Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Pluto Press, 2021 288 pages £15.39
Engel-Di Mauro sets out to prove his thesis that socialist states are far less damaging to the environment than capitalist states. He argues as a scientist, being a soil analyst by profession, but also as a Marxist. Consequently, this publication has 29 clear and verifiable graphs recording data on carbon, methane and particulate emissions that no reader will find difficult to follow. What is innovative is that these graphs are related to socio-economic systems as well as raw data. He classifies three types: capitalist, socialist government and state socialist. He refines these to include core capitalist, capitalist semi-periphery, socialist government semi-periphery and state socialist semi-periphery. Using these categories Engel-Di Mauro’s intention is to illustrate the relations between political systems and their pollution output, while taking into account the linkage between core and periphery which is, in essence, the transfer of pollutant activity from the imperialist to the dependent countries.
The book also presents graphs on more conventional data on emissions measured per capita, that is in relation to population size. This measurement shows that China produces half the emissions per capita of the US, even though China is constantly described as the world’s leading polluter. According to 2016 data from the Global Footprint Network, China ranks 68th out of 185 countries in per capita total Ecological Footprint of Consumption (EFC).
Engel-Di Mauro also tracks the changes in volume of emissions for the USSR before and after 1991 when the socialist state collapsed in disarray. These clearly show that the onset of capitalism led to the sudden rise in EFC. Similarly records show the soaring rise in greenhouse gas that followed China’s turn to a capitalist-orientated economy under Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The major expansion of the urban areas that followed was ‘at the expense of surrounding ecosystems and the spread and intensification of soil, air and water pollution’. The rise in the living standards of the Chinese population has come about through prioritising capitalist investment incentives; high productivity and low labour costs. There has been a huge planetary and human price to pay for this industrialisation with extreme inequality between urban and rural populations and corruption. Further, Chinese dependency on exports is conditional on the continuation of buoyant western demand for consumer goods.
Cuban state socialism
Cuba is the third state socialist country Engel-Di Mauro considers in detail. His graphs record the fall from 1970-2014 in per capita PM2.5 and carbon emissions. Before the 1959 Revolution Cuba was a mono-crop sugar exporter, dependent on US unequal exchange and ravaged by de-forestation and intensive cropping. After the Revolution the main concern of the socialist state was to improve productivity in all sectors to increase the health and education of the people.Conventional methods of intensive farming and fossil fuel mechanisation were adopted initially. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc Cuba suddenly lost over 85% of its markets and all of its oil supply. Combined with the illegal US blockade on Cuban trade the island entered what was known as the ‘Special Period’. The state planned for the survival of socialism, refusing to close a single school or hospital and continued to assert its national sovereignty. The impact of the near collapse of the economy did, however result in a rapid fall in per capita emissions of particulate matter.
Cuban environmentalists had long associated the degradation of the eco-system with colonial occupation, capitalist production methods and exploitative trading relations. Today the state encourages organic farming, biodiversity, reforestation, wind and solar power and is reducing wasteful transport, fuel and the dependency on synthetic chemicals. While Cuba’s need to increase productivity in all sectors remains, the island has chosen to develop within the paradigm of ecosocialism, planning out-put and working with the natural world. As a result, Cuba, as Engel-Di Mauro states, is ‘the most environmentally sustainable country’ on Earth.
Beyond the evidence that capitalist countries are far more polluting than socialist states Engel-Di Mauro uncovers the connections that show neo-liberalism is a global presence and therefore a global polluter. In China, for example, ‘in 2005, CO2 emissions due to exports exceeded import-related emissions by 1,000 million tonnes’. In other words, the geographically named nations of the world emit pollution in relation to their economic power expressed as capitalist consumerism. So, he says, ‘if CO2 embedded in imports were included in greenhouse gas accounting, the UK figures would be twice as high as those reported’.
Compare with care
Here we come to the most important political point of Engel-Di Mauro’s work which he calls ‘the poverty of comparison’. All the environmental data on pollution and fossil fuel consumption must be understood in the context of the social relations of production in each country and between countries. These include the historic colonial and present-day imperialist exploitation of natural resources. Additionally, physical properties within national borders, barren or fertile, mountainous or on a plain, watered or dry, and the prehistoric distribution of underground natural resources that would later become commodified, are the material elements that must be understood in data collection. It becomes evident that the private ownership of property, capitalism, in one or other of its corporate forms, is not only a national question. It is a leading causal factor in the determination of every nation’s economic sovereignty in the real world. In other words, statistical measurement on emissions by country contains information on the developmental relationships between nations over time.
There is a hierarchy of economic, military and legal power in the world. Early colonisers extracted a mass of wealth for hundreds of years from nations that were left impoverished and underdeveloped by the time they gained formal independence. Some newly liberated countries attempting to implement socialist economic changes, as in Burkina Faso, (formerly Upper Volta), experienced unceasing violence from the capitalist world and ended with the assassination of their leaders, like Thomas Sankara in 1987 (see p14). Other socialist states, like the USSR, had to divert an increasing proportion of expenditure on developing the military in order to defend their sovereign right to build socialism. These contexts are necessary to make meaningful comparisons between the ecological damage of different social systems. Engel-Di Mauro argues that this is the proper basis for a dialectic materialist method of understanding bio-physical data.
The green politics of Bolshevism
Engel-Di Mauro’s methodology works superbly in his examination of the Soviet Union and opens up a history that has largely been marginalised or forgotten. A certain generation of readers will be shocked by what Engel-Di Mauro uncovers, particularly those who grew up during the Cold War when hostility to the USSR from the US and its allies dominated every aspect of social opinion. Even those who supported the Soviet Union were persuaded that, in its need to modernise and to recover from two world wars, the revolutionary government prioritised industrial output above environmental concerns. Engel-Di Mauro calls on much detailed research to refute this and establish the fact that the socialist state cared deeply about protecting the environment from the start.
In 1917 the Bolshevik Party inherited an economy of low agricultural productivity combined with an export orientated capitalism developed with great brutality under Tsarism. The environmental impact of pre-revolutionary industrialisation was severe. There were no controls or limits on the rights of capitalists to pollute land and water in their pursuit of profit. Huge factories employing thousands of workers utilised oil from Baku and coal from the Donbas. Hunting and logging had devastated vast acres. Russia was one of the largest cotton growing exporters in the world and the result was widespread water-logging and soil salinisation which encouraged persistent malaria. In Central Asia the Tsarist regime displaced millions of nomadic herder peoples in order to free up the steppe grasslands for future exploitation.
The environmental achievements of the revolutionary government
The Soviet working class had an acute awareness of capitalism’s inherent tendency to destroy the environment. It understood capitalism’s tendency to increase productivity by intensifying the exploitation of both labour power and natural resources. Among the revolutionary government’s first legislation were measures to restrict unplanned industrial output in order to protect the environment. This was the polar opposite to the rampaging ‘free enterprise’ ideology of the US and the colonial ruthlessness of the British Empire. From as early as 1919 controls and oversight of industrial production were enforced to protect nature. In 1921 the first agrometeorological service in the world was established and by 1923 wastewater legislation was enacted to protect reservoirs from sewerage contamination. Forests, surface waters and underground mineral resources were all nationalised and brought under conservation policies. The All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP) was founded in 1924 and had 37 million members in 1987. Environmental education and mass ecological sensitisation have been described as ‘truly vast’.
State planning under socialism
The newly formed state of the Soviet Union was a centrally planned economy in which each sector related to the centre through a variety of institutions competing for the allocation of funds. From the start environmental legislation and conservation measures were supervised by millions of inspectors in the People’s Control Commission which was established in 1920 as the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate. The socialist state was not the faceless monolith caricatured by western propaganda. What anti-communism really objects to is that the plan prevails over the market and production for social use takes precedence over the interests of private property.
In its hysterical denunciation of socialism, the US targeted the Soviet Union’s efforts to become self-sufficient in food, alleging huge environmental damage by developing the ‘Virgin Soil’ of Soviet Central Asia. The ecological damage of the intensive farming there was real enough. In the area of the Aral Sea (an inland lake), dust bowl conditions like those of the Great Plains of the USA in the 1930s threatened. However, Soviet agriculturists took action, building wind breaks and other protective structures to reverse the decline in soil health. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991, the Aral Sea was reborn in three adjacent locations and its acidity had been rebalanced.
The maintenance and restoration practices that were carried out on a huge scale by the Soviet government were possible because there was no obstruction by private companies and the land belonged to the state. In contrast, as Engel-Di Mauro documents, US and British environmentalists face a constant fight to get the most basic information about private organisations, even where chemical usage affects water supplies or air and soil pollution damages whole communities.
Capitalism’s crimes against the planet
Engel-Di Mauro concludes that ‘Capitalist societies, including liberal democracies, where mass destruction is largely reserved for those elsewhere, are the most destructive monstrosities in human history’. While this is true and well stated the real virtue and importance of this publication is that Engel-Di Mauro’s research demonstrates that socialism is the only possible way forward to save the planet from environmental destruction. He not only puts the record right on the history of socialist states and the environment but argues for the urgent need for ecosocialism now.
Susan Davidson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! no 288, June/July 2022
