Our world is on fire; capitalism is leading our way to hell; every sane person can see it clearly.
In Europe, it is becoming increasingly trendy to call oneself “anti-capitalist”, especially among Western environmentalists. One can hear these self-proclaimed “radicals” talking about how capitalism, especially the fossil fuel industry, is the root cause of our ecological crisis.
Undoubtedly, capitalism is to blame for the existential crisis of humanity, but not exactly in the narrow sense that these Western environmentalists mean–the capitalist relation of production inside the national borders of Western countries.
Instead, for five centuries since European capitalism expanded its tentacles to the rest of the world, the capitalist (and later imperialist) vampire has been living on slaughtering black and brown people and destroying the nature surrounding them.
In other words, the entire history of ecological degradation is a history of (neo)-colonialism and imperialism.
It began when European colonisers came to Africa, Latin America and Asia to set up plantations, degraded the diverse ecosystem into monoculture, reduced the fertile soil to desert, and sucked every drop of natural and human blood.
It accelerated when European colonisers discovered the perfect recipe for mass extinction, i.e, stealing the fossil wealth on the land of non-white natives, and using fossil fuels to lubricate the meatgrinder of (neo)-colonialism and imperialism.
Now it has reached a new stage, or rather the last stage: as the imperialist vampire refuses to die, it is desperately putting up its last struggle and making genocidal attempts to destroy every living thing on the planet with the NATO+ death machine, under the motto of “if I have to die, I will drag you all to hell along with me.”
So, what is the way out?
Many petit-bourgeois Western environmentalists may say, “we know, green capitalism is the way out”. However, this self-contradicting idea has proven to fail after the “Green New Deal” in the EU became a dead cat, and the greenwashing strategy of the bourgeois ruling class became so obvious that even most liberal green party voters cannot deny it any longer.
Many seemingly “radical” Western environmentalists may say, “we know, degrowth / postgrowth is the way out”, although the seemingly perfect third way, the way that according to these “radical leftists” will work much better than both capitalism and actually existing socialism, does NOT even exist in reality. Following the “third way” of “changing the system inside the broken system”, we will return to the square one of green capitalism.
It should not be very surprising for us that solutions proposed by Western environmentalists do not work at all in reality. How can these Western labour aristocrats who are still benefiting significantly from the genocidal system, the root cause of the ecological crisis, be willing to cut the throat of the imperialist vampire and truly solve the crisis? To do so, they have to sacrifice their white-class privileges and commit class suicide, which is apparently for them a higher price than the total extinction of humanity.
Being surrounded by these Western environmentalists every day, I can tell you that they are 100% convinced that their solutions will save humanity, just as they deeply believe that they are the white saviours carrying the “holy mission” of saving “backward” black and brown people.
The over-confidence, or frankly speaking, the delusion of these Western environmentalists is not a coincidence, but a result of Western hegemony. As the tentacles of Western hegemony spread to every corner of our lives, even how we solve crises is dictated by the “civilised” West.
For decades, most internationally recognised environmental and climate research has been from the West, often focusing on whitewashing the crimes of the global imperialist class and manufacturing racist narratives like “overpopulation is the root cause of ecological crisis” (one can get 112,000 results in Google Scholar by searching “overpopulation climate change”).
For decades, Western countries, especially those in Scandinavia, the prime culprits of the ecological crisis, have been bragging about their “great” contributions to sustainable development, while blaming the problem on the “unsustainable development” of major third-world countries like China and India.
For decades, everyone regards Western hegemony in environmental research fields as a “natural” order of things, although we have been standing upside down for way too long to recognise the basic fact that it is insanely undemocratic to let a tiny minority, less than 20% of the world population, to decide how we, the global majority, should or should not solve one of the biggest crises faced by the humanity today.
As the world is on fire and the fire has almost reached an irreversible level, we, the global majority, the natives in the third world and the settler colonial states, should stop continuing this upside-down path chosen by Western environmentalists towards the dead-end of human history, total extinction. We should reclaim the battlefield against ecological crisis.
So, how can we reclaim the battlefield?
As the history of the past five centuries has been a history of ecological degradation caused by Western civilisation for the white minority, to turn the wheel of history 180 degrees around, we need to reclaim the term “civilisation” and build a future for the global majority. Borrowing words used by socialist China, we need to build “ecological civilisation”.
To build “ecological civilisation”, we, the global majority, need to reclaim things that belong to us, in particular energy, food sovereignty and the right to development.
Energy
Nature was impartial and blessed the global majority with plenty of energy sources, especially solar. However, such a blessing became a curse when white Europeans spread their capitalist tentacles to solar-rich regions.
With the help of (neo)-colonial and imperial death machines, white Europeans, the global minority, have been sucking on energy that belongs to the third world for around five centuries, leaving the global majority de-developed and impoverished, reversing the natural order of things.
This upside-down global order of energy is the very origin of ecological degradation. To reverse it, we need to reclaim the energy. But how?
There are two main categories of energy sources: fossil and renewable energy.
Fossil energy like coal, oil, and gas is the favourite energy of the white empire, as it is mostly produced in a centralised way, and hence can be monopolised and used to expand Western hegemony. Until today, most third-world countries still rely on imported fossil energy purchased with U.S dollars, thus being almost unable to escape the stranglehold of the white empire.
In contrast, renewable energy, especially solar energy, is the friend of the free people of the world. No matter how hard the white empire tries, it cannot block the sun. This makes it possible for third world countries like Cuba to survive the genocidal crimes of the white empire, and further to thrive and break free from the white empire’s de-development trap.
Thus, to reclaim the energy, we, the global majority, must develop our abilities to harness renewable energy sources. This is exactly why socialist China decided to develop the renewable energy industry at the beginning of the 21st century. The decision was made not to compete with the capitalist West in the “lucrative” renewable energy industry, as many Westerners may believe, but rather to achieve energy sovereignty and break free from the curse of the imperialist West.
As socialist China, a third world country, has become the global leader in the renewable energy industry, it is not a distant dream anymore for the global majority to reclaim energy that belongs to us.
China is not only providing the global majority with cheap fish like mini-grids, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, but also teaching other siblings how to fish by actively transferring renewable energy technologies to other brother third-world countries.
Between 2016 and 2025, China has provided training opportunities for more than 10,000 participants from over 120 third world countries in over 300 capacity-building projects to enhance their skills in renewable energy and decarbonization, one of the examples is the Capacity-Building Training Workshop for the China-Ethiopia-Sri Lanka Trilateral South-South Cooperation Project on Renewable Energy Technology Transfer (“中国—埃塞俄比亚—斯里兰卡可再生能源技术转移三方南南合作项目 ”能力建设培训班).
In addition, with the help of the South-South Cooperation Center for Technology Transfer (技术转移南南合作中心), a new solar power generation system for electric vehicles suitable for remote areas lacking grid coverage developed by CAS Qiguang New Energy Technology Research Institute in Chengdu has been successfully transferred to Asian countries such as Laos and Sri Lanka.
But this is only half of the story. Besides building our capacities to harness renewable energy sources, we also need to cut the pipelines of imperialism, i.e, to reclaim fossil energies that belong to our own land.
In the past, the white empire has successfully regime-changed many “left-leaning” governments in the third world who tried to claim the ownership of fossil energies, like in Iran (1953), Libya (2011), Iraq (2003). But the pursuit of national sovereignty is as resilient as grass; “wildfires cannot destroy it completely, and the spring breeze makes it sprout anew (野火烧不尽，春风吹又生)”.
Now, in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Yemen, the spring has come, and the anti-imperialist breeze is gradually blowing away the bloody cloud of the white empire. By reclaiming the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, brave Iranian people and Yemeni people of the Ansar Allah are cutting the fossil pipelines of the imperialist vampire and starving it to death. This winter we will see it struggling on at death’s door.
Food sovereignty
Similar to energy, the global majority was also blessed with abundant fertile land to grow food and feed its entire population. If the Europeans did not embark on the genocidal colonial path, stole the land of the non-white natives, and turned the stolen land from the source of human nutrition into the source of capital accumulation, our mother earth would have no problem nurturing all her children without suffering from ecological degradation.
Take Sri Lanka as an example: before the colonial era, natives on this beautiful island had developed an advanced, sustainable, and self-sustaining agrarian civilisation with collective ownership and large-scale irrigation infrastructures. After the island was colonised by the British, the advanced sovereign agriculture was systematically destroyed to make way for plantation-based export agriculture, the cash cow for the British colonisers.
This has devastating effects on both the native people and the nature they live in. It has stripped native people of food sovereignty and trapped the entire island in the de-development vicious circle. It has also caused great biodiversity loss and irreversible soil erosion, thus significantly increasing the frequency of natural disasters and making native people more vulnerable to the climate crisis.
The extent of deliberate ecological degradation by (neo)-colonisers is unbelievably large, as stated clearly in a paper written by a Sri Lankan scholar P. Wickramagamage,
“the upper catchment areas of the major rivers in the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka had been stripped of the natural vegetation to make way for the plantation agriculture during the British period…the consequences of these actions were immediately visible in the form of accelerated soil erosion, siltation of low lying areas, frequent flooding, drying out of streams, etc. Even after Independence, land clearing continued unabated. Today only small patches of forest are left; even those are not in the critical areas.”
Just as explained by the Sri Lankan scholar above, the genocidal crimes of colonisers did not stop after the island gained flag independence. In recent decades of the neoliberal era, the process of dispossessing native people and destroying nature has been further accelerated by IMF-imposed austerity policies, predatory microfinance and the domination of multinational chemical monopolies. As multinational chemical monopolies expanded their domination over export agriculture in Sri Lanka, the overuse of pesticides has caused an epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology—CKDu since the 1990s, affecting about 400,000 people and killing around 20,000. Moreover, as a result of both export-oriented agriculture and “successful” IMF austerity surgery, one in four native people in Sri Lanka live below the poverty line, and one in five households cannot meet their essential food needs.
Thus, to stop further ecological degradation, the global majority must reclaim food sovereignty. But how?
As most food is produced on land, the first step towards food sovereignty is land sovereignty. In other words, the masses must take over the ownership of land through armed struggles. The significance of land ownership can be clearly observed by the vast differences between the food sovereignty level of socialist third-world countries, where the native people own their land, and that of capitalist third-world countries, where the global imperialist class directly or indirectly owns most of the land.
For instance, socialist China has managed to provide around 20% of the world population with affordable, sufficient, and healthy food by using only around 9% of the world’s arable land. The average consumption of fresh vegetables in China amounts to over 1.5 kilograms per person per day, exceeding the level of consumption in most Western countries.
In contrast, Brazil, with only around 2,7% of the world population and around 4,5% of the world’s arable land, has not managed to completely solve the food security problem. Although the prevalence of undernourishment in Brazil has fallen below 2.5% since 2022, approximately 8 million people in Brazil still face severe food insecurity, and 50 million people still cannot afford a healthy diet.
Certainly, seizing the ownership of land is easier said than done. However, with the Axis of Resistance taking the lead of the anti-imperialist struggles, there is no reason for us to doubt that more and more third world countries will gradually march on this path towards land sovereignty and national liberation.
Nevertheless, as the past experiences of socialist China before the 1970s have shown, having achieved land sovereignty does not necessarily mean that a country will have the capacity to grow abundant food. To fully reclaim food sovereignty in the era of climate crisis, it is imperative to develop industrial capacities and sustainable practices in the agricultural industry.
This is not an impossible task for third-world countries anymore since the third world, with China, Vietnam and Russia leading the way, is gradually reclaiming technological sovereignty in sustainable agriculture. These non-aligned countries are currently taking an active part in supporting other sibling countries to modernise their agricultural industry and reclaim food sovereignty.
For example, both China and Russia are providing technical support for Burkina Faso in agricultural fields. The Chinese agricultural technical assistance team has provided practical farming training and donated agricultural supplies to young participants in Burkina Faso in July this year. Vietnam plans to send experienced experts and technicians to Angola to help conduct field surveys, establish technical demonstration models, provide training, and transfer technologies to local farmers. In addition, in Kenya, integrated farming systems (such as drone-based foliar spraying, soil sensors, drone mapping and precision irrigation) with Chinese precision agricultural technologies are being built based on local climate and economic conditions to reduce pesticide use by 30–50% and lower water consumption by up to 90%.
Therefore, the historical trend of putting things back to the right order is inevitable. Certainly, there is still a long and bumpy way ahead of us until we, the global majority, reclaims the food sovereignty. But as Fidel Castro said, “difficulties will not keep us from moving forward”.
Right to development
Reclaiming the energy and food sovereignty lays the foundation for the development of the third world where most of the global majority live.
I can imagine that once heard the word “development”, many people will immediately say, “ What, ‘development'? “ Isn’t this article about how to solve the ecological crisis? Is the author promoting “green capitalism”?
Many people, especially Western degrowth scholars, do regard development of productive forces as the root cause of the ecological crisis. However, if one looks back to human history, one will realise that no group of humans could degrade the environment to such a significant level until white Europeans de-developed the third world countries using direct or indirect violence.
Before the era of colonialism, countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America had reached a rather high level of development without any severe environmental and climate consequences. It was after white Europeans and their capitalist system with inherent genocidal motives dominated the world that nature started being destroyed on purpose, along with the slaughtering of black and brown people.
In other words, the root cause of the ecological crisis is not development, but rather de-development of the global majority by the imperialist vampire. Thus, to reverse the historical wheel from ecological degradation to ecological civilisation, the de-developed shall be the developed, just like what Frantz Fanon said, “the last shall be the first”.
We, the global majority, must break free from the de-development trap of the imperialist West and find our own path towards sustainable development, or borrowing words from the theory of Chinese modernization, “a model of sound development featuring improved production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems”.
Some people may argue that it is impossible to decouple development of productive forces from ecological degradation. However, this is untrue. What is impossible to decouple from ecological degradation is not development, but rather capital accumulation, or, to put it in another way, not development for the people, but rather development for capital.
Why? Let us look at two examples of the most ecologically destructive industries: the military and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry.
Regarding the military industry, its purpose in China is to defend national sovereignty and protect Chinese people against aggressions of the imperialist West. In contrast, the purpose of the military industry in the West is to expand its imperial domination and help the Epstein class accumulate more capital.
Thus, while the U.S, the big brother of the imperialist West, is significantly increasing its already vast amount of military spending that accounts for 37% of the global total military spending, China adopts the policy of “moderate investment, rational advancement, and overall restraint (适度投入、理性推进、总体克制)” and maintains the military spending at a stable level of around 1,5% of its GDP, below the global average of 2,5%.
In terms of the AI industry, its purpose in China is to facilitate people’s lives and improve people’s wellbeing, while its purpose in the U.S is to develop non-existent “general AI” that can replace human labour and to pursue an impossible “permanent” class dominance of the global imperialist class over the popular class.
Hence, in China, the devastating ecological impacts of the AI industry have been the top concern. Thanks to public investment in research, Chinese scientists have found solutions to use seawater to cool the data centre and renewable energies to power it. The world’s first subsea data centre with seawater circulation cooling and powered directly by offshore wind has started operating earlier this year in the waters near Lingang, Shanghai.
In contrast, (almost) all data centres in the U.S still use freshwater and fossil energy, as it is simply not profitable for the capitalist ruling class to invest in energy transformation and in research on seawater cooling. As a result, data centres are not only remarkably increasing carbon emissions, but also exacerbating the water shortage problems faced by ordinary working class people in the U.S, with companies like Google wasting 10.9 billion gallons of fresh water on cooling.
These examples show clearly that the reason why “green capitalism” can never work is not that it is technologically impossible to minimise ecological impacts while producing things with high use values for the people, but that the global imperialist class can’t accumulate capital in a for them large enough scale and high enough speed if they have to produce useful things with lower ecological impacts, rather than useless things with higher exchange values and heavy ecological impacts.
Conclusion
Ecological crisis is not a natural phenomenon as the Epstein class wants people to believe, but a white-people-made problem caused by the complete reverse of the natural world order: the majority rules. To overcome this existential crisis, we, the global majority, need to change the upside down world order back to its natural state, reclaim what belongs to us, develop a collective path towards ecological civilisation based on native intelligence, and take the lead in the battle against the imperialist vampire.
They are no longer calling for a "green revolution".
This stopped when china started or had already been the leader on green technologies.
Excellent