Fighting ecocide doesn’t look like liberal “degrowth” schemes. It looks like the Palestinian resistance.

Palestine’s resistance shows what it truly looks like to fight for one’s land, as opposed to the “climate movement” that billionaire NGOs have created. The Palestinians are waging a real struggle to save their water, farmlands, and homes from all-consuming violence. Their fight leaves no room for the misanthropic views of western “climate politics,” because this fight is an existential war for the survival of an entire people. In this conflict, there is no layer of separation between human beings and the planet, like there is within the world of western “environmentalism.” The struggle’s participants don’t feel a need to make arguments like “humans are the virus,” because the connection between the land and the humans who live on it couldn’t be more clear.

This is one of the lessons from the Global South’s liberation struggles which we must internalize as we fight against the data centers, and against the broader ecological violence that’s being multiplied in scope. The nature of these struggles makes them incompatible with the western climate movement’s “degrowth” thinking, which negates class analysis in favor of a “humans vs. the planet” equation. The left within the imperial sphere can afford to ignore the wellbeing of the working masses, because it’s a privileged element that gets its activism resources from finance capital. Within these conditions, it can make sense to further drive down the people’s living standards as a supposed environmental solution. It can never make sense under the conditions of an actual, immediate battle for collective survival.

As our ruling class expands and intensifies its destruction of our lands, and our fight becomes more existential in nature, a danger is that the movements opposing this destruction will operate according to the degrowth logic. We cannot underestimate how much the western left has internalized the thinking of finance capital’s “environmental politics,” and been trained to see humanity or industry as diseases which must be defeated. The west’s “climate movement” has created a large layer of individuals who hold self-hatred for being human, or hatred for civilizational progress; which often translates into a belief that unrestrained adventurist violence is justified by the magnitude of the fight before us.

To the leftists who advocate for adventurism, we can respond: indeed, this fight’s magnitude is overwhelming. It was overwhelming during Lenin’s time too; all of history has been a history of class struggle, with the underclass always being engaged in totalizing battles. And during the battles he was fighting, Lenin had the same analysis on adventurism that today’s serious Marxists do. About the “Socialist-Revolutionies” who promoted terrorism, he observed how

the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realise that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle. Over-ardent protestations very often lead one to doubt and suspect the worth of whatever it is that requires such strong seasoning. Do not these protestations weary them?—I often think of these words, when I read assurances by the Socialist-Revolutionaries: “by terrorism we are not relegating work among the masses into the background.” After all, these assurances come from the very people who have already drifted away from the Social-Democratic labour movement, which really rouses the masses; they come from people who are continuing to drift away from this movement, clutching at fragments of any kind of theory.

This is the real origin of the ultra-left mentality that we need to embrace spontaneous violent action: a lack of willingness to build a mass movement, and gain the strength that comes from winning the people to your side. The Extinction Rebellion logic that we have to commit provocations against the masses due to an urgency for saving the planet is only a cover for this deficiency.

We can fix this deficiency, if we truly learn from the Global South rather than pretend to learn from it. Since October 7, these same ultra-leftists have portrayed their adventurism as being in tandem with the Palestinian resistance. This is specifically true for the wing within the NGO left that’s genuinely illiberal in its thinking, and whose members have sought out the most radical ideas and activities.

Unlike the left actors who condemn Hamas to fulfill a gatekeeping role, these ultras represent a rebellious current, one that the liberal institutions are now increasingly seeking to exclude from their circles. Even as these ultras are being shoved out of the liberal sphere, though, they are still liabilities to the revolutionary cause. And one of the things that makes them so harmful is how they claim to be aligned with the world’s popular liberation struggles, while projecting their own destructive libidinal impulses onto these struggles.

Gaza’s resistance couldn’t be more different from the west’s ultra-left. One is based within its nation’s popular masses, while the other is hostile towards the masses. While the Palestinian resistance forces use militancy in a strategic way, the ultras use “militancy” as justification for forsaking strategic thinking. For a Palestinian resistance to even exist, it must be intelligent. It must act with consideration for the conditions that it’s navigating at every given moment, and it must act according to the interests of the people it’s fighting for. There’s no room for infantile errors when you’re facing the threat of annihilation, and any mistake will cost you everything.

The majority of Gen Z Americans now support the Palestinian resistance. This means we have a millions-strong pool of people who could soon enter into the class struggle, while already having a strong anti-imperialist consciousness. It’s our task to provide them with organizational structures that have really learned from the Global South’s struggles, rather than ones that functionally assist finance capital. The danger from the ultra-leftists is that even though they represent a rebellious split from the institutional left, and they truly believe these liberation forces must be supported, this partial consciousness cannot stop them from being destructive. Without our intervention, they’ll lead the next Gen Z movement recruits astray, and get many people arrested or killed while marginalizing revolutionary politics.

At this stage, the most effective thing that we can do to combat the impacts of our systemic crises is provide aid to our communities. Not mutual aid, but aid that’s distributed on behalf of working-class organizers for the purpose of building alternative political power. Through this work, we’ll provide the masses with sources of support that they can rely on as our ruling class continues to engineer a collapse.

In terms of fighting for an end to this manufactured destruction, the actionable path forward runs primarily through the anti-imperialist struggle. This is something that Greta Thunberg realized after shifting towards the fight against the Gaza genocide, and breaking from the NGO-industrial complex: to defeat the institutions that are destroying humanity’s means to live, we have to fight against the most direct and extreme manifestations of capitalist violence. We have to act in tandem with the Global South’s masses, assisting them in battling against the primary enemy: U.S. hegemony.

This clarity about what must be done lets us escape the psychological damage from finance capital’s propaganda about climate. As a child, Thunberg became overwhelmed by the fear that the world was going to effectively end due to global warming, a fear that our hegemonic media put great effort into spreading during the early 2010s. But this kind of mental terrorism from our ruling class becomes ineffectual when you enter into a tangible collective struggle, and join in helping people who actually are fighting against their own extinction. It’s by becoming familiar with what such struggles really look like that somebody can overcome terrified paralysis, as well as the fear-based impulse to “take action” without thinking for yourself. If we make our movements connected to the Palestinian struggle, and the other efforts by those fighting off imperial domination, we’ll successfully separate our efforts from the financiers.

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