Guest post by ATRI BHATTACHARYA

[Given Kafila’s deep interest in the question of climate change, environmental crisis and the explorations of possible pathways out of it,  we publish this piece by Atri Bhattacharya who  attempts a synthesis of different kinds of thinking emerging on the Left, globally today, which point towards different kinds of postcapitalist imaginations.]

The contemporary environmental crisis presents what appears to be an existential paradox: how can human societies organize production, consumption, and habitation without systematically destroying the ecological systems that sustain them? The four texts under examination—Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro’s analysis of socialist states and ecosocialism, Amy Zhang’s ethnographic study of waste politics in Guangzhou, Sam Mickey’s philosophical meditation on whole earth thinking, and Mathew Lawrence with Laurie Laybourn-Langton’s ecosocialist manifesto—offer divergent yet potentially complementary responses to this question. Taken together, they reveal that the relationship between political economy and ecological degradation is neither simple nor uniform. While Engel-Di Mauro argues that socialist states demonstrated environmental records superior to their capitalist counterparts (Engel-Di Mauro 2021, 126-127), Zhang’s meticulous fieldwork exposes how Chinese state-socialism has produced what she terms “sustainability by dispossession” (Zhang 2024, 65). Mickey, approaching from a different trajectory altogether, suggests that ecological wisdom requires transcending the very categories of state and capital through what he calls “anthropocosmic” consciousness (Mickey 2015, 83-95). Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton, meanwhile, offer a practical political program—ecosocialism—that seeks to dismantle capitalist power while building democratic, planetary alternatives (Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton 2021, 80-102).

This essay argues that despite their apparent disagreements, these texts collectively demonstrate that no existing political-economic system has resolved the fundamental contradiction between human social organization and ecological sustainability. More importantly, they reveal that the conditions for genuine ecological transformation require simultaneously: (1) democratic control over production and consumption; (2) recognition of non-human agency and intrinsic value; (3) transnational solidarity that refuses both colonial extraction and nationalist closure; and (4) a cultural-ontological shift in how humans understand their place within planetary systems. The essay proceeds in four sections: first, examining the contested legacy of actually existing socialist states; second, analyzing Zhang’s critique of Chinese environmental governance; third, exploring Mickey’s philosophical resources for ecological transformation; and fourth, evaluating Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton’s ecosocialist program as a synthetic proposal.

The Contested Legacy of Socialist States

Engel-Di Mauro’s chapter from *Socialist States and the Environment* performs an important revisionist intervention. Against narratives that depict socialism as inherently ecologically destructive—a claim often derived from the catastrophic environmental records of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites—Engel-Di Mauro insists on historical specificity and comparative rigor. He documents that early Soviet environmentalism, particularly the *zapovedniki* (strict nature reserves) system, represented “one of the most ambitious conservation programs in world history” (Engel-Di Mauro 2021, 115). Between 1925 and 1929, protected areas quadrupled to four million hectares; under Stalin, 128 zapovedniki were established, totaling 12.5 million hectares (117-119). Moreover, approximately 13 percent of the Soviet population—37 million people—participated in environmental education programs through researcher and volunteer networks (119).

The significance of this record becomes apparent through comparative analysis. Engel-Di Mauro provocatively asks whether any capitalist democracy has surpassed socialist states in the “number and intensity of environmental disasters” (126-127). He cites Bhopal, the Niger Delta, Exxon Valdez, and Deepwater Horizon as evidence that capitalist systems generate ecological catastrophe as a routine feature rather than an exception. This is not to exonerate socialist states but to challenge what he sees as ideological rather than empirical criticism. The Soviet Union’s environmental failures, Engel-Di Mauro argues, stemmed not from socialism per se but from three specific pressures: the Tsarist legacy of environmental destruction in Siberia and Central Asia; the imperative of rapid industrialization to defend against Nazi and fascist aggression; and the institutional structure of Gosplan, where production targets consistently overrode conservation goals (97-98, 40-41).

However, Engel-Di Mauro’s defense has limits that he himself acknowledges. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” originally conceived by Marx and Engels as a transitional phase toward the stateless, classless communist society, became instead a permanent justification for centralized state power (37). The Comintern’s Popular Front strategy and the sacrifice of the Spanish Revolution to Soviet geopolitical interests exemplify how state socialism subordinated internationalist and ecological commitments to raison d’état (41-42). As Robin Blackburn notes, the collapse of actually existing socialism revealed not the impossibility of socialism but the specific pathologies of its statist form (Blackburn 1991, 173-249). Engel-Di Mauro concurs that future ecosocialist movements must learn from both the successes and failures of state socialism, developing flexible, decentralized, and ecologically sound structures that neither fetishize nor simply reject state power (52-53).

The Environmental Contradictions of Chinese State-Socialism

If Engel-Di Mauro offers a qualified defense of Soviet-style socialism’s environmental record, Amy Zhang’s *Circular Ecologies* presents a devastating critique of Chinese state-socialism’s ecological governance. Zhang’s ethnographic research on Guangzhou’s waste management system reveals how China’s “circular economy” operates as a regime of dispossession, toxicity, and invisible labor. The irony could hardly be starker: while the Chinese state promotes “ecological civilization” as a guiding ideology, its actual practices systematically displace rural populations, poison peri-urban communities, and extract unpaid labor from migrant workers (Zhang 2024, 45-48, 119).

Zhang documents three interconnected mechanisms of what she calls “sustainability by dispossession” (65). First, the destruction of “urban villages” (*chengzhongcun*) to build LEED-certified skyscrapers and luxury malls displaces rural migrants who lack urban *hukou* citizenship rights. These “floating populations” become the invisible infrastructure of recycling, sorting waste without legal protection or stable housing. One collector, Wen, could not maintain a storage space because repeated evictions destroyed any possibility of permanence (46-48). Second, the Phoenix Waste-to-Energy incinerator in Mei Village, built just 100 meters from homes, released black smoke and toxic odors. When villagers documented a twenty-fold increase in cancer rates, state health authorities denied the evidence. The “technical monitoring” groups that the state established had no training; they could only stand inside the plant as passive witnesses (63-64, 74). Third, the four-color recycling bins introduced in 2012 remain largely unused by homeowners, while sanitation workers from rural Hunan and Sichuan provinces sort waste manually for 1,600 yuan monthly—less than $266—far below Guangzhou’s living costs (118-119). As Zhang concludes, “China’s circular economy actually depends on invisible and exploited labor, people forced to live like the waste they process” (123-126).

Zhang’s analysis also reveals the class politics of Chinese environmentalism. Middle-class homeowners in Panyu and Huadu districts successfully protested proposed incinerators through what she calls “technicizing deliberation”—using open access information laws, scientific data, and international comparisons to avoid direct political criticism (96-97, 104). This strategy succeeded where poorer villagers’ protests failed, but precisely because middle-class activists possessed the cultural capital to speak the language of technical rationality. Their environmentalism, Zhang argues, was never universal; it was a strategy for protecting property and privilege that pushed marginalized groups even further to the margins (104-105).

Yet Zhang also documents fragile spaces of hope. In Garden Villa, activist Yuan Fei and her friends established a community center producing “eco-enzyme”—a cleaning solution made from fermented kitchen waste, molasses, and water. Using this enzyme to wash hair, care for plants, and even treat local rivers, Yuan declared: “With the simplest work, the most economical method, we can change our environment” (137). Zhang interprets this as a “probiotic counter-politics” that bypasses state technology and builds collaboration between humans and microorganisms (130-131). It is a small practice, incapable of stopping industrial pollution, but it demonstrates that the desire for ecological relation persists despite and against state planning.

The tension between Engel-Di Mauro and Zhang is instructive. Engel-Di Mauro’s comparative framework treats socialist states as a general category, finding Soviet environmental performance superior to capitalist alternatives. Zhang’s ethnographic specificity reveals that Chinese state-socialism—whatever its official ideology—operates as a system of primitive accumulation that externalizes ecological and social costs onto the most vulnerable populations. These accounts are not necessarily contradictory if we recognize, following Immanuel Wallerstein, that socialist states have always existed within and against the capitalist world-economy (Chase-Dunn 1982, 21-55). The question is not whether socialism is inherently ecological or anti-ecological, but under what conditions socialist movements and states can resist the pressures of accumulation, militarism, and bureaucratic centralization.

Philosophical Resources for Planetary Coexistence

Sam Mickey’s *Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence* offers resources that neither Engel-Di Mauro’s political economy nor Zhang’s ethnographic critique fully articulate: a philosophical and spiritual framework for ecological wisdom. Mickey draws on indigenous traditions, ecofeminism, classical religions and philosophies, and complexity science to develop what he calls “anthropocosmic” consciousness—a mode of being in which humans recognize themselves as participants in, rather than masters of, cosmic processes (Mickey 2015, 83-95).

Mickey’s synthesis is deliberately pluralistic. From indigenous traditions, he cites the Western Apache saying “wisdom sits in places”—knowledge is acquired through intimate relationship with specific landscapes (65-68). From ecofeminism, he draws on Val Plumwood and Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge” to challenge androcentric and anthropocentric perspectives (68-72). From Buddhism, Confucianism, and Socratic philosophy, he finds resources for understanding the self as continuous with rather than separate from the world (72-77). From quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and evolutionary cosmology, he argues that science itself has moved beyond mechanistic reductionism toward recognizing the universe as a “communion of subjects” rather than a collection of objects (77-82). Mickey explicitly refuses to privilege any single tradition, proposing instead a “rhizomatic wisdom” (after Deleuze and Guattari) that remains open, networked, and never complete (81-82).

The political implications of Mickey’s philosophy become clearer in his discussion of the “emerging Earth community.” Drawing on James Lovelock’s Gaia theory and Thomas Berry’s “Ecozoic Era,” Mickey argues that humanity’s task is not to manage the planet but to participate in its self-organizing processes (97-107). The Earth Charter (2000) represents the political articulation of this vision, recognizing the rights of all beings. Mickey’s emphasis on “planetary subjectivity”—the claim that every being has its own perspective, its own *telos*—challenges both capitalist commodification and state-centered governance (101-105). A tree has tree-rights; an insect has insect-rights. This is not biocentrism but what Mickey, following Gaston Bachelard, calls anthropocosmism: a recognition that humans and the cosmos mutually constitute each other (88-92).

Mickey’s final chapter on energy is particularly timely. He draws on the first and second laws of thermodynamics—energy is neither created nor destroyed, but entropy increases—to argue that the energy crisis is not merely technical but cultural and spiritual (132-142). Fossil fuel combustion has raised atmospheric CO2 from 250 ppm in 1750 to over 400 ppm today, exceeding the safe limit of 350 ppm (133-134). But non-equilibrium thermodynamics reveals that entropy is not merely decay; in open systems like stars and living cells, entropy is also the condition for new complexity. A supernova’s death creates the elements for new life. Drawing on Confucian *qi* (vital energy) and William Blake’s assertion that “Energy is eternal delight,” Mickey proposes that genuine ecological wisdom celebrates energy as a “communion of subjects”—sun, wind, plant, animal, and human dancing together (140-142).

Mickey’s philosophy offers what Engel-Di Mauro’s political economy and Zhang’s critique lack: a positive vision of human-nature relation that is neither productivist nor ascetic, neither statist nor neoliberal. However, Mickey provides little guidance for political strategy. How does one move from “planetary subjectivity” to the transformation of waste incinerators, urban displacement, and global supply chains? This is precisely where Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton’s manifesto becomes essential.

Ecosocialism as Political Program

Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton’s *Planet on Fire* is the most explicitly political text of the four. Written as a “manifesto for the age of environmental breakdown,” it combines sharp critique of neoliberal capitalism with detailed policy proposals for ecosocialist transformation. The book’s central claim is that environmental breakdown is not a technical problem but a political one, rooted in asymmetries of power (Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton 2021, 23-35). Against Jared Diamond’s narrative of Easter Island’s “ecocide,” they show that ecological destruction is always a question of *who* controls resources, *how* they extract profit, and *onto whom* the costs of destruction are imposed (32-35).

The authors provide devastating statistics: the wealthiest 10 percent of the global population are responsible for nearly half of all emissions, while the poorest half are responsible for just 10 percent (44-47). Since 1992, forest cover has declined, soil has eroded, insect populations in Germany have fallen by 76 percent, and vertebrate populations have dropped by 60 percent (52-54). One million species are now at risk of extinction. Tipping points are already active: Arctic permafrost is melting; the Amazon is becoming savanna. This is the context in which three political responses have emerged: status quo neoliberalism (Macron), denialist conservatism (Trump), and eco-ethnonationalism (Le Pen, Bolsonaro). Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton warn that the third path, which promotes “lifeboat ethics” and closed borders, could prevail amid escalating crisis, leading to “eco-apartheid” and even genocide (65-79).

Against these options, they propose ecosocialism: democratic control, social ownership, and the mutual flourishing of humans and nature within biophysical limits (80-102). Their program has four pillars: expanded commons, a reconstituted state, reimagined household economics, and democratic markets. In practice, this means: central bank green lending guidelines and public investment at 4-5 percent of GDP (131-165); worker and community ownership stakes in companies, with a minimum of 30 percent voting rights for workers (166-203); land, data, and digital infrastructure as commons rather than commodities (204-248); universal basic services including free health, education, and transport (249-282); and a four-day working week with paid leave expansion (277-281).

Perhaps most significantly, Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton address the question of transition. They do not pretend that decades of damage can be reversed painlessly. They acknowledge that worse conditions are coming. But they insist that science offers an unprecedented opportunity: the faster emissions are reduced, the less damage will occur. Their ten-point ecosocialist manifesto includes: a new purpose beyond GDP; green financing through central banks; worker and social wealth funds; commoning of land, data, and digital infrastructure; universal services; dignified labor with a four-day week; care and play with paid leave; energy democracy through fossil fuel nationalization and redirection; cooperation through community wealth building; and the end of imperialism through tax haven abolition, fair trade, and climate refugee protection (283-311).

Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton’s program is ambitious, but it raises questions that neither Engel-Di Mauro nor Zhang nor Mickey fully resolve. Can state power, even democratically controlled, avoid the centralized productivism that undermined Soviet environmentalism? Will “democratic markets” truly escape the logic of accumulation, or will they reproduce capitalist dynamics under new management? How can transnational solidarity be built when the eco-ethnonationalist right is ascendant in much of the global North? These are not objections but challenges—the questions that any serious ecosocialist politics must answer.

Toward a Synthetic Ecological Politics

Reading these four texts together reveals that the relationship between socialism and ecology is neither inherently harmonious nor inherently contradictory. Engel-Di Mauro demonstrates that Soviet socialism achieved genuine environmental successes, particularly in conservation, while also succumbing to militarist and productivist pressures. Zhang’s devastating ethnography shows how Chinese state-socialism’s circular economy operates as a regime of dispossession, toxicity, and invisible labor—though her own documentation of eco-enzyme activism suggests that alternative ecological relations persist within and against state power. Mickey offers profound philosophical resources for reimagining human-nature relations, but provides little strategic guidance. Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton offer a comprehensive political program, but leave unresolved the question of how to build democratic, transnational power capable of implementing it.

The synthesis I propose is this: an ecological politics adequate to the present crisis must simultaneously (1) learn from the successes and failures of actually existing socialist states, avoiding both uncritical celebration and dismissive condemnation; (2) attend ethnographically to how environmental governance actually operates, revealing the class, race, and colonial dynamics that abstract models often obscure; (3) cultivate philosophical and spiritual resources that challenge the ontological assumptions of both capitalist accumulation and statist productivism; and (4) build democratic, transnational movements capable of winning and implementing ecosocialist policies. No single text accomplishes all of this. Read together, they gesture toward a politics that is at once materialist and spiritual, critical and constructive, local and planetary.

As Mickey writes, following Gary Snyder: “You start with the part you are whole in” (Mickey 2015, 142). Amy Zhang’s eco-enzyme activists in Guangzhou start with their kitchen waste. The Preston model in the UK started with local procurement policies. The Brazilian rubber tappers led by Chico Mendes started with their forest. These are not utopian gestures; they are the seed forms of a world that has not yet been built, but which might yet be.

Bibliography

Blackburn, Robin. 1991. “Fin de Siècle: Socialism After the Crash.” In After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, edited by Robin Blackburn, 173-249. New York: Verso.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1982. “Socialist States in the Capitalist World Economy.” In Socialist States in the World-System, edited by Christopher Chase-Dunn, 21-55. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore. 2021. “A Brief History of Socialist States and Ecosocialism.” In Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures, 34-53. London: Pluto Press.

Lawrence, Mathew, and Laurie Laybourn-Langton. 2021. Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown. London: Verso Books.

Mickey, Sam. 2015. Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence: Ecological Wisdom at the Intersection of Religion, Ecology, and Philosophy. London: Routledge.

Zhang, Amy. 2024. Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.