By Ecehan Balta
COP31, the 31st UN Climate Change Conference, will take place in Antalya, Turkey, in November 2026, bringing together governments, international institutions, civil society organisations and other actors to discuss the next steps in global climate action. Alongside COP31, the People’s Climate Summit (PCS) will take place in Antalya from 14 to 18 November as an independent, movement-led space bringing together those most affected by the climate crisis and ecological destruction. Beginning with the Global Day of Action on 14 November, the Summit will focus on four main areas: food sovereignty and agroecology; fossil fuel phase-out and energy democracy; war and militarism; and the rights of nature. It aims to strengthen international solidarity and develop collective alternatives rooted in climate justice rather than market-based and corporate-led responses.
This article is written in the hope that, read together with the text on the ecological crisis adopted at ISp’s first congress, it can serve as a starting point for a broader discussion on ISp’s position and perspectives in this field.
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Not a Crisis of Nature, but a Crisis of the System
Humanity is facing an ecological crisis that is deepening, interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Climate change is its most visible expression, but the crisis is far broader than that. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, soil and water pollution, water scarcity, the destruction of oceans, the damage caused by industrial agriculture, the expansion of mining, dependence on fossil fuels and a constantly growing waste economy are different manifestations of the same systemic crisis. For this reason, it is no longer sufficient to describe the present moment simply as a “climate crisis”. What we are confronting is a compound ecological crisis.
Nor is this crisis a distant threat belonging to the future. Extreme heat, droughts, floods, wildfires, crop losses and water shortages have already become part of everyday life in many parts of the world. Scientific assessments show that current policies are taking the planet far beyond the goals of the Paris Agreement. Yet explaining the ecological crisis merely as “humanity’s destruction of nature” conceals its social and class character.
Humanity is not a single, homogeneous subject in relation to the ecological crisis. A private jet user and a textile worker in Bangladesh do not carry the same responsibility for the crisis, nor do they have the same capacity to protect themselves from its effects. The same is true of a shareholder in an oil company and a small farmer trying to produce under conditions of drought, or of a global mining corporation and a community living next to one of its mines. To understand the ecological crisis, therefore, it is not enough to ask how much carbon is emitted. We must also ask who produces, who consumes, who makes the economic decisions, where wealth accumulates and onto whom the costs are shifted.
The ecological crisis is not a crisis produced by nature itself. It is a crisis of a particular social order and of the way that order relates to nature. That order is capitalism.
Capitalism and Ecological Destruction
The fundamental dynamic of the capitalist mode of production is capital accumulation. Capital cannot simply be satisfied with making a profit. Competition compels each individual capital to reinvest, expand production, find new markets, reduce costs and turn ever more natural and social spheres into commodities. Under capitalism, therefore, economic growth ceases to be a simple policy choice and becomes a condition for the reproduction of the system itself.
Capital accumulation continually requires more raw materials, more energy, more land, more labour and more markets. The central contradiction in capitalism’s relationship with nature emerges here. For capital, a forest is not only a living ecosystem but also a source of timber, a potential mining site, a tourism investment, a carbon credit or a piece of real estate. A river can be calculated as hydroelectric potential before it is understood as part of social and ecological life. Land can be transformed from the basis of food production and life into a financial asset. Nature appears to capital first and foremost through exchange value rather than use value.
The concept of the “metabolic rift”, developed from Marx’s analysis of the material interchange between human societies and nature, is important for understanding this process. Capitalist production continually widens the gap between the pace of social production and the capacity of natural systems to regenerate themselves. The extraction of groundwater faster than it can be replenished, the release within a few generations of fossil carbon formed over millions of years, intensive agriculture that does not allow soils to recover, and fishing beyond the regenerative capacity of marine ecosystems are all different expressions of the same logic.
The ecological crisis is therefore not an accidental by-product of capitalism. It is the outcome of the historical contradiction between an economic system that must expand continuously and a planet that is finite and can regenerate itself only at certain rates.
Responsibility and Consequences Are Unequally Distributed
The claim that “we are all in the same boat” obscures the class and global inequalities at the heart of the ecological crisis. We may inhabit the same planet, but our responsibility for producing the crisis, our capacity to protect ourselves from it and the price we are forced to pay are not the same.
Fossil fuel companies, large mining corporations, banks and investment funds, and the automotive, aviation, petrochemical and agribusiness industries have accumulated enormous wealth through forms of production that generate ecological destruction. By contrast, outdoor workers exposed to extreme heat, small farmers losing their livelihoods to drought, coastal communities threatened by sea-level rise, poor households losing their homes to floods and populations living next to mining projects experience the consequences of the crisis far more directly.
Ecological inequality has been historically produced not only between classes but also between countries. The development of capitalism cannot be separated from colonialism. The rise of European capitalism depended on the systematic exploitation of land, raw materials and labour in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Contemporary global production chains reproduce many aspects of this historical relationship in new forms. Many countries of the Global South are locked into economic structures based on the export of minerals, oil, gas, agricultural products and cheap labour, while a significant share of the value generated through these systems accumulates in transnational corporations and financial centres.
At the same time, North-South inequality cannot replace class analysis. Ruling classes in the Global South also accumulate wealth through mining, fossil fuels, land dispossession and cheap labour. Likewise, millions of workers in the Global North face the consequences of rising energy and food prices, housing crises, insecurity and deindustrialisation. A Marxist ecological perspective must therefore analyse imperialist inequality and class inequality together.
The Limits of Green Capitalism
Capitalism’s response to the ecological crisis is becoming increasingly clear. The system no longer responds to climate change only by denying it. It is also turning the crisis into a new field of capital accumulation. Solar and wind energy, electric vehicles, battery technologies, lithium and other critical minerals, hydrogen, carbon markets, carbon capture technologies, “nature-based solutions” and green finance are becoming rapidly expanding investment fields.
The transition to renewable energy is of course necessary, and the use of fossil fuels must be brought to an end. But a technology does not automatically become socially or ecologically just simply because it is low-carbon. If the expansion of electric vehicles depends on the rapid growth of lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt mining; if solar plants are built through the dispossession of local communities; or if giant wind projects generate profits for private companies while local populations have no meaningful decision-making power, then fossil extractivism may simply be replaced by a new form of “green extractivism”.
Capitalism’s proposed transition therefore often leaves the basic logic of the economy intact. An oil corporation can be replaced by a lithium corporation, or a coal monopoly by a renewable energy monopoly. This can make a significant difference in terms of carbon emissions, but it does not automatically transform ownership or power relations. From a socialist ecological perspective, the central question is not only whether energy is fossil-based or renewable. It is also who owns the energy system, who decides where investment goes, how much energy is produced and for which social purposes it is used.
Climate Finance and Ecological Debt
Climate finance is one of the clearest expressions of the connection between ecology, imperialism and justice. The industrialisation of advanced capitalist countries consumed a large share of the planet’s carbon budget over more than two centuries. Yet many of the countries now facing the most severe impacts of climate change have contributed relatively little to historical emissions.
Climate finance should therefore not be treated as charity or development assistance. It is a question of historical responsibility. Yet the existing climate finance system risks drawing countries that are already struggling with the effects of the crisis into a new debt regime. The fact that a large share of climate finance provided by advanced economies takes the form of loans rather than grants means that countries with far less historical responsibility for climate change are being asked to borrow in order to finance adaptation and energy transition.
This reproduces global inequality through a new mechanism. Natural resources, labour and ecological capacity are first transferred towards the centres of global capital, and then peripheral countries are compelled to borrow in order to confront the ecological destruction produced through that historical process. The debts are then largely repaid to financial institutions located in the Global North.
A Marxist climate justice perspective should therefore understand climate finance not as “aid”, but as a partial repayment of ecological debt. This implies a shift away from loans and towards grants and public funding, the prevention of new climate-related debt burdens, the expansion of loss-and-damage finance and substantial cancellation of existing external debts. Climate finance should also be allocated according to social needs rather than the profitability requirements of private investors.
Militarism, Imperialist Rivalry and the Ecological Crisis
The ecological crisis cannot be separated from war and militarism. While the world debates the supposed lack of resources for climate adaptation, energy transition, health, housing and food security, military expenditures continue to rise. This is not merely a contradiction in public spending priorities. It reflects the intensifying competition between capitalist states over energy resources, minerals, trade routes, technological superiority and geopolitical influence.
Lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements, all of which are central to the energy transition, are becoming new arenas of geopolitical rivalry. Water, agricultural land, energy infrastructure and emerging trade routes are increasingly becoming part of inter-state competition. A “green transition” carried out within capitalist power relations therefore does not automatically produce a more peaceful world. On the contrary, new rivalries over critical minerals and technological infrastructure can be added to older conflicts over fossil fuels.
War itself is also a major source of ecological destruction. Bombardment, the destruction of infrastructure, the contamination of soil and water, the forced displacement of millions and the enormous resource consumption of war economies all deepen the ecological crisis. Socialist ecological politics must therefore also be anti-militarist and anti-imperialist.
Ecological Justice and a Just Transition
The ecological transition will inevitably produce major economic transformations. Coal mining, oil and gas production, the automotive industry, transport, agriculture and many branches of industry will have to change fundamentally. The central political question is therefore not simply whether transition is necessary, but who will pay for it.
Just as capitalism transfers the costs of economic crises onto workers and the poor, it can attempt to shift the costs of ecological transition onto the same groups. Rising energy prices, job losses, consumption taxes and more expensive transport and food can coexist with new subsidies and investment opportunities for corporations. Such an approach is not only unjust. It also risks turning ecological politics against the working class and undermining the social basis of transition.
A socialist ecological approach must defend the opposite. Workers in fossil fuel industries cannot be made to pay the price of decarbonisation. Workers in sectors that are to be phased out must be guaranteed income, retraining, early retirement where appropriate and new employment at equivalent wages and conditions. More importantly, transition plans should not be designed from above by corporate managements and state bureaucracies. Trade unions and workers must participate directly in democratic decision-making over the transformation of production. A just transition should not be understood as social assistance designed to compensate workers for the damage caused by transition. It must mean workers having real power over the transition itself.
Why the Working Class Is a Central Actor
Some sections of the ecological movement treat the working class as a category belonging to an earlier industrial society. Yet the global proletariat is larger and more diverse than ever. Industrial workers are part of it, but so are logistics workers, agricultural labourers, energy workers, health workers, teachers, care workers, service-sector employees, platform workers and millions of precarious workers.
The central role of the working class in ecological transformation does not arise only from its exploitation under capitalism. Workers are the people who operate the systems of production and social reproduction every day. They run electricity networks, ports, railways, factories, mines, hospitals, water systems and food supply chains. The working class is therefore not only a victim of capitalism. It is also the social force with the material capacity to stop production and reorganise it on a different basis.
For this reason, the convergence of the ecological movement and organised labour is strategically decisive. A lasting and democratic ecological transition depends on the working class becoming not a passive victim of change, but an active subject of it.
Energy Democracy
The energy transition cannot be left to the investment decisions of private capital. Energy is one of the basic infrastructures of modern society. Heating, cooling, cooking, mobility, communication, education and healthcare all depend on access to energy. Energy should therefore be treated not simply as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a basic social right.
Energy democracy approaches the energy system first and foremost as a question of ownership and power. Bringing major fossil fuel and energy corporations into democratic public ownership, managing energy generation and distribution under the control of workers, local communities and consumers, and planning the transition to renewable energy according to social need are central to this perspective.
This approach must also bring energy demand itself into question. The energy required by a hospital, a school or a home does not have the same social value as the energy used for luxury consumption, advertising infrastructure or private jets. The aim of socialist planning is therefore not simply to produce ever more energy, but to decide democratically what kind of energy should be produced, how much should be produced and for which social purposes.
Food Sovereignty
The food system is another central arena of the ecological crisis. Agriculture and food systems are responsible for a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the issue goes far beyond carbon. The global food system is increasingly dominated by a small number of multinational corporations that exercise growing control over seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, agricultural machinery, grain trading, processing and retail. This structure drives small and medium-sized producers towards high input costs, debt and dependence on corporations.
Food sovereignty offers a fundamentally different perspective. It is not only about ensuring that everyone has access to enough and safe to consume food. It is also about ensuring democratic control over how, where, by whom and under what conditions food is produced. Protecting access to land and water, supporting small producers and cooperatives, strengthening the rights of agricultural workers, challenging the absolute control of corporations over seeds, ensuring food safety and quality, expanding agroecological production, and strengthening local and regional food systems are all part of this perspective.
This does not mean romanticising older forms of agricultural production. Scientific knowledge, mechanisation and new technologies can and should be used. The decisive question is whether they are used to maximise corporate profit or to guarantee access to healthy food, secure livelihoods for producers and the regeneration of ecosystems.
Internationalism Against Extractivism
One major danger of the energy transition is that it could produce a new global wave of extractivism. Electrification and renewable energy infrastructure require large quantities of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and other minerals. Capitalism tends to meet this need not by democratically planning resource use and reconsidering socially unnecessary demand, but by opening new mining frontiers.
Low-carbon consumption in Europe or North America can therefore depend on intensified exploitation of lithium basins in Latin America, cobalt mines in Africa, or copper and nickel deposits in Asia and elsewhere. Destroying water, land and livelihoods in one country so that electric vehicles can expand in another cannot be regarded as an ecological solution.
Socialist ecology therefore cannot be confined within national borders. It requires an internationalist perspective in which environmental gains in one country do not simply export dirty production elsewhere, in which resources are shared equitably and democratically, and in which workers and local communities are able to organise solidarity across borders.
Transitional Demands and Democratic Ecological Planning
To argue that capitalism cannot permanently resolve the ecological crisis within its own logic does not mean dismissing present-day reforms and struggles. On the contrary, what is needed is a transitional programme that connects urgent demands today with the broader goals of social ownership and democratic planning.
Such a programme should include an end to new fossil fuel exploration and extraction, a scientifically necessary and planned phase-out of fossil fuels, democratic public ownership of major energy corporations and the development of renewable energy systems according to social need. Access to energy, water, housing, transport and basic food should be guaranteed as social rights. Public transport should be radically expanded and made free or very affordable wherever possible. The costs of ecological transition should not be shifted onto workers and the poor. Resources should instead be raised through greater taxation of large fortunes, fossil fuel companies and high-carbon luxury consumption.
At the global level, the cancellation of unsustainable external debts, a shift from loans to grants and non-repayable public climate finance, and the expansion of loss-and-damage funding on the basis of historical responsibility are essential. In agriculture, agroecology, cooperatives, small producers and the rights of agricultural workers should be strengthened, while public and commons-based forms of ownership should be defended against the privatisation of water, seeds and other essential natural resources. At the same time, the working week should be reduced without loss of pay, productivity gains should be converted into more free time rather than ever greater commodity production, and the enormous resources currently devoted to militarisation should be redirected towards ecological transition, healthcare, housing, education and care.
Some of these demands can be partially won through struggle within capitalism. But if pursued consistently and together, they inevitably raise a more fundamental question: who should control investment and production decisions in the economy? This is where the importance of a transitional programme becomes clear. Rather than erecting a mechanical barrier between reform and revolution, the task is to connect immediate struggles with the questions of ownership, power and democratic control.
Democratic ecological planning cannot simply mean transferring corporations into bureaucratic state ownership. Public ownership is not the same as bureaucratic control. Workers, trade unions, local communities, women’s organisations, ecological movements, scientists, small producers and consumer organisations must participate genuinely in decisions over investment and production. Decisions about how much is produced, which sectors are expanded, which are reduced, which technologies are used and how natural resources are distributed must become questions of democratic social decision-making.
Connecting Ecological Struggle with Other Struggles
Ecological struggle is not a separate “environmental issue”. There are direct connections between women’s unpaid care work and water and food crises, between the conditions of agricultural workers and industrial agriculture, between migration and climate disasters, between racism and the concentration of environmental destruction in particular communities, between wars and energy resources, between trade union struggles and a just transition, and between debt crises and climate finance.
Ecosocialism therefore does not mean simply placing different struggles side by side. It means understanding the common material and social relations that produce them. Working-class emancipation, anti-imperialist struggle, anti-racism, women’s and LGBT+ liberation, Indigenous rights, the struggle for peace and ecological struggle are not isolated fields.They confront different forms of domination produced and reproduced within the same system of capital accumulation.
The Ecological Crisis Is Also a Crisis of Power
Humanity already possesses much of the technical capacity required for ecological transformation. Renewable energy technologies, energy-efficient buildings, electrified public transport, agroecological production methods and scientific knowledge for climate adaptation already exist. The central problem is not primarily a lack of technical capacity.
The deeper problem is the property and power relations within which this capacity is used. Who controls the land, the banks, energy companies, mines and major means of production? Who decides what a factory produces, whether a mine is opened, where energy investments are made and how the social surplus is allocated? These are the questions that ultimately determine how the ecological crisis can be addressed.
The ecological crisis is therefore, in the final analysis, also a crisis of power.
An Ecosocialist Future
Socialism cannot mean adding environmental regulations to the productivist models of the twentieth century. The ecological crisis also requires the socialist movement to critically reassess its own history. The idea that the unlimited development of productive forces will automatically produce human emancipation is no longer sustainable.
But the alternative is not to share poverty or scarcity. Capitalist societies already consume enormous quantities of labour and natural resources in activities with very limited social value. Militarisation, advertising, planned obsolescence, financial speculation, luxury consumption and car-centred urban development are among the clearest examples. Redirecting these resources towards healthcare, education, care, housing, public transport, renewable energy and ecosystem restoration could raise rather than reduce the quality of life of the majority.
The aim of ecosocialist transformation should not be to build a society with more commodities, but to reduce the dependence of a good life on market relations. Better public services, shorter working time, accessible housing, healthy food, clean energy, strong public transport and more free time can demonstrate that ecological limits and social well-being do not have to be opposing goals.
Conclusion
The ecological crisis is not a secondary environmental issue for the socialist movement. It is directly connected to how capitalism produces, how it grows, how it distributes the world’s resources and how it subordinates social needs to accumulation. Climate struggle is therefore also a struggle against energy and mining monopolies, finance capital, imperialism, militarism and the commodification of land, water and food.
Capital’s answer is to preserve the existing economic system while making it lower-carbon. Socialist ecology poses a more fundamental question: who should decide what is produced, how it is produced, how much is produced and for what purposes social wealth is used?
A lasting response to the ecological crisis must therefore transform not only technologies and energy sources, but also ownership of production, economic decision-making and the distribution of social power. Ecological struggle is not a struggle to protect nature from human beings. It is a struggle to free the joint reproduction of human society and nature from the compulsion of endless capital accumulation.
In this sense, the ecological crisis is ultimately not a crisis of nature, but a crisis of the system.
