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In September 2019, the world erupted in a kind of climate insurgency. The global “climate strike” movement filled the streets in 4,500 locations, in over 150 countries. Estimates suggest as many as 4 million people filled the streets across the globe. Insurgent electoral campaigns in the US and UK, respectively led by Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, proposed radical climate investment programs that both built green infrastructure and offered public jobs and provisions, following decades of brutal austerity.

The climate movement was no doubt inspired and led by youth, particularly in Europe. In January 2019, Greta Thunberg, founder of the climate strike and Fridays for the Future (FFF) movement, calmly reprimanded global elites at the World Economic Forum: “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is” [1].[1] Thunberg, Greta. “Our house is on fire” (speech at WEF, reprinted), The Guardian (2019, January 25). Available here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate Thunberg rose to fame by employing a modest but powerful tactic—the strike. By refusing to attend school on Fridays, Thunberg, and eventually thousands after her, aimed to disrupt ordinary life and bring attention to the climate crisis. In his call for the climate strike in September 2019, Bill McKibben called on everyone to disrupt business as usual, because “Business as usual is what’s doing us in” [2].[2] McKibben, Bill. “This Climate Strike Is Part of the Disruption We Need”. Yes! Magazine (2019, September 4). Available here: https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2019/09/04/climate-strike-bill-mckibben-young-people Just two months earlier, in the United States, the youth-led Sunrise Movement was joined by the recently elected democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) in a protest “sit-in” occupation of establishment Democratic Party Leader Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office in Washington, DC. The youth brandished signs calling for “Green Jobs for All”, and AOC praised the activists for putting their bodies on the line.

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In the Fall of 2019, these questions pointed to clear answers—the movement would force governments to embark on a war-like investment program, call it a Green New Deal, to tackle the challenge at the speed and scale required. The agent of change was also clear. It was the kids, call it the youth bloc. The young generation, whose future was most imperilled by climate change, would rise up and force all of society to transform itself, pushing them to ensure a better tomorrow. From the standpoint of 2025, however, it’s clear this theory of change has not worked out. Emissions hit another record in 2024 and are likely to do so again in 2025, and global temperatures keep rising. Although governments and even corporations around the world set modest targets for climate action around 2020-2021, many, if not most of them, are now clearly backtracking on their pledges. Meanwhile, it’s also clear that “climate change” itself has become a less important issue to the popular masses amid a relentless “cost of living” crisis. What went wrong?

Climate Youth as An Agent of Change?

If an agent of change is to “be the change”, then there are some premises to account for. First, it must have an interest in change. On the one hand, for the younger generations on a warming planet, this interest seems unequivocal, material and existential. If we fail to act, it will be their generation that bears the worst consequences—I often claim that I began writing on climate politics out of concern for my own daughter, who will reach retirement age in the year 2080. On the other hand, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the youth bloc’s interest is not universal. There are children of fossil fuel executives and other carbon-intensive sectors of capital who do not have an interest in climate action. And, if the status quo is “doing us in” as McKibben put it, there are many more affluent children whose interest is in maintaining the status quo as it is. In any event, having an “objective” interest in change does not automatically create a “subjective” awareness of it, or a desire to fight for it. There are many children who are not particularly activated by the climate crisis and are instead subsumed in media culture, K-pop, or whatever else. Even poor and marginalised kids, you could argue, have a stronger interest in climate action and are probably more focused on everyday survival than the abstract concerns with global temperatures and parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So, while youth do have an interest in climate action in the most general sense, it is not at all clear that this interest could translate into action.

A second premise is that the historical agent of change should also have a plausible path to assembling a mass coalition capable of implementing their agenda—particularly in democratic societies, where forming electoral majorities is crucial. With the youth bloc, however, we are talking about a part of society that is not only a distinct minority of the population, but also one that is defined by its political incapacitation (i.e. lacks the franchise under a certain age). In fact, the birth rates of rich countries in the Global North are in free-fall, so the “young” proportion of the population is dropping fast. In the United States, at the height of the baby boom in the 1960s, children under 18 made up 36% of the population, but today it is 22% [5].[5] “Share of Child Population in the Total U.S. population from 1950 to 2021”. Statista (accessed 2025, August 25 ). Available here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/457796/share-of-child-population-in-the-total-us-population/ This rapid demographic collapse is occurring even in poorer countries like Ecuador and Guatemala [6].[6] Burn-Murdoch, John. “Peak Population may be Coming Sooner than we Think”. Financial Times (2024, October 25). Available here: https://www.ft.com/content/3862923c-f7bd-42a8-a9ea-06ebf754bf14 But with the youth bloc, we’re not just talking numbers. The main issue is that they lack the right to vote, placing much of the burden of their agency on the “older” part of the youth bloc (say, those between ages 18-30). But even that demographic is characterised by its lack of political participation and overall apathy. To be clear, voting is not the only, not even the most important, action in political life. As we cited above, kids can still organise protests and actions—recently, they have even been taking to the courts to sue states or fossil fuel companies for harm to their generation—but suffice it to say, the youth bloc’s path to political power would only be tread in coalition with older generations. The main question lingers: how can they lead and assemble a much broader, mass coalition?

The third and most important criterion for an agent of change is that they should have leverage to force elites in society to address a set of demands. Here, it is difficult to see where the youth bloc could obtain such power. In fact, Greta Thunberg and the FFF movement took a tactic—the strike—from the labour movement, because, as I argue below, it is but a powerful example of how ordinary people, by withdrawing their labour, can, in Jane McAlevey’s words, “create a crisis” that shuts down workplaces and economies to force attention on movement demands [7].[7] McAlevey, Jane. “The West Virginia Teachers Strike Shows That Winning Big Requires Creating a Crisis” The Nation (2018, March 12). Available here: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-west-virginia-teachers-strike-shows-that-winning-big-requires-creating-a-crisis/

It is possible that if each and every student went on strike for a sustained period, it could force teachers, administrators, parents and the larger community to address their demands. The question is what kind of organisational vehicle could exist to obtain such participation from children? There is no union, nor is there a strike vote in play. Indeed, the FFF movement is defined by its pretty tepid tactic of only going on strike on Friday—the day everyone is ready to go home for the weekend anyway. Losing a handful of students every Friday is no existential threat to the operation of the education system in Sweden or anywhere else. More broadly, it was telling that the mass action yielded by FFF—the September 2019 “climate strike”—was decidedly voluntarist and uninterested in the real potential leverage of the strike to actually effect change. In an article meant to inspire action, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and others gave away the game before it started:

“We know not everyone can join us. On a grossly unequal planet, some people literally can’t do without a single day’s pay, or they work for bosses who would fire them if they dared try. And some jobs simply can’t stop: emergency room doctors should keep at their tasks” [8].[8] Klein, Naomi. McKibben, Bill. Et al. “We’re Stepping Up–Join Us for a Day to Halt this Climate Crisis” The Guardian (2019, May 24). Available here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2019/may/24/school-climate-strikes-expected-to-be-largest-yet-live-coverage-greta-thunberg

This is clearly the mark of a movement with little concern for strategy—it is more a symbolic act of protest than a real theory of change, or an effort to build real power.

Therefore, the climate youth do not have a universal interest in climate action; they lack a mass base in society, and they do not have the leverage to force society into action. What do they have? They have moral righteousness. The FFF movement explicitly claims to attempt to exert “moral pressure” on policymakers [9].[9] Fridays For Future – What We Do, Who We Are (Webpage excerpt, acessed 2025, August, 27). Available here: https://fridaysforfuture.org/what-we-do/who-we-are/ And, of course, this is a crucial ingredient in any social movement—think of Martin Luther King’s moral power in his addresses. Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speeches firmly position her on the “right” side of history in the struggle for the future. But it is also clear that “moral pressure” is not enough. A truly world-historic agent of change needs more heft. Let me propose another option.

Marx’s Wager

“…the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
Karl Marx, International Workingmen’s Association, General Rules, 1864

If there’s one core position Marx retained throughout his life of politics, it was this belief in what many call “working-class self-emancipation.” The idea was that capitalism itself creates its own “gravediggers” in the proletariat, granting them the potential to abolish it. For Marxists and socialists after this point, there was a clear historical agent of change: the working class. For the first time in history, there was not only the material production necessary for the abolition of poverty, but an agent with the capacity to bring it about; in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s apt words, “a class which contained a real possibility of a classless society” [10].[10] Meiksins Wood, Ellen (1986). The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism. London: Verso, p. 90.

In Marx’s theory of proletarianization, sowing the seeds for socialism also had an ecological angle. For all of human history prior to capitalism, most people made their living directly from the land through communal production of subsistence, using agricultural or foraging techniques. What Marx aimed to show was that capitalism’s very existence—its capacity to produce surplus value or profit—hinged upon the social majority being forcibly dispossessed of the land and any other means of production. While this “freed” labour from precapitalist forms of bondage and slavery, it also meant the bulk of the population lived in a constant insecurity, forced to sell their “labour power” on the market in exchange for money so that they could obtain subsistence in the commodity form.

Yet, tearing the mass of the population from the land, making them reliant upon global commodities, also meant the working class under capitalism might dispense with local, parochial or even nationalist interests, and rather look toward the global, international level of working-class struggle against capitalism itself. In the face of a global ecological crisis, this planetary theory of working-class agency takes on new significance. For Marx, the proletariat was an agent that would emancipate humanity; however, we now also need a force capable of maintaining the conditions for the survival of our very species.

Compared with the youth bloc, the working class has more promising characteristics as a potential agent of change. First, under capitalism, the working class has a clear, material interest in the kind of transformative change necessary to address climate change and broader ecological problems. A Marxist analysis suggests that the basic operation of capitalism—the generation of profits—depends on one class exploiting the other: capitalist owners of productive assets and resources exploit a working class that only lives insofar as they sell their labour power in exchange for a wage. This basic relation between capital and labour ensures that the bulk of the working class not only lives under the despotic rule of capital in the workplace—with no freedom to shape production decisions and subject to endless indignities—but also faces deep proletarian insecurity in acquiring the basics of a good life like food, health care, housing and more. History has proven that if the working class organises itself in its own interests, it can erode the power of capital—and this is precisely what is also needed to address the climate crisis. Plainly, it is the imperative of capitalist profitability that both prevents the working class from having a good life and the necessary—but usually unprofitable—investments needed to rapidly shift our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels [11].[11] Christophers, Brett (2024). The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. London: Verso.

Second, in contrast to the minoritarian and politically impotent nature of the youth bloc, the working class represents the vast majority of the population. Some Marxists would insist everyone who relies on a wage is part of the working class, but even excluding middle-class professionals and managers, Michael Zweig still found it comprises close to two-thirds of the employed population—and it would be closer to three-quarters if we included, as we most certainly should, the non-waged caregivers in households [12].[12] Zweig, Michael (2011). The Working-Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. In the Global South, while the wage-earning population is often much lower, increasing numbers live as what Mike Davis called the “informal proletariat” eking out survival through things like waste collection and street trading [13].[13] Davis, Mike (2006). Planet of Slums. London: Verso. The key is that the vast majority of the global population relies on the market for survival, which means they all share the kind of proletarian insecurity described above. Of course, the challenge for us today is that the working-class majority is increasingly divided politically, racially, by gender, nationality, citizenship and more. History shows that the antidote to this relentless division—one that only supports the interests of the capitalist class—is working-class political organisation, such as the labour and other parties of the early to mid-20th century.

Third, the core of Marxism also hinges on the premise that the working class has special leverage, by virtue of the fact that society relies on their labour to function. By withdrawing their labour, the working class can force political elites to a set of radical demands. In 2018, West Virginia teachers, with support from the community and parents, shut down the state’s school system and materialised their political demands in a right-wing state in a mere couple of weeks. Such is the power of the working class. In the Fall of 2023, the United Auto Workers strategically shut down the Big Three automakers’ most profitable factories, forcing them to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and won a record contract for their members. It is no coincidence that the most progressive economic policies passed in US history under the New Deal—Social Security, union rights, progressive taxation—came on the heels of a massive wave of strikes in 1934. Again, the problem for us today is that this power might be latent in any capitalist society, but it is almost as if many workers have forgotten the power they possess. Strike activity has declined rapidly in the neoliberal period. Releasing this power requires class organisations that are willing to fight and to take risks to improve the conditions for the class as a whole.

Conclusion: Don’t Be a Doomer, Organise!

What does this mean for the youth bloc of climate activists? It does not mean they cannot be central to a strategy to address climate change. However, instead of exclusively building organisations based on climate youth, such as FFF or the Sunrise Movement, climate youth could also put energy into building working-class organisations, like trade unions and political parties. These organisations share a general strategic orientation toward the working class as the force in society, with the interests, numbers, and leverage to build the power we need at the scale we need to address the climate crisis. Indeed, there has been an uptick in new union organising in the United States as of late, and it has been largely the younger generations that are leading it, whether we’re talking about Starbucks, grad students, or Amazon warehouse workers.

It also means climate activists can partner with and support working-class struggles. That is what happened recently in Germany, for example, where many climate activists speak of a “labour turn” in the movement. Climate activists consciously built alliances with transit union workers to create a campaign addressing worker concerns for better wages and conditions, as well as climate demands for increased public transportation. In Belgium, the PTB, or Workers’ Party, has built a powerful organisation based on a traditional working-class agenda: taxing the rich to provide more secure public goods, such as housing, transportation, healthcare, and other essential services. But they also have members and workers in the unions—in heavy, carbon-intensive sectors like steel and chemicals—who are organising to force the bosses to either invest in a green transition or face public takeover. This party is also profoundly shaped by its own student movement (COMAC), which recruits activists at universities through campaigns and political education, with the ultimate goal of transitioning them into party work.

All these efforts recognise that we are unlikely to win on climate as purely a single-issue “movement”—such single-issue politics has been the hallmark of a divided and defeated Left during the last decades of neoliberalism. Rather, we need a much broader anti-austerity working-class agenda to redistribute wealth from the few to the many in the form of public goods. Some of those public goods, such as electricity, housing, and transport, have obvious climate implications, but others, like healthcare and education, do not. The key is to recommit strategically to Marx’s wager that it is only the working class under capitalism that has the potential power to change the world. We not only have a world to win, but we also have a planet to salvage.

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