Ecology and Class Struggle

Part 4 of 5: Dismantling the Carbon Empire

Morning Comrades.

This is Part 4 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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The Infrastructure of Extinction

The climate crisis is not a natural event. It is the direct consequence of a built system, of pipelines, mines, ports, highways, data centers, chemical plants, and shipping fleets engineered for one purpose: the extraction and movement of surplus value through fossil-powered capitalism. This system is not malfunctioning, it is working precisely as intended. The carbon economy is the imperial economy. And dismantling it means dismantling the ruling class’s control over land, energy, and planning.

In earlier parts of this series, we saw that the top 10%, primarily Western capitalists and their allies are responsible for nearly half of the world’s climate-damaging emissions (Tollefson 2025). We explored how this burden falls disproportionately on the Global South and the working class. And we argued that ecology without class struggle merely greenwashes imperialism.

Now we turn to the concrete material systems that must be dismantled, seized, and repurposed. This part examines the historical role of land enclosure, imperial energy regimes, and capitalist planning in producing ecological collapse and outlines revolutionary alternatives rooted in collective ownership, socialist ecological planning, and the abolition of fossil-fueled capital logistics.

Land as Capitalist Power: From Enclosure to Eco-Apartheid

Capitalist ecology begins with land theft. The enclosures of feudal commons in England accelerated by the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century, laid the foundation for agricultural commodification and labour discipline. Peasants were expelled, forests privatised, and subsistence destroyed in favour of market logic.

This logic became global through colonialism. Land grabs in the Americas, Africa, and Asia forcibly integrated Indigenous territories into imperial supply chains. Under settler rule, the land was not only a source of wealth, but a weapon: it regulated class formation, displaced traditional lifeways, and centralised state and capitalist power.

Today’s so-called “green land grabs” follow the same logic. Carbon offset programs, reforestation schemes, and conservation zones have displaced hundreds of thousands of people, especially in Africa and Southeast Asia (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012). These lands, though branded “sustainable,” are controlled by Western NGOs, agribusinesses, or carbon speculators, not by the people who depend on them for survival.

In short: capitalist land use remains a system of eco-apartheid. Forests are commodified. Rivers are dammed. Soil is poisoned for monoculture export crops. Land is either productive (for capital) or abandoned. The Earth itself is abstracted into carbon metrics, ignored as a living system and claimed as property.

Revolutionary ecology must begin by abolishing private property in land. As Marx wrote: “The earth is not the property of man… It is the common treasury of the generations” (Capital, Vol. III, 1894). Land must be socialised, stewarded, and restored by the communities that live on it, not traded on markets.

Energy: From Fossil Tyranny to Communal Power

Capitalist energy regimes are built on two imperatives: expansion and centralisation. Since the dawn of coal and steam, fossil energy has served to scale labour exploitation, militarise territory, and control populations. The oil industry, especially since the 20th century became the material basis for global imperial power, especially that of the United States.

As Timothy Mitchell shows in Carbon Democracy, the flow of oil allowed capitalist states to circumvent labour movements (unlike coal, which relied on mass workers and unions), dominate the Global South via petro-dollars, and fuel endless war (Mitchell 2011). Energy became a sovereign force: the domain of nation-states, empires, and transnational corporations, not people.

Today, even renewable energy is being developed within this imperial mold. Solar fields displace Indigenous communities. Wind turbines are built by exploited migrant workers. Smart grids are owned by finance firms. Capital is not transitioning away from extraction, it is reformatting it.

We cannot merely “transition” technologies. We must transition power. Revolutionary ecological strategy must demand:

• Expropriation of fossil and green energy companies under public and worker control

• Local energy sovereignty, where production and distribution are based on need, not profit

• Abolition of energy poverty, guaranteed access for all, and rejection of energy austerity politics

• Demilitarisation of energy infrastructure, including an end to oil wars and extractive colonialism

Energy cannot be a private commodity. It must be treated as a public right and managed democratically.

Planning for Life, Not Profit: Abolishing Capitalist Logistics

Perhaps the greatest illusion of green capitalism is the idea that market incentives will “naturally” steer us toward sustainability. This fantasy is disproven daily by reality. From Amazon’s global shipping logistics to Wall Street’s carbon derivatives, capitalist planning is built around cost-efficiency, not planetary survival.

Capitalist planning is anarchic. Firms maximize profits regardless of ecological costs. Governments subsidize fossil fuel infrastructure even while signing climate agreements. Cities are zoned to separate work, housing, and food, forcing transit emissions and alienation. Commodity chains stretch across continents for minimal labour cost savings, at enormous energy expense.

As Andreas Malm writes: “The problem is not energy. It is capitalism’s inability to plan” (Malm 2021, 42). A just transition requires abolishing the “logistics of extinction” and creating new systems that plan for use, not exchange. This means:

• Democratically coordinated production and distribution, guided by ecological limits

• Shortening supply chains, reviving local industry, and ending fossil-based freight dependency

• Reclaiming urban and rural planning to integrate housing, work, and food systems sustainably

• Mass conversion of wasteful or ecocidal industries (e.g. military, luxury goods, air freight) into sectors of social and ecological restoration

Planned degrowth in the imperial core is not sacrifice, it is liberation from overwork, alienation, and ecological destruction.

Planning the Commune or Perishing with the Empire

The future will be planned. The question is: by whom, and for whom?

Right now, capitalist elites are planning for their survival: privatised climate shelters, securitised borders, geo-engineering, technocratic population management, and corporate “green” governance. Their vision is a necropolitical ecology, one that accepts planetary triage in order to preserve capital's command.

Against this, we must plan for the commune. Not a single commune, but a global network of decommodified, eco-socialist, class-conscious systems of survival and solidarity. This means:

• Socialist control of land and resources

• Democratic energy systems

• Ecological planning led by workers and oppressed peoples

• Decolonized, anti-imperialist infrastructure

We do not need new markets. We need new councils. New assemblies. New ways of life. The logistics of capital must be torn out root and branch, not reformed.

As Walter Rodney wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “Development is not just about technical measures. It is about seizing power” (Rodney 1972, 220). Ecology, too, is a question of power.

The carbon empire will not fall by polite policy or market nudges. It must be dismantled. And in its ruins, we must build a system that restores not just the climate, but our collective capacity to live, plan, and decide for ourselves.

Again, thank you for your time and attention,

Yours, warmly,

V.

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Bibliography

Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature? Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2 (2012): 237–261.

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

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. III. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1991 [1894].

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1972.

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.