Ecology and Class Struggle

Part 3 of 5: Revolutionary Eco-Strategy

Morning Comrades.

This is Part 3 of 5, with the below as a brief abstract of what this week is about:

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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.

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Green Capitalism Is Still Capitalism

The ecological crisis has not gone unnoticed by capital. In fact, it has become a central arena of accumulation. Phrases like “net-zero,” “green transition,” and “sustainable development” dominate policy documents, corporate rebranding campaigns, and even international treaties. Yet this greening of capitalism amounts to little more than a new phase in the commodification of nature. It does not challenge the logic of extraction, private ownership, or imperial resource flows, it repackages them.

The growth of the “green economy” is now valued at over $10 trillion globally (IEA 2023), with investments flowing into electric vehicles, carbon offsets, renewable energy portfolios, and geo-engineering. But this so-called green revolution has been built on the backs of the same exploited labour forces and colonized lands that powered fossil capitalism. Renewable energy still depends on forced labour, extractivist mining, and private capital markets.

This part of the series argues that any ecological strategy that does not mobilise the working class against the green bourgeoisie will reproduce the same hierarchies under a new colour. True ecological transition must be revolutionary, class-driven, and rooted in the seizure of the means of environmental production: land, energy, infrastructure from capitalist control. Without this, we are not building sustainability; we are building a green-washed empire.

The Myth of the Win-Win: Green Growth as Ideological Cover

In mainstream discourse, green capitalism is promoted as a way to “decouple” economic growth from environmental degradation. Governments and corporations promise that through innovation, markets, and investment, we can both grow the economy and save the planet. This is known as the “win-win” doctrine.

Yet empirical evidence demolishes this claim. In Less is More, Jason Hickel demonstrates that absolute decoupling, reducing total environmental impact while growing GDP has never occurred at the scale or speed required to stay under the 1.5°C limit. He writes: “The richest nations are simply outsourcing their emissions to poorer countries while pretending their economies are greening” (Hickel 2020, 92). The Global North's “clean” economies depend on dirty production lines and deforested zones in the Global South.

Moreover, green capitalism introduces new commodities: carbon credits, offset markets, green bonds which allow polluters to pay for the right to destroy, rather than ceasing destruction. As environmental theorist Andreas Malm puts it: “Green capitalism is not a contradiction in terms—it’s a tautology. It means sustaining capitalism, not the planet” (Malm 2021, 57).

This ideological sleight of hand serves a class function: it promises bourgeois society it can continue in comfort while presenting technological adaptation as the new frontier of capital accumulation.

Who Builds the Green Transition? Workers at the Core

While capitalists speculate in carbon futures and tech entrepreneurs claim to "disrupt" the climate crisis, it is the global working class who must build, operate, and suffer under the infrastructures of green transition. From Congolese miners digging for cobalt to Mexican solar panel assemblers and Indian wind turbine technicians, it is labour, not innovation that produces the so-called green economy.

But these workers are not merely victims of ecological capitalism. They are also its latent grave-diggers. No ecological transformation is possible without the power of organized labour. And yet, major climate NGOs and green policy frameworks almost entirely ignore worker organizing. Instead of solidarity with striking miners or landless farmers, we are given TED Talks and celebrity-led reforestation apps.

This is a profound political mistake. As the Red Nation collective writes, “Decolonization is not a metaphor, and climate justice is not a hashtag. It is material struggle for land, water, food, and life” (The Red Nation 2021, 5). Labour movements must demand not just green jobs, but democratic control of green infrastructure.

What would this look like? It would mean energy cooperatives run by workers and communities. Public transportation systems built and owned by the people, not Uber. Industrial conversion plans made by workers’ councils, not Silicon Valley shareholders. Climate strategy determined by those who work the land, not those who own it.

Case Studies: Class-Based Ecological Resistance

Examples of revolutionary ecological worker organizing are not hypothetical, they already exist.

• In South Africa, the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA) has demanded a Just Transition that includes not only a shift away from fossil fuels, but worker ownership of energy systems. They reject the privatisation of renewables as “green colonialism.”

• In India, the anti-dam movement of the Narmada Bachao Andolan brought together displaced villagers, environmentalists, and trade unions in a mass struggle against ecocidal development funded by the World Bank.

• In Argentina, worker-recuperated factories like FaSinPat (formerly Zanon) have integrated ecological practices into self-managed production, showing that worker-led green industry is possible outside the profit system.

• In Rojava (Northern Syria), the Kurdish liberation movement has begun implementing a form of eco-socialism rooted in communal agriculture, women’s leadership, and renewable energy, all in the midst of war.

These cases illuminate the central truth: sustainability without sovereignty is a lie. The green future must be planned, not by markets, but by the masses.

Toward a Program of Revolutionary Ecological Unionism

A revolutionary eco-strategy must root itself in a practical, material program that connects environmental transformation to class struggle. Such a program might include:

• Universal Energy Democracy: Nationalise all major energy producers under worker and community control. Shift to renewable sources based on local need, not corporate profit.

• Green Industrial Conversion: Redirect military and fossil infrastructure (e.g., aerospace, auto, oil) toward ecological restoration, housing, transport, and food production, under worker planning.

• Ecological Land Reform: Seize unused land and agribusiness holdings to return to communal, Indigenous, and cooperative farming rooted in agroecological principles.

• Climate Reparations and Debt Abolition: Cancel Global South debt and redirect wealth expropriated by colonizers and polluters toward restoration and survival.

• Planetary Strike Infrastructure: Use union networks to develop global strike potential across carbon-heavy sectors: aviation, shipping, logistics to disrupt capitalist ecology.

None of this can be legislated by bourgeois governments. It must be fought for, seized, and held by organized revolutionary forces, workers, peasants, landless, and the urban poor. The ecology of the future will be red, or it will not be at all.

From Greenwashing to Green Communes

As the global rich consolidate their “climate-proof” bunkers and capital pivots to technocratic decarbonization schemes, the rest of humanity faces collapse. We cannot afford to dream of bipartisan climate action or benevolent corporations. The ecological horizon will not be shaped in Davos or Silicon Valley, but in factories, fields, and forests where the oppressed reclaim power.

It is time to remember what Karl Marx wrote in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The ruling ecological ideas today, green growth, carbon markets, ESG serve the continued rule of capital. Our task is to destroy those ideas in theory, and the class that propagates them in practice.

Only a worker-led, anti-imperialist, ecologically rooted struggle can ensure the end of environmental catastrophe. Everything else is gardening.

Thank you for your time and attention,

Yours, warmly,

V.

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Bibliography

Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. London: Penguin, 2020.

International Energy Agency. Global Green Economy Outlook 2023. Paris: IEA, 2023.

Malm, Andreas. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London: Verso, 2021.

Red Nation. The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.

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.