Andreas Malm on climate crisis, hunger, and revolution

Does the 1917 uprising in Russia prefigure the possible impact of climate crisis?

By John Riddell: In the following text, an excerpt from “Revolutionary Strategy in a Warming World,” eco-socialist writer Andeas Malm projects how the catastrophic effects of unchecked climate crisis may launch the world’s most vulnerable societies into revolutionary upheaval. Malm draws parallels with the effects of food emergency in Syria (2011) and Russia (1917), basing the latter analysis on a pathbreaking volume by Lars T. Lih.

The entire text of Malm’s article is available in Climate and Capitalism; it also appears in Rethinking Revolution, Socialist Register 2017.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution,” Malm writes. “If the planetary order upon which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they possibly remain stable?”

This truth is well understood by the U.S. military establishment, Malm notes, whose “consistent and candid interest in the issue” stands in “stark contrast to the denialism  of the American Right.” He points to a prediction by David Kilcullen, “perhaps the most astute mandarin of the military wing of the empire,” that low-lying megacities in the Global South may well be overwhelmed by breakdowns of water and food supplies along with deadly floods and heat emergencies.

“Those who pledge allegiance to the revolutionary tradition – in whose collective mind the experience of 1917 will probably always loom large – should dare to use their imagination as productively as any writer of intelligence reports,” Malm says. He points in particular to the example of Syria: “In the years leading up to the outbreak of the 2011 revolution, that country reeled under an epochal drought” that caused widespread hunger.”

Syria’s capitalist rulers redoubled the effects of drought by neo-liberal measures to seize land and resources from poor farmers, Malm states. The ensuing social crisis and uprising was rooted in the combination of social stress and hunger with the inequities of the regime. He cites many examples of this combination in history.

The relevance of this analysis is confirmed by Malm’s parallel examination of the Russian experience of 1917-21. He draws here on a little-known but persuasive book by Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914—1921. Lih is better known for his studies of V.I. Lenin and revolutionary Russian Social Democracy, many of which appear on this website.

Malm’s analysis of the impending ecological catastrophe can be extended to the capitalist system of production as a whole. During the First World War revolutionary Marxists saw the world capitalist crisis as expressing an underlying contradiction between global productive forces and the capitalist mode of production. As Leon Trotsky wrote, three months after the war’s outbreak, “The present war is basically a revolt of the productive forces developed by capitalism against the nation-state form of their exploitation.” (Riddell, ed., Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 150).

The Russian revolution proved that such a crisis can have a positive outcome for all humankind.

The example of revolutionary Russia: ‘Building a small ark against imminent disaster’

Andreas Malm

By Andreas Malm: …Incidentally, uneven and combined development plus catastrophe was also the equation that touched off the Russian revolution. The catastrophe in question was, of course, the First World War, which caused the entire food supply system of Tsarist Russia to crash. To make matters worse, heavy floods in the spring of 1917 washed away roads and railway lines and blocked further procurements. On 8 March — the story is well-known, but now casts a new light on the future — the women workers of Petrograd went on strike and marched through the streets, demanding bread from a duma incapable of delivering it. Soon they called for the fall of the Tsar.

The crisis took a new plunge in August 1917, when grain prices suddenly doubled and Petrograd faced the challenge of surviving without any flour. “Famine, genuine famine,” one government official described the situation, “has seized a series of towns and provinces — famines vividly expressed by an absolute insufficiency of objects of nutrition already leading to death.” It was at this moment that Lenin penned what is arguably his key text from 1917, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, in which he made the case for a second revolution as the only way to avert total nationwide famine. In his internal and external agitation, this was his stock argument for striking the October blow:

“There is no escaping the famine, and there can be none except by an uprising of the peasants against the landowners in the countryside, and by a victory of the workers over the capitalists in the cities. … ‘In insurrection delay is fatal’ — this is our answer to those having the sad ‘courage’ to look at the growing economic ruin, at the approaching famine, and still dissuade the workers from the uprising.”

The Pentagon refers to climate change as a “threat multiplier.” Lenin spoke of the catastrophe of his time as a “mighty accelerator” bringing all contradictions to a head, “engendering world-wide crises of unparalleled intensity,” driving nations “to the brink of doom.” His wager was, of course, to seize the unique opportunity thereby opened up. That did not diminish his hostility to the war — it had no more implacable enemies than the Bolsheviks — but he saw in all its miseries the most compelling reasons to take power, and nothing worked as effectively to rally the workers behind him. Climate change is likely to be the accelerator of the twenty-first century, speeding up the contradictions of late capitalism — above all the growing chasm between the evergreen lawns of the rich and the precariousness of propertyless existence — and expedite one local catastrophe after another. What should revolutionaries do when it hits their turf? Seize the opportunity to depose any exploiters and oppressors they can get their hands on. But there is, needless to say, no guarantee of a happy outcome.

Counter-Revolution and Chaos as Symptoms

Acute shortages of food and water are poised to become some of the most tangible effects of global warming. In the run-up to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, rising food prices partly caused by extreme weather intensified the latent tensions, and the Middle East — so far the revolutionary cauldron of the century — can expect more to come. No region is as prone to water scarcity, and none as vulnerable to “tele-connected food supply shocks,” or harvest failures in distant breadbaskets driving up prices of the imports on which the population depends.

In revolutionary Russia, the supply shock originally stemmed from the blockades and demands of the First World War and then multiplied across the vast territory; for the Bolsheviks, it was as much a curse as a blessing. In his remarkable study, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914—1921, Lars T. Lih shows how the dearth of food not only propelled them to power, but prompted them to develop the authoritarian tendencies that would later devour them.

Moreover, those tendencies were in full swing already before October. The Tsarist state itself took the first steps towards a “food-supply dictatorship,” in which the state applies coercion to enforce the delivery of food to starving citizens. “The food-supply question has swallowed up all other questions,” one government employee observed in the autumn of 1916, and “as economic anarchy has spread, all the deeper is the process of penetration of the state principle into all aspects of the economic existence of the country.”

The Provisional Government continued on the same track — all political currents save the anarchists agreed on the necessity of strict centralised control to bring forth the grain — but proved utterly unequal to the task. The Bolsheviks turned out to be the sole party disciplined and hard-hitting enough to reconstitute the centre and reign in the centrifugal forces. But to succeed in their efforts, they had to ditch any ideological doubts about the state and make maximum use of the remaining scaffoldings of the Tsarist bureaucracy. The problem was that they had promised “all power to the Soviets.”

According to a logic Lih reconstructs in painful detail, genuinely self-governing soviets (and communes and factory committees) had the interests of their own constituencies closest to heart: in the countryside, they held back grain from the cities; in the cities, they sent volunteers to the countryside to collect whatever could be found and distribute it to their members. The experiment in direct democracy the Bolsheviks had done so much to encourage merely deepened the chaos in the food system — the one plague they had vowed to eradicate. Locked into this contradiction, they opted for subjugating the soviets to the party, shooting suspected hoarders, stationing agents in the villages to surveil the peasants, setting the whole train of bureaucratic control in motion.

But the choice — this is Lih’s main point — was forced upon the Bolsheviks by the situation. Exacerbated by first civil war and then drought, the scarcities seemed to allow for no other general course of action than a food-supply dictatorship, to which the vast majority of Russians eventually resigned themselves, preferring some stability and food on the table to the endless deprivation and uncertainty of the revolutionary years. Here the seeds of Stalinist counter-revolution were sown. Paradoxically, in Lih’s analysis, they sprang from a remarkable feat: precisely because they were so ruthless and consistent in their centralization of the food system, the Bolsheviks did avert total breakdown. In a formulation now pregnant with meaning, Lih sums up his view of their young state: “a Noah hastily constructing a small ark against imminent disaster.”…

For the full text, including footnotes, see  Climate and Capitalism. The article is also found in Rethinking Revolution, Socialist Register 2017.”