Why Anticapitalism and Eco-Trans-Feminism must march together.

We live in a time where every crisis is isolated, sterilized, treated as a separate emergency: climate, social, economic, health. It’s a way to make them manageable, and therefore, defanged. But it only takes a less domesticated gaze to see they all share the same origin: a system built on the violent exploitation of the living. That’s why eco-trans-feminism and anticapitalism cannot be parallel battles. They are the same struggle, seen from different angles. And they must march together.

Global capitalism is not just an economy. It’s a colonial, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, racist, ableist machine. To function, it needs hierarchies—ways to rank lives as worthy or disposable. It needs violable bodies, expropriable lands, invisible labor. As Silvia Federici wrote, “the transformation of women into a natural resource free of charge was one of the pillars of the transition to capitalism.” Today, that same logic plays out in lithium-scarred deserts, in monocultures poisoned by agribusiness, in undocumented care workers with no protections, in trans bodies made into media targets and left in chronic precarity.

Eco-trans-feminism—as lived and theorized by Françoise Vergès, María Lugones, Berta Cáceres—is not a conference hashtag. It’s an act of disobedience. It rejects the idea of neutral progress, or that merely “including” oppressed subjectivities into existing structures is enough. It dismantles the dominion of the human over all other forms of life and, with it, the speciesist violence that treats animals, plants, ecosystems as disposable objects. Because if a cow can be turned into a factory, a woman can be reduced to a womb. If a forest can be reduced to biomass, a trans body can be ignored by a public health system built only for “normal” bodies. Antispeciesism, in this sense, is not a side ethic—it’s a core part of critiquing a system that commodifies anything that breathes.

Anticapitalism, if it’s to be more than an economic critique, must get its hands dirty. It has to confront the way power moves through bodies, not just wages. It must break with the toxic masculinity of certain old-guard leftist traditions, still unable to deconstruct their own privileges. As Tithi Bhattacharya writes, capitalism is upheld by a web of reproductive, emotional, and sexual labor—unseen and underpaid. And that’s where the real resistance happens: in kitchens, in anti-violence shelters, in trans-feminist collectives, in Indigenous communities defending their land.

Likewise, feminism that doesn't challenge capital is domesticated feminism. Good for ads and brand campaigns, but useless to those facing structural violence every day—those whom the system wants exploitable but not too loud. “Feminism that doesn’t disturb capitalism is destined to fail,” Nancy Fraser wrote. And she was right. Enough with the girlboss managers—we need revolutionaries.

Greenwashing plays the same trick: promising ecological salvation while continuing to extract, poison, displace. The energy transition, if it’s not also a transition of power, is just updated colonization. Wind farms that erase mountains, solar fields that take over farmland, "tech solutions" designed by those who’ve never had to drink from a poisoned river—this is not the solution. It’s the problem, dressed in green.

That’s why the climate crisis is not just an environmental issue. It’s a political device. We won’t be saved by efficiency, but by justice. And justice doesn’t come from compromise—it comes from radical alliances.

If you defend land without defending the people who live on it, you’re just doing colonial conservation. If you defend LGBTQIA+ rights without fighting economic precarity, you’re just asking for a better seat in the disaster. If you talk about antispeciesism without talking about human exploitation, you’re just replicating a moral hierarchy. We need voices that connect the dots—without fear of being disruptive.

As Audre Lorde reminds us, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.”
So let’s stop separating. Our struggles are one.

And we don’t have time to make them acceptable.