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

Waning U.S. hegemony and China’s rise as a superpower in green technologies have given climate politics a new geoeconomic dimension. Yet, given its emergence in the context of the Cold War, environmentalism has long been shaped by systemic rivalry. In divided Germany, the territorial proximity of two different states placed the green emphasis on systemic neutrality at the center of debates on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While Western environmentalism rejected the Marxist-Leninist endorsement of techno-scientific progress in the name of a universal problem of civilizational survival, socialist thinkers interpreted The Limits to Growth (1972) report as evidence of a structural crisis of monopoly capitalism and argued for long-term socialist planning as the viable solution to the environmental problem. It was within this contentious Cold War ecology that the East German philosopher Wolfgang Harich developed his provocative theory of “communism without growth.” Published in 1975 and marking its fiftieth anniversary in 2025, Harich’s book articulated a distinctive ecosocialist critique of growth, mediating between Western environmentalism and its Marxist-Leninist dismissal. Revisiting Harich’s concept of homeostatic communism in the age of climate catastrophe, this article traces his shift from authoritarian ecological despotism toward an ecological class analysis centered on eco-social conflicts.