Let's not ask a Marxist about the environment

"Solving our global ecological crises today requires understanding how capitalism has transformed humanity’s relationship to the land," says the Marxist Jacobin website. "Karl Marx’s thought," they say, "gives us the tools to do just that."

Does it? Did it? The record of the Soviet Union and its empire — history's largest experiment in Marxism — was dismal. Air in the city of Nikel, in the Arctic Circle (below), was so bad that occupants routinely wore respirators outside to avoid the sulphuric acid in the air. 

The Caspian Sea was transformed into a sewer. "Hundreds of factories and refineries along the Caspian Sea dump untreated waste into the sea," explains Thomas DiLorenzo, "and major cities routinely dump raw sewage. It has been estimated that one-half of all the discharged effluent is carried in the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. The concentration of oil in the Volga is so great that steamboats are equipped with signs forbidding passengers to toss cigarettes overboard." 

Meanwhile, in Russia's "steel city" Magnitogorsk (to this day now only Russia's third-most polluted city), 

any new arrival to the city [was] likely to notice an industrial tinge to the air, like the whiff of a charcoal brazier and an acrid dryness at the back of the throat. ... [T]he level of benzopyrene in the air, a carcinogen that has been linked to lung cancer, was 23 times the allowed amount. In addition, millions of cubic metres of industrial waste water is pumped into the Ural River each year, according to environmentalists, polluting it with heavy particles, nitrites and other chemicals.... [A]ccording to Anna Rozhkova, head of the environmental group EcoMagnitka, only one in 20 children born in the city is completely free of health problems and allergies. The head of Magnitogorsk’s oncological hospital said in a 2012 interview that “people around the world are susceptible [to cancer], but we unfortunately outpace all others.”

That report is from The Guardian.

Pollution in the Marxist paradise was so inevitable that citizens were literally forced to adapt. A contemporary cartoon shows citizens, having no legal recourse,  using the chemical waste to paint the houses.

And it wasn't just Russia. Victor Sebestyen's book Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire explains that

even by East German standards, Leipzig was a filthy place. Millions of tons of sulphur dioxide were spewed into. the atmosphere nearby each year. The water in the reservoirs and rivers were massively polluted. An official government report, kept strictly secret, revealed that the city's water supply contained twenty substances available only on doctor's prescription, and ten times West German levels of mercury. Journalists and scientists who investigated the high levels of cancers, respiratory ailments and skin diseases around the city — which produced more than two-thirds of East Germany's electricity — were simply arrested.