All that’s necessary is for you to give up your money and freedom!
The Capitalist Market Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis — but Green Socialist Planning Can
Governments and central banks are increasingly presenting green or sustainable finance as the solution to the climate crisis. This approach claims that we can address a problem caused by the capitalist market by relying on that very same market. It exploits pervasive feelings of anxiety about climate change to lead us toward a new frontier of capital accumulation, where complex financial instruments will determine how we realize our environmental goals.
Yet there is another side to green finance that has not received the attention it deserves, and which has major implications for the Left. The investment scenarios designed to facilitate this project are a form of unacknowledged economic planning, whose advocates still promote the virtues of the market in theory while recognizing its limitations in practice.
In fact, those scenarios ultimately derive from the socialist calculation debate of the early twentieth century, which sought to lay the intellectual foundations of an alternative to capitalism. Technology has finally caught up with those who argued that computerized data collection and processing could liberate us from dependency on the market as a calculating tool.
So far, however, this version of planning is being used to prop up the existing social order rather than to construct a new one. We need to bring it under democratic control so that we can impose a very different set of priorities.
That’s Modern Socialist speak for “government being heavily involved in all aspects of the economy, up to and including owning the means of production.” It means them controlling your company, controlling what the government allows you to purchase, where you can go, what you can do. It’s a very long piece, but, you get the idea, and, in case you weren’t aware, Jacobin Magazine is a hyper-leftist, uber-socialist magazine, which, weirdly, relies on capitalist things like subscribing monthly, and they have their own store! You can pay, using the capitalist system, for things like tote bags, t-shirts, a book called The Socialist Manifesto, and, even a great ball cap!
$30, huh? Not free?
