Climate Change As Class War

But it didn’t take long for a mixture of overwhelming crisis, policy shifts, and above all militant upsurge from workers themselves to dramatically tilt the balance of power toward the working class between 1933 and 1936. The result was the most significant restructuring of capital-labor relations in the twentieth century, the New Deal. Of course, it was fraught with contradictions and conciliations with the capitalist class, and by 1947 the working class was once again on the retreat. But we can learn lessons from these failures if a working-class upsurge comes again in the 2020s.

But all efforts to recover a rooted and localized relation to nature ignore the very basic definition of working-class proletarian ecology: the lack of direct connection to the ecological means of life. The question becomes: what is to be done about the masses of people already torn from the land?

My students often ask me what they can do to save the climate. I imagine they’re used to hearing things about lightbulbs or electric cars. But they need to hear something different: join a union.