Maja and Reuben Fowkes, ‘Extracting the Future: the Socialist Anthropocene through Artists’ Eyes,’ in Tim Beasley-Murray, Michal Murawski and Wendy Bracewell, eds, Anti-Atlas: Critical area studies from the East of the West (UCL Press, 2025)

What was the relationship between actually-existing socialism and nature? Did socialism ‘destroy’ nature? Did it seek maniacal ‘mastery’ over nature? Or was there in fact a lived, practised (and centrally planned) ecological, even proto-anthropocenic, sensibility to the socialist project, even in its most seemingly vicious Lysenkoite phases? This entry by Maja and Reuben Fowkes – gathering its ‘data’ from an analysis of socialist realist artworks –profiles the ‘socialist Anthropocene’ as a fluid but discrete spatial terrain; a continent on which the high modern project of conquering and accommodating nature ran a corollary but distinct course from that of the Western capitalist world.

Anti-Atlas is open access and can be accessed here.