Onur Yılmaz and Güney Işıkara held a virtual meeting with Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Professor of Geography at SUNY New Paltz, whose people-environments research under the prevailing capitalist system and potential alternatives includes his book “Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures” published in 2021 by Pluto Press.
June 2022
Abstrakt: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. We would like to start with a bit about your personal journey. It’s very interesting to read about it in the opening part of your book, where you write basically that you were raised in a ‘liberal democracy’ and internalized the defamation against socialist regimes, the frustration with revolutionaries, and so on. How did a change in your perspective occur? How did you as a researcher come to conclude a necessity for ‘state socialism’?
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (SAED): That’s a difficult question to answer without undergoing an autobiographical sketch, which I will try to avoid. In hindsight, I experienced my childhood in a country dominated by US bases, military bases, and right-wing state-orchestrated, NATO orchestrated terrorism. But I did not understand this until much later in life, and I think that that probably had something to do with my rejection of liberal democracy. Along the way, I’ve had a lot of help from many luminaries. More recently, the work of Gerald Horne, the historian. And Domenico Losurdo, who unfortunately is no longer with us and is a very important Italian communist. But also even before then, a chance reading of Lenin’s work, having previously not been acquainted with any Marxist works at all, was influential. Things like that happened during adolescence, which became meaningful because of my subsequent political development. I suppose the path started through collectivist anarchism. Ultimately, I was somewhat disenchanted with that framework, but that process took a long while. I think my first move away from liberal democratic commitments took place in 1985.
It was one of those moments in adolescence. Perhaps this is common to many people who bear witness to something that they’re not able to explain, something very shocking. In my case, that was the bombing of the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia, an African American activist group. It wasn’t due to an uncritical support of that group, but the fact that the state bombed them. It was broadcast live in the United States––where I was living at the time during my middle adolescence––which always prides itself on all these democratic principles and human rights. I think this event left a lasting mental scar.
Eventually, when I was entering post-graduate programs in the 1990s, even reading Capital or any Marxist work was grounds for ridicule. It was very rough in the nineties, and I tend to be obstinate, which I suppose is one of my problems, but perhaps one of my saving graces sometimes. And I proceeded nonetheless to read the forbidden or ridiculed works with even greater enthusiasm. And they opened my eyes to a lot of things. They allowed me to understand things much more effectively. Not just in terms of the world economy and national economies, but also in terms of social relations of power. So I think those are the highlights of how the entire edifice of liberal democracy that had been instilled in me since childhood began to come apart. I believe that the attack on Iraq in 1991, the bombing of Yugoslavia, and all of those horrific wars, imperialist wars, also disenchanted me with a lot of socialists, mainly Western Marxists. The change in me didn’t arrive at that moment, but it chipped away at many Western Marxist presuppositions about existing socialist states. And I have to say that what shocked me even before the attack on Iraq in 1991 was the invasion of Grenada and then of Panama.
But again, these are the sort of pivotal moments that build up. I felt that many, not just social democratic approaches but structuralist or self-described post-structuralist Marxists, could not provide me with the sort of explanatory tools or the political wherewithal to deal with all those realities that I was witnessing.
There were many occasions in which one finds other people as comrades. But then it turns out that they cannot distinguish between their privileges in a liberal democracy and what happens in the rest of the world, nor see the connection between them. Those things began building up until I went to Venezuela. I think that is where everything congealed for me. And it made it more apparent that a lot of my presuppositions were already falling apart, and a lot of the frameworks that I thought were once helpful just needed to be tossed away. And I had to build something out of what already existed, but it was either ignored, put aside, or just dismissed as authoritarianism. And I thought I couldn’t agree with that sort of discourse anymore.
Abstrakt: I think that brings us to the central concept or the object of investigation of the book, namely (socialist) states. And again, at a relatively early stage in the book, you come up with a taxonomy. You speak of different types of countries. The first group is the capitalist countries that you interchangeably name liberal democracies, free-market democracies, etc. When you talk of state socialist countries, you speak of socialist governments, countries or socialist parties governing a capitalist economy. Why do you think it is important? Why do you think it is essential to distinguish, especially between socialist countries? And why did you think it is crucial to define the category of state socialism precisely?
SAED: Thanks for that question. It is a significant one. Of course, that’s what animated several sections of the book. I was very dissatisfied with how lax the categories being employed were, to the point where you could make any argument you wanted. And because, I’m almost afraid to say, I believe that Marxism is a form of science. And, because of my scientific background in physical geography and soil science, I just can’t help but try to bring clarity, at least for myself, about what exactly I am analyzing. And so those categories, I mean, could also be viewed as provisional. It’s an attempt to make sense of all those data. And I think I also state in the book that I would love to see an alternative to it, but one has to at least be systematic about it, instead of just conveniently picking whatever one wants to have an outcome that fits one’s particular political commitments. So that’s one part. It’s just about systematicity and clarity of definition as much as possible.
The other part was because I lived in Hungary, and I got to speak to many people who got messed up by what they call the systemic change or, some people would call democratization, or the transition, or whatever. Others might call it the restoration of capital. And then, reading more Hungarian socialist thinkers and others, it dawned on me that perhaps it’s best to look at state socialism as a transitory and contradictory reality. And that makes it a little more open and dynamic because we’re dealing with class struggles, and they don’t go away just because you have a revolution.
I think this is something many revolutionaries have recognized before and many people have written about. I was just drawing from many other people’s thinking on this. It’s just that when there isn’t a clear definition of what that post-revolutionary situation means, then there is no ability to say what can be avoided in future. There’s no ability to say what worked and what didn’t work. And concerning environmental impact, the consequences of this sloppiness for me are rather dire. It means that we cannot point to any socialist project that has been successful with the rest of nature. Or we could just sweep it aside and say that all these social experiments sucked, and then we have nothing to learn from them, and we might as well just join the liberal democrats at that point.
There are many political repercussions to this lack of systematizing, but it also was a way of understanding better for me. What do those different kinds of, I guess, social structures mean? How did they work? I’m still learning.
I also went to the PRC several times and am trying to understand that situation. I would like to visit countries like Vietnam to understand what differentiates a context like the People’s Republic of China and Hungary in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. They’re not the same, but what specific differences can one pick up? You know, and of course, one major similarity was that you have indeed a party that calls itself communist. It’s not just a way of pulling a prank on the rest of the world. I’ve learned by going to the PRC that there are several currents, some very different currents with very different thinking about what to do. And there are struggles there. And so the matter dawned on me that the situation is much more in flux. Similarly, if one looks at the USSR during the period under Stalin, it’s always a situation in flux. There were plenty of struggles there, too, at that time.
So I was trying to get away from a monolithic understanding of these systems as they emerged and developed. And so that’s why I think looking at state socialism as a transitory kind of system that could go in multiple directions, as it has, is probably a better way of doing the research. And then, when they have a much more capitalist oriented economy, such as with the Deng reforms in the PRC and the Doi Moi reforms in Vietnam (I guess Laos has similar kinds of changes), what does one make of that? I’m still trying to grapple with that.
But for me, the issue was, how do I make some clear categories that I can associate with different kinds of environmental impacts? Then I thought if you have a predominance of a capitalist economy in the PRC, but you still have the main directing organs through a Communist Party, it’s not the same as the United States. It simply is not. And anybody who says it is, I’m sorry, you must at least look at the reality in which you can have a millionaire or a billionaire like Jack Ma, who is restrained. And then you see what happens with Elon Musk in the US, to name a noticeable difference.
I think those differences do matter in terms of environmental effects. But that’s only one aspect of the story. What I also try to do is to take world system theory more seriously as well. That’s because that’s part of my background, too. I inserted it as part of the explanatory framework or at least the definitions to see in what world-system position do we have these socialist states or socialist governed economies? Are they in the periphery, the semi-periphery in the core? I think that matters a great deal in terms of environmental impact and, of course, in terms of social relations. That’s part of what I’ve appreciated about Lenin and his understanding of imperialism. When one talks about core countries, those are the imperialist countries. That’s how I’ve come to understand the issue of environmental impacts.
Abstrakt: One of the book’s core strengths is that clear eyed analysis when comparing the environmental impacts of these categorizations, capitalist and socialist countries and when evaluating state socialism on its own turf. So let’s start with the cross-country or cross-system comparisons. And to make this comparison framework clear, you distinguish between absolute, synchronic and diachronic comparisons. Can you elaborate on this distinction, the merits and demerits of each, and why this methodological clarity is crucial?
SAED: The comparative frameworks have been instilled in me ever since I was doing archaeology. Like, what does it mean to compare these different archaeological sites? What are we comparing anyway? On what basis? And then in geography, physical geography, the same thing. So that’s kind of been instilled in me. It’s one of those benefits that I’ve had in my education process despite its liberal democratic nature. But the three kinds of comparisons are derived from reading different works on socialist states and the environment, both from right-wing and left-wing perspectives.
And, inevitably, one comes to one of the first kind of unstated framework. It is the absolutist comparison in which one side is depicted as having had the worst environmental destruction the world has ever seen. And the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is Chernobyl and the Aral Sea and stuff like that. That’s an absolutist comparison, meaning that it’s depicting an entire society in superlative and negative terms.
And that’s a way of basically evading a serious analysis of the data because one could quickly look at Bhopal. That is the worst accident ever in the history of humanity. And people were never evacuated, never even compensated, and there were tens of thousands of deaths. You can simply claim that there’s nothing in history that compares to Bhopal, and hence conclude that liberal democracy is much more harmful. I wanted to be more systematic about the issue; but because absolutist comparisons are so rife, I thought it was important to include them, as illogical as they may be.
The synchronic comparisons are the more subtle ones in which, often, basically, you compare what the countries are doing during the same period. Such comparisons are often made as if countries are unrelated to each other. It’s amazing because we have influential processes like world trade, and these kinds of comparisons erase the interlinkages. The interlinkages don’t exist whenever it’s convenient. So I tried to get away from that by using world system conceptualizations because it introduces the interlinkages. But that is still very unsatisfactory as well.
One also has to bring in what these units of analysis called countries are part of. It’s about taking a dialectical materialist approach. If you think about it, you cannot look at phenomena as if there are just separable parts. There are parts of a whole. So we have to look at the whole as composed by its constitutive elements, whose interactions change the whole. Synchronic perspectives usually lack linkages or dialectical understanding, more precisely. I went through synchronic comparisons anyway to give some examples of how faulty that comparative approach is . And even with that, such a well-established synchronic comparison approach still shows that, for the most part, socialist states were much better on the environment than capitalist ones. And that’s what I found. I didn’t think it was going to be that clear.
That finding is not necessarily straightforward because it depends on the time frame. So when you have the initial industrialization drives, which are very quick, of course, you’re going to have a lot of environmental damage. So if we put that as a context, which is missing in most analyses, then it can explain the initial spurt of environmental destruction, and then it slows down and declines with time.
Similarly, if one doesn’t look at the overall context of constant attacks––such as sanction regimes from the get-go––if one doesn’t look at those interactions from the totality of a capitalist world, then it’s difficult to explain the environmental impacts. Unsurprisingly, the conventional explanation using the synchronic comparison perspective is that ‘socialism is just intrinsically evil’. What is interesting is that, when looking at the data even on mainstream terms, the opposite is proven. And that’s what I also show.
Then there is the diachronic view, meaning a view in which we’re not comparing countries as if they were on different planet, as if they did not belong to the same overarching totality. Let’s look at them in context. That is, according to their historical unfolding; it’s––I hope people will catch on to that––a dialectical or at least an attempt at a dialectical materialist approach because I’m looking at change as the norm. And I try to explain that change within a social formation on its terms, with the contradictions within those countries that are also related to contradictions of broader scope at the world level, the regional level, etc.
So I tried to incorporate that kind of diachronic framework, but only by means of three very brief case studies because each of them would require an entire book in itself. So I was trying to give some sketches of how that kind of analysis could be done in a way that does not reduce the USSR or the People’s Republic of China or Cuba to some sort of monolithic entity that is unchanging and is just devastating to the environment and showing why you had some successes, as well as how. From a diachronic perspective, we can also take into account what is conveniently ignored, which is the hundreds of years of environmental devastation before the revolutions that brought about socialist states .
One of the things that I would like to do in future is to look at Laos and Vietnam (I have already started studying the Mongolian People’s Republic). They emerged with victorious revolutions against the most incredible odds , over the French and then US empires, which had wrecked forests, rivers, and lakes. Just thinking about how those people survived those devastating imperialist onslaughts is mind-boggling. Even to say ‘look at Laos and Vietnam, with their poor forestry, tree management, etc.’ should be regarded as an insane perspective because one has to ignore, among other horrors, the immense amounts of napalm bombs and Agent Orange dumped on those countries by various US governments.
But the same goes with Tsarist Russia, where basically the extractive industry, especially logging, served the US and Canada very well in their economic development, for example. And one has to forget about the centuries of slavery and plantation agriculture in Cuba. All of those things come into view when you take a diachronic perspective, basically looking at these systems as they unfolded historically, as they changed, as their relations with other societies also changed.
Abstrakt: You always put phenomena into their social context and ecological context. And that’s why, for example, time and again you emphasize that the drive or the motivation behind the militarization of the USSR was first and foremost a self-defense instinct, which was absolutely necessary.
As you put it, you critically reclaim state socialism. You put it into its historical and broader biophysical context, study the interaction between the political processes and environmental processes in a world-historical context. So what are the main results that you would like to highlight with respect to the USSR, China, and Cuba, or state socialism in general?
SAED: By and large, to give a very panoramic view of what strikes me as some of the most important aspects of what has happened with socialist states with respect to the environment is that each historical context really set the stage as to the range of what could be done with the environment in terms of the level of conservation or the kinds of innovations made to have more ecologically sustainable ways of living. Not just the range, but also the kinds of problems that had to be faced. And that put some very important constraints into what could be done. So that’s one part.
In the case of the USSR, you have a longer tradition of ecological preservation, and that found immediate resonance with the likes of Lenin, Lunacharski and other Bolsheviks. So you immediately had a very important synergy – and I think in hindsight something that we could apply now, a very important overlap between political revolutionary objectives and ecologically sustainable objectives. They were not differentiated, unlike what many people usually assume because of a lack of historical knowledge about what happened. Zapovedniki predated the Bolsheviks, but it was the Bolsheviks who expanded ecological preserves to an unprecedented amount of total area. It was amazing. And zapovedniki still exist, though they’ve unfortunately been divided up because of the demise of the USSR.
So that’s one thing that is really striking to me. It’s kind of a combination of political commitments with ecological principles, which are usually said to have waned or to have been tossed aside by Stalin. But that’s actually not the case. And one must also understand that millions of people were involved in that historical turn called “Stalinism”, and that there were a lot of struggles not just against Stalin, but against destroying at least certain kinds of ecosystems. And they were successful struggles as well. They should not be ignored. And also, on the other side, even under the apparent pomposity of Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, you had some very constructive environmental effects.
So what does that tell us? One is about what is done under circumstances in which you’re constantly under duress, under attack from the outside, and you have many different voices, a lot of struggles inside: how does one cope with all that and have some sort of coherent strategy about the environment? It’s not so simple. Maybe now that we have the hindsight, we have the luxury of all that history having been made, as well as the disasters, including the human disasters, the social disasters, and the environmental disasters; but we also have very important positive developments in society and the environment to learn from. So we can be better prepared to understand what needs to be faced, and to have a bit more of a plan. The Bolsheviks, unfortunately, lacked that luxury of experience and hindsight. In some respects they were kind of going in blind on a lot of things. Now we don’t have any excuse to go in blind, and it’s thanks to them. We should acknowledge that too.
With the People’s Republic of China, one of the things that really struck me was the insistence on reforestation programs. Because in China, unlike the USSR, you had massive deforestation over centuries. Most of the forests were basically gone. And then you had the pillaging by imperialist countries, military attacks and then the horrors of Japanese imperialism, the horrors of Chiang Kai-shek as well. And then by 1949, if one expects that a society is going to think about whether they’re going to have ecological preserves, you would be out of your mind; simply because most of those would not have been feasible in the Chinese context, that you didn’t have the massive Taiga forest and the like that you had in the USSR even with all the destruction post-1917, and later with the Nazis. One has also to factor that in in terms of ecological processes, and lasting ones as well.
So in China you had a different set of circumstances. The ecological context is just as important as the social history there. In one context, it’s 1949 with a threat of nuclear war baked in, and the other starts in 1917. Thus, it’s hard to imagine a similar sequence of environmental policies for China as you had in the USSR.
The world context also needs to be taken into consideration. I think that’s one of the things that I would highlight as well: Understand your world-historical context as one tries to proceed with a great systemic change in society that is also ecologically sustainable. This is stuff that I don’t see ecosocialists really thinking seriously about. That’s actually what has animated this book too, I have to say. I try not to say that in the book itself, but I think it’s fairly obvious.
With respect to Cuba, this is actually the most incredible thing as well, because in Cuba you see the emergence of many things that were actually borrowed from the Bolsheviks as well as the early Mao period. This emphasis on trying to make use of the environment to industrialize to make life much better for most people, for all people, but at the same time not wrecking the environment while doing that: it’s a very difficult thing to do, especially early on. And in Cuba, one of the first things they do is similar to what was done the USSR, in protecting coral reefs and enlarging the national park areas. Not for the same reasons, not for the same purposes. But then again, it’s a small island, so you can’t really set so much stuff aside. But in that small island you have hundreds of years of plantation systems which had already wrecked the forest, the soil. And they can’t just jump back ecologically, just because you have a revolution.
And yet, by the 1980s, they had already been developing agroecology principles that really make for a much more ecologically sustainable use of soil. And they put in place a lot of things that are not even in place in the richest countries in the world to make for a better, healthier environment. Of course, there is mining, nickel mining, etc. But the question is not about mining per se, it is about what are you going to do with that mining? Is it going to be helping the people or is it going to be helping to line up the pockets of the few? You’re going to have to do some mining anyway, but you can supplement it with a lot of recycling, which they do in Cuba, much more than they do in the United States. And all sorts of other things can be considered, which are more about how to cope with constant attack, internal contradictions, and out of all that have an ecologically sensible policy and sets of practices.
So in any case, at least in those socialist states, whatever the problems with them, whatever they did and accomplished was due to their priorities being so different from those in capitalist countries, from those of liberal democracies or ofother kinds of capitalist political systems. State-socialist aims were to improve people’s lives. It shows also in terms of the better environmental impacts overall, especially over time. To the point that Cuba, in terms of achievement relative to conventional development indices, is the most ecologically sustainable country in the world. That’s something about socialist states that should not be ignored. And that’s one of the things that I also wanted to highlight in the book, because to all of these people who just say “socialists are just authoritarians” etc., we say, “well, but you still have to grapple with the fact that we have these achievements”. And they’re very difficult to come by. And so for those people, especially among Western Marxists, who have all this moralism about all these so-called dictatorships in socialist states, they should look at their own countries and see how well they’ve done over 100 years and then come and speak about that. There is some arrogance at play.
Abstrakt: It is so valuable that you do this rigorous and concrete historical analysis instead of this “one size fits all” approach, because today this has almost become the price of admission: if you want to join the discussion, you first have to strongly condemn the Soviet Union in all possible aspects. You have to take absolute distance from the Soviet Union as a socialist, and then you can join.
A follow-up question: time and again in the book, the logical conclusion of your argument is an emphasis on the world-historical context, because––of course, this is not to totally salvage them, to say they have no responsibility whatsoever––these countries were obligated to be militarized, to start nuclear programs. But there is this developmentalist approach, or whose growth rates are higher, especially in the second half of the 20th century in the Soviet Union. You put this as an irony in the context of the Soviet Union. Usually, the blame is always put on Stalin. But in the Soviet Union, most of the environmental degradation started after Stalin and with the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the capitalist world and so on. In some sense can we say that today when envisioning future ecosocialisms, we have to think at least regionally, if not globally, because coexistence with capitalism is very difficult?
SAED: Yes, that’s a very important point you make. And your frustrations really resonate very much with mine. And before I go into the problem of coexistence, I wanted to add that it would be interesting to ask people who talk about democracy in the socialist context to reject the USSR, also reject the United States and the British Empire for their genocides. Shouldn’t socialists who talk like this do so consistently, for the US and other such countries? It’s kind of interesting that even among socialists, one is asked to distance oneself from the USSR, but not to distance oneself from the UK and France, who are basically genocidal maniac regimes. It’s curious, it’s something that I’ve had to grapple with. To go back to my autobiography, I know escaping it is not easy. This liberal, bourgeois thought is very hegemonic. It’s difficult to rid oneself of in any case. And I’m still battling with that, I can feel it. And that’s also why coexistence is not really an option.
It’s not an option, yet it’s something that has to be faced. How does one face it? Certainly not by splitting up into different groups, certainly not by having countries go to war with each other like the USSR and People’s Republic of China, or not by saying “oh, you’re too reformist because you’re doing this and that”, but by understanding instead the very variegated contexts in which all of these communities exist.
Right now, for example, if one compares the situation in Rojava and the Zapatistas or the PFLP in Palestine, what makes it difficult for them to combine forces? Well, the geopolitical circumstances are really different and difficult and produce very contradictory tendencies within and between those formations, so that it should not be surprising that they would tend to be pushed to work at cross purposes. So how do we deal with that? That’s one thing that I’ve been asking myself and I obviously don’t have an answer, but it has to do with the differentiated unity in which we exist, the totality of the world capitalist economy and the world capitalist system within which all of these countries and formations exist. You cannot escape the problems until one really finds ways of overcoming these contextual differences, historical differences, not overcoming them by rejecting them or by pretending they’re not there, but to address them in a mutually sustaining way.
And that’s something that used to happen with Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, with the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam. They had these arrangements in which, on the basis of these countries’ needs, you would have trade rather than profiting off each other. I think even while the USSR had a problem that Mao rightfully pointed out with ‘peaceful coexistence’, which is not possible, there is still a reason why the USSR governments attempted to attain coexistence that I think needs to be appreciated. The reasons can be found in multiple foreign invasions, and also in unresolved internal dissent and in the rise of capitalist roaders from within.
But then, in the PRC, we see this as well. So does one say the same thing about the People’s Republic of China as just vying for coexistence? Well, one could say that. But is that helpful in terms of the overall strategy of combating a capitalist world economy? I’m not so sure. And so finding ways in which forces can be coordinated is to find ways in which all these very different contexts can be accounted for in a mutually enhancing fashion. I think this is one of the priorities, or at least in my view, should be among the priorities.
If one is serious about capitalism, one must grasp that capitalism is global from the beginning and Marx had already shown that ages ago. Still, I can understand why at a particular point of time you have the concept of socialism in one country in the USSR. It is because that was the only feasible option at the time if the USSR were to survive. I’m surprised that many people don’t just pick up on that. It’s like, oh well, isn’t that convenient policy? No, it’s just what the situation was. Again, for all the criticism of the Stalin regime, at that time there was only the one socialist state and then in 1922 only the companionship of the Mongolian People’s Republic, where self-defence capacity was even more precarious.
We should be in the process of building power across the world amongst socialists instead of having socialists getting in each other’s way. We also have to be mindful of the fact that we will have massacres, we will have a lot of death, and it’s horrible. And what do we learn from the USSR’s early experience in the 1930s, what do we learn from the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China? We must not toss it all aside as just a mistake or as events unrelated to socialism. For me, no, it’s not a mistake, but an evolving process that we have to grapple with and try to avoid in future.
And that should be the question instead of saying “well, Stalin was horrible” and that be the end of it. Well, it was horrible, but then what? I’m being optimistic in some respects but it’s not like we’re going to find ourselves with a revolution and suddenly things will be wonderful. We’re going to have a lot of fighting to deal with. How do you do that? By staying human at the same time, which is not so easy. How does one do that without having the prospects of people trying to take over and massacring everybody else because they believe that they have the only right direction to take, which to me, is what the Bolsheviks went through.
I still see a lot of socialists who are not willing to really deal with those aspects. And that to me is especially surprising when it comes from socialists in liberal democracies, where it should be very well known that even reforms within their respective countries can bring about reductions in the pressure of the imperialist boot, in the assassinations of revolutionary leaders. That’s also what the Black Panther Party suffered. That’s also what the American Indian Movement suffered. All within liberal democracies. You know, how could we be blind to those processes and think that we’re just going to have democracy among ourselves, with no infiltrations, no one trying to take the reins, no paranoia. That would be wonderful, I really wish it were that simple.
Abstrakt: So in the book, among many other examples, you also mention Rojava several times, where new social relations have been established along the lines of democratic confederalism influenced by the social ecology of Bookchin. Actually, as Turkish Revolutionaries, we perceive Rojava as part of our own struggle, as a united revolution of Turkey and Kurdistan. So we follow what’s happening there very closely and we draw inspiration from it. It’s kind of one of the first revolutions in the 21st century. Do you have any special observations or reflections on Rojava or Bookchin’s framework of libertarian municipalism?
And we can put this maybe into the larger context of the newer currents of problematizing the state as such, or problematizing centralization as such. So you can answer for Rojava in particular, and then continue more generally on those aspects as well.
SAED: On Rojava, I would rather defer to you and to others to educate me about what’s going on. I’ve only read as much as I can so as not to be ignorant of the Turkish and Kurdish contexts. I have a very limited understanding of it. My worry has been the making of Rojava what it cannot be, especially among certain ‘anarcho-communists’, anarchists, and social ecologists. But I want to be corrected as well, because I’m sure I can be totally wrong.
This is how I read the situation so far since 2011, in Rojava in particular: on a certain level they’re building a state without saying it. They’re doing it differently, and I think it’s more constructive to do it that way, but to say that it’s really an alternative to the state is unconvincing. And to say that they don’t have a central leadership when there is a clear mantra of loyalty to a specific leader, then it is doubly unconvincing.
For the ecological question, it is really difficult having any sort of ecological preservation in a war zone. So, I’ve read some stuff from the leftists that I find very sad, sort of ridiculing the Rojava project as still having private property, as still having no tangible results ecologically. Well, you find yourself in the Spanish Civil War and tell me how much you can do. These are ridiculous and unrealistic expectations.
On the other hand, again, as far as I understand, in terms of regional and global dynamics, the Rojava Revolution is a question. In Germany at least, I’ve been accused of being dismissive of the Rojava revolution, though I wasn’t trying to be dismissive. I was trying to be realistic in the fact that there are some severe constraints that occur as a result of the fact that you have multiple regional and imperialist forces at work. And so it kind of makes sense that, for example, you wouldn’t have much coordination or collaboration between left wing Palestinian forces and Kurdish leftist forces. It makes sense because they’re in very different situations. Some of the forces that the Palestinians are fighting against are the same forces that are to some extent helping the Kurdish leadership in Rojava survive. Even helping is a bit strong, kind of leaving them in abeyance, not being completely wiped out, but only being partly wiped out. But that’s a different context than the Palestinians.
It’s amazing what people in Rojava has been able to achieve. And I think it is so important to link it up to a Turkish revolution, that is so fundamental for me as well. Just from my very limited perspective on this question, it has to be a dual revolution. And that’s probably why the Erdoğan government is trying its utmost to destroy forces within Turkey, as well as making incursions in Syria and northern Iraq at the same time. Because if you combine these forces, it’s going to be the end of that regime. I hope so, perhaps I’m being very optimistic.
Abstrakt: You put it very concretely and very correctly, because it’s still a battlefield, and all the alliances are contradictory. And it makes the revolution hard to sustain. All along the way it makes sacrifices and reconciliations. And so right now, it’s basically under siege from everywhere. But still, at least there are some revolutionary forces that can still have influence on the region, on the Turkish side, on Syria and on Iraqi Kurdistan. So there is still hope at least.
One last question. This is an umbrella question. Over the past few decades, we have all these new currents, more bourgeois-leaning ones, like steady-state economics or small-scale capitalism or these totally fuzzy concepts of wealth economies, wellbeing economies. On the one hand, New Zealand and the like, and on the other hand, on the left we have the problematization of state again, which partially has to do with the position towards the state socialism of the 20th century, or the problematization of centralization or the problematization of the vanguard, and so forth. Now there are the degrowthers. So what is your overall take on this? You can pick several of them, but I think the underlying main themes are state power, centralization versus worker control, and the question of democracy and state. So, what do we learn from the socialist states, what can they contribute to how we envision future ecosocialisms?
SAED: First I should preface the whole thing by saying that I’m certainly in favor of the most centralization possible given the context. It actually enables the specificities of different communities to have more of a voice in how things are done, which can be very important. But at the same time, this can go against the needs of other communities. If, let’s say, you have the need for certain kinds of energy supplies in a community, they’re not willing to exploit those resources because they live there and they don’t like it. How do you come up with a compromise? You have to have some dialogue. How do you create that sort of dialogue? How do you create the coordination? You have some sort of centralized structure. So inevitably, I think one always ends up in the same place.
And there is a book that’s come out from Verso about horizontalism versus verticalism, which tries to suggest that actually it’s neither. You can never have either one. It’s not possible. The USSR is stereotypical for a reason. I guess the Stalin era was never as centralized as it is imagined. It was just a vast, huge country. Just as Russia is now as well. Many people were doing things at the regional level that did not correspond with what was going on in Moscow. So that’s one aspect.
I think that there are too many idealized models being pushed in both directions: either the ones who support the state, or the ones who just speak of decentralization, bottom-up. It’s like a dichotomy between exchange in a non-capitalist market, if you like, and exchange in planning. It’s not a workable dichotomy in practice.
So degrowth, for example, some of them are going back to the utopian socialists and they remind me a lot of that kind of current in which they have all their plans, which are interesting, and then they have no strategy as to how to implement that. That’s a really good way to keep themselves busy and their hands clean, and I really don’t care for that. That’s actually one of my problems with degrowth and things like it. They say, “let’s chart our desires, and we’ll leave it at that”.
So I think a lot of these thinkers come out of communities where they’ve never had to face a gun in front of their face, where they never had a history of being invaded by an imperialist power. And I think that’s probably part of the problem there. Maybe I’m being reductionistic, but to some extent that’s how the matter feels because frameworks like degrowth come mostly from those kinds of contexts. Of course, I come from those kinds of contexts, so I’m already contradicting myself.
It’s just that it’s easy to say stuff like that when you’re in Australia, New Zealand, France, but not, let’s say, Mali or DR Congo, where it’s just been mayhem over and over again for many people. So things like the circular economy, ecosystem services, all of that sort of stuff is just the capitalist side of it. If there’s one thing that one can learn from the experiences of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, it’s how important it is to actually have a centralized structure that takes responsibility. In the US, you can say “oh dear, we don’t have enough ecological services”. So what is the solution? “Well, we have to privatize more stuff to make people more responsible in a decentralized fashion,” right? Businesses are supposed to be self-regulating, which of course, never happens. It’s a disaster every time. So on the capitalist side, obviously there have been so many disasters and they continue to happen, that it’s kind of a joke to even consider things like the well-being economy or the Gross National Happiness index from Bhutan or whatever.
Meanwhile, you have CO2 emissions that just go up and up and obviously capitalist policies are not working. So maybe something is wrong with the kind of thinking that goes along with those policies. But on the leftist side, in some respects, it is frustrating because I feel like a lot of people have not had the opportunity that I had, to read socialist histories. Maybe they’d be familiar with the debates in the First International, which somehow are kind of similar to these decentralization-centralization debates, on workers’ control or having a party that comes to power through the parliamentary road versus a non-parliamentary road, taking over factories versus going for policy changes.
These things are not new, and I think learning from socialist states is even more important for that reason, because once you do have more influence, not necessarily in terms of taking power, but just having more influence in how our national economy is run, that means a lot of responsibility and that means a lot of things you actually don’t like doing. And how do you face up to that concretely, instead of just fantasizing your way around it?
If Mélenchon actually became the president of France, what would he really be able to do? And it’s not just him, all the people who are involved. How would they be able to get things done differently? And then they’ll soon find out that they have a lot of obstacles and a lot of people who would like to see them dead. And then what do they do? Just allow such homicidal inimical forces to continue because of democracy, decentralization, and so on? Meanwhile you get wiped out. These are the things I don’t see any of the currents which reject the history of state socialism really grappling with. It feels like one must re-read Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and repeat the same process again. Okay, let’s start again. Let’s look at these socialist histories. Let’s understand what happened with socialist states, what they did well, what they did badly. And now what we do instead of having this wish list for utopian socialism.
Let’s say we do take over the reins of the state. How do we maneuver it in a different way compared to what happened in the USSR? How do we deal with US imperialism if we’re not in the US? Are we just going to sort of pretend that people weren’t dying of starvation in the country where you did your successful revolution? Let’s say it’s the Central African Republic and you have a successful revolution there. Are we going to pretend that you’re going to be able to survive on your own wherewithal completely within that country, you’re going to overcome all these obstacles, and on top of it, French troops won’t come in and wipe you out?
I’m repeating myself, but, in some respects, these kinds of currents that just don’t seem to be able to understand tactics, to understand and expect the contradictions, the paradoxes as you rightly put it. And instead of dealing with them in a dialectical fashion, they just substitute this more linear view, which is really interesting coming from the left, a very linear view in which you go from first having democracy and then other things. I’m sorry, it doesn’t work quite that way. I’m sure there are not a few Iranian communists who can tell us a few things about how things can turn out very differently from what you expect. It’s just an example but in Turkey, imagine in the Turkish context implementing a degrowth program. It doesn’t work.
Abstrakt: This was great. There’s a lot to a lot more to talk about, but we think this is a good point to stop. We know the book is great, it must be translated. We’re sure it will be at some point, but it’s great if we can make that sooner. There is a lack of this topic in the Turkish literature.
SAED: Thanks very much. For what I’ve seen from Abstrakt, I’m very impressed. It’s amazing what you all do.