Essay by Eric Worrall
While the author admits that early 20th-century socialism isn’t noticeably green, it’s clear that the 21st-century version could save us from climate catastrophe.
Is there still climate change under socialism?
Market failure will certainly delay drastic climate action, but even if the whole world in the 20th century were socialist, the planet would still warm up.
Via Leigh Phillips
August 10, 2022
updated August 11, 2022 4:52 pmIt is common to come across the notion, especially in remnant climates, that humanity and the rest of the planet will not stare at the threat of climate change. if it’s not for capitalism – from Naomi Klein’s bestsellers This changes everything: Capitalism vs Climate(2014) with a growing number of activists who self-identify as “ecological sociologists”.
However, there is no evidence that this is the case. …
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Consider this thought test. Imagine that the failed German Socialist Revolution of 1918-19 was in fact succeeded. Instead of being attempted in semi-feudal, largely agrarian Russia, in our opposing history, socialism reemerges in the democratized, modern industrialized societies, for which Marx predicted to be its birthplace. From Germany, socialism spread throughout Europe and then the world. To simplify matters for the sake of thought experimentation, let us define socialism as a global economy that allocates goods and services through democratic planning on the basis of need. , rather than, like capitalism, primarily through the market on a profit basis. Furthermore, in our thought experiment, let’s give our socialists an additional, temporary and say that capitalism was defeated everywhere, for example, in 1930. Democratic socialism is global. Have no disaster of the Soviet Union. There is no Maoist famine. There is no second world war. There is no Cold War. Colonialism was poised to unravel rapidly in the 1920s rather than reluctantly, incompletely, violently, in the 1950s and 1960s. There was no profit crisis in the early 1970s and therefore no There was the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s.
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In other words, in our counterfactual world, production could have been organized for purposes other than profit (or for the most part, depending on how much one favors the socialization of production), but this will actually create more products. And this is of course what Marx imagined when he expressed frustration that the way production for exchange of goods unreasonably limited what could be produced. Socialism will not lead to less production, since the set of all things profitable is smaller than the set of all things useful to humanity. Instead of coal plants powering factories mainly in Europe and America in the 1930s, they would power them everywhere. Growth will be limited only by global economic capacity at any given time.
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Putting all of this together, the most we can say is although global warming would likely be worse under the socialist regime by the time its full threat was discovered in the 1980s, the response would be quicker and more equal than our existing capitalist world.
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Read more: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/08/would-there-be-climate-change-under-socialism
I don’t see much evidence of that “faster” socialist response to global warming in China, unless we count all the coal plants they’re building.
The author mocks Russia’s agricultural backwardness as the cause of the failure of the Soviet Union, but industrial backwardness is not Russia’s problem, after Stalin’s terrible modernization program. The nation launched the first man into orbit and brought him home safely, not paralyzed by a lack of technological prowess.
Russia’s problem is socialism.
The author’s claim that there will be no famine under global socialism is also ridiculous. The Soviets were unable to feed themselves, despite a great deal of farming expertise, especially during the early Soviet period – Tsarist Russia was an agrarian economy. The rich Kulak farmer Who Stalin surrounded and killedor small private contracts allowed in the latter part of the Soviet Union, were always far more productive than politically correct collective farms.
The explanation for the failure of Soviet collectivized agriculture is obvious. Food crops are very fragile, if there is a problem, the intervention must be quick and comprehensive. A farmer who stands to personally benefit from the sale of his produce is highly motivated to tackle blight or pest as soon as it appears. But for an employee responding to a collective, failure reporting just creates more work. Their penalty for reporting problems is having to work overtime to fix the problem. So if the problem is small, it’s always easier to ignore the problem, pretend not to notice the problem, and shift the burden of overtime work to the next shift.
The problem with blight is that it grows exponentially. Some infected plants very quickly become infected whole fields. Days, even hours, can make a difference in how widespread an issue is. Everyone was trying to avoid having to work overtime to fix the problem, by the time the collective farm manager noticed the problem and asked the workers to sort it out, it was too late to save the crop.
China realizes that pure socialism can never work under Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping, who allowed the privatization of agriculture to restore productivity, after witnessing the failures of the Soviet Union and experiencing the failures of China. Deng justified his Capitalist reforms that saved China from socialist starvation and launched the modern Chinese economic powerhouse, with his famous saying “it doesn’t matter what cats do.” black or white, if it catches a mouse, it’s a good cat.”
China still imports a lot of food, but its capitalist agricultural sector is in much better shape than the previous Soviet system.
Of course, it is possible that a world dominated by global socialism would resemble Cuba – a weak industrial society where medieval serfs suffered under oppressive centralism. Greens often see Cuba as a climate action icon, but the idea of the entire planet being run like Cuba is just too horrible to imagine. Even The Guardian admits socialist Cuba has never been able to feed itself, they rely heavily on food imports, and always have. Cuba suffers from the curse of collectivized agriculture that produces poor yields, just as others have tried it.
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