We must be socialist so that we can be poor

Another entrant in that race to explain why we must stop having a successful economic system and move over to one that doesn’t work:

The climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the environment has become a surprise bestseller.

The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.

There’s a logical hole here - it’s entirely possible to have a static and capitalist society. Most of history was just that after all. It’s markets, free markets, which produce the growth. So, to stop the growth you need to stop the markets, not the capitalism. Stop people trying new ways of doing things and you do indeed stop that growth - for growth is new ways of doing things.

There’s also an incentives mistake here. The demand for growth isn’t driven by capitalist demand for profit at all. It’s driven by consumer demand for a better life. It’s us out here who rather like getting more for less of our sweat by hand or brain. Thus it’s us driving that desire for growth.

Finally there’s a simple factual mistake. Back when the IPCC started modelling the global economy, in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, it was made very obvious that a free market and capitalist world solved climate change better than a planned and social democratic one, let alone a socialist.

So there’s not a great deal of either logical or factual support for this idea that we must all be poorer. Nor that we should all be socialist.

Back a century the great claim of scientific socialism was that by replacing all that chaos and waste of markets with proper planning then we’d be richer. That was why we should be socialist, to be that richer. Didn’t work out that way as we know. So, now we’ve this demand that we must all be socialist so that we can be poorer. We must still be socialist, it’s the justification that has changed.

Still, at least this is better than Jason Hickel’s latest demand - we should be poorer so that we can be socialist.