Book Review – Communism the Highest Stage of Ecology by Guillaume Suing
Introduction
Guillaume Suing is a French academic biologist who has been studying the results of applied biology, especially genetics, in socialist countries, in particular the former Soviet Union and modern-day Cuba. In Communism the Highest Stage of Ecology, Suing examines whether communism is inherently anti-ecological or if a socialist planned economy offers the only basis for sustainable and sovereign agriculture. In doing so he dismantles many of the myths that have been peddled by academic biologists in universities in imperialist countries and by bourgeois environmentalists, both about the Soviet Union and the history of the ‘Green’ movement in imperialist countries.
Ask a self-styled environmentalist when their movement originated, and many of them would cite Rachael Carson’s 1953 work Silent Spring, that is that modern environmentalist politics arose as a response to the natural consequences of the expansion of chemical agriculture in the imperialist countries after the Second World War. What is virtually unknown, among environmentalists and the left in imperialist countries, Suing tells us, is that “Until the 1950s, for over 30 years, the USSR was the world’s most advanced country in the field of ecology, not only in its ability to protect the environment, but also in its choice of agricultural techniques. And this was no accident”.
Suing also challenges the widely accepted belief that ecologically-friendly production methods are necessarily less ‘efficient’ or ‘productive’ than those of large scale capitalist agribusiness, with their abundant use of pesticides, fertilisers and weedkillers. He makes it clear that for the world to produce plentiful healthy food for humanity as a whole really requires economic planning at state level, undisturbed by any need to generate financial profit for private owners of land or the means of production.
This book details the history of the scientific development and the practical application of the field of agroecology in the Soviet Union, a generation before bourgeois environmentalists took up their ‘struggle’. Like so many of the Soviet Union’s achievements under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, the advances made in sustainable agriculture were sacrificed, Suing tells us, as revisionism overtook the leadership of the CPSU(B).
A second example of 'agroecology in one country' given is the transformation of Cuba’s agricultural base, in the ‘special period’ following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the hands of revisionism.
As well as the practical application of science to sustainable agriculture, Suing also examines the ideological struggle over evolutionary biology between geneticists, primarily in the imperialist countries, and agrobiologists in the Soviet Union, the most (in)famous of whom was Trofim Lysenko. By putting this ideological struggle into its scientific and historical context, it serves as an important challenge to the popular myth that Lysenko was a singularly pseudoscientific charlatan, and demonstrates rather that his opponents were guilty of what they accused him of. As well as Lysenko’s much maligned contributions, throughout the text Suing carefully illustrates the huge contributions that Soviet scientists, with a dialectical materialist outlook, made to the broad field of environmental sciences.
Taken together Suing’s argument provides a basis from which communists can, and he argues should, assert that the planned economies, of socialist states and their scientific and technological advances, provide a better means to address civilisational environmental challenges than either ‘green capitalism’ or social-democratic ‘eco-socialism’.
The experience of the Soviet Union under a planned economy
In Suing’s expert view, “Until the 1950s, for over 30 years, the USSR was the world’s most advanced country in the field of ecology, not only in its ability to protect the environment, but also in its choice of agricultural techniques” … (page 6)
He bases this opinion principally on his studies of the works of Soviet scientists in the years between the two world wars. While both in the Soviet Union and in the West there was a drive to increase agricultural production in order to be able to feed a growing population, the means of solving this problem differed radically. The West pursued a path of “agricultural intensification” greatly extending the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides to grow greater yields of cereals and other crops on a similar area of land. The Soviet Union conversely pursued a programme of “agricultural extensification” in which more stable and reliable yields were sought over a larger farmed area. Therefore the focus was far more on improving the quality of the soil itself and developing plants that would thrive despite the conditions available. By replacing profit seeking and feudal landlordism with socialist planning, the Soviet Union was able to develop an agricultural system that responded directly to the material conditions: plentiful land with a difficult and variable climate. For both the Soviet Union and the West, the priority was making sure there was immediately enough to eat, but as far as possible the Soviet approach was much better for the environment and for long-term sustainability. Thus the sciences of pedology (the science of the soil) and agroecology really date from this Soviet era.
Suing explains (p.84): “ … agronomy is a far-reaching science, as it lies at the crossroads of the history of humanity (which needs to be fed) and the broader history of living organisms (fauna and flora evolving themselves on different timescales) … “Attempting to increase agricultural yields without impacting on environmental resources means, above all, increasing the quality of cultivated soil (pedology mainly under the direction of [Vassili Robertovich] Williams) and the optimised capacities of cultivated varieties themselves (biology, mainly under the direction of Lysenko)”.
In the course of soil research, Soviet scientists, with a dialectical materialist outlook, were the first to theorise the ‘biosphere’ a concept that is still important in the environmental sciences today: “While people in the West were still satisfied with a soil classification of soils based strictly and uniquely on underlying parent materials, Russian geologists, on the other hand, argued that a soil is born from the dynamic interaction of the mineral subsoil with atmospheric activity and biological activity (the production of humus by bacteria, fungi and microscopic and macroscopic fauna). The players involved in soil formation are therefore numerous and interdependent, and one type of soil can change into another, because everything is dynamic, even if the subsoil remains the same…
“The biosphere, a dialectical materialist concept formulated by [Vladimir] Vernadsky in 1926, still forms the basis of all ecological considerations… It emphasises all the interactions organising the Earth’s different envelopes, and suggests that we should never consider modifying one of its elements while neglecting the others. It’s an avant garde holistic vision that predicts everything that environmentalists are denouncing today in terms of the capitalist system’s excesses with regard to the environment” (pp. 78-79). Suing also explains how a dialectical materialist outlook and the challenge of farming in the Soviet Union’s variable climate gave us advances that today underpin much of modern climate science, such as Michail Budenko’s development of the first energy balance climate models in 1961.
In contrast to the imperialist countries, science in the Soviet Union was rarely ‘purely academic’ but was energetically put into practice in a way that was only possible because scientific institutions were highly integrated with the network of state and collective farms, as noted by a French agronomist, J Baby, when he visited the Soviet Union:
“The question of soil growth and fertility is one of the fundamental theories of agronomic research in the USSR … In Satarov, I visited the Institute of Agriculture for the entire South-East region … It directs the activities of twenty-eight attached scientific organisations, has seventeen laboratories staffed by dozens of professors and research fellows, and two hundred workers cultivate the Institute’s experimental fields. Furthermore, a sovkhoz [state farm] and forty-eight kolkhozes [collective farms] are also experimental fields controlled by the Institute … Work is directed into six different directions: (1) cereal and forage crop rotation; (2) forest plantations; (3) methods of using organic fertilisers; (4) how to work the soil; (5) water and snow retention; (6) coordination of all these problems in the field … A sandy sterile soil has thus been rapidly transformed into black [the most fertile] soil … by the simple, rational use of microorganisms and appropriate sowing” (translated from ‘Les grands travaux et la lutte pour la transformation de la nature en URSS’, L’information géographique, no 2, 1952).
The holistic and dialectical outlook also underpinned the development of agronomy, the science and technology of producing plants for human use; into agroecology, the application of ecological science to developing resilient agricultural systems that mimic natural processes. Williams, following the 19th century geologist Vassily Dokuchaev, promoted the placement of meadows, fields, forests, shelter belts and water bodies as key elements for agricultural productivity. He clashed with soil scientists who worked purely on chemical analysis of the soil and he promoted such measures as growing clover and grass in fodder meadows to both feed livestock and protect the soil.
One consequence of this school of thought was that this period saw the creation for the first time of large-scale nature reserves (zapovedniki) that were preserved exclusively for the purpose of scientific study of undisturbed nature (“The aim was to create wilderness reserves throughout the country, both to protect the great diversity of the Soviet environment and its biodiversity, and to enable agronomists to draw inspiration from nature and its natural cycles, adapting the most appropriate agricultural techniques to local conditions” – p.80). Lenin himself thought that such reserves should be created in every area of the Soviet Union. As Suing points out “Only a revolution could expropriate the feudal lords in order to manage and integrate the Russian soil, now a recognised and protected national asset”.
The second world war forced Soviet agriculture to short termism but they returned to Williams/Lysenko methods after the war. An agricultural plan was drawn up in Stalin’s name, the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature’ adopted by the Council of Ministers in 1948.
“… it was intended to increase agricultural production through the development of extensive farming and to limit soil erosion, in particular by multiplying the number of forest windbreaks; to develop irrigation through the creation of surface waters capable of stemming drought; and to introduce crop rotation enabling the soil regeneration that intensive farming by definition prohibits.
“Forest strips averaging two hundred metres in width were to surround cultivated areas in huge farming regions, with the dual aim of improving the soil’s ability to retain water and protecting crops from wind and rain damage.
“Finally, the aim was to put into practice on a large scale the methods of the soil scientist Williams and his famous inspiration, Dokuchaev. These included the use of polyculture to avoid the use of chemical pesticides, and the use of straw and fallen leaves from trees to develop cover cropping (a fundamental element in the protection of soil structure and life …) (p.66).
Rather than simply listing the agroecological achievements of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, Suing carefully follows a dialectical materialist approach and explains how it was socialist planning in agriculture and scientific development that allowed the Soviet Union to develop sustainable farming practices in response to the material conditions of large-scale farming in difficult and variable conditions.
Revisionism destroyed the Soviet Union’s progress in agroecology
The advent of Khrushchev, however, put an end to this whole era, as his marketisation of the Soviet economy, went hand in hand with the chemicalisation and huge expansion of arable agriculture into the steppes of Siberia and Kazakhstan, a move that was “severely criticised by the last Stalinists in the Central Committee [Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazare Kaganovitch]”. Despite initial increases in production, the Westernisation of Soviet agriculture led to enormous environmental costs, such as the infamous drying up of the Aral Sea, but they also weakened the Soviet Union’s position against the imperialist powers. By the early 1970s grain shortages sent the Soviet Union cap in hand to the United States where monopoly cartels, such as Cargill (commodity brokers, masters of the capitalist world) and Continental Grain worked with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to negotiate astronomical tariffs, in what was known as the Great Grain Robbery.
Throughout, Suing debunks the myth that it was the ‘production for production’s sake’ of the planned economy that brought Soviet agriculture to environmental and economic ruin and instead argues that it was the chemicalisation and abandonment of Stalin’s Great Plan as part of a programme of privatisation that undermined the Soviet Union’s agricultural base. “The Soviet Union sought to make its agricultural production profitable by any means necessary, for the period inaugurated by Khrushchev and closed with Gorbachev, by polluting intensive agriculture based on pesticides and chemical fertilisers. This desire is entirely logical, given that the ultimate goal, far from any capitalist tendency towards agribusiness was to satisfy and raise the food needs of the Soviet peoples. There was never any question, even in the last few decades, of ‘production for production’s sake’” (page 56).
Cuba: agroecology in one country
Suing is a great admirer of the achievements of the Cuban revolution also, and he credits Cuba’s survival, after the USSR collapsed, to its having a planned economy thus enabling it to develop ecology-friendly cultivation methods suitable to the material conditions. He notes that Cuba initially followed the Khrushchevite intensification and chemicalisation model but in the 1990s special period food and energy imports vanished overnight.
“… only a socialist state in charge of the national economy can and must successfully implement such aa sustainable and ecological agricultural project, independently of the disastrous global input market. No capitalist state is in a position to achieve a tenth of this feat, because it presupposes national planning that bans intensive agriculture (which competes to the death with any desire for organic farming on its domestic market) … while mobilising the indispensable human, educational, scientific and technical resources” (p.29).
One need only compare this with the modus operandi of Monsanto to appreciate its significance.
It is noteworthy that, as Cuba has had no pesticides since 1990, it has saved its bees.
Suing contrasts the situation in Cuba as regards ecological farming with that of the West: “In Cuba, the government can define a political choice and organise the rules of the economic game. We’re in countries with a market economy, where we have rulers who say: ‘I’d like to be able to do that, but if I decide to go that way, we’ll have capital flight; if I decide to favour local companies, I’m at odds with the World Trade Organisation’ … In France there has been a rapid and strong concentration of land, and a decline in the number of farmers. In Cuba, there has been an extraordinary redistribution of land; in ten years, over one and a half million hectares! On a French scale, this would mean the Midi-Pyrenées and Aquitaine regions combined” (p.31).
As with the Soviet Union, Suing charts the adoption of agroecology in Cuba as a response to the material conditions, specifically needing to pursue a resilient sovereign food system rather than exports after the loss of its main trade partner. Throughout he is careful to contrast the materialist approach of socialist agroecology programmes with the idealist approach to the environment of Western ‘Greens’, ‘Eco-socialists’, and Trotskyites.
Lysenko’s contribution to agrobiology
No discussion of the development of the biological sciences in the Soviet Union would be complete without an examination of the role and contribution of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko, so goes the myth, was a charlatan and pseudoscientist who put ‘ideology’ (by which the myth-makers mean dialectical materialism) before empirical evidence, therefore any biological science emerging not only from the Soviet Union but indeed from any socialist country is not worth the time of day.
In demonstrating how fundamentally mistaken this attitude is, Suing details the understanding of evolutionary biology at the time and underpinned the ideological struggle that set geneticists in the imperialist countries against agrobiologists like Ivan Michurin and Lysenko in the Soviet Union in a debate about the nature of heredity that cut to the core of the ideological struggle of materialism versus idealism.
In the 1930s, before the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA, the Mendelo-Morganist approach to genetics asserted that the information held in genes, having arisen from random variations, was immutable. Without knowledge of the biochemical mechanisms the key evidence this approach relied on the results of cross-breeding experiments (following from the work of Gregor Mendel) and microscopy of chromosomal structures within cells and the discovery of sex-linked hereditary traits (chiefly the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan). As far as the evidence at the time was concerned there was no hard evidence (and for good reason as we will see) that the information inherited through genes was not immutable, that is that acquired traits could be passed on to an organism’s offspring.
Suing instead points out that, following on from the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, bourgeois biologists since the 1980s have uncovered lots of evidence for the heredity of acquired traits. The immutability of genes was in fact evidenced against as early as 1945, when Barbara McClintock discovered ‘jumping genes’, (she briefly became persona non grata as a result). More recently scientists in the growing field of epigenetics, which is concerned with the heredity of traits by means other than genes, have been reaching some of the same conclusions as Lysenko did in his day.
Of course this is with the advantage of having technology to study the actual biochemical mechanisms, such chemical tags which can be inherited after attaching to DNA, causing physical differences such as how the molecules fold and regulating gene expression in the organism’s offspring. “It has been known since the 1960s that specific molecules are capable of recognising the starting or end point of a given gene in the chromatin of the nucleus, and of adhering to it to prevent or accelerate its expression into active proteins. The metabolism of such molecules has always been very uncertain, and at the level of the nucleus, we’ve always wanted to limit ourselves to the already complex linear structure of DNA, without considering the added complexity of its three-dimensional folds, its reversible windings around large protein particles (histones), its condensed or uncondensed state,, and above all the molecular ‘marks’ ‘imprinted’ on the outer part of DNA bases (methylations are the main examples) by enigmatic enzymes. These methylations are ‘wear and tear’ marks, making more accessible to expression the DNA sectors that have been most useful in a given environmental context, and normally disappear during subsequent divisions and generations” (Suing, p.140-141).
Lysenko, with the applied science that was possible with the Soviet system of collective and state farms, produced experimental results based on the heredity of acquired traits, most famously the ‘vernalisation’ of cereals. This evidence was dismissed by Western scientists as falsified without evidence and on explicitly political grounds; Suing quotes mathematician Dominique Meeus, : “His so-called experimental results stemmed from his ignorance of scientific methods, and no doubt from a tendency to ‘improve’ observed results in the direction of his hopes. Lysenko emphasised the philosophical implications of the opposition between his theory of the heritability of acquired traits and genetic theory. Genetics would be a mechanistic, determinist, defeatist ‘bourgeois’ science (…) Lysenkoist biology would be a ‘proletarian’, dialectical, liberating science, enabling humankind to improve its diet: human intervention can lead a plant to change behaviour and transmit this modified behaviour to its descendants” (p.112).
Suing also concedes that Lysenko’s work was weakened by his denial of evidence for the existence of genes: “When Morgan identified through a multitude of selective crosses four linkage groups between hereditary variations in Drosophila [fruit flies], and at the same time discovered that it does indeed have four pairs of chromosomes in its karyotype, it was a serious and deliberate scientific error on Lysenko’s part to ignore these results with contempt; a suspect blindness” (pp.123-124).
Modern Western epigeneticists are often quick to point out that their work does not prove Lysenko was correct, but conversely since science has come to understand the some of the biochemical mechanisms of heredity Lysenko’s opponents were also wrong and ignored evidence where it clashed with their political and philosophical outlook. But what cannot be denied is that modern science has continued to demonstrate and uncover the truth that genes are not immutable and that mechanisms exist that allow for acquired traits to be inherited.
Genetics, like other material and physical phenomena, does not exist in a vacuum but rather has complex interactions with the totality of its environment. Like all material phenomena, like Darwin’s discoveries themselves, they tend to substantiate the dialectical materialist methods and philosophy of Marx.
Conclusion
In his book, Suing sets out to show that “the needs of a rapidly growing population is not necessarily opposed to ‘Nature’… [Like Luddites] environmentalists divert the very real contradiction between Capital and Nature in favour of a very idealistic and insurmountable contradiction between Nature and Technical Progress” (page 6-7). Such people tend to fall into blaming ‘overpopulation’, as did the late and unlamented Reverend Malthus, all too often blaming the poor for their own poverty, the ultimate logic of which cannot but be to welcome war and genocide as a method for reducing the population!
Suing decries “… the anti-productivist principle of the ecology (environmentalist) movement [that] stems from a philosophical presupposition about an idealised Nature, which can only be ‘desecrated’ by human labour, contrasting human progress with technical progress. Yet the history of humanity is first and foremost that of the domestication of its environment, the founding act of which was the Neolithic revolution. Prehistory is marked by the transition from hunter-gatherer tribes to sedentary human groups who domesticated plants and animals to meet their basic needs by attaining greater security, regularity and quantity of necessities (pp.10-11).
Marx was clear that in the present day it is capitalism that is the problem, not people: “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer” (Capital Vol 1).
And Engels adds: “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, and mostly quite the opposite in character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transferred into the very reverse opposite …” (The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man).
Suing’s book is a challenge to those of us whose years in a bourgeois environment and in bourgeois education have created in us a metaphysical ‘cause and effect’ mindset that makes dialectics hard properly to understand. It is a challenge well worth the trouble of taking up, from which we will undoubtedly benefit greatly.