A New Environmental History of Socialist States

Andy Bruno

For a long time, discussion of the environmental legacy of the Soviet Union on the left was characterised by hasty dismissals of the irrelevance of the experience for contemporary struggles or suspicion of anyone raising the question as a mouthpiece for capitalism. The recent openness to rethinking non-capitalist environmental efforts of the past has been a welcome development. In a spirited 2015 article on Soviet ecology, John Bellamy Foster argues that “the USSR can be seen as a society that generated some of the worst ecological catastrophes in history but that also gave birth to some of the most profound ecological ideas and practices, based on materialist, dialectical, and socialist intellectual foundations.” He focuses primarily on ecological thinking in the late Soviet era to highlight the fresh, innovative, and under-appreciated contributions of Marxist scientists and philosophers, who were grappling intellectually with environmental problems. While seeing positive trends in environmental performance at the very end of the Soviet period, he also echoes a claim of historians that the ecological revolution in environmental consciousness came to an abrupt and tragic end with the collapse of the country in 1991.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro advances this interpretative thread even further in his revelatory new book, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures. By expanding the study to all known efforts to establish socialism in modern states, he comes to an even more recuperative conclusion. Not only “were some disastrous environmental impacts of state socialism…neither pervasive nor intrinsic,” but the net effects of socialist states were “environmentally constructive.” The “accomplishments within state-socialist countries” are “practicable examples from which ecosocialist futures can be built.”

An additional lesson from the environmental history of state socialism for ecosocialist efforts today concerns the imperative for economic growth. Where socialist states mirrored the logic of unending economic expansion in the capitalist world (following a fair, or at least widespread, reading of Marxism that views history as unfolding in a series of stages), they tended to dramatically despoil the environment. Where socialist states followed more sustainable practices, such as nature conservation, recycling, ecological monitoring, strict regulations, and aiming for sufficient conditions for living well (instead of ever-increasing and evermore intensive consumption of material resources), they offered possible environmental paths for the future. The fraught struggles within the left in Ecuador over extractivism in the twenty-first century portend the continued salience of the problem of growth economies for ecosocialist efforts. While ecosocialists and current advocates of degrowth have not always seen eye-to-eye, Engel-Di Mauro has played a significant role in helping bridge these divides by hosting two discussion forums on degrowth ideas in Capitalism Nature Socialism in 2012 and 2019. Judging from his editorials, he became more open to the possibility for a unification of these two approaches over the interim. Though degrowth perspectives barely feature in the analysis of Socialist States.

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