This resolution presented by the Tendency for a Revolutionary International (TIR) was rejected by the 2025 World Congress by 4 votes in favour, 102 against, 18 abstentions, and 5 No Votes.
1. A climate crisis that threatens the planet, but whose consequences primarily affect the poor and working classes
After decades of denying the obvious, even international capitalist institutions are sounding the alarm about the scale of the climate crisis and the risks to the planet's survival.
In 2018, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, a group of scientists attached to the United Nations) hit the headlines. This institution announced that since the second half of the 19th century, the planet's temperature had risen by an average of 1 to 1.5°C. Exceeding the 1.5°C threshold, which will soon be reached, would lead to an increase in the number of meteorological disasters. The IPCC indicated that at the current rate of production, which is generating far too many greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in the worst-case scenario we could reach 5.5°C by 2100. The meteorological consequences of such an increase would make it impossible for the human race to survive.
Global warming is the result of an accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane, among others), which trap solar energy. Although global warming threatens the survival of all humankind, the current consequences are primarily affecting the oppressed and exploited.
Today, two-thirds of the world's population may be exposed to dangerous or even fatal heat for vulnerable people such as the elderly, the homeless and the sick.
In India in 2019, 600 million people were left without running water due to drought. In Chennai, India's sixth largest city (population 6 million), the heat reached 50°C and there was a water shortage for more than 30 days. Demonstrations took place in front of the prefecture, sometimes turning into riots and the looting of private water tankers. This is not the first time that the poor people of this region have faced this problem. In 2015, a similar heatwave killed more than 2,000 people in India.
Climate change is not just about more heatwaves. Ocean regulation is also being severely disrupted. Since the 1980s, the North Pole has lost 30% of its total ice pack. At this rate, sea levels will rise by more than a metre by 2100. An increase of 65 cm would be enough to flood cities such as Sydney, London and New York.
The ocean absorbs a quarter of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions linked to the combustion of fossil fuels. This leads to acidification, and therefore the death of certain underwater species (plankton, coral, etc.). Their disappearance, far from being insignificant, has an impact on the food chain and leads to the rarefaction of certain fish species, whose fishing is the main resource of certain communities, as well as a source of jobs and profits in industrial fishing regions.
In 2015, scientists watched with great concern as El Niño, the warm current in the eastern Pacific, deregulated. Heatwaves and cold snaps occurred simultaneously at unexpected times in different parts of the world, disrupting food production and lifestyles. With one in seven of the world's population already facing chronic hunger, the unpredictability of agricultural production is having a negative impact on the flow and price of food, increasing the number of victims of undernutrition.
Global warming is having a myriad of knock-on effects, each more catastrophic than the last for our ecosystem and the living conditions of the world's workers, who are suffering the violent social consequences of cyclones, fires, floods and other disasters. The ecological crisis undoubtedly has social consequences, deepening inequalities between classes. It is one of the many aspects of the oppression experienced by the working masses under the reign of capitalism.
2. The cause of the crisis: the capitalist mode of production
Capitalist climate experts agree that human activity is responsible for the crisis. They are all trying to hide the real culprit in the destruction of our eco-system: the capitalist mode of production.
For several millennia, human activities have not endangered nature or the survival of species. It was in the 19th century that the first climatic crises were documented, with the industrialisation of Western Europe, when the capitalist mode of production developed, whose objective is not the satisfaction of human needs, but the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of capital by the social class that now owns the means of production: the bourgeoisie. It is the very operation of this system that is leading to such brutal disruption. The capitalist system inexorably leads all owners of capital to produce according to what brings them the most profit. If they do not comply with this rule, they simply go bankrupt. It is this way of producing that leads to totally irrational production, taking no account of the satisfaction of humanity's needs or the long-term preservation of natural resources. The capitalist mode of production inexorably leads to anarchic production, guided by the quest for immediate profits, without any long-term planning, periodically resulting in crises of overproduction and famine, intensive farming that is a source of pollution and animal welfare, deforestation, soil and ocean pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, heat waves, rising seas, etc.
Today, one hundred capitalist companies are responsible for 75% of greenhouse gas emissions, even though we know that the release of these gases into the atmosphere is the main cause of global warming, which poses a real risk to the survival of species on Earth.
3. Against the impasse of green capitalism
Capitalists began to take an interest in the climate crisis and ecology, not out of concern for the planet, but because some of their profits were beginning to be affected by climate change. As with every crisis, capitalists seek to adapt in order to maintain their profits. The first thing they saw in the climate crisis was the opportunity to open up new markets. They understood the growing interest in the issue and invested in communication and a series of projects, labels and summits that enabled them to appear as 'eco-responsible'. Ecological interest has become a market where money is invested to deceive consumers instead of being used to actually change production.
The "dieselgate" scandal in 2015 revealed these methods to a wide audience. Some time after funding an exhibition on global warming, Volkswagen found itself at the centre of a scandal revealed by investigative journalists. The company had rigged its diesel engines to cheat on carbon footprint tests, so that its CO2 emissions were lower than they actually were. This cheating enabled it to benefit from an "eco-responsible" label and to sell its vehicles at a higher price. Virtually all European car companies have used this trick. Of the one hundred companies responsible for three quarters of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, twenty-five emit half. All of them belong to the fossil fuel sector, and all of them are making huge profits. Many of them excel in the art of greenwashing. Such is the case with Total, the world's 17th biggest polluter, whose advertising campaign praises its development of low-carbon and renewable energies, as well as its environmental initiatives (solar energy, CO2 storage, reforestation, etc.). As a patron of museums and historical monuments, the company was invited to Climate Financial Day in 2018, another summit of this green-painted bourgeoisie. Total's investments in "sustainable development" represent only 5% of its €9.2 billion in investments in 2018. Most of its capital is invested in discovering new oil fields, which means new sources of pollution. This "eco-responsible" company alone accounts for 1% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions! That's equivalent to 311 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
Capitalism, even when painted green, has only one objective: the pursuit of profit. We can harbour no illusions about the possibility of a reasoned capitalism that puts the preservation of the environment and the needs of humanity above profits.
This is clearly the assessment of the various climate COPs that have met, adopting objectives that no country will meet until we have overturned this system as a whole.
To disguise their inaction, the capitalists and the bosses of the most polluting companies are trying to shift the blame for the crisis onto the workers. They sing the praises of small, everyday individual gestures that could supposedly change the climate, while blaming poor working men and women who cannot afford to switch to an electric car or buy organic food.
In reaction to this anarchic and destructive capitalist production, we are witnessing the emergence of mainstream “degrowth” currents.
The most "orthodox" supporters of this movement criticise industrial society itself and advocate a return to a simpler way of life, with artisanal production, thus denying the undeniable progress that industrialisation has represented as a means of meeting everyone's needs and considerably improving living conditions. Mainstream degrowth thinking advocates a radical change in consumption, pointing the finger at those who buy products that generate pollution as being responsible for global warming. Today, 15% of the world's inhabitants still have no access to electricity; more than a billion people live in shanty towns, while around 1.5 billion farmers struggle to produce enough food to feed themselves. On the other hand, 26 people hold as much wealth as 50% of the world's population, or 3.6 billion people.
The ecological crisis is not the result of technical progress, no it is the result of the privatisation of control over the means of production to a minority of capitalists who produce in an anarchic and uncontrolled way, not to meet the vital needs of the majority of the world's population, but solely to increase their profits. It is only up to the working classes and the oppressed to self-determine their needs, overthrow both productivism and capitalism, reorient production and readjust its level, so as to meet the self-determined needs of all peoples, while abandoning methods and products that destroy the planet.
4. To save the planet: overthrow capitalism, impose socialist planning and workers' control
The urgency of the climate crisis makes the need for socialist revolution all the more pressing. "Socialism or barbarism" is not just a slogan. Overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, wresting control of the means of production from the hands of the bourgeoisie and putting them under workers' control, is an urgent necessity for the survival of the planet.
We must oppose this anarchic and destructive production with production planning under workers' control.
Just by taking control of some of the hundred most polluting companies, it would be possible to achieve the reduction in greenhouse gases recommended by the IPCC. Without workers taking back the means of production, without the expropriation, at the very least, of key sectors of the economy, such as energy, without an economy organised to meet the needs of humanity rather than governed by the "law of the market", no serious objective will be achieved.
5. Intervene and develop climate mobilisations by developing a class struggle orientation and placing them under the leadership of workers
The working classes are often the first victims of the climate crisis. All over the world, the dividing line between social and ecological mobilisations is becoming increasingly blurred. More and more often, environmental demands are merging with wage demands.
The working class, as the social force capable of overthrowing capitalism, is the class best placed to halt the climate crisis.
Revolutionary Marxists must take part in ecological mobilisations, seeking to apply the same methods as those used by the workers' movement: strikes, self-organisation of struggles, control of production, natural resources, living spaces, etc.
As in every struggle, we seek to make them independent of the bourgeoisie and to place these struggles under the control of the workers.