The Capitalist Market Can't Solve the Climate Crisis — but Green Socialist Planning Can

Properties1
tagscalculation, planning, computation, climate, lange, hayek

3 min read

The Capitalist Market Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis — but Green Socialist Planning Can

Authors: Giulia Dal Maso and Alessandro Maresca | Date: 2022-10-18 | URL: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/capitalist-market-climate-crisis-green-socialist-planning-neoliberalism Status: fetched (WebFetch; arguments and short quotes captured)

Summary

The closest thing in the corpus to a left engagement with the economic-calculation-problem. The authors do not deny the calculation debate happened or that the socialists lost it on the terms of the 1930s; they argue the debate’s constraint was technological, and that finance itself now performs the planning function the calculation critique said was impossible.

Key Claims

  • The historical concession: the models and equations proposed by advocates of socialist planning (Barone, Lange) “were in practice unsolvable without the aid of computers,” and the infrastructure to gather the necessary data did not exist. The authors accept this as an accurate description of the mid-century failure.
  • The rebuttal move: that constraint has lifted. Climate finance now runs integrated assessment models (IAMs), Net Zero Scenario calculations, and climate stress tests — allocating capital using “data, models, and scenarios that are produced from outside of the market.”
  • Therefore: “green finance” is planning that refuses the name. The question is not planning vs. markets but who controls the existing planning apparatus.
  • Genealogy: traces IAMs back to early-20th-century socialist economists (Enrico Barone) and cites Allende’s Chile and Stafford Beer’s cybernetic Project Cybersyn as precedent for algorithmic economic coordination.
  • Concedes neoliberals have conceded: figures like Mark Carney “recognize that the market, left to its own devices, cannot prevent climate catastrophe.”
  • Also concedes limits on the left’s side: existing scenarios “remain within narrow limits” and lack diversity of assumptions.
  • Proposal: democratically driven economic planning built on existing data and algorithms, aimed at participatory, decentralized decision-making rather than a central board.

Direct Quotes

“Planning is already a reality: we need to take control of it as a tool with which to socialize and democratize finance.”

“They base their decisions on data, models, and scenarios that are produced from outside of the market.”

“Investment scenarios translate hypothetical worlds into a set of metrics and calculate what we need to do to make those worlds real.”

“Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”

Notes

Assessment of how well it actually answers Mises/Hayek: it engages the computational version of the problem (Lange’s side of the debate — can the equations be solved?) and largely bypasses the knowledge version (Hayek’s side — is the relevant information tacit, local, and generated by the act of exchange rather than merely collected?). Its “decentralized and participatory” framing gestures at Hayek’s objection without confronting it. The wiki’s standing lint finding — that no left source engages the calculation problem — should be softened rather than removed: one source now engages half of it.

Note this is a 2022 piece, not from the current cycle; it is the strongest available left engagement, not a contemporary intervention.

Concepts: economic-calculation-problem, socialism, decommodification | Debates: does-socialism-work-economically | Entities: richard-wolff