>Hmm, ok, maybe I can get an answer from you: what changes in
>industrial and agricultural practices, energy sources, the build
>environment, living arrangements, etc., will occur under socialism
>that will avoid the eco-catastrophe capitalism supposedly has in
>store for us. It's not just a matter of invoking the words "socialist
>revolution" along the lines of "Presto Change-o," is it?
>
>Doug
The key concept is "metabolic". Although Marx dwelled on the rift between
farming and the natural fertilizers, which had caused a "metabolic rift"
responsible for soil sterility, raw sewage in the cities, etc., the concept
of metabolism extends to energy consumption and industrial production as
well. I have discussed the question of energy and global warming with
Foster frequently and he agrees that in order to complete a "unified field"
Marxist-ecological analysis initiated by Marx, it would have to include
energy consumption as well. The only methdology that can integrate all
these questions holistically is a materialism of the kind that Engels took
a stab at in "Dialectics of Nature". Further efforts in this direction can
be found in Bebel's "Woman Under Socialism" and Bukharin's "Philosophical
Arabesques". It is covered in depth in Foster's "Marx's Ecology".
Key to solving the ecological crisis is eliminating the town and
countryside duality. When I raised this question in the past on PEN-L, it
was heartily rejected as I expected it would be. The rejection is based on
life-style considerations, but never engaged the science which underpinned
Marx's demand in the CM:
"Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual
abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable
distribution of the populace over the country."
This is a precondition for resolving the ecological crisis around the
questions posed by Marx in V. 3 of Capital, which were also addressed by
soil chemist Von Liebeg. This crisis never went away, even after the
introduction of chemical fertilizers. They just postponed the day of
reckoning.
The disappearance of fossil-based fuels is a whole other story. My guess is
that a radically different kind of life-style will be necessary in the
future for the survival of humanity. I don't think that this will be
palatable to many of the people who post regularly to PEN-L, who seem
rather committed to the urban, consumerist life-style found in the
imperialist centers. For those of us who have read and admired William
Morris, these alternative prospects might seem more attractive. I think
that people will democratically elect a new life-style based on the premise
of greatly expanded leisure time, less regimentation, decreased risks to
health and closeness to nature. Of course some socialists will continue to
see socialism as an extension of capitalist civilization with the working
class at the steering wheel instead of the bourgeoisie. But that's been a
problem for Marxism since the 19th century.
For an idea of what Cuban Marxists have been experimenting with in this
vein, consider the following:
The following article appears in the latest issue of Green Left Weekly
(http://www.greenleft.org.au), Australia's radical newspaper.
*****************************************************
Cubans discuss environmental sustainability
What can environmentalists learn from Cuba, a country that still flirts
with nuclear power, is besieged by many environmental problems typical of
the Third World, and lags behind countries like Denmark and Holland on
issues like recycling, green taxes, alternative energy and eco-labelling?
During a recent visit to ``the fairest island ever revealed to human eyes''
(as Christopher Columbus described Cuba), I searched for the answer. I
wanted to understand the impact of the ``Special Period in Time of Peace''
-- the emergency program to save the socialist revolution after the
collapse of the Soviet bloc.
After talking to environmental scientists, administrators and activists,
and reading recent Cuban writings on ecology, it is clear that there is a
lot of debate about how to reverse environmental degradation. It is also
obvious that few Third World countries can match the legislative, planning
and educational efforts that Cuba is applying in its battle for
environmental sustainability.
Moreover, few environmental movements can match Cuba's revolutionaries in
government, scientific institutions, education system and emerging
non-government organisations in their passion and dedication to the
environmental cause.
For centuries, Cuba's natural resources and beauty were sacrificed to
Spanish colonial landowners and, later, US corporations. In the early
1800s, the great Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt was already
lamenting the destruction of Cuba's native forests.
In his book Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels -- Karl Marx's
collaborator -- could find no better example of the impact of capitalist
greed on the ecosphere than the operations of Cuba's Spanish planters ``who
burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the
ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee
trees ... what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards
washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare
rock!''
Through such vandalism, Cuba was transformed into an exporter of sugar,
tobacco and coffee. Total forest cover fell from 85% in 1812, 54% in 1900,
to 14% by the time of the 1959 revolution. To this crime against nature
before the revolution can be added many others, including: rapacious nickel
mining (coating a wide expanse of the island in red dust); endemic problems
created by monoculture crops; and the gamut of damage that goes with rural
poverty.
After the revolution
The revolution and the later development of Cuba's economy as part of the
former Soviet bloc was double-edged.
The revolution eliminated poverty, unemployment, landlessness and
illiteracy and built up basic rural infrastructure, thus attacking the
degradation of the countryside at the source. Through sweeping land reform,
the leaders of the revolution disproved the myth that degradation is due to
the pseudo-explanation, still favoured by World Bank functionaries, of
``rural overpopulation''. For the first time, and despite continuing
population growth, deforestation in Cuba began to be reversed. By 1997, the
island's forested area stood at 21.5%, a 7.5% increase since 1959.
On the other hand, the model of industrialisation that Cuba adopted in the
1970s generated (when combined with the continuing reliance on sugar
exports) a new set of environmental stresses. Oil spills, coastal erosion,
rising salinity, algal blooms and high levels of industrial pollution
showed Cuba was paying a high environmental price for industrialisation.
Even though environmental protection featured strongly in the country's law
books, the impact on factory managers was often minimal. According to Cuban
environment teacher and writer Carlos Jesus Delgado Diaz: ``A study carried
out by the National Assembly of People's Power at the end of the 1980s
reflected the fact that, when faced with the choice of fulfilling the
production plan or breaking the law, a significant number of administrators
plumped for fulfilling the plan no matter what the cost''.
The blame for such decisions should not be laid solely at the feet of the
managers. The criminal US economic blockade, which forced Cuba's
integration into the Soviet bloc's economic system (COMECON), gave the
country no choice but to apply Eastern Europe's resource- and
energy-squandering technologies.
Cuba's insertion into the COMECON system retarded the growth of
environmental consciousness. Miguel Limia David, a senior researcher with
Cuba's Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA), has
stressed ``the predominance of an instrumentalist and personally
irresponsible attitude to the use, enjoyment and disposal both of natural
as well as socially created resources''. Why? For years ``we basically
aimed at producing more wealth and raising consciousness without paying
appropriate attention to the costs of producing that wealth''.
Special period
However, even before the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc threw Cuba's
model of highly mechanised agriculture into crisis, problems such as
growing pesticide resistance and soil erosion had led to the development of
alternatives. In the 1980s, some US$12 billion was devoted to training
specialists and developing infrastructure in the areas of biotechnology,
health sciences, computer hardware and robotics.
This timely move ensured that when imports of fertiliser, machinery and
spare parts fell by 80%, the country was able to devote its scientific
knowledge and agricultural research infrastructure to the largest-ever
conversion from conventional agriculture to organic or semi-organic
farming. This proved vital to maintaining food supplies in very hard times.
This came with many severe environmental problems intact, as identified in
the 1997 National Environment Strategy:
* Continuing large-scale soil degradation -- erosion, bad drainage,
salinity, soil acidity, and compacting;
* the deterioration of health and environment conditions in cities and
towns, due to a fall in spending on housing and urban infrastructure;
* fresh and salt water pollution that was undermining fishing, agriculture
and tourism, as well as natural ecosystems;
* selective deforestation, which damaged soils, water tables and fragile
ecosystems; and
* loss of biological diversity.
The concessions that Cuba has had to make to survive in the capitalist
world -- such as a large increase in joint ventures in industries like
tourism -- brings new stresses. Similarly, the growth in numbers of
self-employed people and small farmers also threatens to boost
environmental decline.
Can Cubans solve their environmental problems? Cuba has the great advantage
of having faced facts: the fundamental enemy of global sustainability is
capitalism's production for private profit. Capitalism cannot survive
without constantly regenerating an anti-environmental and consumerist
ethic, no matter what greenwashing corporations say.
As Delgado Diaz explains: ``As a spiritual phenomenon, capitalism has
produced ways of viewing life and has equipped modern man and woman with an
ethical outlook that is incompatible with the solution of the environmental
problem that science has advanced as technically viable.''
Energy specialist Hector Eugenio Perez de Alejo Victoria notes that it is
vital not to leave the definition of key ecological terms like
``eco-efficiency'' to promoters of the capitalist market. ``The search for
a definition is subject to great threats, one of which is the continual
propaganda of the international media as to the benefits of consumerism,
where a satisfied client is supposedly to be found at the end of every
chain. In reality, consumerism is nothing more than an infinite cycle of
dissatisfactions; satisfaction for a short period of time and almost
immediately more dissatisfaction it is a sort of drug addiction and
produces the greater part of the global environmental disaster.''
Humanity-nature relationship
Cuban ecological thinking stresses that the global environmental crisis and
the world's social and economic crises are interrelated, in particular
through way the ``North'' exploits the countries of the ``South''. As
Garrido Vazquez notes: ``It is impossible to conceive of sustainable
development without resolving beforehand the problems of extreme poverty,
which are nothing but the results of centuries of colonial domination and
exploitation, and which have re-emerged in recent times through the
application of neoliberal policies.''
A point of reference are the writings on the humanity-nature relationship
by Cuba's national hero and martyr, Jose Marti. These, in the words of
Limia David, ``refer to the need to develop a harmonious relationship with
the universal conditions of life, with `first nature', as well as to build
an ordered, pure and cultured `second nature'''.
A succinct expression of this outlook came in Fidel Castro's speech to the
1992 Rio Earth Summit, and has since been matched by a rapid increase in
environmental laws and projects within Cuba. Between 1992 and 1998, the
National Assembly of People's Power amended the Cuban constitution to
entrench the concept of sustainable development; the National Environment
and Development Program was developed (outlining the path Cuba would take
to fulfil its obligations under the Rio summit's Agenda 21); CITMA was
established; an overarching environment law passed; and a national
environment strategy was launched.
Other major initiatives included a national strategy for environmental
education; a national program of environment and development; projects for
food production via sustainable methods and biotechnological and
sustainable animal food, as well as a national scientific technical program
for mountain zones and a national energy sources development program. Each
of these program are composed of smaller projects and initiatives,
involving local communities, People's Power bodies, universities, schools
and mass organisations.
Successes
What has been achieved? There have been gains in health, access to water
and electricity, education and land reform, which according to orthodox
classification methods are not ``environmental'' but without which no real
advances against environmental degradation are thinkable.
Such gains would never be realised if Cuba reverted to capitalism and was
obliged, for example, to pay the US$100 billion debt that Washington
estimates Cuba owes for private property expropriated by the revolution. As
one environmentalist put it: ``The foremost environmental problem we have
is making sure we don't fall into the hands of the empire.''
Cuba's highly educated people, of whom more than half a million are
university graduates, are an invaluable resource base for recent advances
such as the conversion to organic agriculture, the thorough surveying of
its ecosystems and energy and resource base, the completion of a national
biodiversity study, improved methods of water and soil management, and the
application of new technologies for treating waste.
Two fields in which Cuba is making headway against the odds are renewable
energy and alternative housing.
Renewable energy
Two concerns that have focused increased attention on alternative energy
are Cuba's high level of dependency on oil imports (around 10 million
tonnes annually before 1989) and the fact that its first nuclear reactor
has still to come on line, even though work began in the late 1970s.
According to Perez de Alejo Victoria, the Development Program of National
Energy Sources is putting maximum effort into developing energy systems
based on sugar cane residues (bagasse), wind farms, micro hydroelectricity
plants, solar and photovoltaic technologies as well as on Cuba's
unexploited oil reserves.
Cuba's energy goals have been made more difficult by the elimination of
some potential energy sources: peat reserves are to be left untouched until
environmentally benign methods of peat-burning can be developed and in 1998
the National Assembly of People's Power suspended the construction of
Toa-Doaba hydroelectric project, which would have flooded an ecosystem as
rare and beautiful as that of Tasmania's Franklin River.
So far, the energy program can boast the generalised usage of bicycles, the
development of kerosene substitutes for cooking, the conversion of boilers
to enable straw to be burnt as fuel and the increased use of biogas.
The most promising potential energy source is bagasse. With existing
technology, Cuba's annual production of 4.3 million tonnes of sugar cane
biomass could reduce oil dependency by 700,000 tonnes. If Cuba can gain
access to new Brazilian technology which can gasify sugar cane biomass, the
country could increase electricity output per biomass unit by up to 10
times -- a huge step forward in reducing energy dependency.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba met its relentlessly rising housing demand
by building Soviet-style concrete blocks of flats as rapidly as possible.
The enforced end of this model of housing development brought some benefits
which in the medium term promise more human-scale, environmentally benign
housing.
The non-government organisation Habitat-Cuba is devoted to producing a
sustainable housing model that recognises that the concrete required for
Cuba's standard housing stock has come at a high (and unaccounted for) cost
in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and that the passive acceptance of the
standard model has led to bureaucratic blindness and indifference towards
alternative building materials in which the Cuba is rich.
At the same time the collapse of housing investment during the special
period had seen a rise in the number of unhealthy suburbs, especially in
older urban areas. This is an urgent challenge to build environmentally
sustainable, healthy settlements, basing design, techniques and execution
on consultation with local communities, sympathetic architects and other
professionals as well as with the relevant ministries.
Habitat-Cuba has developed bamboo as a housing construction material, as
well as the introduction of mud-brick techniques (in the face of initial
scepticism by a local community who thought they were being returned to
stone-age life!). Like CubaSolar, an NGO specialising in alternative
energy, Habitat-Cuba has built scores of successful projects across the
island as well as having provided training in alternative construction
techniques.
Towards a lasting solution
Despite such advances Cuba's environmentalists do not underestimate the
difficulties their country's environment faces. Delgado Diaz points out
that ``it is extraordinarily difficult to break the vicious circle of
underdevelopment, environmental degradation and poverty. Phenomena of this
type impose an individual economic dynamic that is often resolved at the
expense of the environment.''
What are the prospects? Perez de Alejo Victoria said that ``the
environmental realities are pretty unflattering, especially as regards
renewable energy, which obliges me to be tactically pessimistic, even if
from the strategic point of view I view the future with optimism.''
Limia David is less hopeful. He thinks environment policy can only work to
its full potential if Cuban society overcomes the indifference generated by
its paternalistic heritage, conquering ``the unsatisfactory degree of
involvement of the direct producers in the means of production, that is,
the inadequate linkage between everyone's way of life and the final results
of the production process.''
For David, Cuba's acute environmental problems cannot be solved by
political will alone, necessary and important though that is: ``They
essentially demand not a new attitude on the part of policy generated by
the state and the entire political system, but one that arises from the
ordinary people, from the local communities and specific labour
collectives. It is critical to develop a feeling of responsible ownership
when faced with the universal bases of life.''
However, Modesto Fernandez Diaz-Silveira, a CITMA specialist in the
management of environment policy is more confident: ``The sustained
economic recovery and institutional changes that are taking place in Cuba
provide a solid basis that allow us to advance with optimism in the
application of our environmental policy, the norms and methods of
application of which will take us to a higher stage in the protection of
the environment and the rational use of natural resources.''
The main factor behind this confidence is the mass participation and
revolutionary commitment of Cuba's people and communities in implementing
environment policy, an ingredient that no capitalist society can match.
Even while Cuba still lags in making use of many of the tools available to
capitalist governments (eco-taxes, environmentally adjusted national
accounting), participatory democracy gives Cuba the chance to advance
towards sustainability while in the rest of the Third World the environment
collapses.
This is especially so when combined with the Cuban political system's
capacity to implement integrated plans involving all ``players'' and its
desire to educate its people in humanist and environmental values.
There is a broad debate on the island about how to involve the mass of
people in the battle for environmental sustainability. That is far more
inspiring and hopeful than an environment policy which consists of Dodgy
Brothers flogging us shares in tax-deductable eucalypt plantations.
BY DICK NICHOLS
[Quotations from Cuba Verde (Green Cuba), Jose Marti Publishing House,
Havana, 1999. Dick Nichols edited Environment, Capitalism and Socialism
(1999), the Democratic Socialist Party's analysis of the environment
crisis. To obtain a copy, send $17.95 (includes postage) with your address
to New Course Publications, PO Box 515, Broadway 2007.]
Louis Proyect
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