(BTW the gangster capitalist Russia of today has an even worse record.)
Louis Proyect wrote:
> 1) "What we today call "environmentalism" is ... based on a fear of
> change," says Frank Furedi. "It's based upon a fear of the outcome of human
> action. And therefore it's not surprising that when you look at the more
> xenophobic right-wing movements in Europe in the 19th century, including
> German fascism, it quite often had a very strong environmentalist dynamic
> to it." Fascism, animal rights and human rights The most notorious
> environmentalists in history were the German Nazis. The Nazis ordered
> soldiers to plant more trees. They were the first Europeans to establish
> nature reserves and order the protection of hedgerows and other wildlife
> habitats. And they were horrified at the idea of hydroelectric dams on the
> Rhine. Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis were vegetarian and they passed
> numerous laws on animal rights.
>
> (The above paragraph is from the transcript of the British channel 4
> documentary "Against Nature," whose political direction came from Furedi's
> Living Marxism magazine. I extracted this passage from Ron Arnold's
> Committee in Defense of Free Enterprise web-page, where the transcript is
> featured as a "guest editorial." Arnold is best known as the leader of the
> "Wise Use" movement, a right-wing anti-environmentalist group. Arnold
> recently contributed an article on the Unabomber to Living Marxism
> magazine. The article claimed that the Unabomber was some kind of deep
> ecologist rather than a crazed terrorist.)
>
> 2) If the forest is a symbol of German nation, then forest die-back is a
> threat to national identity. This association played a key role in sparking
> the contemporary German green movement but it also posed considerable
> difficulty for that movement because it reveals how contemporary ecological
> sensibilities have their roots in traditions that also prompted the Nazis
> to be the "first radical environmentalists in charge of a state".
>
> (David Harvey, "Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference," p. 171)
>
> The fundamental mistake that the "brown" Marxists Frank Furedi and David
> Harvey make is in assuming that the Nazi party introduced nature worship
> into German society. Harvey explicitly cites Alice Bramwell's "Ecology in
> the 20th century: a history," but there is little doubt that she influenced
> Furedi as well. Bramwell devotes considerable effort into making the case
> that Hitler was a prototypical green because he cared about the forests.
> The political implication is that Adolph Hitler is a forerunner to the late
> Judy Bari of Earth First.
>
> This is bonkers. Nature worship in Germany goes back to the origins of
> modern romanticism. It was felt almost everywhere, from the writings of
> Goethe to the symphonies of Mahler. Students at the University of
> Heidelberg had hiking clubs through the entire 19th century. The Social
> Democracy had such clubs as well and they were viewed as an integral part
> of the character development of young Marxists. A recent biography of
> Walter Benjamin points out how important such nature hikes were to him. It
> was part of the general German culture, which influenced the both socialist
> and ultraright parties, including Hitler's.
>
> It is important to understand that the feeling of loss that the industrial
> revolution brought on was very widespread throughout Europe and was not
> peculiar to Germany. Thomas Carlyle articulated this feeling of loss and
> the pre-Raphaelite school was a movement based on such a desire to return
> to pre-industrial roots. Carlye influenced John Ruskin and William Morris,
> two important anti-capitalist thinkers. He also strongly influenced
> Frederic Engels' "Condition of the Working Class in England" and is cited
> frequently.
>
> David Harvey alludes to the apparent ecological concerns of Nazi party
> member Martin Heidegger, who did not want to see nature turned into a
> "gigantic gasoline station." Harvey claims that the slogans of Earth First
> parallel those of Heidegger. Heidegger says nature must be seen as "the
> serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water,
> rising up into plant and animal." Earth First says, "Set the Rivers Free!"
> Ergo, the Nazi functionary and the people who were hounded by the FBI and
> right-wing terrorists had common ideological roots.
>
> The problem with taking a history of ideas approach to these fundamentally
> political questions is that you end up in a pure Platonic world of
> contending Ideas. This is not a sound approach for Marxists, especially
> those with sterling reputations like David Harvey. The simple truth is that
> nearly every philosophical tendency has something to say about the
> environment and how to save it. John Bellamy Foster has pointed this out
> and it is worth repeating. Disciples of Adam Smith are using his doctrines
> as a way of solving the ecological crisis through free market pricing
> mechanisms. They argue that if you adequately price water or soil, then it
> will be conserved properly. The Old Testament becomes contested territory
> as well. Green-minded Jews have defended their holy scripture from the
> charge of being anthropocentric by citing passages which call for
> stewardship of the earth, rather than naked exploitation. These
> philosophical debates, as is their nature, are incapable of being resolved.
> They do serve as grist for academic conferences and journals.
>
> It is much more profitable for those of us in the Marxist tradition to
> concentrate on historical and social phenomena. In that context, there are
> some interesting developments that took place in the first year or so of
> Nazi rule that might be interpreted as having a greenish tinge. I speak now
> of their call for social transformation through a synthesis of urban and
> rural life, which was called "rurban" values by Arthur Schweitzer in his
> "Big Business and the Third Reich." The Nazis promoted the view that the
> class-struggle in the city could be overcome by returning to the villages
> and developing artisan and agricultural economies based on cooperation.
> Ayrans needed to get back to the soil and simple life
>
> The core of Nazi rural socialism was the idea that land-use must be
> planned. Gottfried Feder was a leading Nazi charged with the duty of
> formulating such policy. He made a speech in Berlin in 1934 in which he
> stated that the right to build homes or factories or to use land according
> to the personal interests of owners was to be abolished. The government
> instead would dictate how land was to be used and what would be constructed
> on it. Feder next began to build up elaborate administrative machinery to
> carry out his plans.
>
> Not surprisingly, Feder earned the wrath of the construction industry. This
> segment of heavy industry had no tolerance for any kind of socialism, even
> if it was of the fake, nutty Nazi variety. Hitler had promised the captains
> of heavy industry that the "rabble-rousers" in his party would be curbed
> and Feder certainly fell into that category.
>
> Hjalmar Schacht was a more reliable Nazi functionary who agreed with the
> need to curb Feder's excesses. After Hitler named Schacht Minister of
> Economics on November 26, 1934, he gave Feder the boot assured the
> construction magnates that business would be run as usual.
>
> >From 1934 to 1936, every expression of Nazi radicalism was suppressed.
> After the working-class was tamed in 1933, the petty-bourgeois supporters
> of a "People's Revolution" were purged from the government one by one. The
> real economic program of the big bourgeoisie was rearmament. Any pretense
> at "rural socialism" was dispensed with and the Third Reich's real goal
> became clear: preparation for a new European war. It needed coal, oil and
> other resources from Eastern Europe. It also needed to channel all
> investment into the armaments industry, which could act as a steam-engine
> for general capitalist recovery. In brief, the economic policy of the Nazi
> government started to look not that different from Franklin Roosevelt's. It
> was World War Two, after all, that brought the United States out of the
> Great Depression, not ineffectual public works programs.
>
> So except for the fitful "rurban" experiments of the first 2 years of Nazi
> rule, there was very few actual policies that could be called ecological.
> Does this mean that it is legitimate to describe, as Harvey citing Bramwell
> does, Nazis as being the "first radical environmentalists in charge of a
> state"? This claim turns out to be completely false.
>
> The first radical environmentalists in charge of a state were actually the
> Soviet Communists. Douglas R. Weiner's "Models of Nature: Ecology,
> Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Union" (Indiana Univ.,
> 1988) is, as far as I know, the most detailed account of the efforts of the
> Russian government to implement a "green" policy.
>
> The Communist Party issued a decree "On Land" in 1918. It declared all
> forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a
> prerequisite to rational use. When the journal "Forests of the Republic"
> complained that trees were being chopped down wantonly, the Soviet
> government issued a stern decree "On Forests" at a meeting chaired by Lenin
> in May of 1918. From then on, forests would be divided into an exploitable
> sector and a protected one. The purpose of the protected zones would
> specifically be to control erosion, protect water basins and the
> "preservation of monuments of nature." This last stipulation is very
> interesting when you compare it to the damage that is about to take place
> in China as a result of the Yangtze dam. The beautiful landscapes which
> inspired Chinese artists and poets for millennia is about to disappear, all
> in the name of heightened "productiveness."
>
> What's surprising is that the Soviet government was just as protective of
> game animals as the forests, this despite the revenue-earning possibilities
> of fur. The decree "On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting
> Weapons" was approved by Lenin in May 1919. It banned the hunting of moose
> and wild goats and brought the open seasons in spring and summer to an end.
> These were some of the main demands of the conservationists prior to the
> revolution and the Communists satisfied them completely. The rules over
> hunting were considered so important to Lenin that he took time out from
> deliberations over how to stop the White Armies in order to meet with the
> agronomist Podiapolski.
>
> Podialpolski urged the creation of "zapovedniki", roughly translatable as
> "nature preserves." Russian conservationists had pressed this long before
> the revolution. In such places, there would be no shooting, clearing,
> harvesting, mowing, sowing or even the gathering of fruit. The argument was
> that nature must be left alone. These were not even intended to be tourist
> meccas. They were intended as ecological havens where all species, flora
> and fauna would maintain the "natural equilibrium [that] is a crucial
> factor in the life of nature."
>
> Podiapolski recalls the outcome of the meeting with Lenin:
>
> "Having asked me some questions about the military and political situation
> in the Astrakhan' region, Vladimir Ilich expressed his approval for all of
> our initiatives and in particular the one concerning the project for the
> zapovednik. He stated that the cause of conservation was important not only
> for the Astrakhan krai [does anybody know what this means?], but for the
> whole republic as well."
>
> Podiapolski sat down and drafted a resolution that eventually was approved
> by the Soviet government in September 1921 with the title "On the
> Protection of Nature, Gardens, and Parks." A commission was established to
> oversee implementation of the new laws. It included a
> geographer-anthropologist, a mineralogist, two zoologists, an ecologist.
> Heading it was Vagran Ter-Oganesov, a Bolshevik astronomer who enjoyed
> great prestige.
>
> The commission first established a forest zapovednik in Astrakhan,
> according to Podiapolski's desires Next it created the Ilmenski zapovednik,
> a region which included precious minerals. Despite this, the Soviet
> government thought that Miass deposits located there were much more
> valuable for what they could teach scientists about geological processes.
> Scientific understanding took priority over the accumulation of capital.
> The proposal was endorsed by Lenin himself who thought that pure scientific
> research had to be encouraged. And this was at a time when the Soviet Union
> was desperate for foreign currency.
>
> Under Lenin, the USSR stood for the most audacious approach to nature
> conservancy in the 20th century. Soviet agencies set aside vast portions of
> the country where commercial development, including tourism, would be
> banned. These "zapovedniki", or natural preserves, were intended for
> nothing but ecological study. Scientists sought to understand natural
> biological processes better through these living laboratories. This would
> serve pure science and it would also have some ultimate value for Soviet
> society's ability to interact with nature in a rational manner. For
> example, natural pest elimination processes could be adapted to agriculture.
>
> After Lenin's death, there were all sorts of pressures on the Soviet Union
> to adapt to the norms of the capitalist system that surrounded and hounded
> it and produce for profit rather than human need. This would have included
> measures to remove the protected status of the zapovedniki. Surprisingly,
> the Soviet agencies responsible for them withstood such pressures and even
> extended their acreage through the 1920s.
>
> One of the crown jewels was the Askania-Nova zapovednik in the Ukranian
> steppes. The scientists in charge successfully resisted repeated bids by
> local commissars to extend agriculture into the area through the end of the
> 1920s. Scientists still enjoyed a lot of prestige in the Soviet republic,
> despite a growing move to make science cost-justify itself. Although pure
> science would eventually be considered "bourgeois", the way it was in the
> Chinese Cultural Revolution, it could stand on its own for the time being.
>
> The head administrator of Askania-Nova was Vladimir Stanchinksi, a
> biologist who sought to make the study of ecology an exact science through
> the use of quantitative methods, including mathematics and statistics. He
> identified with scientists in the West who had been studying predator-prey
> and parasite-host relationships with laws drawn from physics and chemistry.
> (In this he was actually displaying an affinity with Karl Marx, who also
> devoted a number of years to the study of agriculture using the latest
> theoretical breakthroughs in the physical sciences and agronomy. Marx's
> study led him to believe that capitalist agriculture is detrimental to
> sound agricultural practices.)
>
> Stanchinski adopted a novel approach to ecology. He thought that "the
> quantity of living matter in the biosphere is directly dependent on the
> amount of solar energy that is transformed by autotrophic plants." Such
> plants were the "economic base of the living world." He invoked the Second
> Law of Thermodynamics to explain the variations in mass between flora and
> fauna at the top, middle and bottom of the biosphere. Energy was lost as
> each rung in the ladder was scaled, since more and more work was necessary
> to procure food.
>
> This interesting slice of Soviet history is completely ignored in David
> Harvey's book, as is history in general. This is unfortunate. The only way
> to make sense of the environmental movements of the 20th century is within
> the context of the class struggle and not within the history of ideas. I am
> not sure why Harvey elected to take this approach, but it tends to
> decontextualize everything.
>
> There is a strong case for the intrinsic ties between Marxian socialism and
> the ecology movement, but that is a subject for other articles and books.
> Harvey's attempt to drive a wedge between the greens and Marxism is tied to
> a workerish impulse that has marked the extreme left over the past 25
> years. Whether it comes from Living Marxism or the Spartacist League, it is
> grounded in a dogmatic understanding of Marxism. It is disconcerting to see
> one of our premier Marxist thinkers echoing these sorts of "brownish"
> sentiments, but we can understand their origin. We are living in a deeply
> disorienting period as global capital seems unconquerable. Therefore, any
> evidence of capitalist engagement with a democratic demand such as
> affirmative action or clean air and water can tend to make us suspicious of
> the demand itself. This is not Marxism. It is sectarianism and must be fought.
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)