Upstream

On @Upstreampodcast, Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro argue that Soviet forest, soil and nature-preserve programs show that communism's need-based logic drives inherent ecological sustainability, contrasting it with capitalism's extraction-driven, growth-focused profit motive. So communism needs no "green modifier" as it is inherently built in, while capitalism's phasers default to destroy instead. Henry Hakamäki co-hosts the Guerrilla History podcast and is a translator/editor at Iskra Books. Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, professor of geography at State University of New York at New Paltz, researches soils and soil degradation and has published on socialist movements for the last 15 years. The book Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology by French scholar Guillaume Swing was translated/edited by Hakamäki and Engel-Di Mauro. The title echoes Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism & Nkrumah's Neocolonialism, the Highest Stage of Imperialism. Swing argues that communism, properly understood, is the most rational form of ecological practice, distinct from eco-socialism/green communism labels. Capitalism can only greenwash with carbon markets, EVs for the rich, pollution offsets because its logic is endless accumulation on a finite planet. Capitalist firms are legally bound to maximize profit for shareholders, externalizing costs, pollution, and labour exploitation. Communism i,s by contrast, is organized around meeting human needs instead of profit maximization - the fundamental difference per Hakamäki. The book and speakers position that capitalism is ecologically incompatible because infinite production on a finite planet is logically unsustainable even with "green" products produced under profit motivation. Exploiting workers is obviously also ecologically unsustainable and just plain jerk behaviour. Capitalist ideology severs humans from the rest of nature, treating nature as inputs and resources to be consumed for capitalism's ends rather than parts of a system we must coexist in. If the global economy doubles every 20 years, it would be 8x the 2080s if the trend continues - a scale the planet can't sustain (Hakamäki). Individual capitalists can't break free and do the right thing because they are locked in a prisoner's dilemma competition: if they don't exploit aggressively and fast enough, their competitors will. Hakamäki addresses the misconception that communism is inherently productivist,i.e. production for its own sake, a perception associated with the USSR. The USSR needed to feed its population after eras of feudalism and war. It chose extensive agriculture over soil-destroying intensive methods, developing pedology and treating soil as a living system. The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature (1948) planted forest shelter belts across 2M hectares, an area larger than France, to fight wind/drought and restore fertility. Hakamäki calls it "permaculture before permaculture had a name". In contrast, capitalism's disregard for and destruction of the environment cannot be overstated, and the extent of catastrophes often slips from consciousness, with communism's example of Chornobyl being more prominent in popular memory than Union Carbide/Dow Chemical's Bhopal. The Union Carbide, later Dow Chemical,l Bhopal disaster in India, Dec. 198,4 involveda methylisocyanatee leak that killed tens of thousands and left generations disabled and deformed decades later. The impact was concentrated among poor Muslim and Dalit ("untouchable" caste) residents who were never evacuated or compensated for the disaster. Chornobyl's casualties were comparatively fewer, and evacuees were given new housing in safe zones. But I can recall only one having an excellent mini-series on Western TV in the last decade. Bhopal is less known than Chornobyl because one gets equated with democracy and the other with socialism (Engel-Di Mauro). Soviet Russia's environmental gains, documented by liberal historians in the 1970s, were erased from the Western narrative after the 1990s' World Bank Report. Another Western capitalist trope exists around how science was done under a supposed communist dictatorship. The claim that Soviet dictatorship suppressed science is undercut by how advanced Soviet soil, space and engineering science was compared to Western capitalism in the same decades. Hakamäki has readily equipped on his phone a declassified 1953 CIA report "Comments on the Change in Soviet Leadership," released in 2008, as proof of the CIA's own position regarding the myth of soviet leadership being a dictatorship. The report states "Even in Stalin's time, there was collective leadership," calls Western idea of a dictator "exaggerated". In contrast, under capitalism, scientists are specifically used and unconsciously participate in causing harm. Engel-Di Mauro cites the Tuskegee experiment;ment, Hakamäki cites The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and documents ~30 years of undisclosed US government radiation experiments on citizens to see what the effects of nuclear fallout would be on the population. The book is nearly impossible to find now, and secondhand copies sell for hundreds of dollars. Thankfully, Anna's Archive exists: annas-archive.gl/search?q=th… Engel-Di Mauro and Hakamäki put productivism in context. Every successful socialist revolution occurred in colonized or semi-colonized, war-devastated states,s including Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam,m and Laos. Military encirclement continued after revolution, such as the Ukrainian nationalist sabotage inside the USSR persisting until 1953/. The USSR and China ended periodic famines only after decades of development. Successfully building socialism requires a decadal, multi-generational view, per Engel-Di Mauro, citing patterns like the Indigenous rule of 7 generations in decision-making. In closing, the two focus on oil to compare communism and capitalism. Engel-Di Mauro quotes the book: a socialist state atop oil "always... more useful in the long run to... global environmental protection" than a capitalist state investing heavily in renewables. Socialist states extracting oil - such as the newly colonized Venezuela - do so to fund sovereignty, education, and healthcare, using it as a tactical bridge move off fossil fuel dependence (Hakamäki). In contrast, capitalist renewable investment aims to preserve market position amid continued extraction. Cuba used Soviet oil to build education & health systems, then after Soviet collapse and the "special period," used that human capital to pivot to agroecology, which is previewed as part two of the interviews topic. In sum, socialist ecological failures are framed as policy choices and encirclementpressure.. At the same time, the gains are structural products of needs-based planning inherent to communism and absent from capitalism's profit motivation. pca.st/1w5bsczr