Capitalism, communism, and environmental protection: Lessons from the German experience

Environmental History, Jul 1998 by Dominick, Raymond

At no time since its inception two hundred years ago has the ideology of free market capitalism stood more dominant than it does today. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, communists confidently challenged the advocates of laissez-faire, claiming that their system could produce more wealth than capitalism and distribute it more equitably. In the process, they boasted that communism could cure a broad range of social problems, including environmental pollution.L

Following the worldwide collapse of communism, almost all these claims proved to be false, none more so than the promise to protect the environment. After the Iron Curtain crumbled and uncensored reporting became possible, academics and the popular press rushed to document the massive environmental devastation in the Soviet zone.2 The West German magazine Der Spiegel indignantly branded communist East Germany as an "ecological outlaw of the first rank," noting, for example, that the Buna chemical works in the East dumped ten times more mercury into its neighboring river in a day than a comparable West German plant did in a year. The same article also reported that each of the two-cycle cars commonly operated in the East emitted one hundred times as much carbon monoxide as a western auto equipped with a catalytic converter. Elaborating on the air pollution problem, an article in Current History pointed out that East German sulphur dioxide emissions per capita were the highest in the world; the burden of that particular pollutant exceeded the corresponding figure for capitalist West Germany by a factor of twelve. Reflecting on these and other environmental contrasts in the summer of i99o, as East and West Germany moved toward unification, the New York Times reported that "one issue taking on urgency is how the orderly and clean half of the country can help clean up the disheveled and polluted half.... Quick action is needed because four decades of unbridled industrial spewing and spilling in East Germany have created an acute crisis for man and nature."3

Some commentators used the appalling evidence from the region east of the Iron Curtain to argue that the fundamental economic principles of communism predictably and inevitably produce environmental disaster. A Polish economist observed that "in Marxist ideology, natural resources are free and have no intrinsic value . . . Their sole purpose is to serve, not to constrain, humans." A West German analyst seconded this view, writing that the "socialist labor theory of value inevitably led to serious, almost universal environmental and health dangers." An American observer interpreted these environmental failings as the result of the absence of capitalism: "Absent a profit motive, energy, materials, and natural resources could be squandered without care. And they were."4 Such an implication-that capitalist economic principles can cure the environmental crises caused by communism-dovetails perfectly with the current zeitgeist, but it is highly questionable from an historical point of view.

Offering a recent and radically different interpretation of environmental conditions in the former Soviet zone, Roger Manser has charged that both the Western media and the local opponents of communism deliberately overstated the extent of the ecological disaster in Eastern Europe in order "to bury communism and central planning." Manser bluntly calls the reports summarized above "one of the last propaganda coups of the cold war." Of course, he does not deny the environmental damage in the former communist countries; he simply suggests that it be put in perspective against the environmental record of capitalism. He then provides one such comparison by contrasting conditions before the collapse of communism with what transpired after free market mechanisms were introduced, documenting in the process how poorly the free market has performed so far.5 Few environmental historians would be surprised by the fact that the free market, unaided by appropriate government regulation, failed to clean up Eastern Europe's environment. To underscore that point, this study will sample two periods from German history. First, the environmental consequences of the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century will be examined; second, the environmental records of capitalism and communism in West and East Germany will be compared over the forty-year period from 1949 to 1989. The evidence from this survey will then underpin an analysis of the fundamental causes of Germany's environmental maladies.

The rise of industrial capitalism occasioned unprecedented damage to the natural environment. For the German case, no book makes this point more clearly than Ulrike Gilhaus's recent study, Schmerzenkinder der Industrie. Gilhaus builds the case against the free market by pointing out how the earlier, paternalistic state had protected the interests of primary producers like farmers, foresters, and fishermen. Unintentionally, policies designed to protect these primary producers sometimes benefited the environment. For example, to protect neighboring farms from pollution damage, the law required smelters to shut down during the spring season, when new vegetation was especially vulnerable to the deleterious effects of pollution. For similar reasons, government regulations also restricted the total number of smelters. When pollution damage did occur, the law made it relatively easy for plaintiffs to collect compensation.6