Marius Bickhardt

Can’t find the article though

The paper also mentions the great work on geoeconomics by @mbabic.bsky.social!

Cold War Ecology. Socialist Environmental Reflexivities from the “Club of Moscow” to Harich's “Degrowth Communism” in the GDR Waning U.S. hegemony and China’s rise as a superpower in green technologies have given climate politics a new geoeconomic dimension. Yet, given its emergence in the context of the Cold War, environ...

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Cold War Ecology. Socialist Environmental Reflexivities from the “Club of Moscow” to Harich's “Degrowth Communism” in the GDR

In @cnsjournal.bsky.social, our PhD Candidate @mbickhardt.bsky.social reflects on how socialist thinkers interpreted and reacted to The Limits to Growth.

"plan of ecological measures" - some early soviet green planning theory, maybe of interest to @cominsitu.bsky.social @abenanav.bsky.social @futurehistories.bsky.social @jakobheyer.bsky.social @christophsorg.bsky.social !

Thank you, Jan!

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'Cold War Ecology. Socialist Environmental Reflexivities from the “Club of Moscow” to Harich's “Degrowth Communism” in the GDR'

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Camera obscura: energy as an ideologically inverted relation to nature?

Only a renewed project of social and ecological emancipation can, in Harich’s terms, move society “Forward to nature!” (Vorwärts zur Natur!) (2021, 342).

This trajectory raises urgent questions of democratic control over energy utilities and grid infrastructure, as well as the improvement of working and living conditions in the East, if its reduction to an energy colony is to be avoided.

The geography of the Cold War remains visible in contemporary German climate politics. Low labor costs and cheap land have attracted large-scale West German investment, leading eastern regions to produce more renewable energy per capita.

Whereas Kohei Saito ( @koheisaito.bsky.social) interprets Marx’s late engagement with the natural sciences and pre-capitalist societies as a turn toward “degrowth communism” (2023), this study situates its emergence in the context of socialist critiques of the Club of Rome.

Harich‘s sublation of ascetism seems to align with contemporary appeals to “radical abundance” as an ecological horizon of emancipation ( @kaiheron.bsky.social, Milburn, and Russell 2025).

By insisting that consumerist “prosperity” under capitalism is purchased at the price of “unbearable work pressure, stress, frustrations of all kinds and a cultural low point” (2015, 235),

Accordingly, Harich argues that the “workers movement” must act “in alliance with all elements of society that are mortally threatened by the ecological crisis” (Harich 2021, 125).

the eco-Marxist tradition has conceived the ecological subject formation through an alliance between the industrial proletariat and new social movements (O’Connor 1988).

While the sociologist Matthew Huber (@matthuber.bsky.social) maintains that the industrial working class remains the decisive pivot of climate justice struggles by virtue of its productive power in decarbonizable sectors (2022),

Harich articulated a model of ecosocial struggle that moves beyond the entrenched dilemma of “jobs versus environment” (Barca 2014).

In a controversy with the French Marxist Guy Biolat (1973), whom Harich denounced as a “left growth-fetishist” for defending nuclear energy and opposing environmentalist resistance to the production site of Concorde planes in the name of jobs,

His critique of the Club of Rome centered on its “capital error” of excluding the “class question” which neglects the political conditions of possibility for a post-growth society (Citation2021, 226, 272).

While Harich’s initial green Leviathan cast the nation-state as the central actor of the environmental crisis, his thought also gestured toward a different conception of the ecological subject.

In their paper “Problems of Optimization in the Planning and Control of the Environment”, the economists N. Fedorenko and K. Gofman similarly argue that “nature conservation work still receives too little consideration in the overall system of national economic planning and management” (1973, 38).

will also bring about a general rise in the temperature of the air and water, which may have undesirable consequences for mankind owing to the melting of polar ice". (1979, 13)

He further warns that the "increase in the use of fossil fuel will cause the progressive pollution of the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and dust and

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Given the finitude of non renewable fossil stocks, Chatschaturow calls for a combined development of nuclear energy, hydropower, geothermal energy and the direct exploitation of solar radiation, whose industrial conversion into electricity he envisages as a “task for the future”.

he also emphasized the need to elaborate a socialist “plan of ecological measures” based on “methods of calculating both the economic and social effect of improving the use of natural resources and environmental protection” (1979, 22).

While the Soviet economist T. Khachaturov rejected the conclusions of the Club of Rome with reference to the ecological “contradiction of the capitalist economic system itself”,

In the appendix to the 1977 Spanish edition, the GDR philosopher sketches a new critical grammar of fossil capitalism, since “coal-fired plants, like all combustion of fossil fuels, overburden the atmosphere with pollutants, above all carbon dioxide” (2021, 340).

In resonance with Fedorov’s analysis, Harich discerned an implicit “anti-capitalist tendency” in the MIT study. Harich argues that the “imprecise term of ‘growth’” in fact designates the extended reproduction of capital causing an ever growing intensification of planetary flows of matter and energy.

He therefore attributes an “unconscious socialist tendency” to Western environmentalists, borrowing an expression from Marx’s discussion of the Dutch agronomist Carl Fraas.

Fedorov develops an immanent critique of the MIT study, arguing that its call for zero growth implicitly points beyond the capitalist mode of production, since “the principal driving force” of capitalism is not “any abstract ‘striving for growth’ but rather the pursuit of increased profit”.