Socialist States and the Environment

Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786807908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences.

As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism's heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends.

By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn't, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.

1

Introduction

The unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues. One cannot say too much about the extent to which all these machines that spew fumes spread carnage. Those who have the technological means to find the culprits have no interest in doing so, and those who have an interest in doing so lack the technological means. They have only their intuition and their innermost conviction. We are not against progress, but we do not want progress that is anarchic and criminally neglects the rights of others. We therefore wish to affirm that the battle against the encroachment of the desert is a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society. As such it is a political battle above all, and not an act of fate. (Sankara 2007 [1986], 258)

When, in 1983, a popular insurrection reinstated Marxist Pan-Africanist Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara as head of state of Burkina Faso (then called Upper Volta), environmental protection was among the first items in the new revolutionary government’s agenda. This complemented commitments to gender equality, public health, literacy and national self-reliance. Those policies were explicitly intertwined in the quest to reach socialism. In the span of four years, until Sankara was assassinated in 1987, mass mobilisations enabled the development of planned wood cutting and livestock movement as well as reforestation to contain desertification (Biney 2018). Since then, with the French neocolonial yoke restored, forests have been diminished from 68,470 to 52,902 km² (as of 2016), a contraction of roughly 23 per cent (World Bank 2021a).

As Burkinabé revolutionaries knew, ecological sustainability is a political struggle and socialism its linchpin. Inheriting and elaborating on a century of socialist experiences and centuries of decolonisation struggles, they had embarked on a promising adventure. They had it right. There is little prospect for an ecologically sustainable society without socialism, without decolonisation. But there was more to this linkage. The Burkinabé revolutionaries showed how socialism is imbued with ecological thinking and how constructive state institutions can be to achieving social equality and environmental sustainability. State socialism, as an intermediate phase, can have and has had ecologically and socially beneficial effects. This can be claimed without downplaying state-socialist problems and horrors. The issue is recognising what has gone well and facing up to what has gone wrong, with an aim to inform current and future efforts, strategies and struggles for an environmentally sustainable, egalitarian, classless, state-free society.

The insights and actions of the Burkinabé revolutionaries could not be more relevant today. A profit-crazed, commerce-glorifying world is the daily stale and toxic bread for most of us. Propelled by the insatiable thirst for profits, capitalist communities are structurally incapable of leaving ecosystems in healthy states. A salient illustration is the settler colonial liberal democracy called Brazil, from where the Bolsonaro regime has intensified encroachments and attacks on Amazonian Indigenous peoples. This is consistent with a long history of attempts to annihilate non-capitalist communities, whose ability to thrive without any need of capital is as intolerable to capitalists as any form of socialism. Socialism, especially in its state-powered variant, may have an uneasy relationship with non-capitalist systems, but with most non-capitalist and anti-capitalist bulwarks gone, there is hardly any restraining the intrinsic rapaciousness of capitalism.

The resulting present is an ever-intensifying concentration and centralisation into fewer hands of the wealth produced by almost all societies worldwide, a systemic tendency of capitalism that Karl Marx underlined long ago (1992 [1867], 776). And there are nauseating repercussions to this. Capitalism is what produces more than a billion people going hungry or malnourished or vulnerable to famines in an age of abundant food production as never witnessed in human history. It is what keeps one in three persons from having access to safe potable water (WHO 2019). It is what gives preferential treatment to housing speculators over those needing shelter. It is the development of profitable and ever deadlier wars, with ever more devastating weaponry, the diffusion of mass imprisonment, mass displacement, mass migration, mass death and vast riches and political privileges for a small fraction of humanity.

The correlate to these preventable, if not politically willed social disasters is the continuing destructive impact on the rest of nature. The capitalist present is a hundredfold speed-up of species extinctions, unparalleled in the history of earth (Ceballos et al. 2017), and an average 68 per cent fall in the populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians since 1970 (WWF 2020); that is, since many fetters on capitalist activities have been loosened (also known as neoliberalism). The present is over 40 per cent of insect species threatened with extinction (Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019). It is an increasingly more contaminated present that keeps adding to the decades of already mounting quantities of discarded plastics, persistent toxic substances (PCBs, lead, etc.), oil spills, radioactive waste and much poisonous else. The present is a relentless growth in greenhouse gas output into the atmosphere and more frequent extreme weather events (Herring et al. 2020). The present is melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and drowning coastlines and islands. The present is 10 per cent of humanity linked to about 50 per cent of all human-produced CO₂ emissions, a figure roughly mirrored in half of humanity correlating with about 10 per cent of the emitted CO₂. Since 1990, when almost all socialist states were undone, yearly emissions have expanded by 60 per cent, over a third of it related to the lifestyle of the wealthiest 5 per cent (Gore 2020). The present is the gory glory of capital, the free market unleashed, the pinnacle of the magnification of the liberal freedom to loot and kill. That is what really triumphed in 1989. That is what cannot be fathomed by the astonishingly still-existing old believers in capitalism and its hyper-armed and world-policing political correlate, liberal democracy.

Even major capitalist institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) acknowledge environmental destruction as a major problem. More importantly, ever more people worldwide understand that the problem is social, not merely technical, and certainly not removed from daily life. Notions like Pachamama, environmental justice, Sumak Kawsay and strike for climate are salient examples of renewed, revived or, in the case of ecologically indebted societies (economically wealthy countries), rediscovered linkages that sometimes cross the large regional wealth gaps dividing the world. These movements recognise and press against the structures of power underlying environmental destruction. In the mainstream, a few in the biophysical and technical sciences appreciate the enormous gaps in political power and the specifically capitalist causes of global environmental destruction (Ceddia 2020; Wiedeman et al. 2020). Regrettably, within those sciences capitalism-friendly prescriptions or technical formulations of regulatory frameworks abound, even when repeatedly phrased in ominous terms (Ripple et al. 2020). The problem is simplistically laid out as one of global population and economic growth. Rarely do technical experts venture into social causes and relations of domination, much less promote an alternative politics, and even less reveal their own political proclivities. When scientists like Wiedeman et al. (2020) feel free enough to speak their mind on capitalism (even naming it) – in a journal like Nature, no less – and even point to Marx and socialist alternatives, something major must be afoot. Perhaps in the biophysical or technical sciences people are starting to sense just what a warped understanding of the world most of us have been fed. But even as they seem so close to questioning the foundations of their own society, our brave scientists seem unaware of the huge wealth of historical experiences and resulting ideas, and novel forms of organising, for a society free of domination. Their recommendations spell this all out:

What is needed are convincing and viable solutions at the systems level that can be followed. We call for the scientific community across all disciplines to identify and support solutions with multidisciplinary research, for the public to engage in broad discussions about solutions and for policy makers to implement and enable solutions in policy processes. (Wiedeman et al. 2020, 7)

Aside from their ingenuousness on actually existing political processes, where, to name a few problems, Indigenous environmentalists are assassinated and the ‘public’ is usually met with teargas or worse whenever attempting to be seriously engaged with such issues, these scientists must not know about the existence of Cuba or the notion of the control over the means of production and the not so peaceful struggle that it implies. Nonetheless, under current conditions it would be shocking if these brave scientists are not shunned or accused of ‘communism’.

The present is also dotted with stubborn, decentralised, small-area projects worth following, supporting and helping to interlink with each other. There are plenty of them and they point to workable alternatives. Renewable energy and forest conservation increasingly undergird the satisfaction of daily needs in the autonomous Tzotzil Maya egalitarianism-oriented caracoles (municipalities) coordinated through the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) in Chiapas (Mexico). In the centre of the US empire, the Menominee community, in their ongoing struggle for survival as a people, are renowned for their sustainable forestry techniques (Davis 2000). There are many instances of shared urban living arrangements, including squats, that are ecologically less impacting in cities like Barcelona, Melbourne and Rome (Cattaneo and Engel-Di Mauro 2015; Nelson 2018) or in the middle of Virginia in the US (Kinkade and the Twin Oaks Community 2011). Crucially, many Indigenous peoples are on the front lines of defending water, forests, soils and much else worldwide.

Yet these weavings of alternative institutions cannot mobilise people and resources to the level states can, so the myriad anti-capitalist egalitarian projects and efforts, and the movements behind them, have not made the sort of impact needed to diminish substantively the destructive environmental impacts of capitalist systems. Nor should they be expected to carry out such a feat, given the relations of power at play globally. Hundreds of earth defenders, organising resistance against profit-hungry resource looters, are murdered each year (Global Witness 2020). It should not be surprising that solutions cannot be found at the systemic level until systems are radically transformed (i.e. dismantled through replacement), but approaches based on largely uncoordinated small initiatives eschewing state institutions on principle have not proven effective at such transformation. Often, especially where most people are forced into wage dependence, alternative projects cannot offer the means to live well and sometimes just to survive.

There is here an issue of scale. Compared to the relentless and global destructive impacts of capitalist relations, what has so far been achieved – with countless praiseworthy efforts – is manifestly insufficient. This is of course easy to utter, and, to pre-empt any misunderstanding, pointing out the existence of a massive problem is not meant here as any criticism of past and existing alternative projects. The point here is that such projects, crucial as they are, must reach the capacity of overcoming and replacing prevailing institutions worldwide if the aim is to turn things around towards ecologically sustainable social equality. This is another way of saying that a commensurate counter-power is needed, implying forms of centralisation (with mutually beneficial divisions of tasks) just to enable coordinated global action. It seems that usually alternatives are instead on the defensive, beleaguered and, when getting together, end up reproducing pre-existing schisms, if not fragmenting even more. Planetary disasters, like persisting and widening social inequalities, imperialist wars, ozone layer disruption, global warming and ocean acidification and pollution, reflect a net political defeat, at least so far. This should be acknowledged and confronted as much as alternative projects and practices should be highlighted, commended and materially supported. But the task here is not to develop or recommend any guidelines or develop potentially replicable tactics and organising techniques based on successes in bettering the conditions for people and other forms of life. Many have already done so and continue to do so through multiple paths and diverse experiences, as in the examples just mentioned (for more, see Sen 2018). This book is more about recuperating, informing, clarifying and posing questions by drawing from the constructive outcomes of state socialism.

REASONS TO REJECT CAPITALISM AND ITS LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC VARIANT

Capitalism’s pairing with indirect or parliamentary democracy is of recent vintage and confined to only a few countries. Capitalism is a set of social relations based on endless, racialised and gendered capital accumulation, private property, national states and liberal to authoritarian ideologies (for instance, ‘free-market democracy’, nationalism, ‘populism’, fascism, colonialism and supremacism). Most capitalist societies exist largely as suppliers of commodities for liberal consumption mainly in liberal democratic regimes. They are typically ruled by one or another form of dictatorship, including one-party and monarchical states. For most of its history, capitalism involved strenuous efforts by the ruling classes to deny any form of political participation by majorities. The US, in this regard, is among the stealthiest examples. Were it not for hundreds of years of often violently repressed pressures from below, including from socialist movements, parliamentary democracies with universal suffrage would probably not exist today (Miliband 1994, 24–6).

When parliamentarism and capitalism combine as liberal democracy the situation is not necessarily improved for those living under such regimes, and gets worse for peoples elsewhere by way of imperialism and colonialism. Gerald Horne (1986), among others, have shown how liberalism from its inception is imbued with racism and colonial logic as part of its very class-differentiating foundations (cf. Du Bois 1945). Slavers and ‘planters’ like Calhoun or Washington cannot be easily dismissed as outside the liberal framework, as if they did not share the same philosophical bases as later figures like J.S. Mill and others of like mind, including those within liberal institutions that hatched fascism and Nazism. After all, Von Mises, Hayek and Croce were all supportive of fascism, at least as a temporary measure to quash worker militancy and save capitalist regimes from themselves. Without liberal democracy and its support for fascists and Nazis as part of anti-communism, fascist and Nazi regimes could not have existed. Liberals of all stripes – conservative, labourite, left liberal, radical, republican, etc. – have much to answer for (Losurdo 2005; Rockhill 2017).

Laconically put, liberal democracy is the art of creating, dumping on and sacrificing others (not just people) to establish or reproduce privileges for a propertied few. From the start, the matter has been sorted out by dividing societies into races. This is why environmental racism is the norm, not the exception, in liberal democracies specifically and capitalist countries generally, whether at the scale of a city or the entire planet. Discussions on and appeals to democracy should always be qualified by appealing to readers’ intellectual refinement in distinguishing talk of democracy from support for genocide, slavery and colonialism or from apologetics for, to cite only a couple of examples, the US Confederacy or fascism and Nazism, since those mass-murdering dictatorships were creatures of liberal democratic systems, even elected to parliament (Heller 2011; Perrault 1998).

During the decades when the state-socialist camp was a serious contender to liberal democracies and their allied authoritarian regimes, state-socialist systems were holding in check what is now becoming a much clearer unbridled destruction of working-class life prospects and ransacking of the environment worldwide. It must also be appreciated that the historical achievements of communist, socialist and anarchist movements have been consistently deformed or smashed by liberal democratic forces through constant military pressures and other repressive means (Blackburn 1991, 236; Democratic Socialist Party 1999, 63–4; O’Connor 1998). This is not an excuse for leftist anti-capitalist violence and authoritarianism, but the oppressive turns and, barring anarchism, the statism developing in such movements cannot be understood as if isolated from the societies and international context out of which those move...