Just Stop Oil activists march in central London—should the movement focus on fossil fuels or the entire capitalist class? (Pic: Just Stop Oil)
Tell me about your book and why you think the Marxist analysis is so important?
My book really came out of frustration with climate politics.
There was a lot of discussion of climate change as a problem of class inequality. But it tended to talk about class inequality purely in relation to income and consumption patterns.
This struck me as not a very Marxist way of thinking.
It is not really about income or consumption, it’s about your relationship to production.
The main culprits of the climate crisis are not rich consumers with high carbon footprints.
It’s really about capitalists who, as a class, own and profit from carbon intensive forms of production like steel or chemicals or fossil fuels.
We need to think more strategically about how we build a movement that can take on the power of that class of owners and profiteers. Their power needs to be significantly eroded.
It then struck me that the main people who are exercised and involved in climate politics also come from, if not a class in the Marxist sense, like a stratum of the working class, which I call a professional class.
It is people who are highly educated, journalists and NGO staffers and academics.
What I thought was really lacking in climate politics was a real working class perspective.
And particularly one that took seriously that it is the working class that is the strategic agent of change that can transform society.
No other force in society has the structural power that the working class has.
Can you say more about your critique of degrowth?
There is a category of the professional class environmentalists who I call the anti-system radicals who do have a kind of anti-capitalist politics.
I situate degrowth into that perspective. I think it comes from a radicalisation about the severity of the climate crisis and ecological crisis.
But it does not represent any sort of mass political movement.
Degrowth has these connotations of what I call a “politics of less”. Because of its negative connotations, it is just not going to be a winning politics.
If we’re going to build a mass majoritarian working class politics, we need to be crystal clear what working people who are struggling now with the cost of living crisis stand to gain from our politics.
But as I’ve been part of the debate over degrowth, I’ve realised that there’s a lot of common ground.
A lot of degrowth advocates are very aligned with a more socialist politics of decommodification of people’s basic needs.
What they actually want is to degrow the bad stuff in society, like fossil fuels and the military.
But they will acknowledge that we need to grow a lot of the good things like clean energy, public transit and green housing.
I would say that is what we want, it is socialist planning, which is taking conscious control over investment and production and planning it according to human needs.
A lot of degrowth people, if they think of a struggle between different actors, it’s often framed as between the Global North and the Global South.
That papers over the fact that within the Global North there are significant class divisions.
There’s a majority of working class people in rich countries who are being exploited by the capitalist class, just like workers in the Global South are being exploited by the capitalist class.
It’s more beneficial to talk about a global capitalist class that exploits a global working class.
Yes, there are divisions within that working class and there are certain levels of benefits and consumption in the Global North that we should think about.
But when it comes to my country, the US, people are just getting their ass kicked.
They can’t afford healthcare, which we should consider a basic human need. Housing is out of reach for millions of people.
People are having to choose between paying electric bills versus putting food on the table.
Can you explain your views on nuclear power?
Obviously I am very worried about climate change.
I think it’s a real civilisational, existential crisis for our species.
You can generate electricity with nuclear power and it’s very, very low carbon, particularly once you have constructed the plants. I think this is something we just can’t afford to take off the table.
From a socialist perspective, the ultimate dream is that we could take more democratic control over production and plan it in a more rational way. Plan it to produce not for profit, but for use value.
I know it’s not popular on the left, but I actually think nuclear power has unbelievable use value in Marxist terms.
It’s got very high energy density. Tiny bits of uranium can generate enough power for hundreds of thousands of homes.
It takes way less mining, way less materials than a lot of the green alternatives, renewables in particular.
You need silicon for solar panels. Lithium, cobalt and other types of minerals are needed for a lot of these green technologies.
We should be concerned about the waste that is produced by nuclear power plants. It is highly radioactive and highly dangerous.
But the actual amount of waste generated by nuclear power plants is incredibly small.
In fact, coal power plants produce way more radioactive waste by orders of magnitude.
The final thing is what energy scholars call power density, which is how much land or space it takes to generate a certain amount of energy.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude better on that front as well.
Perhaps most importantly, outside of maybe hydroelectric power, it’s the most reliable source of power where you can generate it basically 24/7.
In places that are cold and have lots of cloud cover you do need more reliable sources of power, which nuclear can provide.
There is on the left this somewhat romantic idea of energy democracy, that everyone is going to participate in the governance of our electricity system.
But my sense, and I might be wrong, is that most actual working class people don’t particularly care about how electricity is governed.
They just want it to be on. And they want it to be reliable. And they want it to be cheap.
I think socialists should argue for it to be decommodified. And I think when it comes to the nitty gritty of managing it, you actually need a whole lot of expertise.
So I think there are certain things in society that we as socialists should be comfortable with being governed on a large scale.
How do you assess the state of the environmental movement?
I think we can all agree that the environmental movement feels pretty out of steam and is at an impasse.
I’m working on a critique of what I call movementism.
It frames this struggle as a climate movement against the fossil fuel industry, analogous to movements like the suffrage movement or the civil rights movement.
I don’t think this type of movement is going to be up to the challenge of dealing with the climate crisis.
That requires an incredible restructuring of our entire energy infrastructure.
The only movement I think it’s analogous to is the movement for the abolition of slavery. That was a fundamental challenge to a class that controlled a certain form of production.
But I don’t think you could say that slave plantation production had infiltrated society to the extent that fossil fuels have today.
I think it requires attacking not just the fossil fuel industry, but the entire capitalist class and the rich and the wealthy as a whole.
I’ve been inspired by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ran a socialist campaign on the cost of living, on housing. Even on things that can be related to climate change, like free public transit.
But he didn’t centre climate change in his politics.
He had this laser focus on working class material needs in order to build a mass base.
I think we have to build that large-scale working class movement.
We have to rebuild the labour movement in general, and rebuild the capacity of workers to fight and win concessions from capital on a large scale.
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