Ecology: The Heavy Legacy of Leon Trotsky

First Time In English & With A New Postscript

By Daniel Tanuro

Monday, August 23, 2010

For more than twenty years, revolutionary Marxists have been questioning themselves: was their missed appointment with ecology, in the 60s to 90s of the last century, attributable to Marx and Engels? If so, to what extent? Hundreds of pages have been written on the subject. Although the thesis of a "Marx ecology," defended by J.B. Foster, is somewhat excessive, no one dares to seriously maintain anymore that the authors of the Communist Manifesto were productivists who fetishized technology and had no idea of natural limits...

Why did their environmental concerns find so little echo afterward? The victory of the revolution in a peripheral country – combining the demands of what was called "rattrapage" ("catch-up" to the level of development of the central capitalist countries, translator's note) and the new possibilities of a centralized policy aimed at radical transformation – was certainly responsible for much of the monstrous damage of Stalinist productivism. However, it would be wrong to attribute everything to the Stalinization of the USSR: the enthusiasm about the possibility that science might be put at the service of progressive transformations was undoubtedly not for nothing in the unlimited techno-scientific optimism – quite removed from Marx's prudence – expressed notably by Leon Trotsky. It is important to return to this.

After putting ecological issues on the agenda for several years without giving them sufficient weight, the Fourth International adopted a resolution "Ecology and Socialism" in February 2003 [1]. In 2010, it adopted a specific resolution on climate change and declared itself in favor of ecosocialism [2]. Following this line, the movement should dot the i's: its founder had the immense merit of opposing Stalinism, which allowed the transmission of the Marxist-revolutionary heritage to the post-war generations. Unfortunately, the legacy was incomplete: the tools elaborated by Marx and Engels for an understanding of the metabolism between humanity and nature were not part of it. This article has no other purpose than to note this and explain it, in the hope of contributing to deepening the ecologization of Marxism.

A Very Dominating Domination

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were also spreading scrofula." [3]

Among other reflections, this long citation from Engels shows that the founders of Marxism had a dialectical vision of progress in humanity's capacity to transform the environment. Trotsky presents a different tone. In a work dated 1923, the founder of the Red Army writes:

"The present distribution of mountains, rivers, fields, meadows, steppes, forests and seashores cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But these are mere student essays in comparison with what is coming. Faith only promised to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing 'on faith,' is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done on the basis of industrial considerations – mines, tunnels, etc. In the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to more far-reaching industrial and artistic plans. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad. (...) Socialist man will master the whole of nature (...) by means of the machine. He will point out places for mountains and for the courses of rivers, and will lay down rules for the oceans." [4]

It is true that Trotsky, when he wrote these lines, had not read The Dialectics of Nature, which was published in 1925 (in German). But this work was accessible to the Bolshevik leaders from 1920-21, since Engels' manuscripts were in the custody of the German Social Democrats who had handed them over to the Russian party after the October Revolution [5]. Moreover, it should be noted that even in 1923, the very year of Literature and Revolution, Trotsky could have been inspired by numerous texts by Marx and Engels on the subject of the human-nature relationship.

In particular, he could have taken note of Marx's warning about "a rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism" – the first formulation of the concept that would later evolve into what we know today as the "ecological crisis." As early as 1866, Marx wrote to Engels: "(...) we have the irrefutable proof, based on geology, etc., that after a certain period the earth itself must die a natural death... But I consider it very important that Liebig's [...] negative aspects should be popularized. Moreover, apart from the influence of the depletion of the forests, etc. [...] on the springs, etc., the fact that cultivation, when it proceeds in a natural way and is not consciously controlled [...] leaves deserts behind it (Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece)" [7].

But the idea that such gigantic upheavals could have perverse effects was never outlined in his subsequent texts, until his death in 1940.

The transports of this type are not limited to the pages where Trotsky exercises in political fiction. In Culture and Socialism (1927), he supports without reservation the construction of the Dneprostroi hydroelectric dam – "gigantic but not fantastic" – and evokes with lyrical accents the Shatura power plant, which burns enormous masses of peat to produce electricity [5]. One should ask whether these development projects could have been replaced by others, ecologically less aggressive at that time. The answer is far from evident... Indeed, to avoid anachronism, one must take into account the enormous difficulties of Soviet power: after four years of war and three years of civil war, with the reflux of world revolution being a reality, it is clear that the USSR – backward, starved, exhausted, isolated and surrounded by imperialism – had to take off economically and could not have done so without carrying out a certain number of heavy investments, particularly in the energy field with the means it had. Another element of the context: the immensity of the country and its natural resources did not particularly encourage worry about the environmental consequences of this or that polluting industrial installation. But this does not exhaust the question at all. Indeed, some scientists not hostile to the regime, including some members of the Communist Party, contested these projects, and did so within the framework of official organs [6]. Yet their objections found no echo with Trotsky: even when he was responsible for the USSR's scientific institutions in 1925, he did not even allude to them, let alone respond to them.

Independently of the historical context, it must be noted that Trotsky does not have quite the same conception of the "domination of nature" as Marx, Engels, and even Lenin. Here, for example, is the continuation of the passage from Engels cited at the beginning of this article: "The facts remind us at every step that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature, but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." This is clear: humanity can only "dominate" nature to the extent that a good student dominates his examination subject! Trotsky obviously never claimed the contrary, otherwise he would not be a materialist. But his vision of "domination" is clearly more... dominating – one is tempted to say: macho. Above all, it ignores the negative feedback effects of progress, when this phenomenon was already well known at the time.

Science and Technology: Unbridled Optimism

This brings us to examine more closely the way Trotsky sees scientific progress. As is known, the idea that triumphant science was in the process of elucidating all the mysteries of the universe one after another was very widespread at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It was the spirit of the times. The founders of Marxism did not always escape it completely. However, Marx, who did not have a linear vision of progress, deeply despised what he called "this shit of positivism" [7]. As for Engels, here is how he settles the question of absolute knowledge, of sovereign science: "The sovereignty of thought is realized in a series of men whose thinking is extremely unsovereign, and the cognition which has an unconditional claim to truth is realized in a series of relative errors; neither the one nor the other can be fully realized except through an endless duration of human life. (...) We have here once again the same contradiction that we met with earlier in regard to the character of human thought, necessarily represented as absolute, and its reality in individual men of obviously limited thinking; this is a contradiction which can only be resolved in infinite progress, in the succession, at least practically infinite for us, of human generations. In this sense human thought is as sovereign as it is not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge is as unlimited as it is limited" [8]. Lenin takes up the same idea in simpler terms: "We shall approach objective truth (without however ever exhausting it)" [9].

Trotsky is less prudent. In 1925, when he is president of the Scientific and Technical Council of Industry and therefore responsible for all Soviet scientific institutions, he speaks before an audience of chemists. His speech praises, based on "techno-scientific optimism," the great Russian scientist Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table of elements. Lev Davidovich expresses himself with transport: "Mendeleev's faith in the unlimited possibilities of science, foresight and mastery of matter must become the common scientific faith of the chemists of the socialist homeland. Through the mouth of one of its scholars, Du Bois-Reymond, the social class that is leaving the historical stage confides to us its philosophical motto: 'Ignoramus, ignorabimus!' that is, 'We do not understand, we shall never learn!' Lie, responds scientific thought which links its fate to that of the ascending class. The unknowable does not exist for science. We shall understand everything! We shall learn everything! We shall rebuild everything!" [10]

The will to give the masses and militants confidence in their capacity to take their fate into their own hands is a constant in Trotsky, and sometimes expresses itself in a somewhat excessive manner. But here there is more. Indeed, his enthusiasm for Mendeleev is motivated, in particular, by the fact that the techno-scientific optimism of the great scientist served as a basis for his struggle against the Malthusians. It is understandable that Trotsky wanted to support Mendeleev on this point. However, to confront the Principle of Population, Marx had no need of a faith in the unlimited possibilities of science: he contented himself with noting by reductio ad absurdum that it would simply be impossible for population to exceed the food capacities of the environment and that, if Malthus had been right, that is, if there had been an insurmountable contradiction between exponential population growth and linear growth of agricultural production, then the first man on earth would already have been one too many. Arguments of this type were sufficient for him to demonstrate that the pastor Malthus was doing pseudo-science and that his theories were in fact nothing more than a cynical, repugnant and hypocritical plea against assistance to the poor.

We have here again the same contradiction found earlier between the character of human thought, necessarily represented as absolute, and its reality in individual men of obviously limited thought; it is a contradiction that can only be resolved in infinite progress, in the succession, practically at least infinite for us, of human generations. In this sense human thought is as sovereign as it is not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge is as unlimited as it is limited" [8]. Lenin takes up the same idea in simpler terms: "We shall approach objective truth (without however ever exhausting it)" [9].

A Very Linear Vision of Progress

If technology, in general, were a fundamental conquest of humanity, today's anti-capitalists should inscribe in their program the socialist implementation of GMOs, animal cloning and nuclear energy. This is indeed what certain Marxist currents do: for them, the dangers of these technologies derive uniquely from capitalist relations of production, so that workers' control over production would be enough to eliminate them. The example of nuclear fission shows that this is an illusion: once the reaction is launched, no control, worker or bourgeois, can stop it. Genetic engineering presents analogous risks. It is therefore the technology itself that is at issue, not just the organization of production.

In Trotsky's defense, it should be emphasized that the possible dangers of technologies known in 1927 had little in common with current perils. This is indisputable. But, on the other hand, this passage contains in our opinion two serious theoretical errors of broader scope, which are far from being explained by the historical and technological context:

1°) Trotsky reasons as if, at each level of scientific knowledge, there corresponded a technological path, and only one. Yet history provides numerous examples of choices, and even technological crossroads [13]. This reality was known at the time. Trotsky should have been aware of it; it would have enriched his condemnation of capitalism. Unfortunately, while he has an open vision of the possibilities of social evolution, his vision of technologies is inscribed in a schema of unilinear development;

2°) Trotsky seems to consider here that the social organization of production (classes) and material productive forces (including technology) are separated by a Great Wall of China. While technology is nothing other than the application of sciences to production, he does not seem to integrate the fact that a culture of domination can engender technologies intrinsically dominating at the level of the productive apparatus. For him, capitalism's tendency to develop more and more destructive forces, instead of productive forces, is concretized essentially in the military-police barbarism of imperialism in general, and fascism in particular. On this point, his conception is narrower than that of the founders of Marxism who, in The German Ideology, cite machinery and money as destructive forces [14].

In this methodological framework, it is not surprising that Trotsky expresses no reservations about technologies, whatever they may be. In fact, nothing in him resembles remotely the precautionary principle. He does indeed evoke "the social contradiction included in technology itself," but the hope that this formula raises in today's reader immediately falls. Indeed, as an example, the author cites... first, second and third class carriages in railways! Now, in this case, the social contradiction is obviously not "included in technology itself": it derives from the social use made of it.

The reader experiences another hot and cold of this kind when Trotsky counterposes the fact that revolutionaries must break the state apparatus to the fact that they "must not break technology": "The proletariat takes possession of factories equipped by the bourgeoisie and it does so in the form in which the revolution found them." Then comes the promising sentence: "However, in the form in which we took it, this old technology is completely inappropriate for socialism." Alas! once again, it is not technology properly speaking that is targeted, but the social mode of its implementation, because this concretizes "competition between enterprises, the race for profit, uneven development of separate branches, the backwardness of certain regions, the small scale of agricultural exploitation, the waste of human resources" [15].

Socialist Eugenics, Socialist Alchemy... and Lysenko?

A particularly troubling point is that his techno-scientific optimism leads Trotsky onto the slippery terrain of eugenics (very fashionable at the beginning of the century) and the selection of the socialist superman. In the conclusion of his pamphlet If America Should Go Communist (1934), he makes a clumsy attempt to oppose a socialist eugenics to the eugenics of the Nazis: "While the romantic fools of Nazi Germany dream of restoring the old race of the dark forests of Europe in its purity, or rather in its original filth, you Americans, after firmly taking your economic machine and your culture in hand, will apply original scientific methods to the problems of eugenics. Within a century, your melting pot of races will have given birth to a new variety of men – the only one worthy of the name of Man" [16]. We can only salute the antiracism of the statement, but what are these "original scientific methods" doing here and what do the "problems of eugenics" consist of?

The idea of a socialist superman artificially and scientifically selected returns several times in Trotsky's work: ten years earlier, the last chapter of Literature and Revolution ended thus: "Finally, man will begin seriously to harmonize his own being. He will aim to obtain greater precision, discernment, economy, and consequently beauty in the movements of his own body, at work, in walking, at play. He will want to master the semi-conscious and unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, blood circulation, digestion, reproduction. And, within the inevitable limits, he will seek to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Homo sapiens, now frozen, will treat himself as the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical exercises. (...) Man will strive to command his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the height of consciousness and make them transparent, to direct his will into the darkness of the unconscious. By this he will raise himself to a higher level and create a superior biological and social type, a superman, if you will." (our emphasis)

That is not all. Indeed, his approach to technology leads Trotsky to assert peremptorily that the old dream of the alchemists can be realized: "Chemistry is, above all, the science of the transmutation of elements," he declares at the Mendeleev congress. He returns to the subject a year later: "The kinship of elements and their mutual metamorphoses can be considered as empirically proven from the moment when, with the help of radioactive elements, it became possible to resolve the atom into its components."

The contrast is striking. Marx's reasoning is concrete, dialectical. That of Trotsky takes the form of a profession of faith in Science with a capital S, in technological Progress with a capital P. In Capital, Marx emphasizes that capitalist production "disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil" [11]. For Marx, the solution to this disruption does not reside in the unlimited development of the productive forces, but in the transition to a mode of production that permits "the rationally regulated interchange of organic metabolism between man and nature" under "conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature."

For Trotsky, on the other hand, "the machine" – technology – seems to be the magic solution to all problems: "Socialist man will master the whole of nature (...) by means of the machine" [12]. This fetishization of technology is all the more surprising because it contrasts with the quality of his analysis in all other domains, notably political analysis. It seems that in this case, the founder of the Red Army let himself be carried away by the futurist enthusiasm of the era.

The productive forces express materially man's economic competence, his historical capacity to ensure his own existence. Classes grow on this dynamic foundation, and their mutual relations determine the character of culture." "Technology is a fundamental conquest of humanity (...). The machine strangles the wage slave. But the wage slave can only be liberated by the machine. There lies the root of the whole question." [12] There lies on the contrary the root of the error!

A Harmonious Development... and Nature?

But let us leave science and technology there, and address the general question of global relations between humanity and nature. In this matter, Karl Marx produced a remarkable concept: the rational regulation of the exchange of matter (or social metabolism) between humanity and nature as the only possible freedom. As is known, Marx had arrived at this conclusion from Liebig's work on soil depletion, because industrialization, favoring rural exodus, interrupted the cycle of nutrients. Armed with this concept, Marx had returned to the soil problem to see in its degradation an additional reason to abolish the separation between city and countryside.

These developments occupy only a relatively limited place in Capital, but they had not escaped the Marxist theorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx, Lenin responds to authors who consider that the invention of synthetic fertilizers makes Marx's analysis obsolete: "The possibility of replacing natural fertilizers with artificial ones (...) does not at all refute the irrationality of wasting natural fertilizers thereby polluting the rivers and air in industrial districts" [18]. In his popularization work, The Theory of Historical Materialism. A Manual of Marxist Sociology, Bukharin makes a synthesis of the concept of "social metabolism," and adorns it with pertinent considerations on the possibility of estimating the social productivity of labor by reducing different activities to their common denominator: energy expenditure [19].

And Trotsky? Of all these questions, the only one that seems to interest him is that of the abolition of the separation between cities and countryside. Moreover, he addresses it exclusively through the struggle against "rural idiocy" (Marx's formula). He does not mention the soil problem. The abolition of the separation between cities and countryside, for him, means more green spaces in cities, on the one hand, and the industrialization of agricultural production in the framework of gigantic farms, on the other. One must be honest and say that this conception was shared by all the Marxists of the time; undoubtedly, it could not be otherwise at the stage of development of the economy and society. At least Kautsky, in The Agrarian Question, had brought to light certain negative effects of land concentration and mechanization [20]. Nothing similar in Trotsky: it is unilaterally positive. In Culture and Socialism, after having praised the Fordist assembly line, he writes that "gigantic systems of land improvement – through adequate irrigation and drainage – are the assembly lines of agriculture. In addition to chemistry, machine building and electrification free soil cultivation from the action of the elements, thus making it possible for the current village economy to be integrated into the socialist assembly line that coordinates all production."

The vision developed in these pages unfortunately illustrates the worst caricatures about socialism as liberator of productive forces imprisoned by capitalist fetters: "Even in America, capitalism is clearly incapable of raising agriculture to the level of industry. This task falls entirely to socialism." Further on, Trotsky details the two processes that concur in his opinion in the industrialization of agriculture:

– first, the specialization and industrialization of a whole series of production processes that are today between village economy and industry ("The example of the United States shows the unlimited possibilities that are before us," he comments);

– secondly, "the industrialization of the production of crops, livestock breeding, horticulture, etc. (...) It is not enough to socialize, we must extract agriculture from its current state by replacing the current superficial plowing of the soil (today's squalid digging around in the soil) with scientifically organized wheat and barley factories, with cattle and sheep factories, etc."

The rupture of the nutrient cycle is not evoked. Trotsky writes that "the principle of socialist economy is harmony," but he has in mind only the harmony resulting from internal coordination, according to the principle of the Fordist assembly line. Unlike Marx, he shows no understanding of the need to tend toward greater harmony in the relations between economy and nature...

By Way of Provisional Conclusion

One should never insist too much on the need to take the historical context into account. We have already evoked the general framework: the USSR bloodless, surrounded, isolated, etc. But another element, more precise, is the debate undertaken within the Soviet party on how to respond to this difficult situation. From 1923-24, faced with the reflux of world revolution and the demobilization of the Russian working class, two alternative orientations are drawn with increasing clarity:

• that of "socialism in one country," which is built "at a snail's pace," defended by Bukharin and Stalin, who renounce in fact the extension of the revolution and count on the enrichment of the countryside to give the regime the means to build a hypothetical new society. Until the 180° turn of forced collectivization and the first five-year plan, it translates into a total lack of vision on the needs of industrial development.

• and that of Trotsky, who sees in the planned development of nationalized heavy industry the means for the Soviet regime to hold without degenerating while waiting for and favoring a new rise of struggles on an international scale. Faced with a Stalin who stupidly declares that "Russia has as much need for a dam on the Dnieper as a muzhik for a phonograph" [21], for Trotsky, it is indispensable to develop an industry capable of providing the means for development of the countryside while favoring class differentiation within the peasant population. As early as April 1923, in the Theses on Industry that he presented to the 12th Congress of the Communist Party, he explained that this was a question of life or death for the regime [22].

The facts have shown the fundamental correctness of this last analysis. Given the enormity of what was at stake and the increasingly brutal methods of the Stalin-Bukharin faction, it is not surprising that Trotsky sometimes "bent the stick in the other direction," according to a famous expression. Let us note, however, in his defense, that in doing so, he was simply faithful to the technicist and modernist culture of the era, which was that of the entire Bolshevik leadership and which found its artistic expression in the futurist current [23].

However, as we have seen, the historical context does not explain everything. On a series of questions such as the "domination of nature," the perspectives of transformation that derive from it, absolute scientific truth, the status of technologies, etc., we note that Trotsky is behind in relation to certain clearly more nuanced positions of Marx, Engels, and even Lenin. A very surprising point is that some reasoning about scientific or technical development appeals to dialectics as a kind of transcendent meta-theory. This conception of dialectics is completely opposed to the one that Trotsky operates when he analyzes social and political phenomena.

On the other hand, very often, the tone of the texts cited in this article leaves an unpleasant impression of dominating arrogance, even contempt, not only for wild nature but also for what is natural, physiological, uncontrolled in human beings. This point is more important than it appears. Indeed, Trotsky's very dominating version of the "domination of nature" and the imperative discourse that flows from it leave no room for the thought of "caring for" what exists, whereas this is indispensable for the development of an ecological consciousness and practice.

Leon Trotsky is a great internationalist revolutionary and a brilliant thinker. We owe him notably the analysis of fascism, that of bureaucracy, and the theory of permanent revolution. By founding the Fourth International when it was almost "midnight in the century," he allowed the transfer of the Marxist-revolutionary heritage to subsequent generations. To read Trotsky is to touch with one's fingers the reality of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International, of the revolutionary wave at the end of the First World War and its reflux. It is to understand fascism and Stalinism, the popular front, the Spanish revolution and the Canton commune, the decline of the British empire and the rise of American imperialism. In a word, it is to understand the 20th century and to assimilate programmatic and methodological elements absolutely indispensable for the development of an anti-capitalist orientation in the 21st century.

But every medal has its reverse side. In Trotsky, ecological consciousness is at degree zero. In the legacy that he transmitted to his successors were missing the few brilliantly precursory tools of ecosocialism, such as Marx and Engels had developed them. Ultimate irony: of all the October leaders, the only one who attached some importance to the concept of rational regulation of the social metabolism between humanity and nature was the leader of the right wing, the theorist of the enrichment of the kulaks and of socialism in one country, Stalin's stepping-stone: Bukharin. This is not enough to make him an ecosocialist theorist, far from it (we will return to this), but it is a fact, and this fact could only contribute to explaining that the revolutionary Marxists of the post-war period lost the thread of "Marx's ecology."

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P.S. - This critique of Trotsky's ecological limitations should not be mistaken for a rejection of his revolutionary legacy. On the contrary, it is precisely because Trotsky's contributions to Marxist theory and practice remain indispensable that we must confront his blind spots honestly. The very deep and dangerous perturbation of the metabolism between society and the rest of nature—manifest not only in climate disruption but in biodiversity collapse, soil degradation, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, and the wholesale disruption of planetary cycles—demands that twenty-first century revolutionaries integrate ecological consciousness into our strategic thinking from the outset, rather than treating it as an afterthought to be addressed "after the revolution."

The irony is striking: Trotsky, the theorist of permanent revolution who understood that socialism could not be built in isolation from international struggle, failed to grasp that socialism also cannot be built in isolation from the rational regulation of social metabolism that Marx identified as essential to human freedom. Today's ecosocialists must synthesize his insights about uneven and combined development with an understanding of the material interdependence between human society and natural systems—recognizing that the revolution must be simultaneously international and ecological, or it will be neither.

Revolutionary organizations worldwide now have access to both Marx's ecological insights and 150 years of additional evidence about capitalism's systematically destructive relationship with the biosphere. We have no excuse for reproducing Trotsky's technological fetishism or his domineering vision of humanity's relationship with nature. The task before us is to build a revolutionary movement that is as uncompromising in its opposition to the metabolic rift as it is to capitalist exploitation—understanding these as two faces of the same system that must be overthrown root and branch.

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Daniel Tanuro

Originally published on the LCR (Belgium) website: http://www.lcr-lagauche.be/cm/index.php?view=article&id=1739:ecologien-le-lourd-heritage-de-leon-trotsky&option=com_content&Itemid=53

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Notes:

[1] Fourth International, Ecology and Socialism, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article7892.

[2] Fourth International, Resolution: Climate Tipping Point and Our Tasks, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article16635

[3] F. Engels, The Dialectics of Nature, Paris, Editions Sociales, 1968, pp. 180-181.

[4] Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution.

[5] Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism, 1927 (our translation).

[6] Douglas R. Weiner, Models of nature. Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia.

[7] Karl MARX, Letter to Engels of July 7, 1866.

[8] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp.136-137.

[9] Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 147.

[10] L. Trotsky, Mendeleev and Marxism, speech at the Mendeleev Congress, September 17, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive.

[11] Marx, Capital, I, Chap XXVIII, Garnier Flammarion 1969 p.546 — our emphasis.

[12] L. Trotsky, Culture and Socialism, op. cit. Marxists Internet Archive (our emphasis).

[13] In the key domain of energy, for example, from the second half of the 19th century, some engineers advocated that the sun replace coal as a source. These were not just ideas in the air: efficient solar machines were effectively developed in a whole series of application domains. If this energy sector had taken off, it would have changed the face of the world. But it did not take off at all, not for technical reasons, and not even always for efficiency-cost reasons, but mainly because the coal monopolies already had the power to lock up innovation, in order to maintain their super-profits (cf. D. Tanuro, The Impossible Green Capitalism).

[14] Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, Marxists Internet Archive.

[15] L. Trotsky, Culture and socialism, op. cit.

[16] L. Trotsky, If America Should Go Communist, Marxists Internet Archive (our translation).

[17] L. Trotsky, Radio, science, technique and society, 1926 Marxists Internet Archive (our translation).

[18] Lenin, The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx, chapter IV, Marxists Internet Archive.

[19] Bukharin, The Theory of Historical Materialism. A Manual of Marxist Sociology, ed. Anthropos, Paris, 1967. The English version (Historical Materialism. A System of Sociology) is available at www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/library.htm

[20] Kautsky, The Agrarian Question, facsimile reprint Maspéro, Paris 1970.

[21] Cited by M. Liebmann, Between History and Politics. Ten Portraits, ed. Aden, Brussels 2006.

[22] L. Trotsky, Theses on Industry, Marxists Internet Archive.

[23] It is striking that most of Trotsky's texts where he expresses himself on nature have culture as their main theme. Indeed, but this exceeds both the limits of this article and the competencies of its author, his way of apprehending nature is very closely linked to his conceptions of art. This appears notably in his lyrical evocation of the Shatura thermal power plant as an object of art (a thing of beauty).

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Postscript (2025)

This critique of Trotsky's ecological limitations should not be mistaken for a rejection of his revolutionary legacy. On the contrary, it is precisely because Trotsky's contributions to Marxist theory and practice remain indispensable that we must confront his blind spots honestly. The very deep and dangerous perturbation of the metabolism between society and the rest of nature—manifest not only in climate disruption but in biodiversity collapse, soil degradation, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, and the wholesale disruption of planetary cycles—demands that twenty-first century revolutionaries integrate ecological consciousness into our strategic thinking from the outset, rather than treating it as an afterthought to be addressed "after the revolution."

The irony is striking: Trotsky, the theorist of permanent revolution who understood that socialism could not be built in isolation from international struggle, failed to grasp that socialism also cannot be built in isolation from the rational regulation of social metabolism that Marx identified as essential to human freedom. Today's ecosocialists must synthesize his insights about uneven and combined development with an understanding of the material interdependence between human society and natural systems—recognizing that the revolution must be simultaneously international and ecological, or it will be neither.

Revolutionary organizations worldwide now have access to both Marx's ecological insights and 150 years of additional evidence about capitalism's systematically destructive relationship with the biosphere. We have no excuse for reproducing Trotsky's technological fetishism or his domineering vision of humanity's relationship with nature. The task before us is to build a revolutionary movement that is as uncompromising in its opposition to the metabolic rift as it is to capitalist exploitation—understanding these as two faces of the same system that must be overthrown root and branch.

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Notes:

[1] Fourth International, Ecology and Socialism, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article7892.

[2] Fourth International, Resolution: Climate Tipping Point and Our Tasks, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article16635

[3] F. Engels, The Dialectics of Nature, Paris, Editions Sociales, 1968, pp. 180-181.

[4] Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution.

[5] Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism, 1927 (our translation).

[6] Douglas R. Weiner, Models of nature. Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia.

[7] Karl MARX, Letter to Engels of July 7, 1866.

[8] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp.136-137.

[9] Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 147.

[10] L. Trotsky, Mendeleev and Marxism, speech at the Mendeleev Congress, September 17, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive.

[11] Marx, Capital, I, Chap XXVIII, Garnier Flammarion 1969 p.546 — our emphasis.

[12] L. Trotsky, Culture and Socialism, op. cit. Marxists Internet Archive (our emphasis).

[13] In the key domain of energy, for example, from the second half of the 19th century, some engineers advocated that the sun replace coal as a source. These were not just ideas in the air: efficient solar machines were effectively developed in a whole series of application domains. If this energy sector had taken off, it would have changed the face of the world. But it did not take off at all, not for technical reasons, and not even always for efficiency-cost reasons, but mainly because the coal monopolies already had the power to lock up innovation, in order to maintain their super-profits (cf. D. Tanuro, The Impossible Green Capitalism).

[14] Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, Marxists Internet Archive.

[15] L. Trotsky, Culture and socialism, op. cit.

[16] L. Trotsky, If America Should Go Communist, Marxists Internet Archive (our translation).

[17] L. Trotsky, Radio, science, technique and society, 1926 Marxists Internet Archive (our translation).

[18] Lenin, The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx, chapter IV, Marxists Internet Archive.

[19] Bukharin, The Theory of Historical Materialism. A Manual of Marxist Sociology, ed. Anthropos, Paris, 1967.

[20] Kautsky, The Agrarian Question, facsimile reprint Maspéro, Paris 1970.

[21] Cited by M. Liebmann, Between History and Politics. Ten Portraits, ed. Aden, Brussels 2006.

[22] L. Trotsky, Theses on Industry, Marxists Internet Archive.

[23] It is striking that most of Trotsky's texts where he expresses himself on nature have culture as their main theme. Indeed, but this exceeds both the limits of this article and the competencies of its author, his way of apprehending nature is very closely linked to his conceptions of art. This appears notably in his lyrical evocation of the Shatura thermal power plant as an object of art (a thing of beauty).

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Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to Faustino Eguberri, who translated this into Castilian for viento sur, and to Editora Movimento, which translated it into Portuguese for Revista Movimento. This translation, by the Red Mole Substack, follows their choices when translating from the original in French. Many thanks to the author for reviewing the English translation and postscript.