Ecology and Class Struggle

Part 1 of 5: Toward an Ecological Class War

Morning Comrades.

Something new this week and this week only, namely, a 5 part daily dispatch on a subject that is not only extremely important to me but sits at the absolute forefront of our struggle. Usually, when I am travelling, and I will be in London this entire week I take a break from here, but this week I will be shooting off a daily dispatch on the same subject. I have been working on this for some time and in an ideal universe I could dedicate a year or so on this but the working class is not allowed these luxuries.

The topic of this week will be Ecology and Class Struggle.

After the last 5 years on here it should be crystal clear that the primary point of all this work is to build, support and guide us through the struggle to free ourselves from capitalism. On the surface, the guiding motivation is the injustice and violence inherent in the system and that stands. Nevertheless, there is an even greater point that drives this struggle for liberation and that being that capitalism, irrespective of how “social” we aim to make it, is a disastrous ideology that is on path to make the planet we all inhabit, uninhabitable. If we continue to allow this order of society imposed on us by a psychopathic minority, there will simply be no inhabitable planet left for us to even think about the benefits of UBI, let alone a socialist journey towards communism.

In May 2025, Nature published a short but arresting research digest titled “The world’s richest people have an outsized role in climate extremes,” summarizing evidence that the wealthiest 10% of the global population are directly responsible for a massive proportion of environmental destruction, particularly through greenhouse gas emissions driving global heating, droughts, and flooding (Tollefson 2025). While this fact has been long acknowledged in broad activist and Marxist circles, its increasing acknowledgment within mainstream scientific literature should provoke a radical political shift in how climate crisis is addressed. The article's findings must not be viewed as merely unfortunate imbalances but as outcomes of deliberate, systemic exploitation.

These next 5 for free dispatches will first analyse and contextualise the findings of the Nature piece, before moving to a broader critique rooted in class analysis. It will argue that no meaningful ecological transformation can occur unless the material roots of environmental devastation, capital accumulation, imperial consumption, and class domination are confronted and overthrown. Chico Mendes' maxim that “ecology without class struggle is just gardening” serves not as a metaphor but as a political imperative: what is called "sustainability" without revolution is simply the preservation of bourgeois comfort amid planetary collapse.

The Ecological Cost of the Global Rich: Summary and Context of the Nature Article

The Nature article, based on a study led by climate researcher Lucas Chancel, reveals that the wealthiest 10% of people globally are responsible for a staggering 48% of all global warming, inducing emissions linked to deadly climate events between 1990 and 2019 (Tollefson 2025). This group includes individuals with annual incomes exceeding US$38,000, predominantly concentrated in North America and Western Europe. Most disturbingly, the top 1% of income earners were responsible for 23% of global emissions leading to lethal outcomes. These numbers point to a grotesque asymmetry: the lifestyles and investments of the global elite are quite literally killing the global poor.

In the United States, for example, the top decile contributes disproportionately more to emissions than their counterparts in other wealthy countries, such as those in Europe, and far more than people in the Global South. In India, by contrast, the emissions attributable to the top 10% were significantly lower, demonstrating that industrialisation alone does not explain the emission discrepancy, imperial consumption and hyper-capitalist lifestyles do.

This is not only a story of emissions from personal consumption but of structural, systemic investments. The wealthiest earners tend to profit from and invest in carbon-intensive industries: private jets, fossil fuels, luxury real estate, deforestation-linked agribusinesses, further entrenching their role as both beneficiaries and drivers of ecological disaster. As Chancel emphasises, “we need to target policies not just to reduce consumption, but to reduce the power of the carbon elite” (Tollefson 2025).

This is a direct refutation of the dominant ecological narrative that shifts responsibility to the individual as consumer, rather than to the capitalist class as producer and controller. When the richest 10% of humanity are generating nearly half of climate-related destruction, then ecological policy aimed at recycling bins, carbon offsetting, and behavioural nudging is worse than misguided, it is propaganda.

The Necessity of Class Struggle in Ecological Transformation

Chico Mendes’ phrase, “ecology without class struggle is just gardening,” is not an exaggeration but an indictment. Mendes, a union leader and environmentalist assassinated by Brazilian landowners in 1988, recognised early that land defence, rainforest preservation, and ecological stewardship could not be abstracted from the exploitation of workers and Indigenous people. For Mendes, the fight to protect nature was inseparable from the struggle against capitalist accumulation and rural oligarchy. This insight holds greater urgency than ever today.

Ecological destruction is not the result of an accidental or mismanaged industrial project, it is the logical consequence of capital's pursuit of surplus value. Under capitalism, nature is not a living system but a stockpile of extractable resources. Whether through strip-mining in Congo, monoculture expansion in Brazil, or militarised oil extraction in Iraq, ecological damage functions not as a bug in the system, but as a feature.

This structural truth is reinforced by thinkers like John Bellamy Foster, who resurrected Marx’s concept of the “metabolic rift”, the disruption of the natural cycles between human society and the earth under capitalist modes of production. Foster writes: “Capitalist agriculture expropriated soil nutrients without replacing them, breaking the metabolic interaction between humans and nature" (Foster 2000, 162). In today’s climate regime, this rift has grown planetary: oceans acidify, glaciers vanish, and heat domes trap billions, all so the world's elite can maintain surplus profits.

Murray Bookchin, a radical ecologist, argued that the domination of nature stems from social domination. In The Ecology of Freedom, he writes: “The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man” (Bookchin 1982, 1). For Bookchin, any meaningful ecological politics must aim at dismantling class society, not preserving it in greenwashed form. Without challenging ownership and power, ecological activism becomes a hobby for the rich, a form of moral preening, not material resistance.

Reformism vs. Revolutionary Ecology: Why the 10% Cannot Be Persuaded

Mainstream environmentalism represented by policy frameworks like the Paris Agreement, ESG investment, and green capitalism operates on the assumption that the capitalist class can be persuaded or incentivised to protect the planet. But persuasion is a fantasy. The economic logic of capital accumulation is inherently ecocidal. It is not just that the richest 10% do not care about the climate; it is that their wealth and power depend on its destruction.

Take, for example, the explosion of private jet use among billionaires during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Or the fact that luxury consumption rebounded to record highs during the same period when the UN warned of irreversible tipping points in climate systems. This is not ignorance, it is immunity. The rich are building bunkers, not solar farms.

Moreover, the idea that individuals in the 10% can simply “consume less” is contradicted by capitalist structure. Even if a billionaire lives modestly, their capital investments, ownership of firms, portfolios, and shares still actively produce emissions. The issue is not lifestyle but ownership. The only path to ecological survival is to take the productive forces land, factories, logistics chains out of their hands.

As Andreas Malm bluntly puts it: “The climate crisis is not a crisis for capital. On the contrary, it is a source of accumulation and concentration” (Malm 2020, 19). The current trajectory will not be interrupted by appeals to morality, it will be overthrown by collective action. A revolutionary climate movement must be a worker’s movement.

Toward an Ecological Class War

To fight for climate justice while ignoring capitalism is to chase shadows. The Nature article reaffirms what revolutionaries have long known: the climate crisis is not universal but classed. The survival of the many depends on the political defeat of the few.

A revolutionary ecological politics must begin with organising the working class, especially in the Global South, where resistance to extractivism is most acute, around the seizure and transformation of the means of production. Land must be decommodified. Energy must be socialised. Industry must be repurposed not for profit, but for regeneration.

Anything less is just gardening.

As always, thank you for your time and attention.

Respectively, Parts 2 through to 5 will come daily until Friday.

Yours, warmly,

V.

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Bibliography

Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982.

Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Malm, Andreas. Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso, 2020.

Tollefson, Jeff. “The World’s Richest People Have an Outsized Role in Climate Extremes.” Nature, May 15, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01427-y.