In 2023, when Europe was blasted by a record-breaking heatwave named after Cerberus (the three-headed hound of Hades), workers organized to demand protection from the extreme heat. In Athens, employees at the Acropolis and other historical sites went on strike for four hours each day. In Rome, refuse collectors threatened to strike if they were forced to work during periods of peak heat. Elsewhere in Italy, public transport workers demanded air-conditioned vehicles, and workers at a battery plant in Abruzzo issued a strike threat in protest at the imposition of working in “asphyxiating heat”.
One could almost say that the Ancient Greeks foretold today’s climate crisis when they euphemistically referred to Hades, god of the dead, as “Plouton” (giver of wealth). The reference is to the materials — in their day, silver, in ours, fossil fuels and critical minerals — that, after extraction from the Underworld, line the pockets of plutocrats. Modern society’s plutocratic structure explains the astonishingly sluggish response to climate breakdown. The much-touted green transition is barely taking place, at least if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is taken as a yardstick. These continue to rise, even accelerate, and likewise the rate of global heating. The transition remains in the grip of powerful and wealthy institutions that — even if we leave aside motivations of avarice or greed for status — are systemically constrained to put the accumulation of capital above the habitability of the planet.
Against this backdrop, the politics of transition is class struggle beyond that of workers defending themselves and their communities against weather emergencies. That is part of the picture, of course. But class struggle is, above all, evident in the liberal establishment seeking to displace transition costs onto the masses, even as it presides over ever crasser wealth polarization. From this, resistance inevitably flows. The question is, what form will it take?
Some takes the form of an anti-environmental backlash, instigated or colonized by conservative and far-right forces. While posing as allies of “working families”, they denigrate the most fundamental of workers’ needs: for a habitable planet. Some takes a progressive form, the classic case being the gilets jaunes in France. When Emmanuel Macron’s government hiked “green taxes” on fossil fuels as a signal for consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars, the rural working poor and lower-middle classes, unable to afford the switch, donned yellow safety vests and rose in revolt. Although France’s labor-movement radicals joined the cause, they were unable to cohere into a political force capable of offering alternative solutions to the social and environmental crises.
Surveying forms of climate-class struggle, movements, and events provides a glimpse into how the green transition might be redirected along social, worker-led lines. “Class struggle” is used in broad terms here to include questions of ecology alongside social reproduction, sexuality, identity, racism, and the like — all of which concern quality of life and are of as much interest to “labor” as are pay and conditions. Only from the vantage point of capital, or on a narrowly-drawn negotiating table, do workers’ needs appear reducible to ledgers of hours and pennies. Tony Mazzocchi, the U.S. labor leader who coined the term “just transition”, provides a valuable counterpoint. As an activist, Mazzocchi was critical of the post-war social contract whereby union leaders surrendered input into decisions on the production process in exchange for improved wages. His red-green radicalism grew from the insistence that the health and wellbeing of workers requires transformation across the full spectrum of workplace and social life.
Climate breakdown is increasingly making its mark on all forms of class struggle. Across the world, climate hazards become embedded within labor struggles, forming a new basis of mobilization, and on union safety committee agendas, emergency preparedness has been climbing the priority ladder. Freya Newman and Elizabeth Humphrys’ research on construction workers in Sydney explores how workers understand heat stress as a class issue. “Our bosses never come out of their air-conditioned offices on stinking hot days,” grumbled one interviewee, even as they “make us work in horrible places with crazy high temperatures.” In regions where class........