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Show Notes

We sit down with political geographer and author Matt Huber to dig into his book Climate as Class War: Managing Ecology on an Unequal Planet. Huber opens not with doom, but with a power analysis: the climate movement is losing because it's been organized around the wrong class. He breaks down how the professional-managerial class — NGOs, scientists, carbon pricing advocates — has dominated climate politics while ignoring the working class, which has both the numbers and the structural leverage to actually force change. Drawing on Marx's concept of the "hidden abode of production," Huber argues that climate responsibility is concentrated in the capitalist class that owns and profits from carbon-intensive systems — not diffused across individual consumers. The carbon footprint, after all, was a concept invented by BP.

From there we get into why degrowth is a political dead end, how the Green New Deal was co-opted by means-tested identity politics and NGO capture before it could become a genuine working-class program, and why decarbonization is fundamentally an electricity problem — one that should be led by the skilled, unionized workers who actually know how these systems work. Huber makes the case for the rank-and-file strategy, points to the UAW reform caucus and the nascent CREW inside the IBEW as proof of concept, and closes with a simple directive: stop treating climate as a single-issue movement, rebuild the labor movement, and win power first.

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In this week's episode, Adam talks with Jacobin editor and NYC DSA member Nick French about the rise of democratic socialism at the municipal level. Using Zohran Mamdani’s political trajectory as a focal point, they explore how socialist organizers are navigating the shift from insurgent campaigns to the realities of governing.

The conversation digs into the evolution of the Democratic Socialists of America, changing electoral strategy on the left, and the tension between movement politics and institutional power. Along the way, they examine the promises — and contradictions — of “municipal socialism,” the role of grassroots organizing, and what it really takes to turn bold demands into durable political change.

To hear the entirety of this episode, become a patron of HWDI at https://www.patreon.com/hwdipod

In this week's B-Side, I continue my conversation with Daniel Wortel-London, author of ˆThe Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981. We discuss what he would do if he could give advice to Mayor Mamdani: public banking, developing an inside-outside strategy, linking up with social movements and much more. We discuss DSA, co-ops, and all kinds of policies and strategies being utilized by democratic socialists worldwide. This a free teaser of the full episode. To support this project and get access to our full back catalog of B-Sides, become a patron today: http://www.patreon.com/hwdipod