3666. Michael Roberts: The Ukraine War-A Human Disaster

 By Michael Roberts, Michael Roberts Blog, February 24, 2025

Michael Roberts

Today marks the end of the third year of the Ukraine-Russia war. After three years of war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused staggering losses to Ukraine’s people and economy. There are various estimates of the number of Ukrainian civilians and military casualties (deaths plus injuries): 46,000 civilians and maybe 500,000 soldiers. Russian military casualties are about the same. Millions have fled abroad and many more millions have been displaced from their homes within Ukraine. A confidential Ukrainian assessment earlier in 2024, reported by the Wall Street Journal, placed Ukrainian troop losses at 80,000 killed and 400,000 wounded. According to government figures, in the first half of 2024, three times as many people died in Ukraine as were born, the WSJ reported. In the last year, Ukrainian losses have been five times higher than Russia’s, with Kyiv losing at least 50,000 service personnel a month.

Ukraine’s GDP is down 25% and an additional 7.1 million Ukrainians now live in poverty.

The damage to those staying in Ukraine is immense. Learning losses by Ukrainian children are a particular worry: Ukraine will end up with lower quality additions to its workforce due to war-caused (and prior to that, Covid-caused) disruptions in the learning process. These losses are estimated to be in the order of $90 billion, or almost as much as the losses in physical capital to-date. Studies also show that a war during a person’s first five years of life is associated with about a 10% decline in mental health scores when they are in their 60s and 70s. It’s not just war casualties and the economy that’s the problem, but also the long-term damage to those Ukrainians staying.

Despite the war, there has been some modest economic recovery in the last year. Energy exports have jumped. Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea are still functioning and trade is flowing west along the Danube, and to a lesser extent by train. Meanwhile, agriculture has staged a recovery. Even so, manufacturing of iron and steel still remains at a fraction of its prewar level; down from 1.5m tonnes a month before the war to just 0.6m a month.

But Ukraine badly lacks able-bodied people to produce or to go to war. Ukraine’s unemployment rate was 16.8% in January, but that still leaves a shortage of workers because skilled people have left the country and most others have been mobilised into the armed forces. So bad is the situation that there has been talk of mobilising 18-25 years olds who are currently exempt, but this is highly unpopular and would reduce civilian employment even more.

Ukraine is still totally dependent on support from the West. It needs at least $40bn a year in order to sustain government services, support its population and maintain production. It is relying on the EU for such civil funding, while relying on the US for all its military funding – a straight ‘division of labour’. In addition, the IMF and World Bank have offered monetary assistance but, in this case, Ukraine has to show it has ‘sustainability’, ie it is able at some point to pay back any loans. So if bilateral loans from the US and EU countries (and it is mainly loans, not outright aid) do not materialise, then the IMF cannot extend its lending programme.

That brings us back to what will happen to Ukraine’s economy, if and when the war with Russia comes to an end. According to the latest estimate of the World Bank, Ukraine will need $486bn over the next ten years to recover and rebuild – assuming the war ends this year. That’s nearly three times its current GDP. Direct damages from the war have now reached almost $152 billion, with about 2 million housing units – about 10% of the total housing stock of Ukraine – either damaged or destroyed, as well as 8,400 km (5,220 miles) of motorways, highways, and other national roads, and nearly 300 bridges. About 5.9 million Ukrainians remained displaced outside of the country and internally displaced persons were around 3.7 million.

What is left of Ukraine’s resources (those not annexed by Russia) have been sold off to Western companies. Overall, 28% of Ukraine’s arable land is now owned by a mixture of Ukrainian oligarchs, European and North American corporations, as well as the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Nestle has invested $46 million in a new facility in western Volyn region while German drugs-to-pesticides giant Bayer plans to invest 60 million euros in corn seed production in central Zhytomyr region. MHP, Ukraine’s biggest poultry company, is owned by a former adviser to Ukrainian president Poroshenko. MHP has received more than one-fifth of all the lending from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in the past two years. MHP employs 28,000 people and controls about 360,000 hectares of land in Ukraine — an area bigger than EU member Luxembourg.

The Ukrainian government is committed to a ‘free market’ solution for the post-war economy that would include further rounds of labour-market deregulation below even EU minimum labour standards i.e sweat shop conditions; and cuts in corporate and income taxes to the bone; along with full privatisation of remaining state assets. However, the pressures of a war economy have forced the government to put these policies on the back burner for now, with military demands dominating.

The aim of the Ukraine government, the EU, the US government, the multilateral agencies and the American financial institutions now in charge of raising funds and allocating them for reconstruction is to restore the Ukrainian economy as a form of special economic zone, with public money to cover any potential losses for private capital. Ukraine will also be made free of trade unions, severe business tax regimes and regulations and any other major obstacles to profitable investments by Western capital in alliance with former Ukrainian oligarchs.

Ukrainian sources estimate the cost of restoring infrastructure: financing the war effort (ammunition, weapons, etc.); losses of housing stock, commercial real estate, compensation for death and injury, resettlement costs, income support, etc.) and lost current and future income will reach $1trn, or six years of Ukraine’s previous annual GDP. That’s about 2.0% of EU GDP per year or 1.5% of G7 GDP for six years. By the end of this decade, even if reconstruction goes well and assuming that all the resources of pre-war Ukraine are restored (ie eastern Ukraine’s industry and minerals are in the hands of Russia), then the economy would still be 15% below its pre-war level. If not, recovery will be even longer.

Russia: the war economy
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 to take over the four Russian-speaking provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine has ironically given a boost to the economy. In 2023, real GDP growth was 3.6% and over 3% in 2024. Russia’s war economy is holding up.

Over the past three years of war, Russia has managed to steer through sanctions, while investing nearly a third of its budget in defence spending. It’s also been able to increase trade with China and sell its oil to new markets, in part by using a shadow fleet of tankers to skirt the price cap that Western countries had hoped would reduce the country’s war chest. Half of its oil and petroleum was exported to China in 2023. It became China’s top oil supplier. Chinese imports into Russia have jumped more than 60% since the start of war, as the country has been able to supply Russia with a steady stream of goods including cars and electronic devices, filling the gap of lost Western goods imports. Trade between Russia and China hit $240 billion in 2023, an increase of over 64% since 2021, before the war.

However, the war has intensified an acute labour shortage. Like Ukraine, Russia is now desperately short of people – if for different reasons. Even before the war, Russia’s workforce was shrinking due to natural demographic causes. Then at the start of the war in 2022, about three-quarters of a million Russian and foreign workers, the middle class in IT, finance, and management, left the country. Meanwhile, the Russian army is recruiting tens of thousands of working-age men. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 workers join the army every month, about 0.5 percent of the total supply. That has benefited those Russian workers not in the armed forces with security of employment as managers are reluctant to let anyone go.

Wages have soared by double digits, poverty and unemployment are at record lows. For the country’s lowest earners, salaries over the last three quarters have risen faster than for any other segment of society, clocking an annual growth rate of about 20%. The government is spending massively on social support for families, pension increases, mortgage subsidies and compensation for the relatives of those serving in the military.

But inflation has spiralled and the ruble has depreciated significantly against the dollar, forcing the Russian central bank to hike its interest rate to over 20%.

A war economy means that the state intervenes and even overrides the decision-making of the capitalist sector for the national war effort. State investment replaces private investment. Ironically, in Russia’s case this has been accelerated by Western companies’ withdrawal from Russian markets and by the sanctions. The Russian state has taken over foreign entities and/or resold them to Russian capitalists committed to the war effort.

Spending on new construction, higher-tech equipment, new kit has hit a 12-year high of 14.4 trillion rubles ($136.4 bn), up 10 percent from the previous year. Investment growth rate topped the GDP growth rate by a wider margin than at any point over the previous 15 years, according to the Moscow-based Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-term Forecasting.

The main destinations for the country’s hitherto-unseen investment are import substitution, eastward infrastructure, and military production. Mechanical engineering, which includes manufacturing finished metal products (weapons), computers, optics and electronics, and electrical equipment, is one of the fastest-growing areas for investment.

Many Western economists are forecasting a collapse in the Russian economy – as they have been saying for the last three years. The acute labour shortage, persistent and rising inflation caused by soaring military expenditure and ever-tightening sanctions will – it is claimed – finally bring about an economic crisis that will force Moscow to abandon its aims in Ukraine and bring about an end to the war on terms more acceptable to Kyiv and its allies.

Many analysts have attributed these signs of overheating to elevated spending on the war in Ukraine, pointing to record-high military expenditure which is expected to have reached over 7% of GDP in 2024. With defence spending expected to rise by nearly 25% this year, accounting for around 40% of federal government expenditure, some have raised the prospect of Russia slipping into ‘stagflation’, combining high inflation with low to no growth.

But despite fighting the most intense war in Europe since 1945, Moscow has managed to fund the war with modest budget deficits of between 1.5–2.9% of GDP since 2022. As a result, the Kremlin has barely had to borrow to fund the war. Tax revenues generated by domestic activity have soared since the war began. At around 15% of GDP, Russia has the smallest state debt-to-GDP ratio of the G20 economies. So, despite being cut off from most external sources of capital, Russia remains more than capable of financing domestic investment and government expenditure with its own resources.

Over the past two years, Russia has recorded a surplus on its current account of around 2.5% of GDP. For as long as Russia can continue to export large volumes of oil, this is unlikely to change. Russia’s oil and gas revenues jumped by 26% last year to $108 billion even as daily oil and gas condensate production declined in 2024 by 2.8%, according to Russian government officials cited by Reuters. Despite remaining the world’s most-sanctioned country in 2024, Russia exported a record 33.6 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) that year, which is a 4% increase from the previous year.

The Institute of International Finance (IIF) has forecast a decrease in Russia’s fiscal breakeven oil price (the amount to balance budget spending) to $77 per barrel by 2025, supported by a recovery in oil and gas revenues. At the same time, the external breakeven oil price (the price needed to balance the external current account), at $41 per barrel, is the second lowest among major hydrocarbon exporters. That means the current Urals oil price more than meets these breakeven points.

But none of this ‘war economy’ investment will support Russia’s long-term productivity growth. Russia’s war economy will revert to capitalist accumulation when the war ends. And the Russian economy remains fundamentally natural resource linked. It relies on extraction rather than manufacturing. War production is basically unproductive for capital accumulation over the long run. Russia remains technologically backward and dependent on high-tech imports. Even with massive fiscal stimuli, it has yet to produce technologies fit for a competitive export market beyond arms and nuclear energy, with the former already sanctioned and the latter on the brink of being so. Russia is not a substantial player in any of the cutting-edge technologies, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology.

The demographic trough, the declining quality of university education and severed ties with international schools and a brain drain exacerbate these problems. The technological gap will likely widen, with Russia increasingly relying on Chinese imports and reverse engineering (copying). Russia’s potential real GDP growth is probably no more than 1.5% a year as growth is restricted by an ageing and shrinking population and low investment and productivity rates.

The Russian war economy is well placed to continue the war for several years ahead if necessary. But when the war is over, Putin may face a significant slump in production and employment. The underlying message is that the weakness of investment, productivity and profitability of Russian capital, even excluding sanctions, means that Russia will remain feeble economically for the rest of this decade.

The peace
President Trump has declared that he is seeking a peace settlement through direct negotiations with Russia. That would mean the end of US financial and military support for Ukraine. The current Ukraine leadership is opposing any deal that means the loss of territory and any veto on future membership of NATO. European leaders have declared that they will back Ukraine and continue to finance the war and provide military support.

Trump wants back what the US government has spent on Ukraine up to now, as well collateral for future spending to reconstruct the economy. He has complained about the huge transfers of funds to Ukraine unaccounted for. This is misinformation. The majority of the funds the US allocated for Ukraine stayed at home to fund the domestic defence industrial base and replenish US stockpiles. US arms manufacturers are making huge profits from this war.

Now Trump is demanding that Ukraine sign over 50% of its ‘rare earth’ mineral rights to the US in return for delivering the $500bn needed for post-war reconstruction. Trump: “I want them to give us something for all of the money that we put up and I’m gonna try and get the war settled and I’m try and get all that death ended. We’re asking for rare earth and oil, anything we can get.” As US senator Lindsey Graham said: “This war’s about money…The richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine, two to seven trillion dollars worth…So Donald Trump’s going to do a deal to get our money back, to enrich ourselves with rare minerals…” The problem is that around half these deposits (worth some $10-12 trillion) are in Russian-controlled areas.

All this is just another indication that Ukraine’s assets are going to be carved up by the Western powers. Last month, Ukraine President Zelenskyy signed a new law expanding the privatisation of state-owned banks in the country. It follows the Ukrainian government’s announcement in July of its ‘Large-Scale Privatisation 2024’ programme that is intended to drive foreign investment into the country and raise money for Ukraine’s struggling national budget. Large assets slated for privatisation currently include the country’s biggest producer of titanium ore, a leading producer of concrete products and a mining and processing plant. Ukraine envisaged privatising the country’s roughly 3,500 state-owned enterprises in a law of 2018, which said foreign citizens and companies could become owners. Hundreds of smaller-scale enterprises are now being privatised, bringing in revenues of UAH 9.6bn (£181m) in the past two years. This involves a seven-year sub-programme called SOERA (state-owned enterprises reform activity in Ukraine), which is funded by USAID with the UK Foreign Office as a junior partner. SOERA works to “advance privatization of selected SOEs [state-owned enterprises], and develop a strategic management model for SOEs remaining in state ownership.”

British capital is also licking its lips. Recently-published UK Foreign Office documents noted that the war provides “opportunities” for Ukraine delivering on “some hugely important reforms”. “The UK is hoping to reap benefits for UK firms from Ukraine’s reconstruction”, observes a report on British aid to Ukraine earlier this year by the aid watchdog, ICAI.

Putin’s invasion has driven the Ukrainian people into the hands of a pro free market, anti-labour government that will allow Western capital to take over Ukraine’s assets and exploit its diminished workforce. Maybe that was inevitable – from pro-Russian and pro-West oligarchs before the war, now to Western capital afterwards.

The war has not only destroyed Ukraine; it has seriously weakened the European economy as the costs of production have rocketed with the loss of cheap energy imports from Russia. But it seems that the European leaders want to continue the war even if Trump pulls out. They are desperately scrambling for funds to do that and to provide more military aid to the beleaguered Ukrainian government. Some leaders are proposing to send troops to Ukraine. So ‘war not peace’.

Just as bad is the decision of NATO and Europe’s mainstream leaders to double defence spending from about an average 1.9% of GDP by the end of the decade, supposedly to resist imminent Russian attacks if Putin gets a winning peace this year. This is ludicrously justified on the grounds that spending on ‘defence’ “is the greatest public benefit of all” (Bronwen Maddox, director of Chatham House, the international relations ‘think-tank’, which mainly presents the views of the British military state). Maddox concluded that: “the UK may have to borrow more to pay for the defence spending it so urgently needs. In the next year and beyond, politicians will have to brace themselves to reclaim money through cuts to sickness benefits, pensions and healthcare…In the end, politicians will have to persuade voters to surrender some of their benefits to pay for defence.” We get the same message from the leader of the winning party in the German election.

This will mean a huge diversion of investment from badly needed public services and benefits and from technological investment into unproductive and destructive arms production. That puts a huge uncertainty about Europe’s future as a leading economic entity through the rest of this decade and beyond.

3665. Development and the Future of Humanity

By Kamran Nayeri, March 18, 2025

Editor's Note: This essay is a free translation from an article I published in Critique of Political Economy (نقد اقتصاد سیاسی), a socialist website edited by Parviz Sedaghat, in Iran on March 10, 2025. The essay is based on a presentation I was invited to give to an online meeting of Left Co-Thinking (هم گرایی چپ) on "Development and Ecosystems" on January 29, 2025. I would like to thanks all of them for providing me with a forum to share my ideas on these questions and to extented my critical appraisal of the Marxist theory in light of the problems of the 21th century. KN 

The Context and Content of the Development Discussion

Economic growth is the rate of increase in GDP in a country or group of countries over a given time frame usually a year. For example, Africa's economic growth from 2013 to 2023 was 2.3 percent, in Europe it was just 1 percent, and in North America it was 1.2 percent. As a result, Africa grew faster than Europe and America during this period. But it is commonly agreed that the economy is more developed in Europe and North America. Economic development is the transformation of the structure of the economy. In the process of development, a country usually move from its traditional economy, which is mainly based on agriculture, to an industrial economy, and finally to an economy in which the service sector becomes larger than the agricultural and industrial sectors. As the service sector grows, the growth of labor productivity slows down because of slower economic growth as the service sector does not lend itself to automation as well as manufacturing.

Recent discussions of economic development began with the collapse of colonialism after World War II, which led to the independence of dozens of countries, and has been largely sidelined after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberalism.

Among the central issues of this discussion were the concept and causes of economic backwardness and how to develop and industrialize. In this discussion، the role of the world market was prominent which in the 1950s and 1960s led to the establishment  of the Dependency School of dependence which includes a set of national and socialist theories of underdevelopment  and dependent development.  Politically, the Dependency School led to Third Worldism, which focused on colonialism and imperialism as the cause of underdevelopment. It entailed support for national, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist revolutions. These theories were in line with the growth of nationalism in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. 

In the context of the Cold War between Western imperialism and the Soviet Union and the creation of a bipolar world, Third Worldism led to the establishment of the non-aligned movement that encompassed 120 countries. The climax of this movement was in 1979, when Fidel Castro was elected as its president and demanded a New World Order, whose political and economic content was unclear. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the temporary polarization of the world, this movement subsided. 

One of the most prominent examples of dependency theories is the Terms of Trade theory of the Argentine nationalist economist Raul Prebisch who considered backwardness to be due to the inappropriate ratio of the price index of export goods to the price index of imported goods. Arghiri Emmanuel proposed the theory of unequal exchange   that Maintained relatively high wages in industrialized countries cause distortion in value and price of goods in the world market in a way that transferred socially necessary labor (value) from underdeveloped countries to industrialized countries. Paul Baran proposed argued that monopoly capital was the reason for backwardness. 

W. Arthur Lewis, an economist born in San Lucia, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, showed in the essay "Economic Development with Unlimited Supply of Labor" (1954) that economic growth is accelerated and development is possible by creating jobs in the industrial sector because of its far higher productivity of labor than in traditional agriculture. Nicholas Kaldor, Hungarian economist who immigrated to England, proposed his theory of cumulative causation in which he underscores the importance of the industrial sector in technical change and innovation, hence economic development and growth.

The tension between these theories and dependency theories, such as those of Emmanuel and Baran, that provided an explanation for backwardness based on Marxist economics, was critically considered by other Marxist economists. Elizabeth Dore criticizes Dependency School and its Marxist supporters as follows: 

"The distinguishing feature of all Dependency writers is that they treat the social and economic development of underdeveloped countries as largely influenced by external forces, namely, the domination of these countries by other and more powerful countries. This leads dependency theorists to adopt a circulationist approach. They posit that underdevelopment can be explained in terms of relations of domination in exchange, almost to the exclusion of the analysis of the forces and relations of production (Dore 1983, p. 115).”

In his book Imperialism: The Pioneer of Capitalism (1980), Bill Warren rejects the "Marxist" theories of dependency and enumerates the development and industrialization in some backward countries. 

As Baran had argued that monopoly capital, that is imperialism, is the source of backwardness, Warren who marshals empirical evidence of development and industrialization in some of these countries, argues that the problem is in Lenin’s theory imperialism.  However, both Baran and Warren were mistaken about Lenin’s theory. Lenin, who defines imperialism by the export of capital, writes: "The export of capital to these countries affects and greatly accelerates the development of capitalism. (Lenin, 1916, emphasis added). However, the monopoly capital theory beginning with Hilferding, through Lenin and Bukharin, to Sweezy are based on a mistaken reading of Marx’s Capital, particularly Marx’s concept of free competition. They assumed Marx held neoclassical theory of perfect competition. Moreover, Lenin's book on imperialism is not about the question of development and backwardness, but about the economic causes of the First World War, which he considered to be an imperialist war. 

Uneven and compound development theories about late development and industrialization have more explanatory power. Alexander Gerchenkron, a professor of economic history at Harvard University who had studied economic development and industrialization in Germany and Tsarist Russia, proposed the theory of relative backwardness and industrialization. Gerchenkron has shown that industrialization in Germany has been done with the help of banks and in Russia with the help of the state by copying the latest methods of industrial production available at the time. As a result, he predicted that this pattern would be repeated itself in late development and industrialization. His prediction has been confirmed especially in the case of South Korea (Amsden 1992) and China. 

Ernst Mandel has argued that the pursuit of surplus profits encourages industrial capital to contribute to the development of relatively backward countries, which is in line with Gerchenkron’s and Lenin's theories. 

I have also studied eight prominent development theorists: W. Arthur Lewis (Development  with an Unlimited Supply of Labor), Raul Prebish (terms of trade), Arghiri Emmanuel (Unequal Exchange), Paul Baran (Monopoly Capital), Stephen Himmer (Internationalization of capital and uneven development), Nicholas Kaldor (cumulative causation), Alexander Gerchenkron (Relative backwardness and Industrialization), and Ernst Mendel (search for surplus profits and uneven development), I have thus synthesized a general theory of uneven and combined late capitalist development (Nayeri 1991/2023). By "late" I mean entry into the path of capitalist development after the consolidation of the world capitalist market due to generalized commercial sea transport, means of communication, and finance at the end of the nineteenth century. 

Theoretical Background of Development Theories 

Attention to economic development began in Europe with mercantilism in the 15th-18th centuries, beginning at the end of the Renaissance and continued until the beginning of modernity. The goal of mercantilism was to increase exports and reduce imports to increase the country's current account. One of the tools of mercantilism was to increase foreign exchange reserves through a positive trade balance, especially due to the sale of finished products. Mercantilists required for government intervention and regulation and thus proposed strengthening the state against other rival states. Tariffs, especially on industrial goods, were among the mercantilist policies to protect domestic production. In foreign policy, mercantilism was accompanied by colonialism, and the transfer of wealth from the periphery to the developing capitalist countries in Europe. 

The physiocrats, a group of French economists including François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot believed that wealth came from agriculture. They opposed state intervention in the economy and considered farmers to be the engine of the economy.

These were followed by the English political economists with their integration of the idea of value created by labor in the process of capitalist production and division of labor to enhance labor productivity as the engine of growth. 

All these schools of economic thought were influenced by the key idea of Enlightenment.  

The Age of Enlightenment 

The intellectual movement in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries around issues such as the existence of God, reasoning, nature, and humanism led to a revolution in art, philosophy, and politics. At the center of this movement was the substitution of reason for faith and dignity of people above the Church and the court. The goal of knowledge was freedom and happiness. The dominance of the Church over social life was weakened through humanism, the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation accompanied by the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. The latter established a mechanical view of nature instead of paganism which viewed nature as fully alive (Merchant 1982; Nayeri, 2021). Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton were among the scientists and philosophers of this new mechanical view of nature, which paved the way for the plundering of wealth from it for the primitive accumulation of capital, and for ongoing capital accumulation (ibid.). Carolyn Merchant, historian of science and eco-feminist writes in her masterpiece The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution:

“Disorderly, active nature was soon forced to submit to the questions and experimental techniques of the new science. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a celebrated ‘father of modern science,’ transformed tendencies already extant in his own society into a total program advocating the control of nature for human benefit. Melding together a new philosophy based on natural magic as a technique for manipulating nature, the technologies of mining and metallurgy, the emerging concept of progress and a patriarchal structure of family and state, Bacon fashioned a new ethic sanctioning the exploitation of nature (Merchant 1982, p. 164, my emphasis).”

Merchant views science as a “methodology for manipulating nature which became a significant undertaking during the latter half of the seventeenth century.” (see endnote 4, Merchant, 1980, p. 186)  

The Age of Enlightenment led to modernity, which was accompanied by individualism, scientific and rationalist explanations, the emergence and expansion of bureaucracy, urbanization, nation-states, and the expansion of anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization and its globalization. 

Science and technology have been pillars of subjugation of nature yet in the Enlightenment discourse they are the measure of social progress. This line of thinking has been central to the socialist theory of Marx and Engels and its development to the present day. Merchant criticizes the idea of management of nature central to Scientific Revolution and bourgeois idea of progress but even today's ecosocialists continue to use it as a central part of their plan for the future of humanity (for a critique of one such ecosocialist see Nayeri 2015). 

As I have documented it (Nayeri, 2023), the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, that is, the actually existing modernity, has created the climate crisis that threatens humanity and most other life on Earth. The same can be shown in the case of other existential crises: The Sixth Extinction, ongoing pandemics, and nuclear annihilation. 

Marx's socialism, on the one hand, pursues the goal of eliminating alienation from nature and social alienation, and on the other hand, affirms rationalism of the Enlightenment and its idea of progress based on science and technology while criticizing bourgeois individualism (Therborn 1996; Browning 2011). Historical materialism, which is Marx’s and Engels’s theory of society and history, considers the transformation of the mode of production and consequently the relations of production to be based on the development of productive forces, and considers socialism on the basis of the highest level of expansion of productive forces which of course will serve the proletariat in the transition to socialism (Nayeri, 2023). Even if this vision for the future of humanity becomes a reality, the result will be an anthropocentric industrial socialist civilization. Would there be any doubt that such a society will continue to fuel existential ecological crises and human alienation from nature and social alienation? 

Is it not astonishing that the socialist movements in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have accepted these theories, all of which are rooted in the European Enlightenment and modernity, without questioning and criticism? Didn’t Marx and Engels in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) write approvingly:

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

Of course, there are “Marxists” who attempt to “defend” Marx from the charge of European centrism.(Anderson 2022). However, is there any doubt that such views expressed by Marx and Engels derive directly from the Enlightenment thinking on humanism, history, and progress of nations? Are these views also expressed by a section of Social Democracy in of the Second International that argued European colonialism has a progressive historical role and proposed adoption of socialist colonial policies (Lenin 1907). 

Didn't Nietzsche (see Klaire, n.d.), Tolstoy (In War and Peace; Moran, 2024), and Gandhi (Perrett 2015) critique modernity?  Non-Marxist thinkers (e.g., see Ronald 2004; for a review see Nayeri in 2014) have also criticized the central idea of progress.

Getting back to the theories of capitalist development, Adam Smith (1776) in The Wealth of Nations argued for accumulation of capital, hence capitalist development, through division of labor. Still, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Smith throw light one the feelings of individuals and the need for a theory of ethics. While criticizing political economy, Marx himself identified wealth not by accumulation of use-value, but by expansion of free time. Still, in Marx's theory of socialism free time is made possible by increasing productivity of labor based on greater division of labor. This runs counter with Marx’s view of socialism as a self-managed society of direct produced producers (Nayeri 2025). The more industrialized and complex a society, the heavier would  the weight of bureaucrats and technocrats be which undermine the potential for socialist democracy. 

The revolutions of the twentieth century that considered socialism as their goal took place in the periphery of the capitalist world market and were immediately confronted with the need for economic development and industrialization. Today, these countries openly pursue a capitalist economy, or at least a market economy controlled by the Communist Party (Nayeri, 2024). There can be no doubt that these countries also are contributing to the existential crises caused by the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. 

As de-alienation and human development are central concerns in Marx’s view of socialism, let us turn to Native American culture for some clues.

Human Development and De-Alienation from Nature

The philosophy of life among Native American thinkers is fundamentally different from the attitude of modernity. Of course, the cultures of different groups of Indians are different, but they are all derived from ecocentrism of hunter-gatherers in which life is consciously linked to the rest of the ecosystem. Let us consider the philosophic outlook of John Fire Lame Deer (1976). In his conversations with Richard Erdoes, Lame Deere (1903-1976) who was the holy man of Sioux nation explained  his philosophy of life. Erdoes then edited and published it as a book at the time of Lame Deer death. Lame Deer contrasts their view of life with those of white culture. Native American culture is built around concrete symbols. Sitting by the fire where a pot of soup is being cooked, Lame Deer says:

"I'm an Indian. I think about ordinary, common things like this pot.  The boiling water comes from the rain cloud. It represents the sky. The fire comes from the sun that warms us all-men, animals, tress. The meat stands for the four-legged creatures, our animal brothers who gave [us] themselves so we should live. The steam is living breath. It was water; now it goes up to the sky and becomes a cloud again. These things are sacred. Looking at the pot full of good soup, I am thinking now, in this simple manner, Wakan Tanka [sacred spirit] takes care of me. We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which in our mind are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. To you, symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book. To us they are part of nature, rain, stones, trees, animals, even little insects like ants and grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us meaning (Lame Deer and Erdoes 1972, pp. 96-97).”

Lame Deer refers to the slang used by radicalized white youth in the 1960s when they called their parents and those who believed in the dominant culture in society as "straight." In the same way, he says that white culture is a square rectangle. Everything from buildings to furniture and tools has sharp corners that are good for mass production. In Native Indian culture everything is round as they are in nature. 

Biologists Heather Leying and Brett Weinstein (2022), in their book A Hunter-Gatherer Guide for the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life provide an evolutionary overview of human history and argue that human brain was formed during the 2.5 million years of evolution of our ancestors to deal with the challenges of their time as hunter-gatherers. However, our brain has not evolved since modernity got underway to prepare us for the   modern life, especially in the period since the Industrial Revolution. 

They explore the problems caused by this lack of adaptation in various areas such as medicine, food, sleep, sex and sexuality, child-rearing and family relationships, schooling, puberty, culture, and awareness. Incidentally, one of the issues they touch upon is the evolution of the symbols of the living environment, which are round in Native American culture and square and rectangular in modern culture. The first is the pattern of nature, and the second is the pattern of mass production. They illustrate this with the Muller-Lyer illusion in Figure 1. 

<----->      >-----<

Figure 1

Modern humans usually find the two parts shown to have different length. This is attributed to the error of vision. Leying and Weinstein (ibid., pp. 39-40) point out that people who live in hunter-gatherer societies easily perceive that each part of the above figure to be of equal length. In other words, modern humans have a poorer sense of sight compared to their ancestors. It has been known that modern human senses have changed along with the development of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. In fact, the shape of modern human brain has changed since the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago (Neubauer, Hublin and Gunz 2018) and the brain size has probably decreased by 13% in the last 100,000 years (Fox-Skelly 2024). Of course, these findings must not be surprising since  we know that the brains of all domesticated animals have shrunk and changed because the challenges of domesticated life are different from that of wildlife (Scott, 2017: pp. 80-81). By domesticating other creatures, we humans have also domesticated ourselves and lost the capabilities of our ancestors (Barker 2006, pp. 38-39). 

As a result, civilization, especially anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, has deprived us of some capabilities. 

Development and the Future of Humanity

Getting back to economic development, in recent years new models have been proposed with a sustainable development strategy that incorporates economic growth of all social groups along with environmental protection. Two examples are the donut economy and the circular economy. Kate Rawort’s (2017) donut economy is a detailed explanation of a donut-shaped diagram. In the inner circle, the basic needs of human beings are stipulated, and in the outer circle of donut, there are ecological boundaries such as drinking water, climatic conditions, the health of species, and the ozone layer, which the economy and society should not exceed. Rawort does not have a specific critique of capitalism, although she does have a critique of some aspects of the history of economic thought. She views economic growth with skepticism and may even be inclined to a stationary state economy model. If so, she can be considered among the degrowth thinkers. In that case, my critique of the degrowth movement will also apply to donut economics (Nayeri, 2021). 

The fundamental problem with theories of sustainable development is the lack of a radical critique of the existing social system that has created the existential crises of the 21st century. If my argument above is correct, this system, which I consider to be the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, is rooted in modernity and its values, including the idea of progress relying on science and technology to accumulate wealth and power. This manner of specifying the problem is at the same time a critique of the Marxist view, which sees the root of the crisis in capitalism as essentially an economic system and sees the way out of the crisis as socialism as a continuation of modernity under the guidance of the working class. 

Some socialist thinkers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947) have criticized the ideas of the Enlightenment, arguing that modernity, instead of the emancipation of humanity, has led  to the emergence of fascism, Stalinism, industrialized culture, and consumer society. Of course, we must add to this list colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, and existential ecological crises. 

Imperialism and fascism in Germany and Italy strengthened each other in the creation and control of colonies in Africa (for Germany see Schilling 2015; for Italy see Zucci 2019-2020) Perry Anderson (1983) has argued that historical materialism is insufficient to answer the existential crises threatening life on Earth, that is, they go beyond classes and class struggle. I suggest we must have a new philosophy of life in which humanity is viewed as a small part of Mother Nature and must return to nature through a process of de-alienation from nature and undoing of social alienation. 

To better understand the difference between my view and Marxist's attitudes focused on modes of production, forces of production, and relations of production toward ecological crises, let consider the recent wildfires in Los Angeles. There is no debate about the causes of the fires and the extent of the massive damage caused by them. Drought caused by climate change has been unprecedented in the Los Angeles area. California has two seasons dry and rainy. The dry season begins in May and usually ends when the first rain comes in November. But in 2024, it didn't rain inLos Angeles region. The first rain came after the fires were put down in late January 2025. Santa Ana winds, which are hot, dry, fast-moving, blow from September to May. If a spark that usually has a human origin, such as a lit cigarette butt or electrical sparks, ignites a bush, the risk of spreading the fire is high. These are the reasons why the fire started. But why all this damage? The Greater Los Angeles is the largest county in the United States, with a population of 9,663,345. The city of Los Angeles has a population of 3,820,914, with a density of 8,300 people per square mile, but the population density of the suburbs continues to be high to a radius of 20 miles, at 2,000 people per square mile. This population density is a major reason for the high rate of damage. 

There is no doubt about the growing risk of the climate crisis, and the causes of its emergence and intensity. Top on the list of contributors to global warming and climate crisis is continued and increasing use of fossil fuels. The United States has the highest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world at 14.6 tons per person in 2022. This is six times the global average. And, Los Angeles is the world’s most congested city; Los Angeles residents sit in their cars five days each year in traffic that does not move with their car engine pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. 

As a result, the way of life of Los Angeles residents has contributing to the recent fires and the extent wildfires and their massive damage. Will the people living in Los Angeles County and local and national officials learn the lessons from this tragedy to prepare for a better future? The answer, unfortunately, is no. All the evidence suggests Los Angeles is being rebuilt on the same basis it has been founded on. 

Thus, it is clear that Los Angeles residents are more committed to the culture they are accustomed to than to a better and safer future for themselves and the rest of humanity. Of course, Los Angeles wildfires represent only a small part of the climate crisis which attracted worldwide media coverage because Los Angeles is large city in the United States both of which are iconic examples of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Few people know that Bangladesh, with a population density of 1,350 people per square kilometer and a low per capita income of $2,793 in 2023, is one third submerged in floods every year during the monsoon season, which has been exacerbated by the climate crisis. 

As a result, the people of the United States and Los Angeles are directly responsible for the Bangladesh floods. Yet, not only they not taking individual responsibility to change their way of life to address the crisis, there is not sign that they are engaged in any protest against the actions of the new president, Donald Trump, who on his first day in office withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord and lifted bans on the exploration, extraction, refining and sale of oil and gas. 

Ecocentric Socialism

In contrast to Marx's socialism, which was based on nineteenth-century materialism and his philosophical anthropology, which defined the nature of man as a set of social relations formed around the mode of production and his theory of history in which only humans have agency, Ecocentric Socialism is based on animistic materialism stemming from the worldviews of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and the latest knowledge in fields such as biology, anthropology, and anthropology, archeology which have established humanity as inseparable part of life on Earth and the rest of existence. Therefore, its theory of history extends at least 2.5 million years ago when the Homo genus emerged or 3.8 to 4.3 billion years ago when life emerged on Earth, or as Big History has it to the origins of the universe.  In this view of history, all being have agency in interrelationship with all others animate and inanimate beings (remember life itself emerged from non-organic matter!). Therefore, human history is a tiny part of natural history, and without understanding this, it cannot be analyzed and interpreted to solve social and ecological crises. The goal of Ecocentric Socialism, even more than Marx's socialism, is to eliminate alienation, especially alienation from nature (which provides the basis for social alienation). However, Marx has no explanation for the root causes of alienation his explanation of alienation in the capitalist mode of production. Ecocentric Socialism traces the origin of alienation to alienation from nature that began with the advent of farming 12,000 years ago. The farmer domesticated some plants and animals to organize the farm as an artificial ecosystem protected from wild nature. As a result, control and domination of nature became the pillar of farming and civilized society (that is how the idea of management of nature emerged). 

Ecocentric Socialism is a combined socialist and cultural revolution. A socialist revolution is needed to go beyond capital while at the same time a cultural revolution is required to replace the anthropocentric with ecocentrism. 

On the economic level Ecocentric Socialism envisions deindustrialization and degrowth in the overdeveloped  core of world capitalism in North America, Western Europe, China, and other countries that have and are largely capitalistically industrializing.  In the countries of the South there is a need for economic development to meet the human development needs of large masses of the population in a way that would do no harm to the ecosystem and ecosphere. 

At the same time, economies across the world should decentralize as much as possible as self-sufficient local economes run by the producers and for human development consistent with modest comforts of life. This requires a large reduction in the multiplicity of products while expanding production in the areas of education, health, housing, and culture. Along with the empowerment of women, democratic family planning, and increasing ecological awareness, the human population must be reduced from the current eight billion in a few generations less than one billion people.

As Harvard biologist and conservationist E. O. Wilson (2016; Nayeri 2017) proposed and even identified, at least half of the planet's soil and water surface should be immediately set aside as natural reserves closed to human interventions of any sort. 

In previous essays, I have presented social forces and strategy and tactics for Ecocentric Socialism and for the case of United States outlined an action program (Nayeri, 2018; Nayeri, 2017; Nayeri, 2020). Four essential aspects are the dismantling of all power relations, voluntary simplicity, a culture of being as opposed to the culture of having, and the need to  develop a love for nature as the source of all beauties in life. 

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