Ecology and Class Struggle
Part 2 of 5: The Global South and the Frontlines of Climate Imperialism
Morning Comrades.
This is Part 2 of 5, with the below as a brief abstract of what this week is about:
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 Uneven Burden
In the dominant Western narrative, the climate crisis is often framed as a shared global tragedy requiring universal cooperation. But behind this rhetoric lies a stark asymmetry: those least responsible for environmental collapse are suffering its worst consequences. This is not merely an injustice; it is a deliberate outcome of imperialist environmental extraction and neocolonial debt regimes that disempower nations of the Global South while enriching the Global North.
As the Nature study (Tollefson 2025) reveals, the global top 10%, overwhelmingly located in North America and Europe, generate nearly half of the emissions linked to lethal heatwaves and ecological disasters. Meanwhile, communities in southern-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, whose emissions are negligible, are subjected to desertification, food insecurity, displacement, and death. Climate change is not only class war, it is imperial war.
This dispatch traces how capitalist ecological destruction operates through imperial logistics, financial domination, and resource extraction to immiserate the Global South, and argues that any ecological politics divorced from anti-imperial struggle is complicit in maintaining ecological apartheid.
Ecological Apartheid: Unequal Exposure, Unequal Power
In global climate metrics, the category “developing nations” often hides the structural mechanisms that tie environmental devastation to historical and ongoing imperialism. The same countries that were colonised for their resources such as gold, rubber, sugar, oil, are today ravaged by droughts, floods, and rising seas, all linked to an extractive economy that never ended.
In her work This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein writes: “The atmosphere is being colonized by the emissions of the rich, while the poor are left to drown, burn, and starve” (Klein 2014, 76). Her language, colonized, is precise. For instance, Africa produces less than 4% of global CO₂ emissions but is home to the highest mortality rates from climate-induced disasters. Entire island nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati are already preparing for state extinction due to sea-level rise, despite having almost no carbon footprint.
More than just unequal exposure, there is also an imbalance in agency. IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs have robbed many Global South countries of sovereign decision-making in environmental policy. National parks in Kenya or mineral rights in the Congo are often administered more for Western conservation NGOs and corporate investors than for the local population, echoing a long colonial legacy.
Western green technology, too, depends on Global South sacrifice. Lithium for EV batteries comes from Indigenous Bolivian salt flats. Cobalt for renewable energy infrastructure is extracted under brutal conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As Jason Hickel points out, “green growth in the North relies on appropriating labor and resources from the South while offloading environmental costs” (Hickel 2020, 121).
Climate Refugees: The Dispossessed of Global Warming
The UN estimates that over 200 million people may be displaced by climate-related factors by 2050. These are not abstract numbers. From farmers in the Sahel driven off land by desertification to Bangladeshi families fleeing cyclones, climate refugees represent a growing underclass of the planetary proletariat.
Yet these populations are treated with increasing hostility. Fortress Europe militarises its borders. The U.S. expands detention camps. Australia deports islanders. Rather than accepting accountability, the imperial core criminalises the movement of those it has made stateless through climate-induced devastation.
This reality adds a new dimension to classical Marxist analysis: not only are surplus populations created through deindustrialization and automation, but through ecological uninhabitability. The global reserve army of labour now includes climate-dispossessed peoples, making a unified international ecological proletariat more urgent than ever.
Resistance in the South: Ecological Struggle as Class Struggle
Despite this brutal reality, the Global South is also where the most militant forms of ecological resistance have emerged. From the Zapatistas in Mexico resisting capitalist agro-industrialism, to the MST (Landless Workers' Movement) in Brazil occupying unused farmland, to water defenders in El Salvador, Indigenous and peasant movements have led the fight for an anti-capitalist, de-colonial ecological future.
These movements reject both neoliberal development and Western greenwashing. Instead, they demand land redistribution, community-based agroecology, and energy democracy. Crucially, they understand that ecology is inseparable from class and race.
As the Zapatistas declare: “We do not want development. We want dignity, land, and autonomy.” In their eyes, true sustainability is not about carbon credits but about collective control over territory and production.
The South Will Not Save the Planet for the North
The Global South should not be romanticised as the ecological conscience of the world, nor scapegoated as the planet’s burden. It must be recognised as the front line in a global class war being waged through environmental means. Climate reparations are not charity, they are justice. And ecological planning that does not begin by dismantling imperial structures will only reproduce global apartheid in green form.
As Aimé Césaire warned: “No one colonizes innocently.” Likewise, no one sustains innocently under capitalism. The real task ahead is not "aid" or "adaptation" but ecological decolonization. The survival of the earth depends on a Global South-led insurrection against the planetary bourgeoisie.
As always, thank you for your time and attention,
Yours, warmly,
V.
Bibliography
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. London: Penguin, 2020.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
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.
Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). “Communiqué on the Environment and Autonomy.” Chiapas, 2013.