forces of Reproduction — the classical/socialist “proletariat in the production of wealth,” the women whose role in the economy was unacknowledged, the colonized who have been subjected to “unfair trading” for centuries, and “the living beings and the Earth system” whose role as “wealth producers” the ecological crisis makes unassailable.

To this they add several more categories, specifically singling out indigenous peoples (“a quarter of a billion of Earth’s inhabitants, all the same! – who’ve managed to resist the grip of ‘development’”); “the next generations,” including at least today’s youth if not those still to come; “large swathes of the intellectual classes” including Earth scientists and the “engineers and inventors, whose desire for innovation has been shattered by the narrow constraints of production”; “all the activists, militants, people of good will, ordinary citizens, peasants, gardeners, industrialists, investors, explorers in one capacity or other, not to mention all those who’ve seen their territory disappear before their very eyes”; and “the religions” who “represent huge forces and deep emotions that have already managed, over the course of the centuries, to transform souls, landscapes, the law, the arts,” and who include “all those who work, rite after rite, to make sure that the ‘cry of the Earth and the Poor’ – to take up the beautiful expression (or, rather, cry!) of Pope Francis – is finally heard.”

They conclude, revising Marx: “‘A spectre is haunting Europe and the rest of the world – the spectre of ecologism!’ The only thing it’s failed to do is to define itself as the majority.”

Caveats, differences, implications

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class is ultimately, as the subtitle calls it, “a memo.” It is polemical, provocative, and really just a tease (less than 80 pages in length), certainly nothing like a political program. And for all the evocativeness of the authors’ arguments, the book suffers from the polemical overstatements that have characterized Latour’s writing in the past.

Their breezy dismissal of production-based (loosely socialist) politics as no better than the liberalism socialists have contested leads to some real oversights. For instance, in the authors’ chapter on Gramscian cultural hegemony (ch. 8), they write as if they are unaware of the tremendous wave of activist artists fusing together ecological, decolonial, and more traditional social-justice issues (e.g., here, here, here, here, here), or as if the authors have suddenly reduced their “ecological class” from the ambitious set of allies they just drew together to political parties codenamed “green” (“For the moment,” they write in par. 52, “the ecological parties are remarkably absent from the arts scene…”).

And there is at times a grating Eurocentrism in their writing, evident not only in their glib celebration of the idea of Europe (“Happily, there is Europe,” they announce in par. 65), but also in their strangely disembodied perception (in the “Postface” to the English edition) that the years 1945 through 2022 constituted a long peace — as if wars in Yugoslavia (in Europe itself) and those involving European forces in once colonized countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and so many other places across the world, warranted not even a footnote.

What the authors make very clear, however, is that ecology today is geopolitics and that, as they state in their closing phrase, “‘political ecology’ remains the name of a war zone.”

As for Huber, he is right that we have to work to get the “working class” on board, but it’s not evident to me that this is either doable or sufficient without the broader coalition envisioned by Latour and Schultz.

The larger point, however, is that Huber’s project of defeating “fossil capital,” while urgent, may ultimately be insufficient for its own goals. Fossil capital could well be defeated without at all defeating capitalism. It’s defeatable (or surmountable, even by the same capitalists) by a simple substitution for something else, which will likely include post-fossil capital — lithium mining for electric vehicles, solar cells, and mobile phones; copper, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth minerals for wind turbines and various electrical devices; hydrogen and perhaps nuclear energy thrown into the mix; and the whole machinery of capital accumulation set loose with the appropriate incentives to end the carbon era altogether. There is no inherent reason why renewable energy could not be instituted by the same political-economic system that’s already in place within a few decades. All it needs is the political will to create the appropriate incentives.

The result, however, would be more like the next stage of what Alexander Etkind describes in Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources — the commodification of the next set of resources (the ones called “green”) without ending the productionist cycle of ceaseless transformation. (Etkind would like to see an end to that cycle through a “peace treaty between people and nature,” but his closing sentences betray his own doubts: “Greed and stupidity eat away at the foundations of solidarity which nature instilled in us. Because of them, humankind grows on nature’s beautiful body like a malignant tumour, gobbling up some of her juices and poisoning others.”)

Latour’s and Schultz’s goals, on the other hand, go far beyond Huber’s in that they call for a complete overhaul of human society. In this sense they are the “long revolutionaries,” as Raymond Williams once called for, of the eco-ontological turn, who sense that neither the end of “fossil capital” nor the end of capitalism itself (if that were possible) will suffice for a new human compact with Gaia. Fossil capital will need to be defeated, in the short term, but even this is just a battle, not the whole war.

The problem is that production — capitalist or socialist — has been severed from the cycles that render it possible: cycles of production, consumption, decomposition, and reproduction — multispecies relations of “engenderment” and “envelopment” that require continual, careful, and regenerative maintenance in order that they can sustain themselves along with “us.”

“Reintegrating” with those systems is possible, or at least conceivable, because people have managed to do that for millennia. The old ways of doing that — the very specific life-ways of Indigenous groups that managed to inhabit specific localities for centuries — aren’t sufficient for it anymore; there are far too many of us, for one thing, and the localities are all askew. Nor do their life-ways need to be romanticized: they, too, fought for land and resources, and only figured out how to live through trial and plenty of error. But the insights about how it was done are still available, as are the tools for reinventing those ways in current conditions. As with Huber’s scenario, what’s missing so far is the will to implement those insights and those tools.

What does this mean in practice? As Latour and Schultz are well aware, it will ultimately mean redesigning our communities from the ground up. The process of getting there is complicated.

Latour and Schultz write:

As the whole history of social movements shows, it takes a very long time to get manners, values and cultures to align, even approximately, with the logic of interests; after that, to spot friends and enemies; then, to develop that famous ‘class consciousness’; and, lastly, to invent a political platform that allows classes to express their conflicts in an institutional form. The battle of ideas, then, necessarily precedes the electoral process by a long shot. 

That’s where we are now. Beyond that, the ecological class will have to take on state power: “all topics are part and parcel of geopolitics and every topic necessitates a redrawing of land grabs by states. [… The ecological class] has to occupy the state apparatus on all levels and in all its functions.”

And they more or less stop there, ending with a chapter about “Filling the emptiness of the public space from below” — through “redescriptions” of the material interests and dependencies that can make a “people.” (Which sounds to me, more or less, like: through the environmental arts and humanities, though always connected to on-the-ground communities of activists, ecologists, regenerative agro-ecological experimenters, rewilders, Indigenous people, and the like.)

They end: “As Paul Veyne noted, the great upheavals are sometimes as simple as the movement a sleeper makes turning over in bed…” Which makes me think of Neil Smith’s satirical postmodern paean to sleep. (“Sleep, then, can reasonably be scripted as the major locale of transgressive, counterhegemonic imagining and therefore of political strategy.”)

To sleep, perchance to dream.