Socioecological Contradictions in the Development of Socialist Collective Farming: Drawing from USSR and Hungarian Histories

Collective Farms and Communalism

Many peasants, mainly poor and landless ones, benefited from the collectivization processes in the USSR and socialist Hungary, but collective farms were undemocratic and, by the 1970s, frequently led by technocrats. Collectivization of this type was often instituted by means of economic inducements and, in part and mostly in the initial phases, through violent coercion.² The justification for considering such collective farms in this discussion is that, in a context of reigning individualism or peasant household atomization, such forms of collectivization could bear potential for building communes. One could argue that the collectivization process was interrupted by the early 1990s or that it never really was headed to any form of socialism, but either perspective would lose the point that such deep social change is long-term, multigenerational, and nonlinear. The historical attempts made succeeded in undoing centuries of peasant serfdom and in showing that alternatives are feasible, that land can be decommodified and redistributed and, in a socialist system, farming can be even more productive and oriented primarily to feed people. Those are no small achievements. Present and future struggles are consequently in a more advanced position than one of overcoming internally oppressive peasant households, as well as feudal or semicapitalist relations.

Furthermore, communalism is a historical as well as current phenomenon that may overlap with, but is not the same as, socialism (or communism). Communalist forms have been destroyed or much reduced in scope or reach through colonial violence and/or forced incorporation into a capitalist world economy. Luminaries like V. I. Lenin and Alexandra Kollontai long ago demonstrated the connection between the withering of communal institutions such as the mir in Russian peasant villages and the reorientation of peasant household production toward market sales and securing wage incomes to ensure survival.³ Communal land holding was also a patriarchal institution that served to coordinate tax payments to the tsarist administration, rather than improve villagers’ well-being. This recognition of historical trends and the internal inequalities within some forms of communalism in certain areas of the world is reason enough to doubt that existing communal arrangements necessarily lead to socialism.

A similar conclusion about social relations can be drawn regarding ecological sustainability. Communal property in land may be associated with ecologically constructive human impacts, yet, in itself, is no guarantee of social equality or classlessness. For example, in the Lome and Mende areas of present-day Liberia, peasant women villagers’ farming techniques on communal land holdings are those that principally lead to the transformation of relatively nutrient-poor, acid oxisols (red soils) into dark earths (black soils). Black soils are rich in organic matter (and thereby can become more biodiverse) and plant nutrients. Additionally, soil formation (about one centimeter per year) is accelerated to ten times the usual rate for local conditions. However, communal arrangements are predicated on gender and age-based disparities, such that it is mainly men or elderly women who benefit economically from a form of agricultural production that is also tied to wider capitalist relations, especially in the case of cocoa.⁴ Ecologically positive effects on soil characteristics, in this case, are based on a patriarchal and capitalism-integrated form of communal farming.

If one were to count as communal only communities free of any form of social inequality, one would have to dismiss the Russian peasant mir, the ujamaa systems in East Africa, and possibly even the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (which featured unequal gender divisions of labor and often hostile relations with other Indigenous confederacies), as well as most existing or past examples often used to demonstrate the feasibility of communal production systems. This is not to argue against building on or drawing from such models. There are possibilities afforded by preexisting communalism that can be useful toward building socialist institutions. The comunas system developing in Venezuela, which includes ecologically constructive konuko and Indigenous farming traditions, constitutes a major breakthrough that could translate into other countries emerging from settler colonialism and thereby having similar histories.⁵

A historical-materialist view would consider communalism as a potential out of which we can progress ever closer toward the conditions for achieving a classless society. But there also must be an acknowledgment that communalism can be problematic when it impedes chances to improve people’s lives beyond the commune, such as in cases of resistance to the redistribution of surplus to the wider society (this was one of the major challenges the Nyerere government, for instance, faced and could not resolve).⁶ Conversely, in farming communities where feudal or capitalist property systems prevail, policies or social changes that reduce social inequalities or socialize the means of production toward expressly socialist ends, including by furthering the development of communal arrangements, should not be dismissed.

There is also a practical, political purpose to take an evolutionary perspective and widen the range of (historical and current) candidates for communal projects. The further reach and intensification of capitalist relations worldwide since the 1990s suggests that communalism (or common property arrangements generally), wherever it may be initiated or persist, is not autonomous from wider predominant capitalist relations. Even the very few Indigenous communities in voluntary isolation (“uncontacted peoples”) are not autonomous from struggles and policies coming from within surrounding capitalist societies to uphold such isolation, as in the case of North Sentinel Island. Neither is communalism separate from the even larger and more complex biophysical phenomena. Communities isolating themselves from the capitalist world economy must still confront extreme weather events linked to climate change, long-range air pollution, the diffusion of microplastics, and other environmental disasters resulting from external capitalist social systems.

These are reasons to treat collective or socialist cooperative farms as cases worthy of inclusion in the study of communes broadly. Socialist collective farms are initial steps, within a protracted (and nonlinear) process of sustained struggles (including major setbacks), toward the formation of communes or similar organizational forms that are integrated into a larger socialist economy. It is especially important to adopt this kind of understanding where there are historically entrenched material interests in the maintenance of stratified (for example, patriarchal or ethnically exclusive) and atomized peasant village economies, such as there have been in almost every country where communist parties succeeded in realizing socialist revolutions or in introducing lasting socialist programs. In many ways, this was the case in the protracted struggle in the USSR and socialist Hungary to create collective farms or communes integrated into the national economy and producing for socialist ends. The even greater atomization in capitalist farming systems, along with the progressive distancing—if not estrangement—of the majority of people from agriculture (and soils) makes any successes in breaking down individualism and forging more socialist-oriented collectivism even more important. Given that soils are a primary means of producing food, the evolving quality of and dynamics within soils were and remain (in existing socialist countries) a crucial part of the struggle for communal ways of farming.

Diversity of Soils and Impacts

There exist many combinations of soil types and farming systems such that it is not advisable to make generalizations regarding the impact of farming on soils. According to the most recent FAO World Reference Base (WRB), there are globally 32 soil groups and at least 120 subgroups with distinctive characteristics, sufficiently different as to affect how they would be impacted by human use.⁷ As is clear in the case, for example, of tropical soil erosion, different soils have widely divergent levels of sensitivity and resilience to the same type of human impact.⁸ That means that applying the same mechanized techniques may be immediately disastrous for some soils (for example, silty textured on even, moderate slopes) and barely perceptible for others (for example, alkaline, moderately clayey, and humus-rich). Conversely, the same type of soil may be fine for one suite of crops and not for another unless soil conditions are altered through great exertion and inputs (though not necessarily mechanized or agrochemical in character). In some instances, such as in acid-sulphate soils, such intensification may not suffice without unsustainable outlays of resources and constant monitoring through lab testing.

It is also not a straightforward matter to determine the number and areal extent of soil types for each country or region because of their existing different and evolving national classification systems, which are not always translatable into the FAO WRB. This is true as well for any soil classification system, since it may change as soil science evolves. The FAO WRB, for instance, used to feature only twenty-six soil groups, and the U.S. soil taxonomy excluded wetlands as part of soil systems until the 1970s. The issue becomes even more complex when farming communities’ own classification systems are included, as well as the potentially differing emphases within each community on ethnic and/or gendered lines.⁹

However, there are multiple forms of impacts on soils by way of agriculture. These can be categorized as physical, chemical, and biological. Physical impacts include accelerated erosion and compaction. Chemically, there may be a reduction in nutrient levels, often connected to declines in soil organic matter (the main nutrient storage compartment in soils), which also renders soils more erodible. Fertilizer-based nitrogen inputs may accelerate acidification in humid/temperate regions. Agrochemical applications may lead to heavy metal and/or pesticide contamination. Biologically, tillage often quickens organic matter decomposition and can lead to falls in soil organic matter levels unless it is replenished with, for instance, compost or manure. The use of agrochemicals may lead to the disappearance of populations of beneficial species, including microbial ones. As may already be obvious, all of these impacts are interrelated and magnify each other.¹⁰

For each type of negative human impact, there are different kinds of remedies or preventative measures that are applicable to industrial-scale farming. For instance, cover crops appropriate to local ecosystems or climate regions can be planted to reduce erosion rates, loosen compacted soil, and build soil organic matter levels (and thereby soil fertility) at the same time. The results also depend on the severity of those forms of degradation. There may need to be more robust initial interventions using specialized machinery (such as mole drains or subsoiling, depending on soil texture) and thereafter adopting agroecological management methods.¹¹ For farming that already employs ecologically sustainable methods, there may be other kinds of challenges. Aside from ensuring productivity to levels that contribute to a national economy, one common problem is soil nutrient decline over time in the absence of adequate manure sources. This can be offset by organizing green manure and composting operations.¹²

There are a number of technical challenges shared by any form of agriculture, including collective farms, that are related to the diversity of soil types and conditions.¹³ Soil susceptibility to the same kinds of cultivation methods can vary substantially. Since soil characteristics may be altered through histories of human use, the form and extent of the variability can change. For instance, in southwestern Hungary in 1998–1999, I witnessed some parts of a farm’s three-hectare plot becoming waterlogged in spring, even though the area featured the same soil type and was for years under the same maize-rye-rapeseed rotation as the other tracts. The affected portion was rectilinear, several meters wide and crossing the plot. The marks of machinery tracks indicated compaction where, as verified by the interviewed farmer, the highest tractor traffic occurred. Without taking measures to loosen the compacted section, plant life becomes sparse, microbial populations shift to a predominance of anaerobes (slowing down the rate of soil organic matter formation), and nutrient levels are likely to decline on that swath of land. Such instances of soil degradation may be viewed as relatively insignificant and rarely feature in national technical reports or databases, if at all. Even collective or individual farm records may skip such details until they impact crop yield. Nevertheless, future uses of that plot will encounter a diversity of conditions due to prior human impact.

What most impedes an analysis of collective farms’ impacts is inadequate data availability at that scale. There is rarely any breakdown of instances and areal extent of soil degradation according to the type of farm. This means that only preliminary observations or hypotheses can be made by means of deducing from relative figures (for example, percentage of total sown land under collective farms). Descriptions of the geographical extent of soil degradation can be helpful if complemented by data on collective farms, but they do not necessarily indicate causal processes. For that linkage to be made, one must access and examine collective farm records that may no longer exist, including agronomic reports; carry out soil sampling and analyses; and interview farmers and managers, among other research endeavors. This is a research project waiting to be carried to its fullest potential but, to some extent, this has been accomplished elsewhere.¹⁴ In the meantime, some general connections can be made provisionally.

Collective Farming and Soil Conditions in the USSR

The enormity of the former USSR’s land base may bear the largest diversity of soils on the planet, from permafrost and acidic taiga soils to wetland and salt-affected dryland soils, and nearly any type in between, with the exception of the highly leached and acidic kinds of soils often found in tropical and subtropical areas. The USSR’s list would include the large swath of chernozems or grassland soils, mainly in what is now Ukraine, which are among the most fertile soils in the world. Furthermore, within each of the six ecoregional zones identified for the USSR landmass, there are numerous, distinct major soil types.¹⁵

But most soils, as well as their associated climate regions, are not suitable for farming at an industrial scale—or, in the circumpolar regions, for much of any farming at all. More than half of the landmass of the USSR was comprised of forest soils, including the boreal (taiga) zones.¹⁶ There is substantial diversity in the soil’s susceptibility to erosion in regions most suitable to producing grain surpluses. Within the upland steppe zone, for instance, nine soil types have been recorded that are characterized by large differences in erodibility.¹⁷

In such challenging environmental contexts, collective farms (kollektívnoye khozyáystvo, or kolkhozy) eventually became, with their state-owned counterparts, the norm in the USSR. Their establishment was often conflictual, sometimes lethally violent and leading to mass displacement, especially with the 1928 collectivization campaign.¹⁸ Tensions between the government and the peasantry were overcome through the latter’s virtual disappearance and transformation into workers in kolkhozy, state farms, and other economic sectors.¹⁹ By 1940, most farms were collectivized, bringing 78 percent of arable land under collective farm management. Thus, it can be assumed that most impacts on soils were associated with farming practices in the kolkhozy.

Though farming-related damage to soils was done, it cannot as yet be quantified relative to types of farming practices. For example, accelerated soil erosion could be due to tillage parallel to slope on steep gradients, heightened compaction due to treading during wet periods, lack of crop cover during non-growing periods, a combination of such activities, or other factors. The specific kolkhozy contribution to such problems is even less discernible from such information. Data point to generic types of degradation that are not spatially explicit. There would also have been great differences over time. Until the 1960s, the degree of farm mechanization levels and agrochemical use, for example, was very low.²⁰

Nevertheless, from what can be gathered so far, the expansion of kolkhozy through the 1950s and the effects of this expansion on soils would have been tempered by a policy of reforestation and afforestation, as well as practices focused on the replenishment of soil organic matter.²¹ This would result in the effective expansion of soil conservation techniques (including fallow periods and, especially since the 1970s, cover crops), with the curtailment of wind and slope erosion in much of the Russian Plain by massive rows of forest shelter belts and agroforestry projects.²² With the interruption of afforestation and agroforestry programs (and their partial reversal) and the shift to the production of and greater reliance on agrochemicals in the 1960s, farming impacts worsened, especially in areas prone to drought or to plant nutrient deficits (for example, low soil organic matter, low pH, and so on). However, this did not lead to major acidification or contamination problems.²³

The most destructive aspect, judging from soil degradation figures, was through ever increasing mechanization and inadequate measures to reduce soil erodibility. During the Khrushchev administration, the more egregious effects occurred in northern Kazakhstan and western Siberia, especially due to an deceptively high initial yield combined with a subsequent prolonged drought. However, these setbacks were subsequently overcome through conservation policies under the Brezhnev government. Soils in some of the Central Asian regions, where kolkhozy were involved in increasing cotton production as part of a national self-sufficiency objective, eventually showed signs of salinization that persist today, resulting from conventional irrigation effects and regional aridification. The destruction of the Aral Sea’s ecosystems was another consequence of such agricultural practices, though the largest sea shrinkage happened after the USSR disappeared.²⁴ The exacerbating effects of climate change through greater rainfall erosivity in some regions and increasing aridification elsewhere await further study.²⁵ By the end of the 1980s, about a quarter of cultivated land was affected by water and wind erosion, with a couple of percentage points occupied by other forms of soil degradation.²⁶ Given the severe economic and ecological constraints and international (as well as internal) pressures, soil conservation measures were, on the whole, successful, though generally not as much in farmed areas.²⁷

Yet, according to a FAO study, using 1980s soil data, it turns out that the Russian Federation (that is, most of the USSR) featured a much better impact ranking (like Cuba) than most capitalist countries, including the United Kingdom and United States.²⁸ Uruguay had the best record in this evaluation, followed by Guyana and Éire (Ireland). The data were inexplicably separated according to the countries spawned from the destruction of the USSR. Central Asian countries are ranked lower (that is, worse in degradation levels) than even the United States, mainly due to salinization problems. Lithuania, Belarus, and Latvia, conversely, ranked fourth, fifth, and seventh respectively. However, as one of the original authors later admitted, the data out of which the rankings were computed are questionable. They were gathered often through “expert observation” and inconsistent methodologies, rather than sampling, lab testing, and monitoring programs.²⁹ The report must therefore be taken as approximative, pending further study.

Collective Farming and Soil Conditions in Socialist Hungary

Given the more limited area of Hungary (tiny, compared to the USSR), the extent of ecosystem and soil diversity is much less than in the USSR. Soil type distribution in Hungary is associated mainly with the Great Hungarian Plain, segmented by the Danube and Tisza Rivers and crossed by smaller streams and canals. The surrounding uplands and much of the western part of the country feature mainly forest soils that tend to have relatively low organic matter and a clayey subsoil, yet are nutrient-rich. Some of the uplands also feature acidic soil. Soils, especially those on slopes and along rivers, tend to be shallower and nutrient-poor. The Danube-Tisza interfluve and sections of the western and easternmost reaches of the country are characterized by sandy soils originating from windblown and alluvial sediments from the previous glaciation and out of which the soils formed. The highly fertile grassland soils (chernozems, a black soil rich in organic matter) cover portions of the lowlands, mainly in the eastern parts. The chernozem region is interrupted by meadow soils with shallower depths of organically rich material and influenced by periodic flooding. Other areas mainly in the eastern section of the Great Hungarian Plain are affected by high salt concentrations from near-surface groundwater (salts build up in areas of high evaporation rates, dragging the salts upward to the soil surface). There are nine major soil types and forty distinct soil subtypes, thirty-five of the latter comprising the total arable land. About 48 percent of this land is farmed.³⁰

With a large proportion of farmland on very fertile soils, Hungary was among the Central European countries with the highest agricultural output. Two world wars severely curtailed the economic potential in general and in agriculture as well. With a peasant majority, exploitative landlordism, and large estates, collectivization was just as protracted a struggle (1948–1961) as in the USSR. In contrast to the USSR, socialist institutions were largely imposed exogenously. Collectivization campaigns were largely ineffective at first and punctured by the 1956 mass and partially reactionary revolt, which was repressed with the aid of the USSR military. In the more concessionary period that followed, collective farming spread and consolidated countrywide by the late 1960s through a mix of economic incentives and (largely indirect) sanctions. Soil erosion was a principal concern, as it had been prior to the establishment of the socialist system, but mechanization and agrochemical applications were just being restarted and would not be as extensively impactful as decades later.

It was with the reorientation of the economy in 1968 (known as the New Economic Mechanism), which allowed more private farming (in small plots) and joint ventures with foreign capitalist firms, that the impact on soils took a more intensive turn. As with the USSR, the Hungarian state became increasingly tied to core capitalist economies, including through loans and increasing exports to repay them. By the middle of the 1970s, productivity per hectare was among the highest in the world and, as more policies to reduce the gap between urban and rural life were introduced, more people remained or moved to the countryside than otherwise would have been the case. This was accomplished through a synergistic mix of collective farms (mezőgazdasági termelőszövetkezetek) and private household plots (háztájjik) supported, as in the USSR, by state institutions that took care of soil monitoring, agronomic services, agrochemical production, credit, marketing, purchases, and much more.³¹ As in the post-1960s USSR, this turn required ever greater machinery use and agrochemical applications, as well as nutrient-demanding crops (locally developed hybrids) grown as monocultures (as had been also in the presocialist period). Manuring rapidly diminished, as did the employment of manual labor for weeding, sowing, and harvesting.

By the late 1980s, according to the above-cited FAO report, 29 percent of land was severely degraded due to farming. The percentage is likely exaggerated. Nevertheless, soils were (and remain) affected mainly by way of water and wind erosion, exacerbated by compaction. Together, those processes accounted for about a third of the problem. The rest was mainly acidification (20 percent), which was mostly a result of fertilizer nitrogen applications but had already been noted and contained in the 1960s. That is, the problem was well-known and closely monitored, such that there were several liming campaigns carried out in the 1980s that have led to higher levels of pH, which are detectable to this day. In other areas, soils with different properties (higher acid-buffering capacities, like some chernozems) became more alkaline because of the amounts of fertilizer and lime added over the years. There was generally a related net enrichment of potassium and phosphorus in many instances (which can be beneficial, provided that accelerated soil erosion is prevented). Because of what was probably the most comprehensive and extensive soil-monitoring program in the world (and taken apart since 1990), there were also copious instances of successful soil conservation efforts, as described above, regarding preventative measures (such as more fallowing, cover cropping, reduced tillage, and contour ploughing). Some of these measures were already introduced in the 1950s, but economic pressures often had the better of conservation.³²

Collective Farms, Evolving Forms of Socialism, and Soils

In both of the above-discussed cases, socialist collective farms evolved from within systems that came out of imperial formations, war-torn peasant-majority societies that were devastated by multiple military invasions and characterized by partially capitalist structures tied to and differentially affected by a capitalist world system, as well as affected by preceding and extensive environmental degradation. As peasants were often forcibly turned into workers through collective—and especially state-run—farms, industrialization eventually was attained. This permitted an overall and long-term rise in living standards. Nevertheless, both socialist countries featured persistent, even if markedly reduced, social inequalities, which have widened following capitalist restoration. Collective farming, as workplaces generally, was also still stratified in gendered and racialized terms.³³

For the most part, though, economic inequalities were constrained and never reached the levels found in capitalist societies.³⁴ The surplus produced by society as a whole went into providing for the working-class majority, not into raising profits for the few. There was wealth redistribution to a much greater degree than under capitalism. Inequalities were exacerbated with greater commercialization and integration into world capitalist institutions, but, at the same time, living conditions for the majority were improved with guaranteed employment, often relatively higher wages, housing, child care, health services, and free access to higher education. The comparisons are even more favorable with respect to the state of worker and peasant lives before the socialist period.³⁵

Environmental impacts generally, and those on soils in particular, have increased over time and mostly in a negative direction, but not to the extent that has been the case in capitalist countries and, to reiterate, as part of raising living standards. The intensification of soil use by means of agrochemical application and machinery coincided with a greater turn to commercialization and increasing linkages to and, to some extent, dependency on core capitalist markets.³⁶ In socialist Hungary, for example, the spread of soil acidification with increasing agrochemical fertilizer nitrogen inputs was due to raising production for export to nearby capitalist countries (especially West Germany and Austria) to fulfill loan repayment schedules imposed by core-capitalist financial institutions. This relationship is consonant with findings showing that a greater ecological footprint (in terms of resource use and environmental degradation) accompanies greater integration into international capital flows.³⁷ Still, when compared to capitalist countries, the overall impact of agriculture on soils was moderate, and this was largely through collective farms.

Though disparities between town and country were reduced over time, farm industrialization led many to be employed in nearby or distant towns, outside of farming. As peasants became collective workers—mainly shifting to factories, offices, and other non-farm employment—most people (as in the core capitalist countries) have come to have feeble ties to agriculture, and thereby soils, at most by way of household plots or gardens. In both the USSR and Hungary, more and more people moved to towns, such that more than 70 and 60 percent of inhabitants in the USSR and Hungary respectively were urban dwellers by the end of the 1980s.³⁸

The level of urbanization arguably affects who knows about farming and soils, but the trend also impacts recognition of soils in urban areas and their food production potential. This recognition is sorely wanting, just as there is a need to make cities greener and less environmentally impacting. Urban soils are themselves highly variegated over very short distances compared to the countryside and undergo faster rates of development. They can also disappear in a matter of hours as a result of construction and other frequent earth-moving activities. This means that farming knowledge from the countryside might not transfer seamlessly into urban ecosystems.

Collectivization in the agricultural sectors of the USSR and Hungary, and possibly in other socialist countries, appears to have triggered a specific form of (nonantagonistic) socioecological contradiction between, on the one hand, a successful coordination of farm production to overcome food shortfalls, if not vanquish famine altogether, and, on the other, what Rodney identified as “elementary forces” plaguing peasant-majority societies. In both situations, attempts to build an industrial capacity for food production was met by postwar chronic labor shortages (hence more reason for mechanization and agrochemical use) and persistent peasant resistance that was, to a large extent, defused through incorporation into working-class fractions. Throughout, all socialist administrations in both countries, even if to differing degrees, faced threats of annihilation from within (for example, civil wars or revolts) and without (for instance, imperialist countries’ military and economic attacks and/or pressures), leading to a massive redirection of resources to military defense and internally repressive measures.

This long-term social process entailed much soil (and other forms of environmental) degradation that was only in part reverted through conservation efforts. These efforts were themselves stymied by chronic underfunding and low prioritization compared to concerns over survival and improving living standards, aspects associated with capitalist encirclement and increasing economic dependence on core capitalist powers. Furthermore, as socialist governments succeeded in laying the material conditions for a higher phase of socialism (and a communist future), a greater share of the population shifted away from farming and increasingly to living in cities. This trend has likely led to a rising estrangement from farming and, relatedly, from soils. This development likely hampers sensitization to soil degradation and to food production systems.

This form of socioecological contradiction, from what can be deduced through this limited study, seems specific to the beginning phases of socialist postrevolutionary contexts in what were initially peasant-majority countries. However, this historical tendency is not insurmountable. Overcoming this socioecological contradiction is feasible within socialist systems, if, unlike in the USSR and Hungary, capitalist onslaughts are successfully resisted. Cuba offers a primary example. Thanks to the development of industrial capacity over decades, which laid the foundations for investments in research and outreach institutions, agroecological techniques could be applied in both countryside and city by the 1990s, when it was most needed. These practical achievements can serve as a primary model in terms of ways to build gradations of collectivization that is not only integrated with a national economy (and beyond, providing, for instance, the nutritional basis for medical professionals going to assist communities in other countries), but also realizes ecological sustainability in the present in both town and country.³⁹

Building Communalistic Socioecological Futures

Collective farms—or any kind of farming, even the most ideal agricultural commune—will have impacts on soils that may be partially destructive, will have to face legacies of previous impacts (constructive or destructive), and will have to mind the complexity of cultivation outcomes related to soil type heterogeneity. This is aside from shifting regional climate conditions, the changing frequencies and magnitudes of extreme meteorological events, the dynamics of pathogen populations, and the activities of hundreds of thousands of other organisms, below and above ground.

Socioecological aspects of building socialism involve attentiveness to scale and ecological transformation simultaneously. The scale of productivity means transcending not just parochialism, but also the scope of production, which is to ensure everyone’s well-being within a socialist country. This includes industrialization (technological development) and self-defense, which intensify the extraction of resources, often cause harm to public health and environment, and, in the case of self-defense, diverts them to deleterious ends.

Building socialism thus entails both constructive and destructive transformations in society and, more broadly, ecosystems. If the challenges posed by “elementary forces” are to be surmounted, there needs to be multiple-scaled understandings of biophysical processes, not just of society. These cannot be developed from within the bounds of single communes, or eco-villages, or socialist cooperatives. In other words, the framework and attendant policies must account for and contribute to address processes much greater than decentralized efforts initiated from below.

This may be deduced from Rodney’s teaching, but such a framework is generally what has been applied in socialist countries from their inception. Some salient examples are cutting-edge measures on biodiversity protection in the USSR (especially through zapovedniki), on hurricane preparedness and agroecological applications in Cuba, and on reforestation and renewable energy systems in the People’s Republic of China. Part of transitioning to socialism involves the development of not only communal ways of being, but also ecologically sustainable forms of production. The ecological implications of building socialism have never been lost on communist party leaders, given that the well-being of workers hinges on livable environments. The challenge has been reducing the ill effects of these contradictory processes, which are not resolvable within socialist countries alone.

Such a challenge extends to farming, in terms of reconciling place-specific socioecological conditions, as well as local relations of power and heterogeneous, if not contradictory, needs and aspirations, with wider (and also contradictory) national and international situations, processes, and relations of power. Though the social aspects of socialist farming have been studied extensively, there are few published works where the ecological challenges to and effects of socialist cooperative or communal farms are evaluated, and such publications largely revolve around Cuba and Venezuela since the 1990s.⁴⁰ Missing are analyses of the biophysical processes themselves and the many decades of ecological relations involving socialist agriculture in the rest of the socialist world. This is therefore an initial exploration and necessarily limited study on the topic for the sake of greater comparability in the type of human impact considered.

Other kinds of activities or economic sectors ought to be considered as well, such as collectively run factories, housing, or bakeries within specific kinds of urban ecosystems or logging, mining, or other extractive industries relative to respective ecological contexts. There is great diversity to both ecosystems and human activities (as well as their environmental impacts), and, consequently, a large number of combinations of ecosystem and human impact types that require a planning system that includes both social and ecological dimensions at once.

The combinations to consider may constitute a formidable challenge in terms of what sorts of economic activities to promote and develop and where, along with figuring out the least ecologically damaging outcomes. For instance, twenty different kinds of anthromes (biomes shaped directly by human activity) have been identified according to varying levels of intensity of human impact.⁴¹ These anthromes occupy 80 percent of terrestrial surfaces and occur across the ten terrestrial biomes that are conventionally recognized (including desert, tundra, tropical forest, grasslands, chaparral, and so on). This makes for a potential of two hundred combinations, not counting marine biomes in which there are largely indirect effects of human activities. In the case of the USSR, for example, there are five biomes and twelve anthromes to consider. Excluding three biomes (tundra, desert, montane) and three anthromes (ice, drylands, dense settlements) unsuitable for large-scale farming (or any farming at all), there would be eighteen agriculture-ecosystem combinations to address relative to social and environmental policies.

Aside from limiting the view to agriculture, this combinatorial exercise does not account for unique biodiversity hot spots, ecotones, or biological communities within biomes that may be sufficiently different to make for the same sort of human activities having divergent ecological effects within the same biome. In other words, there is a large number of ecosystems, each with different characteristics, potentials, and histories (including of human impact), that, as any human endeavor, socialist projects would face at multiple scales. For example, a study in the Urals revealed that the same intensity of crude oil contamination leads to greater plant mortality rates depending on forest species composition.⁴² It is not just human impact but the distribution of forest species, even within the same biome, that becomes important in gauging potential damage and developing ecological sustainability.

Socialist collective farming, similarly, must be developed according to both ecological and social specificities. For example, it is unreasonable to expect soils developed in dryland, salt-affected, or many tropical forest conditions to accrue the amount of organic matter (and thereby retain similar levels of nutrients or carbon) that soils do in temperate grasslands or forests. That would take a planetary-level, possibly cataclysmic shift in the location of climate regions and biomes, among other kinds of planetary-wide changes. Likewise, it is unreasonable to expect farming systems in besieged postrevolutionary socialist countries coming out of colonial and environmentally destructive histories to attain classlessness and ecological sustainability over a single generation —or even several. Enormous social and geopolitical changes beyond the farm, extending to struggles within the imperialist countries, must be achieved to reach such an objective.

Yet, in socialist countries, even if in contradictory ways and at times with devastating results, much was and is being accomplished that has improved people’s lives while keeping ecologically destructive impacts lower overall compared to the capitalist world.⁴³ Drawing from these historical advances and feats, learning from their mistakes and tragedies, and supporting all existing socialist countries should be among the main tasks for socialists interested in building power and communalism within their respective capitalist countries.

Notes

1. ↩ Walter Rodney, “Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism,” African Review 1, no. 4 (1972): 68.
2. ↩ Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Nigel Swain, Collective Farms Which Work? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Karl-Eugen Wädekin, Agrarian Policies in Communist Europe: A Critical Introduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982).
3. ↩ V. I. Lenin, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977); Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family,” in Selected Writings, trans. A. Hilt (Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill, 1977), 250–60.
4. ↩ Victoria Frausin et al., “‘God Made the Soil, but We Made It Fertile’: Gender, Knowledge, and Practice in the Formation and Use of African Dark Earths in Liberia and Sierra Leone,” Human Ecology 42, no. 5 (October 2014): 708. See also the case studies in Harold Brookfield, Exploring Agrodiversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
5. ↩ Konuko is the Taino name for their farming system, involving raised mounds, intercropping, and green manure. It has become a term used to refer to ecologically sustainable farming typical of low-input smallholder agriculture. See Miguel Á. Núñez, La Ciencia del Konuko y Su Visión Integral (Caracas: Mincyt, 2024). Chris Gilbert, Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023); Luis E. Galaratti Fleitas and Virginia V. Bonilla Guillén, “Agroecología y organización comunitaria: Caso de la Escuela Agroecológica Jesús Márquez Finol ‘Motilón,’ estado Aragua, Venezuela,” Petroglifos Revista Crítica Transdisciplinar 4, no. 1 (2021): 84–102; Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2020).
6. ↩ Horace Campbell, “Socialism in Tanzania: A Case Study,” The Black Scholar 6, no. 8 (May 1975): 41–51.
7. ↩ International Union of Soil Sciences Working Group WRB, World Reference Base for Soil Resources: International Soil Classification System for Naming Soils and Creating Legends for Soil Maps (Vienna: International Union of Soil Sciences, 2018), isric.org.
8. ↩ Michael A. Stocking, “Tropical Soils and Food Security: The Next 50 Years,” Science 302, no. 5649 (November 2003): 1356–59.
9. ↩ See, for instance, Narciso Barrera-Bassols, “Linking Ethnopedology and Geopedology: A Synergistic Approach to Soil Mapping: Case Study in an Indigenous Community of Central Mexico,” Geopedology: An Integration of Geomorphology and Pedology for Soil and Landscape Studies (2016): 167–81. On the gender-differentiated aspects, see Frausin et al. (above) as well as Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, “Disaggregating Local Knowledge: The Effects of Gendered Farming Practices on Soil Fertility and Soil Reaction in SW Hungary,” Geoderma 111, no. 3–4 (February 2003): 503–20.
10. ↩ Miguel A. Altieri, “Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture and the Possibilities for Truly Sustainable Farming,” Monthly Review 50, no. 3 (July–August 1998): 60; Fred Magdoff, “Repairing the Soil Carbon Rift,” Monthly Review 72, no. 11 (April 2021): 1–19; Fred Magdoff and Ray R. Weil, “Soil Organic Matter Management Strategies,” in Soil Organic Matter in Sustainable Agriculture, eds. Fred Magdoff and Ray R. Weil (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2004), 45–65.
11. ↩ Mole drains are unlined subsoil channels made for clayey soils to improve water flow. Miguel A. Altieri, “Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty,” Monthly Review 61, no. 3 (July–August 2009): 102–13; Fred Magdoff and Harold Van Es, Building Soils for Better Crops: Ecological Management for Healthy Soils (Washington DC: Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, 2021).
12. ↩ Green manure is derived from crops specifically grown to produce organic matter to be incorporated into soils.
13. ↩ Mark Ashman and Geeta Puri, Essential Soil Science (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2013).
14. ↩ Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, “Soils in Eco-Social Context: Soil pH and Social Relations of Power in a Northern Drava River Floodplain Agricultural Area,” in Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography, eds. Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann, and Stuart Lane (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 393–419.
15. ↩ V. L. Andronikov, T. V. Afanas’yeva, and M. S. Simakova, “Mapping the Soils of the Major Natural Zones of the USSR from Remote Sensing Imagery,” Mapping Sciences and Remote Sensing 28, no. 2 (1991): 109–18.
16. ↩ Robert W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980), 21–22; Neil C. Field, “Land Hunger and the Rural Depopulation Problem in the USSR,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 53, no. 4 (December 1963), 465–78; Harry Eugene Walters, Agriculture in the United States and the Soviet Union, vol. 53 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1963).
17. ↩ Andronikov, Afanas’yeva, and Simakova, “Mapping the Soils of the Major Natural Zones of the USSR from Remote Sensing Imagery.”
18. ↩ Davies, The Socialist Offensive, 37; Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 489–502.
19. ↩ David Lane, The End of Social Inequality?: Class, Status and Power under State Socialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982).
20. ↩ Davies, The Socialist Offensive, 110–12; Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 453–54; L. F. Wong and V. Ruttan “A Comparative Analysis of Agricultural Productivity Trends in Centrally Planned Economies,” in Soviet Agriculture: Comparative Perspectives, ed. K. R. Gray (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1990).
21. ↩ Guillaume Suing, Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology, trans. Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (London: Iskra, 2025), 82–96.
22. ↩ Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 120; Valentin Golosov and Vladimir Belyaev, “The History and Assessment of Effectiveness of Soil Erosion Control Measures Deployed in Russia,” International Soil and Water Conservation Research 1, no. 2 (September 2013): 26–35.
23. ↩ Josef Breburda, “Land-Use Zones and Soil Degradation in the Soviet Union,” in Communist Agriculture: Farming in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. Karl-Eugen Wädekin (London: Routledge, 1990), 23–39; Yuri G. Chendev et al., “History of East European Chernozem Soil Degradation: Protection and Restoration by Tree Windbreaks in the Russian Steppe,” Sustainability 7 (January 2015): 705–24; K. N. Kulik and M. V. Vlasenko, “Experience in Implementing Major National Projects to Combat Degradation and Desertification in Russia,” Case Studies in Chemical and Environmental Engineering 9 (June 2024): 100583; Suing, Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology.
24. ↩ Davies, The Socialist Offensive, 19; Suing, Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology, 122–25, 136–38.
25. ↩ An oblast-level approximation of the effects of climate change on soil erosion rates can be gleaned from O. S. Bezuglova, O. G. Nazarenko, and I. N. Ilyinskaya, “Land Degradation Dynamics in Rostov Oblast,” Arid Ecosystems 10, no. 2 (April 2020): 93–97.
26. ↩ Wojciech Halicki and Sergey P. Kulizhsky, “Changes in Arable Land Use in Siberia in the 20th Century and Their Effect on Soil Degradation,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 72, no. 3 (2015): 456–73.
27. ↩ N. A. Karavayeva, T. G. Nefedova, and V. O. Targulian, “Historical Land Use Changes and Soil Degradation on the Russian Plain,” in Land Use Changes in Europe, eds. F. M. Brouwer, A. J. Thomas, and M. J. Chadwick (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), 351–77; for a more detailed analysis, see Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 120–25.
28. ↩ A. J. Bot, F. O. Nachtergaele and A. Young, Land Resource Potential and Constraints at Regional and Country Levels: World Soil Resources Reports 90 (Rome: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2000), 111–14.
29. ↩ Pavel Krasilnikov et al., “Assessing Soil Degradation in Northern Eurasia,” Geoderma Regional 7, no. 1 (March 2016): 1–10.
30. ↩ László Pásztor et al., “Compilation of a National Soil-Type Map for Hungary by Sequential Classification Methods,” Geoderma 311 (February 2018): 93–108.
31. ↩ Iván Benet, “Hungarian Agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s,” in Socialist Agriculture in Transition: Organizational Response to Failing Performance, eds. Josef C. Brada and Karl-Eugen Wädekin (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1988); István T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Zsuzsa Lengyel, Mezőgazdaság, Szövetkezetek, Parasztság a Hetvenes Években [Agriculture, Cooperative Farms, and Peasantry in the 1970s] (Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó, 1982); Swain, Collective Farms Which Work?
32. ↩ F. Baranyai, A. Fekete, and I. Kovács A Magyarországi Talajtápanyag-Vizsgálatok Eredményei [Results of Soil Nutrient Content Analyses in Hungary] (Budapest: Mezőgazdasági Kiadó, 1987); P. Csathó and L. Radimszky, “A Magyar Mezőgazdaság Környezetvédelmi és Agronómiai Megközelítésű NPK Tápelem-Mérlege 1901 és 2000 között [The Hungarian Agricultural Environmental Conservation and Agronomic NPK Nutrient-Balance Approach, 1901–2000)],” Agrokémia és Talajtan 54 (2005): 217–34; Béla Gonda, “A Kemizálás a Magyar Mezőgazdaság Fejlesztésében [Chemicals in the Development of Agriculture in Hungary],” Agrártörténeti Szemle 27, no. 1–2 (1985): 255–338; D. Győri, A Környezetvédelem Talajtani Vonatkozásai [The Soil Scientific Basis of Environmental Protection] (Budapest: Budapesti Műszaki Egyetem Továbbképző Intézete, 1975).
33. ↩ Chris Corrin, Superwomen and the Double Burden: Women’s Experience of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1992); Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1998); Iván Völgyes, “Dynamic Change: Rural Transformation, 1945–1975,” in The Modernization of Agriculture: Rural Transformation in Hungary, 1848–1975, ed. Joseph Held (New York: Columbia University Press,1980).
34. ↩ Lane, The End of Social Inequality?
35. ↩ James R. O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York, Guilford Press, 1998), 256–65.
36. ↩ Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993; József Böröcz, “Dual Dependency and Property Vacuum: Social Change on the State Socialist Semiperiphery,” Theory and Society 21 (February 1992): 77–104.
37. ↩ Lukas Figge, Kay Oebels, and Astrid Offermans, “The Effects of Globalization on Ecological Footprints: An Empirical Analysis,” Environment, Development and Sustainability 19 (2017): 863–76.
38. ↩ Charles Becker, S. Joshua Mendelsohn, and Kseniya Benderskaya, “Russian Urbanization in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras,” Working Paper no. 9, Human Settlements Group, International Institute for Environment and Development, London, 2012, iied.org; Zoltán Kovacs and Zoltán Dövényi, “Geographical Features of Urban Transition in Hungary,” Geographica Pannonica 2, no. 1 (1998): 41–46.
39. ↩ Miguel A. Altieri and Fernando R. Funes-Monzote, “The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture,” Monthly Review 63, no. 8 (January 2012): 23–33; Suing, Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology, 27–38.
40. ↩ See Richard Levins, “How Cuba Is Going Ecological,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16, no. 3 (September 2005): 7–25; José A. Díaz Duque, “Los Retos Ambientales en la Producción Agrícola Cubana,” Ecovida: Revista Científica sobre Diversidad Biológica y Su Gestión Integrada 1, no. 2 (2009): 221–40; Miguel Ángel Núñez, “Eco-Redes Agroalimentarias: Enfoque Necesario en la Agroecología,” Acta Biologica Venezuelica 37, no. 1 (January–June 2017): 1–12. Other work approximating the sort of task described here is in Daniel Faber, “A Revolution in Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice: The Political Ecology of Nicaragua,” in Environmental Justice: Discourses in Political Economy, Energy, and Environmental Policy, eds. John Byrne, Cecilia Martinez, and Leigh Glover (Princeton: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 39–70. However, the analysis is centered on general features of public health and, arguably, the vicious U.S.-led Contra war on the Sandinistas and landowner resistance made the establishment of socialist cooperative farms impossible beyond a couple of years. See also Gary Ruchwarger, “The Campesino Road to Socialism? The Sandinistas and Rural Co-operatives,” in Socialist Register, vol. 24, eds. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, and John Saville (London: Merlin Press, 1988), 220–43.
41. ↩ John E. Quinn and Erle C. Ellis, “Anthromes,” in Handbook of the Anthropocene, eds. Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf (New York: Springer Nature, 2023), 203–11.
42. ↩ Sergey Buzmakov, Darya Egorova, and Evgeniia Gatina, “Effects of Crude Oil Contamination on Soils of the Ural Region,” Journal of Soils and Sediments 19 (2019): 38–48.
43. ↩ Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment.