Climate Kalecki, capitalist autonomy, and the non-ending of the world

A debate has opened up in the New Statesman between Adam Tooze and Richard Seymour that I thought started to bring out some of the strategic dilemmas the ecological movement – or, to be honest, humanity in general – now faces. Tooze’s essay argues that we are facing (in his words in a companion piece) a “new kind of crisis - a political crisis of the energy transition.” The push-back against this transition he thinks we should dub the first “climate Kalecki” moment, in reference to the Polish economist, Michal Kalecki, and his identification of the political push-back that government efforts to achieve full employment would produce. Tooze says the parallel is “not exact”, but what struck me about its use was how much it revealed about a specific conception of capitalism, and therefore of the kind of actions necessary. Tooze describes himself as a “self-confessed liberal Keynesian” and his arguments here begin to draw out the limits of this state-centred reformism.

Kalecki was an undoubtedly brilliant Polish economist who foreshadowed Keynes’ most important work, but who never fully got the credit for it from the economics establishment for the cardinal sins of (1) writing in Polish and (2) drawing the correct radical conclusions from it. Much of what Kalecki wrote about, in terms of developing an analysis of what we now call the “macroeconomy”, can be thought of as a direct development of volume 2 of Marx’s Capital, and Kalecki was unabashed in his foregrounding of the conflict between those who work, and those who pay them to work – between workers, and capitalists.

What his economic work demonstrated is that this antagonistic relationship could be reconciled at the level of the macroeconomy, and indeed must be reconciled at the level of macroeconomy if capitalism is to continue functioning at all. The conditions for the successful “reproduction” (in Marx’s terminology) of capitalism, allowing it to continue into the future, are that the different sets of monetary payments made by different actors in the economy balance out. I am paid; I spend the wages I receive; some capitalist therefore gets this money payment back to them, and uses some of it to pay workers and buy machinery; thus the cycle continues.

If workers spend all their earnings, this movement of money forms a complete circuit of monetary flows. And if capitalists invest all of their