Ecology and Class War
Part 5 of 5: The Commune or Collapse: Vision for an Eco-Socialist Future
Morning Comrades.
This is the concluding part of this series 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 Commune or Collapse: Vision for an Eco-Socialist Future
Between Barbarism and Renewal
The present is unbearable, and the future is being stolen. Every scientific report confirms what the oppressed already know: the ecological crisis is accelerating, and those in power are unwilling to stop it. While extreme weather, food shortages, and mass displacement proliferate, the rich retreat into fortified enclaves of green capitalism, techno-solutionism, and necropolitical triage.
We stand at a historic crossroads. The choice is no longer between reform and revolution, but between revolution or ruin, the commune or collapse. To meet the planetary crisis on its actual terms means rejecting liberal gradualism, dismantling imperial ecologies, and building a new world based on collective ownership, ecological stewardship, and class power.
This final section sketches a revolutionary eco-socialist horizon rooted in five foundational principles: decommodification, decolonization, democratization, degrowth for the rich, and ecological restoration through collective labour. It outlines both transitional demands and long-term structures for the re-organization of life on Earth.
From “Green New Deal” to Red Planetary Reconstruction
Mainstream climate politics in the Global North, particularly variants of the “Green New Deal,” have helped re-center environmental crises in public discourse. However, most GND proposals, especially in the U.S. and EU remain wedded to capitalist production, nationalist planning, and carbon Keynesianism.
These programs fail in three critical ways:
They universalise imperial wealth without addressing the Global South’s ecological debt and structural underdevelopment.
They centre growth, even if labeled "green," rather than reorganising social needs.
They preserve ownership by capital, allowing private corporations to dictate the terms of transition.
As Max Ajl writes in A People’s Green New Deal, “What is at stake is not just energy infrastructure, but the mode of production itself, whether it serves the planet or profit” (Ajl 2021, 23). A true eco-socialist alternative must begin where the GND ends: with the abolition of capital’s dominion over nature and labour.
The Commune as Form: Councils, Commons, and Ecological Sovereignty
The commune is not merely a utopian ideal, it is the historic and material form through which the working class has asserted self-governance. From the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Zapatista caracoles and Rojava’s democratic confederalism, the commune represents both a break from capitalist sovereignty and a new basis for ecological life.
A planetary commune system would involve:
Councils of workers, peasants, and urban communities, coordinated regionally and globally
Collective ownership of land, water, energy, housing, and transport, with production for need
Integration of ecological science, Indigenous knowledge, and labour planning to guide resource use
Restoration of the metabolic rift between human societies and ecosystems through agroecology, permaculture, and rewilding where appropriate
Destruction of imperial infrastructures: militaries, fossil logistics, borders that reproduce hierarchy and waste
This vision is not futuristic. It is prefigured in occupations, blockades, food sovereignty movements, and worker cooperatives that already reject capitalist time and property.
Degrowth for the Rich, Abundance for the Many
Eco-socialism is often misrepresented as a politics of austerity. But in reality, it is capitalism that imposes ecological austerity, rationing energy, housing, and food for the poor while producing obscene luxury for the rich.
We must reverse this logic. The richest 10%, responsible for almost half of climate damage must face planned degrowth: bans on private jets and yachts, dissolution of luxury real estate portfolios, and radical reductions in personal and corporate emissions (Tollefson 2025).
Meanwhile, the vast majority of humanity must experience ecological abundance: guaranteed food, housing, healthcare, water, transportation, and education, freed from markets and debt. This is not impossible; it merely requires seizing the surplus currently hoarded by capital and redirecting it toward life.
As Kohei Saito argues in Marx in the Anthropocene, “Degrowth is not about shrinking the economy per se, but about de-alienating labor and restoring freedom from the compulsion to produce for accumulation” (Saito 2023, 145).
Degrowth for the rich. Liberation for the poor.
Transition Through Rupture: Seizing the Levers of Reproduction
One of the major barriers to ecological revolution is the logistical and political complexity of transition. Who builds new systems while the old ones collapse? Who feeds, powers, and houses us during the process of abolition?
The answer lies in the seizure and repurposing of what Marx called the “means of reproduction.” This includes not just factories, but:
Food systems: community farms, expropriated agribusiness land, seed sovereignty
Energy systems: worker-led conversion of grids and refineries, decentralized solar and wind
Care and health: collectivized clinics, neighbourhood networks, unionized reproductive labour
Education: politicised schools, ecological training, democratic science
Media and culture: counter-hegemonic narratives, arts of refusal and renewal
Rather than waiting for the collapse of capitalism, we must interrupt it, redirect its flows, and build dual power where possible. As David Harvey notes, “The question is not if planning will occur, but whether it will be done by the 1% or the 99%” (Harvey 2017, 214).
Revolutionary Internationalism or Climate Apartheid
No ecological program can succeed in one country. Climate breakdown is global, and so must be its response. Eco-socialism demands a renewed proletarian internationalism that abolishes the imperial core-periphery division.
This means:
Climate reparations from Global North to Global South, not as charity, but justice
Debt cancellation and land back programs tied to global transition plans
Global labour alliances across logistics, energy, and agriculture sectors
Refugee freedom of movement, dismantling border regimes that criminalise climate migration
Transnational commune federations, not capitalist trade blocs or green military alliances
The alternative is climate apartheid: a world where fortress states guard islands of affluence while billions die. The choice is collective survival or genocidal stability for the rich.
We Have a World to Win, and a World to Heal
The age of moderation is over. The ecological crisis is not a puzzle to be solved by experts, but a battlefield shaped by class war, imperial power, and historical struggle. Capitalism cannot be “greened.” Its very operation is the destruction of life.
We must fight for a world where nature is not owned, where labour is not exploited, and where planning is done not for profit, but for the reproduction of all that lives.
Ecology without class struggle is gardening.
Ecology with class struggle is revolution.
And revolution is now the only realistic path.
As Rosa Luxemburg warned: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads: either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In the 21st century, that barbarism is ecocide. And our task, urgent, collective, and global is to overthrow it.
This then concludes this week and stands as an introduction to this topic. Technically, this is all it should take, yet in the reality of Capitalist academia I would have to spend a few years outlining all of this week with heaps of economic data only for it to be ignored, as usual, by the powers that be.
Regardless and in spite of their stranglehold on power, thank you for your time and attention,
Yours, warmly,
V.
Bibliography
Ajl, Max. A People’s Green New Deal. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Junius Pamphlet. New York: International Publishers, 1941 [1915].
Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
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.