It is a basic error to believe that workers in the Global North exploit people in the Global South, that there is an “imperial mode of living.” This is just a repetition of long discredited theory of a “labor aristocracy,” the flawed notion that workers in developed countries are paid off by the “superprofits” extracted from lower-paid workers in the developing world.

In fact, there has been a “global class war” of capital against all workers across the planet, and all those workers have much in common and a shared interest in combating capitalist rule. Saito and others do capital’s work by creating hardened geographical wedges dividing the international working class against itself.

Uh no, sweaty, and that's where your wrong kiddo... this global war's existence is only but a recent contradiction between workers and capitalists in the Global North... but even then, consider this:

Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

Something similar can be said about energy. The vast majority of embodied energy appropriated from the South is supplied by fossil fuels and therefore entails greenhouse gas emissions. In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012) (note these texts rely on slightly different country groupings to the ones we use here). The North’s net appropriation of energy from the South (as in Fig. 1 and Table 1) means that the benefits accrue in the former while emissions-related damages fall mostly on the latter. The same is true of the North’s appropriation of embodied land, which is another major driver of emissions (IPCC, 2018).

And this is all in aggregate, from around 30 years.... (think about it historically in the centuries, the western Industrial Revolution was starting at early 1800s)

You can't make a global north worker oppose something that his lifestyle depends on his ignorance of... after all, there's a reason many have been apathetic to their position, if not a few historically turned into petty-bourgeois propetarians or well-supported PMC, with a wee bit stock options and a fat salary...

There are also striking differences when it comes to CO2 emissions per capita (see Table 3). While the world average is 5 t of CO2 per person (2017), the emissions in the Global South averaged 3.4 t per person. Those in the Global North were three times higher, at 10.6 t per person.

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