New research confirms that policy messages on climate favored by college-educated liberals often fall flat with working-class Americans. The good news? Workers are favorable to pro-climate policies that speak directly to their everyday material concerns.

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

  • pot_belly_mole@slrpnk.net
    0·
    25 days ago

    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).