Matthew

Any given emission is not the sole product of an individual, but rather is a product of a web of social relations that make the moment of combustion possible.

For example, what was plantation slavery but a racialized class system of production? This system generated immense wealth and helped establish the United States as a major global power. As Barbara and Karen Fields remind us, this was not a solely racist institution, “as though the chief business of slavery [was] the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco.”

Capitalism is defined by a massive “rentier class,” which can include diverse individuals collecting interest on mass sums of wealth, landlords collecting rents, and corporations whose main revenue comes from a monopoly-level ownership of some key infrastructure or exclusive content.

The combination of meritocratic ideology, which accords much significance to individual effort, and anxiety over one’s relatively comfortable “middle class” consumption, leads the professional class into the delusion that they are the ones primarily responsible for climate change.

As the Ehrenreichs have argued recently, the professional class is rapidly proletarianizing, leading to an increasingly “downwardly mobile” class of highly educated individuals with law degrees or Ph.D.’s who are nevertheless stuck in low-wage overwork or drawing food stamps and rapidly losing faith in the meritocratic creed of the class.

This “next system” politics would not confront the class that owns production but retreat from them.

I argue that this ecological definition of the working class as a class alienated from nature and forced to survive via the market should be central in developing a working-class climate politics.

The working class, as opposed to simply the workforce, of course, is composed not only of its employed members but of nonworking spouses, dependents, relatives, the unemployed and all those who make up the reserve army of labor.118

This broad view of the working class is far more ethnically and racially diverse than our standard view of white male factory workers, including low-wage service workers in retail, health care, education, logistics, warehousing, and and other care work.

In Marx’s time, and in ours, the goal of all socialists and working-class movements should not be to return to a pre-industrial agrarian communalism, but rather to take social control over what are already socialized production systems. Our species’ survival requires a species-wide coordination of production.

The core argument of Capital is that this appearance of freedom conceals the exploitation at the core of surplus value and profit. Although the worker is free to agree to a given wage rate, capital is free to make the workers produce more value than they receive.