We need more than a Green New Deal

I had planned to write a bit about the Hungarian economist, Janos Kornai, who died a few weeks ago, and in particular in his work on “shortage economies”. I think his insights about “actually existing socialism” in the Eastern bloc can be usefully applied to actually existing capitalism everywhere, and clearly I’m not the only one to do so – Matthew Klein, writing in the Financial Times, claims they show a post-pandemic shock therapy may be be needed to break capitalist economies from their dependencies on government-funded “soft budget constraints”. Daniela Gabor does a very neat job of showing why this is wrong here.

What threw me off-course was Aditya Chakrabortty’s latest for the Guardian, which I read as a much-needed intervention in an ongoing debate around the joint issues of political strategy, and theories of the state and economy, in relation to climate change. Criticising the “Green New Deal”, that centrepiece of left climate policy, Chakrabortty claims it is a slogan with poor framing and limited reach; is confused about its actual content; and, in any case, isn’t likely to be enough to address the ecological collapse we actually face.

Intentional or not, the fundamental issues he raises exactly match those that have been knocked about in the last month or so, in the run-up to COP26, and in particular the arguments that have blown up (as it were) on the English-speaking left around the work of ecologist Andreas Malm and his three post-2019 texts, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the edited collection White Skin, Black Fuel. Adam Tooze and Richard Seymour have been going back-and-forth in their respective blogs and into the virtual pages of the New Statesman with some thoughtful contributions, and likewise from James Butler in the London Review of Books. At the centre of this dispute – at least in my reading of it – are the venerable (and related) questions of agency and the state: or, who can change the world? and can we rely on governments?

COP26

COP26 has, unhappily if predictably, supplied one version of an answer to those questions. (It’s “not the G20” and “no”.) Seymour and Tooze have quite distinct takes on both: Tooze arguing for a version of state-centred reformism (indeed one way to read his intellectual project in total is as a rescue attempt for an ...