Climate Change as Class War: Matt Huber on Production, Power, and Proletarian Ecology

About this episode

Matt Huber discusses his book on the intersection of climate change and class struggle, emphasizing the role of the working class in driving change.

Get access to the entire episode by becoming a sponsor member today: Patreon: https://patreon.com/hwdipod Substack: https://hwdipod.substack.com Show Notes We sit down with political geographer and author Matt Huber to dig into his book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso Books, 2022). Huber opens not with doom, but with a power analysis: the climate movement is losing because it's been organized around the wrong class. He breaks down how the professional-managerial class — NGOs, scientists, carbon pricing advocates — has dominated climate politics while ignoring the working class, which has both the numbers and the structural leverage to actually force change. Drawing on Marx's concept of the "hidden abode of production," Huber argues that climate responsibility is concentrated in the capitalist class that owns and profits from carbon-intensive systems — not diffused across individual consumers. The carbon footprint, after all, was a concept invented by BP. From there we get into why degrowth is a political dead end, how the Green New Deal was co-opted by means-tested identity politics and NGO capture before it could become a genuine…

People in this episode

Guest: Matt Huber

Topics covered

• climate change
• class war
• political geography
• working class
• decarbonization

Keywords

• production
• power
• proletarian ecology
• Green New Deal
• degrowth

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

Books & works: Climate Change as Class War: Matt Huber on Production, Power, and Proletarian Ecology, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

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