While Marxists and others on the Left are correct to point out that many college-educated progressives are themselves part of the working class — even many lawyers and doctors must work for a paycheck to survive, after all — the key to socialist political strategy is uniting the whole working-class around a majoritarian agenda. For a civilizational challenge like shifting away from fossil fuels, only broad-based working-class power is capable of achieving what planetary systems require. To build that power, we need to understand why we are failing to win many workers to our politics, and how we can change that.
The “punk” part ain’t no joke
This is a US centric article but I expect there are similar effects in most “western” countries.
I’m a left-wing indigenous Australian, but find my own political priorities don’t align with most other left indigenous people I meet. I consider the climate crisis the #1 problem in the world, with the potential to cause the literal extinction of humanity. Wage equality and racial issues aren’t going to be a problem if everyone is dead.
I think a useful path to solidarity is that almost all of these things are promoted or exacerbated by the same antagonists and that unifying against that shared enemy is the best tool to counter them. Taking power away from the hyper capitalists advances all these goals. If we get to the point where any one of them isn’t that much of a concern anymore and people who were only in it for that start to peel away we’ll have made pretty good strides towards all of them. And by then hopefully they’ll have come to care deeply about the struggles of the other groups and continue on.
We don’t need to figure out what the #1 problem is when we all have the same villains.
I agree with this in general - it’s the billionaire class that’s causing most of the problems for everyone else. Unfortunately for some activists, their anti-colonialism and anti-authority approach spills over into anti-intellectual, anti-science attitudes like rejecting scientific consensus on climate change, vaccines, infection management etc.
During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic I was saddened to see many people whom I considered comrades reject science based medical advice, falling into anti-vax conspiracy theories and other nonsense because of their distrust of what they dismissed as “Western Science”. It’s that pathway that worries me about climate change. I’ve seen that happen already, with people who love their V8 petrol cars rejecting EVs and green energy because they see it as being pushed by “the government” which they don’t trust.
Dig deeper by race, and it’s clear that only one group ranks climate change highly as an issue — white liberal college grads (ranked sixth compared to twenty-seventh for the white working class). Even black and Latino college grads don’t rank it highly (twenty-second and twenty-third out of thirty respectively). Given the scale of what’s required to address climate change, surely requiring large supermajorities to accomplish the boldest action, these numbers should raise alarm bells.
I would imagine non-white groups rank wage inequality and the continued decline of civil rights in American as a much more important issues to them than climate change. I would agree with them. Climate change is very important, but our nation must serve each of our citizens equally.
wage inequality and the continued decline of civil rights in American as a much more important issues to them than climate change
Climate change has the potential to literally wipe out all the humans. Surely that makes it a bigger problem than inequality between humans.
And will notably hurt the poor and those subjected to systemic racism the most. The rich aren’t going to just have their oceanfront property fall into the ocean, they’re going to redirect public resources from at risk communities to it, and buy up the housing at the new climate adapted desirable locations leaving the “affordable” housing that’s too hot or too risky to the poor and disadvantaged.
Surely that makes it a bigger problem than inequality between humans.
For those negatively affected by the erosion of rights both represent existential threats. The difference is climate change is an existential threat decades away while the erosion of rights is a threat today. Why would you prioritize a threat that will kill you 30 to 40 years from now when you may die tomorrow from this other, much closer, threat?
I’m personally not affected, but I can absolutely empathize and agree climate change is the lesser threat to those living today. Ideally, we should be able to address both at the same time, but if we have to give priority, then climate change is lower.
Why would you prioritize a threat that will kill you 30 to 40 years from now
Because climate change is a long term process and the changes we make today are going to take 20-50 years to take effect.
It’s like being infected with rabies and thinking you have a few months before it will kill you, ignoring that the treatment must be given promptly or it won’t be effective. If you wait until the symptoms show, it’s too late to treat it and it’s almost certainly fatal.
If you wait until the symptoms show, it’s too late to treat it and it’s almost certainly fatal.
That is a completely irrelevant argument to a population (and their children) that might already be dead from civil rights violations for 20 to 50 years at the time when climate change impacts are felt by the oppressive survivors.
If you accidentally consumed a fatal poison and had a very short time to counter it, in that moment would you give a crap about solving climate change? I won’t believe you if you say “yes”.
if we have to give priority, then climate change is lower.
at the time when climate change impacts are felt
Did you see the other post on here “The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate”? - this is part of the lie.
No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.” Less embarrassing than “climate change is a Chinese hoax,” but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.
If you accidentally consumed a fatal poison
The premise of your question is trying to compare an individual crisis that affects one person with a worldwide, global problem that affects not just humanity but other species living on this planet.
As I said before, I’m an Islander, and I consider climate change to be a higher priority than stuff like wage equality or cultural issues. Dealing with inter-human discrimination isn’t going to matter if our entire species can’t survive.
Did you see the other post on here “The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate”? - this is part of the lie.
I am not denying climate change. I believe climate change is happening. I believe it is because of humanity’s actions of carbon release (among other things).
You’re selectively cherry picking my comments out of context changing their meaning. I don’t appreciate that. Those comments you quoted were specifically from the population that are facing down issues greater to them than climate change. I get it. Those issues are less concerning to you specifically. That doesn’t mean your opinion changes theirs.
The premise of your question is trying to compare an individual crisis that affects one person with a worldwide, global problem that affects not just humanity but other species living on this planet.
Asking an individual to suffer “for the greater good” has to have some kind of reward that that individual sees their own sacrifice as “worth it”. Working to stop deaths in the distant future of some other groups while accepting deaths that happen today to your own group is a very hard sell. You’re not going to get many takers.
As I said before, I’m an Islander, and I consider climate change to be a higher priority than stuff like wage equality or cultural issues.
Of course you do. I respect your position for your situation. As an Islander, I can absolutely appreciate to you climate change is the biggest and closest threat to you personally and those in your group. I can imagine no greater threat to you and your way of life that the sea rise and dangerous weather that climate change will bring.
Dealing with inter-human discrimination isn’t going to matter if our entire species can’t survive.
You argument evaporates when you make these untruthful statements. Realistically even with the worst models of climate change our species will survive.
Billions of people will die, and our world as we know it will be gone. Millions of other species alive today will go extinct. These are reasons enough for me to believe we need to change our actions today, but humanity will not die. It will survive in a much diminished form.
As for our conversation here. I understand and respect your perspective (and always did), but even with this last post of yours you’re failing to empathize with others that face challenges to them greater than climate change.
I think we’ve reached the end of useful discussion. Thank you for engaging up to now. I believe we will both continue to do what we can to slow, stop, and reverse climate change. Have a great day.
As an Islander, I can absolutely appreciate to you
Sorry, I didn’t explain the Australian context of Islander - I don’t live on an Island.
I’m a Torres Strait Islander by descent, i.e. an Indigenous Australian so considered “Blak” in Australia. (We use “Blak” sometimes to differentiate from the US usage of “Black”). The term “First Nations” is popular these days but I hate it because it sounds like manager speak.
I consider climate change to be more important than Blak issues (or Black issues for that matter), including ones that specifically affect me like police brutality. I’ve had police ignore people physically assaulting me in public before, was ostracised all through high school and in other situations, etc. I consider all of that not as worrying as climate change.
The term “professional managerial class” is what comes to mind.
It is the group of $40.000-100.000 in annual income. That is 35-75 percentile of income in the US or if you want to the middle class, if you want to call it that. The professional managerial class are university educated, who are somewhat self employed like doctors, lawyers and the like. They are probably above that group.
It has some interesting stuff in it, even though it’s of course very USA-focused. I remember Ajay Singh Chaudhary destroying Matt Huber for the productivist ideas in his book, which do not respect the material reality of the ecocrisis. The above piece takes no position on questions of reducing consumption and production either. But this bit I’ll try to memorize:
One of the most frustrating aspects of climate politics today is that it is arguably the Right that mobilizes class politics most effectively on this issue. Right-wing politicians consistently argue climate action is a plot of the liberal elite to harm the lives of average working-class families with rising energy costs and lost jobs. On the other hand, liberal activists often make climate change about everything but class — “Believe Science” — and sometimes advocating policies like carbon taxes that would raise the price of energy (affirming precisely what the Right warns against).
I think that the everyday material concerns are indeed key, and there might be some fairly “easy” victories in the fields of affordable energy, housing and public transport. However, I think there is a real clash between the current desire of the working classes to accelerate their consumerist lifestyles, and the ecological boundaries. For all their sins, the predicament is not just the fossil fuel industry being evil, it’s bigger than that. Getting the obvious things sorted out is a beginning in the right direction, but actual sustainability requires a deeper change of orientation.
I don’t believe we’ll get very far in this transition in the next decades unless we begin to break capital’s control on all the essential aspects of our lives. The accumulation of capital would continue to drive the resource allocation, the political system and the meaning we grant our own existence, to the detriment of life upholding earth systems and the majorities of the world. And there will be no political consciousness to break the control of capital in a consumerist society where people are estranged from how life is recreated and upheld, where democracy means just voting in an election and where work is done just in exchange for a paycheck.
How can this begin to change? Heron, Millburn and Russel have one pretty convincing proposal and example in their book Radical Abundance. An intentionally designed institution that brings workers, local communities and the public sector together to deliberate on and control matters of production and consumption that are directly relevant to the participants.
The best part? It does not require prior legislative or electoral victories to start building these kind of institutions. It would directly counter some growth dependencies. Ideological motivations are not assumed to be the driver of participation. The hardest part? To get people involved and organized of course. But it starts from seeing the promise in this kind of action.
While there are so many different tracks of action required, this is one with great promise, that I’ve seen too little discussion and action on.
