Mary Gillis: Studio Views

This past February I was asked to write an introduction for an exhibition at Gladden Space, a new gallery in Lansing, of work by the artist Mary Gillis. I first met Mary many years ago when she had a studio near my house in Royal Oak. I acquired a work on paper of Mary's for my office when I was a corporate guy. (The other piece was a print by Richard Serra.) The director of the gallery, Ian Stallings, is a pretty interesting guy, a transplant mostly recently from San Francisco where he had been doing high-end design work and repping artists, as well as creating artworks of his own. It turns out I had met Ian a few months previous at the 10th anniversary gala for the Broad Museum at Michigan State University where he serves as a board member. All-in-all it was a good experience and I am especially happy with how the essay turned out.

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The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his famous study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, distinguishes between what he terms the “front stage” and the “backstage” of our social interactions. The front stage is where we consciously present ourselves to others, especially in our formal, public relationships. The backstage is the zone of the more personal, a place where we may, among other things, prepare for our front stage presentations. A gallery exhibition is a front stage: the work on view has been curated from a larger set of objects and installed to represent a particular point of view, be it to show a unified body of work, the evolution of a process or idea, or an artist’s development over time. "Mary Gillis: Studio Views" gives us a rare glimpse into all of this. The studio is an artist’s backstage, the place where ideas and processes incubate and develop and ultimately take shape in works of art that are intended enter the public domain. A visit to Mary Gillis’s studio offers an opportunity to glimpse the backstage of her creative process. 

Her current studio located on the second floor of an older brick building in a light industrial area south of downtown Lansing with a view of a bend in the Grand River. It is divided into several smaller spaces, some having different elevations. Works from various series, from different periods, and in various stages of completion can be found within proximity of one another. Some of the space is devoted to production, some to storage, and some where Gillis is working out how to present certain works when they are to be exhibited or enter a collection. Amidst the diversity of materials, scale and subject there is a sense of a dialog of elements feeding off one another and thereby informing Mary’s ongoing creative practice. 

In the catalog to a 2018 exhibition entitled, "Metalscapes," at K.OSS Contemporary Art in Detroit, Gillis notes: “My work historically shows a balance of movement versus stasis.” Juxtapositions permeate Mary’s work, between the loose brush work contained within geometrical forms, between abstract and more representational imagery, between paintings and sculptures that combine manufactured elements with expressive handwork. 

True to her penchant for experimentation with various media, in 2016 Mary began using recycled highway guardrail. This unexpected material offered a pronounced sculptural element and with-it surprising opportunities and references. 

In contrast to the exposed brick of much of Mary’s studio is a pristine white wall upon which is a new series that harkens back to the late 1970s when she lived and worked in Venice. The original works were large drawings made by building up layers of pastel and then removing the pigment with an eraser to create skeins of calligraphic gestures. 

“The Venice series of drawings on paper, were influenced by the movement of the surrounding waters of Venice, and the exuberance of my 25-year-old self-discovery in the luxury of a studio in the Palazzo Grassi situated on the Grand Canal. The drawings evolved into works on canvas, later exhibited at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York.” – Mary Gillis.

The current iteration reproduces the imagery on aluminum panels, where we see her original gestures on a high-tech substrate, the personal touch with the manufactured product. 

Blue is an important presence in Mary’s palette, especially in the recent “441” paintings but also across many of other works. On one level, this reflects the environment in which Mary works, with the Grand River within eyeshot of her studio, but also the Great Lakes which have such a major impact on our local consciousness. On another level, the fluid brushwork in the paintings, contained as they are in horizontal bands, registers a broader recognition of the nature/culture divide, juxtaposing the desire to impose order on seeming chaos, both physically and expressively, concerns that have long occupied the artist. 

An almond-shaped image is found in many of Gillis’s works. This image is often associated with the intersection of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The image actually dates back at least two millennia to Euclidean geometry, and perhaps even earlier to Pythagoras, where it is known as the ichthys (fish) or in Latin the vesica piscus (fish bladder). (Turned sideways the ichthys is also the “Jesus fish” icon that emerged in the 1970s in charismatic Christianity.) Other associations read the symbol as the dividing cell, the process of one becoming two and the opening through which the lifeworld comes into being. While not necessarily a conscientious reference to these associations, the form resonates along similar lines in Mary’s work that signal emergence, such as the paintings titled Breaking Through and Amphibious.

The form is also evoked in the form of the Valais blacknose sheep that occupies the center of the Mary’s most recent painting Juliet Goes to Italy. Juliet appears isolated on an expanse of ground suggesting the ancient walls of Italy, warm in the undertones and textured with age. The lamb is a favorite image to Mary and she deliberated for months about placing Juliet center stage. 

With this exhibition, a portion of Gillis’s work leaves the backstage of the studio to enter the front stage of the gallery. For the moment, the artist’s work is done. It’s now the public’s turn to take up the conversation.

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024)

Richard Serra at the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 28, 1982. (Photo: Vince Carducci)

RIP sculptor Richard Serra. One of my first pieces as an art writer was on Serra, who had come to the Detroit Institute of Art in the 1980s after they had acquired one of his sculptures, Mozarabe, currently installed in the sculpture garden at College for Creative Studies. I got the assignment and was working at my day job when I got a call at my desk. The voice on the other end said, "This is Richard Serra. Do I know you?" I told him that I was assigned to cover his lecture for Detroit Focus Quarterly, the publication of the nonprofit arts space I was associated with. We agreed to meet at the museum before his lecture where we had a conversation. He invited me to be his guest at the patron dinner being held in conjunction with the lecture. I hadn't been to one of those things at that point and declined, not only out of anxiety but because my grandfather was in the hospital and I needed to see him before visiting hours ended. (Click here for a PDF of the article, and remember I was pretty much just a kid when I wrote it.)

Many years later, when I was living in New York and working on my MA at The New School, I went to his opening at Gagosian Gallery, which was kind of a coming out party for the New York art world after September 11. Serra's show had been postponed as his studio was in the frozen zone of lower Manhattan in the wake of the World Trade Center attack and he was unable to move his sculpture that was supposed to be part of the exhibition. The opening was over the top. There was a cornucopia of food and drink, something New York galleries rarely did especially when it came to the great unwashed. Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg were there as was Gwyneth Paltrow. The artist Alfred Leslie was also having a show in Chelsea a couple of blocks away and he ditched his own opening to attend the Serra event. I literally ran into Julian Schnabel coming out of one of the sculptures. (I made him say "Hi" first 😉) I wrote about the show for Sculpture Magazine (September 2004, pp 72-73), a pretty decent piece of writing if I have to say so myself. (Click here for a PDF of the article.)

I love his work and was fortunate to have one of his prints in my office when I was a corporate exec.

The Street Portraits of Carlos Diaz

Photographer Carlos Diaz approached me a while back about writing something for a show he was mounting at the Detroit Historical Museum of images he took in 1984 during the Detroit Tigers run up to winning that year's World Series Pennant. I've known Carlos for many years, almost back to when he first started teaching at College for Creative Studies 40 years ago. In 1991, I wrote a review for Detroit Focus Quarterly of an installation he did at the Pontiac Creative Art Center called The Unemployed Auto Worker. I also included it in an exhibition I curated that year at Buckham Fine Arts Project in Flint. (The other artists in the show were Robert Bielat and Lynne Avadenka.) I like to rib Carlos about that review as it was initially pitched to Artforum when I was doing reviews from Detroit for them. The review focused on issues of class raised in Carlos's installation, which went against the grain of so much contemporary art of the period that foregrounded identity politics, as it continues to do. The Artforum reviews editor sat on the piece for months until he declared it "stale" and therefore too far past its prime to be published. That seemed like bullshit to me, having waited similar periods for reviews to see the light of day at Artforum, Art in America, and other art magazines I had written for. The editor sidestepped the issue of class in our conversation, but coincidentally my career at Artforum ended after that. (Click here to read the article, which was published in Detroit Focus Quarterly.) At any rate, below is the essay I wrote for the Detroit Historical Museum exhibition, which is on view until November 17, 2024. I thank Carlos for the opportunity to do this piece and for permission to reproduce his work. (All images Ⓒ Carlos Diaz.)

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Carlos Diaz, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A Professor Emeritus of Photography at College for Creative Studies, Carlos Diaz has focused his lens on the world around him for more than four decades. In addition to a sustained and distinguished career as a practitioner, with many exhibitions and inclusion in museum collections to his name, he has mentored several generations of students onto professional success, many to national acclaim. The photographs in this exhibition were taken in the fall of 1984 when a young Diaz, not long out of graduate school at University of Michigan, obtained his first full-time teaching job and relocated to Hamtramck. The setting for these images was the three home games played by the Detroit Tigers in pursuit of the World Series Championship, which they won. The Tiger baseball season of that year was a galvanizing one for the city, not unlike this past fall and winter with the Detroit Lions nearly clinching the NFC Championship and a first-time trip to the Super Bowl.

An abiding concern for Diaz has been what he terms his “interest in the fluidity of history and memory, the connections between people and place.” The relationship between photography and memory is one often considered in the literature on the medium and with the fortieth anniversary of the Tigers’ triumph, the photographs in this exhibition provide an apt occasion to reflect on the connection.

In talking about his work, Diaz speaks of the moment early on in his development when he first saw the work of Diane Arbus, whose photographs often surveyed the margins of society. With that encounter, he recognized that photography could be more than documentary. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus once observed, a comment about all that we don’t know about the subject of an image beyond what is visible within the frame. In the mid-1980s, Diaz explored this notion in a series titled “Unknown Landmarks,” where he went around the city with an 8x10 view camera searching locations and taking time to frame and consciously photograph otherwise mundane locations to question what might constitute the significant places and events we choose to remember, and more important those that are chosen to be memorialized from an official perspective.

One of those images, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984, is in this exhibition. It depicts Tiger Stadium just visible behind a commercial building in the background, with an alleyway between two Corktown houses in the foreground leading the eye to it. It is significant that Diaz used the medieval Latin spelling of “colosseum” in the title, connecting the now-gone ballpark in Detroit with the famous ruin in ancient Rome. The image evokes memories of spectacles – past and present – that have always been part of the public consciousness, fables of legendary contestants, victories and defeats, and the joys and disappointments of spectators, and the ultimate transience of those events and experiences, destined to be replayed again and again in different forms and different places and times.

Street photography, the genre of which Diaz’s 1984 Tigers World Series portraits are a part, seeks to capture chance encounters, typically in public places, rendered as “perfect moments.” It differs from documentary photography, which often operates with a predetermined message as in Jacob Riis’s late 19th-century photographs of the squalid conditions of the inhabitants of tenements in New York City in How the Other Half Lives. It is similarly distinct from photojournalism, which also tends to work in public places but with the intent of capturing perfect moments in the form of newsworthy events. For photojournalism, a perfect moment in October 1984 was Tigers right fielder Kirk Gibson swatting his World Series clinching home run in game 5. And yet, street photography can never be entirely free of the medium’s traditional documentary foundation as what Susan Sontag, in her famous book On Photography, terms “a trace, something stenciled directly off the real.”

In Diaz’s street photographs, it’s often the incidental that constitutes the perfect moment, details that evoke collective memory that may or may not have become part of “official” history. In a photograph in which the ballpark figures prominently, there is a billboard on the right promoting radio personality Dick Purtan, who was once one of America’s top on-air celebrities and who just a few years before had moved from his longtime spot in AM radio to the easy-listening format of “Cozy FM.” Still living, Purtan retired from the public airwaves in 2010. To the left is an ad for the Detroit People Mover, which had begun construction the year before and began service in 1987. Rendered idealistically in the ad, the Detroit People Mover promised to be a solution, if admittedly modest, to the city’s public transit woes, still yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

Carlos Diaz, Cap, Button, and Bumper Sticker Vendor, Detroit Tigers Stadium, 1984 World Series, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A major aspect of the moment captured by Diaz’s World Series photographs is the carnivalesque atmosphere that surrounded the ballpark on game days, when the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull and the surrounding neighborhoods bustled with activity. Conspicuous among the people Diaz photographed are vendors hawking their wares, including popcorn, peanuts, and other food items at prices that were likely lower than similar items available inside the ballpark, as well as a variety of Tigers-branded merchandise, all of it undoubtedly unauthorized by the team’s management. There is a photograph that focuses on a makeshift parking lot, one of many that would pop up for home games, providing locals an opportunity to take in a little cash off sports fans on their way to the stadium visible in the background. These images reflect a spirit of do-it-yourself entrepreneurialism that once ruled on the streets around the stadium.

Carlos Diaz, Detroit Tigers Fan, 1984.

And then there are the fans. A notable image captures a fan blowing a hunting horn and wearing a batting helmet; he holds up a makeshift placard that reads “Trammel, Morris, MVPs” with another, “Tigers Win Debate,” strapped around his neck. (Tigers shortstop Alan Trammel and pitcher Jack Morris were inducted together into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.) Another depicts a crew of three self-assured adolescent boys striking a pose, arms folded, looking straight into the camera, wearing matching caps with “The A-Team” printed across the crown.

In this age of the ubiquitous selfie, the perfect moment appears to be not an appreciation of an event but the tagging of one’s presence for which the event serves merely as a backdrop. With this series of photographs, Carlos Diaz turned his camera away from himself to bear witness to some perfect moments of a few glory days gone by.

Shane MacGowan (1957-2023)

Shane MacGowan, Moscow, 2010 (Image: Redageg, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Shane MacGowan, genius bard of Éire, has died at the age of 65. When my daughter was an undergrad at U-M, I took her to see the Pogues. MacGowan passed out after the third song and the band carried on nonetheless. Not long after that show, the band got together and kicked MacGowan out. He later did a couple of solo records, the first of which, The Snake, I reviewed for New Art Examiner. Below is the text of that review, published in the November 1995 issue. Go raibh suaimhneas síoraí air ("Eternal peace be upon him.")

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The Snake

Shane MacGowan and the Popes

ZTT/Warner Bros Records, 1994

 

Reviewed by: Vincent Carducci

New Art Examiner, November 1995 

 

On a tour of North America several years back, Dublin poet Michael O'Siadhail spoke of what he termed the "mythic homeland" of the Irish. Drawn in images from the western provinces—craggy, windswept coast­lines and dewy, bucolic farmlands—this pastoral dissimulates the harsher realities of present-day Ireland: a nation struggling to maintain its identity in the face of the hegemony of the European Economic Community; a place of political "troubles" in its war-­torn north and economic impover­ishment in its urbanized east.

Both at home and abroad, the Irish have served for centuries as the orig­inal Other of the Anglo-Saxon; and the stereotypes with (dis)respect to them—profligacy, drunkenness, bel­ligerence, etc.—have permeated the master narrative of the English-speaking peoples. Following a logic similar to that of critic Brian O'Doherty, who as an artist assumed the identity Patrick Ireland to rebuke WASP prejudice and protest British occupation in Ulster, several musicians of Irish descent formed a group they called Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for "kiss my arse"), which embraced a semiotics born of prejudice as their political riposte. The Pogues, as they came to be known, and in particular frontman Shane MacGowan, spliced elements of the Gaelic tradition onto the present in order to deconstruct the banality of bourgeois refinement and register a counterhistory of life at the margins of the Empire.

 

With this new disc, MacGowan indisputably establishes who was the driving force of the Pogues' project. Finally given the boot by other members of the band because of his inability to adapt to the stric­tures of the concert-hall grind, MacGowan returns—not in recovery, never having been in denial, which is to say about as close to existential authenticity as it gets—with a new motley crew (including Sinead O'Con­nor and Johnny Depp) to continue reconfiguring the mythic homeland of the Gael in the Postmodern world.

 

As with his previous recordings, MacGowan eclectically fashions old and new, original and appropriated, into a palimpsest of sound. Selections on The Snake from the Irish folk tradition include the paean to drink "Nancy Whiskey" and rebel songs "Roddy McCorley" and "The Rising of the Moon." The originals and a cover of "Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway" further reveal what Jean-Francois Lyotard terms the "minor narratives" of the disenfranchised and the demimonde. 

 

With a rockier feel than earlier efforts, brought about by a more prominent use of electric guitar and full drum kit, The Snake celebrates MacGowan as an exemplary "autochthon" (defined by Deleuze and Guattari as "the native who can speak to the experience as lived"), cussing and fighting, guzzling poitín, and clinging firmly to the Auld Sod against the impending tide of deracination of the self, threatened by an increasingly mobile and elusive global elite, which administers its new power from nodes on the Information Superhighway.

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LL Bean Double-Coding

I got the new LL Bean Summer Men's catalog in the mail recently and had to do a double take. At a quick glance, it appeared to portray an interracial gay couple holding hands and walking their dog on the beach. A closer look showed that the two men were actually walking side by side with their hands appearing to "accidentally" overlap. Ironically, Leon Leonwood Bean's granddaughter Linda Lorraine Bean is a virulent anti-LGBTQ-rights activist, having used her inheritance and political influence to support campaigns to overturn laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination based on gender and/or sexual orientation. Love the tag line: "Feel Great Out There"

Grace Lee Boggs's Next American Revolution

In 2011, I wrote of review of Grace Lee Boggs's book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, for the current events blog Deliberately Considered, published by my New School dissertation advisor Jeffrey Goldfarb. The blog is no longer active, having morphed into the New School e-pub Public Seminar, which Jeff also founded. I have been co-teaching a class at University of Michigan titled "The Egalitarian Metropolis," which uses Detroit as a case study as part of an urban humanities project. As one might imagine, Grace is an important thinker whose work is relevant to our discussions. The book was published before the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy and the city's subsequent recuperation under the reinvigorated forces of capital. But I wanted to reproduce my review, with a couple of minor corrections, for the record. (Click here to read the original post on Deliberately Considered.) I also reproduce a video of Grace in conversation with world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, which took place in 2010 at the US Social Forum in Detroit.

Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.

Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact. (By contrast, the then prevailing Trotskyite view labeled it a “bureaucratic collective,” a new form of political economic organization that while not purely capitalist was not strictly speaking socialist either.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency is also identified with the emergence of Marxist humanism, which takes its inspiration from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, several essays of which Boggs, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, was among the first to translate into English. Today the bottom-up orientation of the Johnsonite view lives on most closely in autonomism. And indeed, autonomist leading light Antonio Negri’s co-author Michael Hardt blurbed the book’s dust jacket as did Robin D. G. Kelly and Immanuel Wallerstein.

Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic meltdown. And there are arguably few better places in the Western world from which to view the devastation than postindustrial Detroit. Yet, Boggs argues, “the D,” as it is known especially to the young folk now that the “motor” of the Motor City has run out of gas, isn’t a site of despair but of hope.

From the abandoned zones of modernity new forms of life have sprung up: urban farming in the shadows of factory ruins, a system of solidarity economics where big box retailers fear to tread, and grassroots arts movements that stress community participation and the development of a new image ecology in place of the ideological emptiness of solipsistic modernist aesthetics. All of this activity is informed by what Ezio Manzini of the international consortium Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) calls “cosmopolitan localism.”

“Living in the margins of the postindustrial capitalist order, we in Detroit are faced with a stark choice of how to devote ourselves to struggle,” Boggs writes. Rather than remediate a deteriorating system, Boggs sets out ideas for starting anew. In addition to local supply chains of food and other goods and services, a radical rethinking of education is in order. The system currently in place is obsolete, she asserts, having been designed to train young people to become willing cogs in a social, economic, and political machine that no longer functions. Taking a cue from one of her philosophical influences, John Dewey, Boggs proposes an experience-based pedagogy based on the civil rights movement model of Freedom Schools, put into practice in the form of Detroit Summer, which holds workshops and other participatory educational programs.

Traditional social movement theorists, not to mention cynics, may view all of this as marginal at best. And yet what Boggs is talking about is essentially a new form of post-party politics. Given the current state of the union, it’s an idea well worth considering.

 

Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein in conversation - 2010 from Moving Images on Vimeo.

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The Orroral Valley Fire, Australia, January 2020 (Photo: Nick D, CC BY-SA 4.0)

 

I was asked by the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America to review this book on climate change by Syracuse University geographer and Jacobin contributor Matt Huber for their publication Detroit Socialist where it first appeared. Below is a edited version of my review, which appeared in the New School journal Public Seminar. (Click here for the Detroit Socialist version and here for the one on Public Seminar.)

 

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A recent survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that 72 percent of Americans, believe that climate change is real with an almost equal number concerned that it will harm future generations. While the climate movement finally appears to be winning the war of ideas, it is still losing the battle for securing the planet. After a brief pause due to the global COVID-19 lockdown, carbon emissions are again on the rise, having reached record levels in 2021 according to the International Energy Agency.

 

Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber traces the origins of the climate crisis and proposes a plan of action in his new book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). Huber, a frequent contributor to Jacobin and other journals, argues that climate change is first and foremost a class issue that pits the interests of capitalists over everyone and everything else, sacrificing the planetary future in the process. He proposes to mobilize the working class not just in resistance but as the most viable agent of change.

Huber offers a class-based analysis of the ecology, and the ownership of the material means of production, from resource extraction to the centrality of carbon-based fuels in the global industrial complex whose productivity has been progressively leveraged over the past 150 years by electrification. He criticizes what he sees as the underlying assumptions of current environmentalism to set up an agenda for a broadly based working-class approach to meet the challenges of a warming planet.

That capitalism is the primary driver of climate change has been largely acknowledged in recent times among academics and policymakers, as well as some elements of the popular media. Understanding the relationship between capitalism and the climate is thus the first step toward constructing what Huber terms a “proletarian ecology.”

Climate change, or more accurately planetary warming, is inextricably tied to the development of modern capitalism, which has consumed more and more energy to expand its industrial base and pursue greater profit. This is particularly true since the mid-twentieth century in what is termed “The Great Acceleration,” whereby the deleterious effects of capitalist-based growth have become increasingly evident across the planetary environment. The increased emissions from industrial production are at the root of emissions in all other sectors of the capitalist economy—transportation, construction, commercial, residential, etc.—as they depend on industrial products for their capacity to function. Electricity is the primary power source for industrial production, and the US Energy Information Administration estimates that some 60 percent of all electricity is generated from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas and coal.

Control of this production system is in very few private hands, which Huber, following London School of Economics sociologist Leslie Sklair, identifies as “the transnational capitalist class.” Huber devotes Part I of Climate Change as Class War to several of these bad actors and the ways in which the material conditions of the climate are all too often obscured. It is well researched and provides concrete detail to what ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, and McKenzie Wark, following Karl Marx in volumes I and III of Capital, term the “metabolic rift,” the disconnect between the environment and human, and in particular more radically capitalist, interventions that have interrupted its natural cycles.

Recognizing that the climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production, Huber asserts that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized. That necessitates a struggle for power against the transnational capitalist class who are reaping the rewards of environmental degradation at collective expense. So far, efforts toward that end have met with limited success.

A major impediment, in Huber’s estimation, is the terrain upon which the struggle is being contested. The climate dispute is currently the purview of a professional class of intellectuals, technocrats, and other knowledge workers—the credentialed beneficiaries of postwar meritocracy—who rely on scientific knowledge, technological intervention, and “smart” policy recommendations to carry the day. Among this class, in Huber’s reading, there is the assumption that things will necessarily change for the better if only the “objective, scientific facts” could be properly communicated and accepted and remediating tactics put into place.

The pitfall of that strategy was succinctly summed up by Upton Sinclair more than 100 years ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Even more so, when the ability to accumulate immense wealth and power depends on blatantly ignoring facts and getting others to do the same. Communicating climate statistics or attempting to address so-called market failures through mechanisms such as carbon taxes will have only modest, and many would argue insufficient, effects so long as there are substantial financial gains to be made.

Another obstacle is what Huber terms the “carbon guilt” also associated with the professional class. On the one hand, there is the “anxiety of affluence,” the deeply rooted Puritanical reproach of consumer excess in American culture, and on the other the virtue-signaling of what is termed “the ecology of austerity,” the imperative to subsist on less, as summed up in the phrase: “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” This latter directive is particularly insidious in the way its emphasis on individual responsibility and restraint dovetails with neoliberalism, which emerged as part of the capitalist attack on workers and the welfare state coming out of the 1960s and into the present.

Furthermore, austerity ecology has little resonance among much of the working class, which during the past half-century has seen their share of the wealth from increased productivity stagnate and even erode while the social safety net has simultaneously been pulled out from under them. From that perspective, it can be argued that it is unreasonable to expect those who are living paycheck to paycheck, many of whom are only one major medical expense or household repair bill away from financial crisis, to voluntarily live lower on the food chain if that is even possible.

The remedy Huber prescribes is to mobilize workers with an appeal to material interests that expands upon the purely economic to embrace a broader ecological framework. This stems from Huber’s conception of the working class as those who are alienated not just from the means of industrial production but from the very natural conditions of life itself. This comes straight out of Marx’s notion of estranged labor as articulated in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.” (Emphasis original.) Nature is what capitalism, at its most fundamental level, alienates the worker from and the foundation of Huber’s conception of the proletarian ecology, which includes anyone and everyone who derives their means of survival from their dependence on market forces.

As part of moving forward, it is important not to cast workers as the victims of some zero-sum game, as much of the climate debate, especially from the right, has heretofore done in the false dichotomy of jobs vs. the environment. In this regard, Huber holds up the Green New Deal as a model of how to address the twin objectives of inequality and climate action. He notes that the Green New Deal rejects austerity as a condition of repairing the environment, but instead sets out an agenda for a just transition to a sustainable future through a combination of economic, technological, and social initiatives that would ultimately benefit workers of all stripes.

In setting out his action plan, Huber takes a cue from longtime labor writer Kim Moody, who in On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket, 2017) identifies the supply chain as a potential chokepoint where workers may organize to disrupt the flow of goods, and thereby profits, as part of a rank-and-file tactic to win their demands and foster solidarity. Huber’s scheme is to move the disruption upstream to where the capacity to produce originates: the electricity grid.

In addition to being the source of much of capitalism’s ability to produce, the electric power industry is fairly well unionized when compared to other sectors of the economy, including renewable energy. It is also already subject in many parts of the country to public oversight when not publicly owned outright. It can thus serve as the cornerstone of a longer-term strategy to socialize and decarbonize the rest of the economy. If a move toward socialization can be achieved in this crucial sector, Huber surmises the potential for working-class power to expand as victories accrue and spread to other sectors.

Huber’s analysis of the links between capitalism and the climate crisis is compelling; he also offers an incisive argument as to the conundrums of current climate politics. However, there are questions that can be raised as to the efficacy of his proposed solution. First is the prospect of mobilizing electric power industry workers against their own union leadership, which like others in the age of diminished union power have sought to maintain relationships with owners in what some would say is a misguided attempt to forestall givebacks and other concessions. Then there is the single-sector strategy, which is liable to be nipped in the bud under what will no doubt be intense opposition from owners, investors, the government, and other powers of the transnational capitalist class. One may also question the prospects of expanding solidarity into the broader working population, which has largely rejected unionization over the past 50 years. (Though there are rumblings of that possibly changing, especially among younger workers, with the recent upsurge in organizing in the “meds and eds,” retail service, and supply chain sectors.)

Beyond what appear to be the unlikely prospects of it ever coming to fruition, one may also look askance with respect to the Green New Deal, as currently conceived, as a model for moving toward a truly just and sustainable future. Most obviously, the Green New Deal is aspirational, setting out a laundry list of desired outcomes without much in the way of concrete details as to how they might be achieved. It is also a capitalist solution to the climate crisis, essentially a neo-Keynesian program that proposes to muster government-led investment in green technologies and social-welfare programs to carry out its agenda within the confines of the market system. Its gesture toward the original New Deal of the 1930s might also be seen as flawed as there is much to suggest that it was the ramping up of production (and the attendant waste) in conducting the Second World War that ultimately “saved” capitalism not New Deal economics, which stumbled in 1937-38.

Climate Change as Class War does offer fuel for thought if only to clarify the irreconcilable conflict between our collective future and capitalism’s scorched-earth drive. Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us. There is no doubt that little will change without radical action. And the stakes are high: There is more than a world to win; there is a planet to lose.