What price for Eco-Leninism?
Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
John Molyneux
Through his recent writings, the Swedish ecosocialist Andreas Malm has created an important and valuable strategic discussion amongst radical environmentalists, as highlighted by Michael Coleman’s review of his How to Blow Up a Pipeline in issue 4 of Rupture. Below, as part of our ongoing engagement with his writings, we publish a critical review of Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century by John Molyneux, a member of People Before Profit, the Socialist Workers’ Network and the Global Ecosocialist Network.
“The time has come to experiment with ecological Leninism.” Andreas Malm
As a long standing Leninist [1] and convinced ecosocialist, [2] it might be expected I would leap at the term ‘eco-Leninism’ and, indeed, I strongly favour a Leninist approach to environmental issues along with the struggle for socialism as a whole. I will return to what I mean by that later in this article. But it first has to be said that when it comes to adopting political concepts and labels, not only general principles, but also the political context must always be taken into account.
Marx and Engels said that in the mid-1840s they called themselves communists rather than socialists because at that time in France and Germany the term communist was favoured in the working class whereas socialist was preferred in middle class circles. In the 1870s, however, they were happy to call themselves both socialists and social-democrats because those terms were gaining mass appeal, especially in Germany. In the early years of the twentieth century Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky were proud Social Democrats, but after the betrayal of August 1914, when most of the leaders of the Second International supported the imperialist world war, Lenin argued for abandoning the tainted label of social democrat and returning to the name communist. In 1917 the Bolshevik Party as a whole and Trotsky followed suit, as did Luxemburg shortly thereafter. Today no revolutionary socialist would call themselves a social democrat. [3]
In this instance, the context is Andreas Malm’s call for ‘ecological Leninism‘ in his recent book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. Malm is an interesting, provocative and very prolific writer, and this book merits a proper critical review in its own right which takes on board many of his valuable insights, as well as discussing some of his limitations. This article, however, is not a review of the book as a whole, but rather a response specifically to his notion of ‘eco-Leninism’, with which I have a number of issues.
For Malm, the Leninism he invokes is that of the period of ‘War Communism’ in the young Soviet state, roughly 1918 to early 1921. It involves an energetic, highly interventionist state, endowed with dictatorial, even draconian powers to mobilise and direct all of society’s resources and labour to deal with an immense crisis – in Lenin’s case, the Civil War and famine, and in our case, the pandemic and the climate catastrophe.
First of all, I’m unhappy about this presentation of the Lenin of War Communism as the essential Lenin. In general, I would defend Lenin’s actions during this period, but let’s be clear: it constituted only a small part of his political practice as a whole and one which was very much forced on him by immensely difficult circumstances. It is as if a doctor who devoted forty years to saving life, but on one occasion shot a rabid dog who was menacing a patient and was then hailed and remembered as a dog killer. It is particularly unfortunate in that it chimes with and feeds into the dominant mainstream view of Lenin as an authoritarian figure who attempted to ‘impose’ socialism on the working class from above and who seized power in October 1917 in a party coup d’état rather than a workers’ revolution: a view I completely reject. Moreover, the view of Leninism as essentially a certain ‘exemplary attitude to reality’ (Lukács) [4] or a kind of ‘gesture’ (Žižek) [5] is often propounded by people who have abandoned the key political positions Lenin actually fought for, such as the revolutionary role of the working class, the necessity of a revolutionary party and the need to smash the capitalist state. Unfortunately this last point applies to Malm himself, who says ‘the most classical Leninist gesture is the only one that can point to an emergency exit’ [6] while also arguing:
““All historical analogies have their limits and problems, but the analogy of War Communism has so many problems as to make it unhelpful.””
‘We have just argued that the capitalist state is constitutionally incapable of taking these steps. And yet there is no other form of state on offer. No workers’ state based on soviets will miraculously be born in the night. No dual power of the democratic organs of the proletariat seems likely to materialize anytime soon, if ever. Waiting for it would be both delusional and criminal, and so all we have to work with is the dreary bourgeois state, tethered to the circuits of capital as always. There would have to be popular pressure brought to bear on it, shifting the balance of forces condensed in it forcing apparatuses to cut the tethers and begin to move [7] ... but this would clearly be a departure from the classical programme of demolishing the state and building another – one of several elements of Leninism that seem ripe (or over ripe) for their own obituaries’. [8]
Thus, Malm invokes the Lenin of War Communism, but rejects the Lenin of The State and Revolution. This leaves us with a capitalist state as the agent ‒ under pressure from sabotage and mass demonstrations ‒ of making war on pandemics and climate change. This perspective seems to me both internally incoherent (the capitalist state implementing war communism?) and dangerous, in that it may end up giving cover for capitalist authoritarianism, much as it echoes the view of Lenin as a top down authoritarian. It is at least as ‘delusional’ as expecting a workers’ state based on soviets to be ‘miraculously born in the night’ [Has ANYONE ever expected such a thing?] Then the whole argument is supported by the caricature of revolutionaries (Marxists/ Leninists/Trotskyists etc) as ‘waiting for’ the revolution, which has always been one of the lazier justifications for reformism.
All historical analogies have their limits and problems, but the analogy with War Communism has so many problems as to make it very unhelpful. I will not explore them all but will just make two observations. First, it was never Lenin’s or the Bolsheviks’ preferred option as to how to proceed but was forced upon them by a dire necessity – utter devastation of the country by foreign intervention and civil war – and as a very short term measure abandoned in early 1921 because the war was over, and it was driving the peasantry into major revolt. [9] Unlike winning the Civil War, tackling climate change cannot be a short, sharp, one-off hit but will have to be sustained over decades, which War Communism could not be. Second, the terrible problems of War Communism were not confined to great brutality and the alienation of the peasantry. The period also saw (through no fault of Lenin’s but as a result of the economic collapse) the virtual destruction and disappearance of the Russian working class – its ‘dislodgement from its class groove’ as Lenin put it – and this was a major factor in driving the bureaucratisation and Stalinisation of the revolution. In any event ‘War Communism’ is hardly a programme or a prospect we can hold out to the Irish or the international working class as the way forward.
This raises another important question which also has wider implications: who is Malm addressing, and who should we as ecosocialists be addressing? I do not mean by this just who is the specific target readership of this particular book but the wider question of who is the target audience of the ecosocialist project as a whole which is linked to who we identify as the agent for the project’s realisation. For Malm the primary audience he seems to be addressing is a relatively small layer of environmental activists whom he hopes will pressure the bourgeois state into taking the necessary action by means of sabotage, direct action etc. For ecosocialists I believe our primary audience ought to be the working class. I do not mean by this that we should not engage with environmental activists (or students, school students etc.) – of course we should. But in doing so, our aim should be to win such people to a working class perspective because only the mass of the working class, in Ireland and globally, has the power to challenge and overthrow capitalism. Therefore our central goal is to win decisive sections [10] of the working class to a socialist/ecosocialist and revolutionary perspective and we must never lose sight of this.
In this endeavour neither the eco-Leninist label (incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of working class people), nor the notion of War Communism, are in the least bit suitable. Rather, we have to link combating climate change to building a better life for the mass of ordinary people by advancing a positive programme of demands, such as the introduction of free public transport, the mass retro-fitting of homes and the creation of thousands of climate jobs. Which brings me back to the matter of what might be an actually Leninist approach to the environmental crisis. Here, I believe that all Lenin’s core ideas – his commitment to the working class, his internationalism and opposition to imperialism and imperialist war, his insistence on the need to smash the capitalist state, his championing of the oppressed, his grasp of the need to build a revolutionary party rooted in the working class – remain crucial. In 2017 I wrote as follows:
Leave aside for the moment the political polarisation already taking place around the world and the possibility of another recession in the next couple of years, with all the incalculable political and ideological effects that will have. Leave all these things aside and we still face the scientific fact of rapidly intensifying climate change coming down the tracks. Once this reaches beyond a certain point and is grasped as an immediate reality rather than abstract speculation by millions of people, as will happen, this will tear up existing political allegiances as the great recession has done, only on a far greater scale.
““Our central goal is to win decisive sections of the working class to a socialist/ecosocialist and revolutionary perspective and we must never lose sight of this”.”
At present there are a number of extremely simple one line rebuttals of socialism and revolution – you can’t change human nature, nothing ever really changes, revolutions always end in tyranny and the like – which continue to function as ‘common sense’ in Gramsci’s use of the term and which block mass support for revolutionary socialism, despite their intellectual poverty and despite our best efforts to counter them. The reality of climate change will change the terms of the debate. Whether we are talking about taking emergency action to prevent it reaching some runaway tipping point or trying to survive its onset with some measure of human decency, the abandonment of an economic system founded on production for profit will become an absolute necessity. Dealing with the immediate effects of climate change – its storms, floods, fires and desertification – will also push people towards collective action and collective solutions...
Of course there will be an ‘alternative’, at least for a period, and we can already see what that alternative will be: the Trumpian and, ultimately, Hitlerian ‘solution’ of walls and barbed wire and concentration camps and letting climate refugees starve and drown on a scale that dwarfs the carnage we have recently seen in the Mediterranean, while the rich insulate themselves in their gated communities in the uplands...
To avert the barbaric response to climate change it will be necessary, as Lenin understood with unmatched clarity, to build revolutionary workers’ parties, defeat imperialism, smash the state and establish workers’ power. That in turn means finding ways to relate these ideas to working class people where they are at now. [11]
I think that still stands.
Endnotes
[1] I became a Leninist in 1968 and my first book, Marxism and the Party (London, 1978) was an argument for the Leninist theory of the party. In 2017 I published Lenin for Today. See also John Molyneux, ‘In defence of Leninism’, Irish Marxist Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (September 2012), pp. 27-46, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/molyneux/2012/09/lenin.html, accessed 19 August 2021.
[2] See John Molyneux and Jess Spear, What is Ecosocialism? (Dublin, 2020) and John Molyneux, ‘The Case for Ecosocialism’, Irish Marxist Review, vol. 9, no. 28 (2020), pp. 29-34, http://www.irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/386/377, accessed 19 August 2021.
[3] Though, sadly, many of the people who call themselves communists, and even make a big deal of it, are, in fact, social democrats, both in their Kautskyite theory and their political practice.
[4] See Georg Lukács, postscript from 1967 in Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (London, 1970), p. 101. This was not Lukács’s view when he first wrote the book in 1924 when he held that Leninism was a theory of proletarian revolution.
[5] Slavoj Žižek, ‘A Leninist gesture today: against the populist temptation’ in Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: toward a politics of truth (Durham, N.C., 2007), p. 74.
[6] Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London and New York, 2020), p. 148.
[7] This is an unattributed echo of Poulantzas’s theory of the state as a ‘condensation of class forces’ which underpinned the practice of Syriza in Greece. For a critique of this theory see John Molyneux, Lenin for Today (London, 2017), pp. 141-146
[8] Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, p. 151.
[9] The famous Kronstadt Revolt was one manifestation of this.
[10] And ultimately the majority, but that will most likely occur only in the throes of actual revolution. The Bolsheviks only won the majority of the Russian working class in September 1917 after the defeat of the Kornilov coup.
[11] Molyneux, Lenin for Today, pp. 260-261.