The Global Justice Platform: A Deal Capitalism Should Take
by Ben Lockwood
Photo by Jimmy Giannini
Capitalism has so successfully degraded our ability to believe in a better future that imagining a world with high well-being, prosperity, and a habitable planet for all feels like engaging in fantastical, utopian daydreaming. But a new report argues that not only is this world possible, it's quantifiably feasible to create it over the course of the 21st century. Before assessing the validity of these claims, allow me to first explain a bit more about the report itself.
The Global Justice Report was recently published by The World Inequality Lab (WIL), a global research center that studies social, economic, and environmental inequalities, as well as the public policies that could reduce them. The report is one example of the WIL's mission, which includes publishing such reports and working papers in addition to extending the World Inequality Database, partaking in academic and public debates, and developing the projects and tools to reduce global inequality.
In the words of its authors, the Global Justice Report lays out "a vision of global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability". This vision takes the form of the Global Justice Platform (GJP), which the authors present as a quantified step toward global justice. Throughout the report, the authors develop the architecture of the GJP, including the institutional and financial mechanisms by which they believe a more just, equitable, sufficient, and habitable planet is possible to create.
It's beyond the scope of a single essay to fully examine the value of the GJP, but there are several points that I believe are worth discussing here. I'll start with what I think are the best aspects of the platform before discussing its shortcomings, and why ultimately I think this might be the best deal capitalism will get.
Let's begin with the best thing about the GJP: its goals. Ensuring a habitable planet while providing everyone on it with a high standard of living is, unquestionably, a worthy goal. More specifically, intentionally shrinking the widening gap of global inequality is a moral imperative for anyone concerned with social and economic justice.
That said, it's important to examine what the GJP means by planetary habitability and economic justice, so let's look more specifically at the platform's intended outcomes, or "targets". The GJP proposes "full income convergence by 2100". Here, the authors mean a convergence in average global income to a level equivalent with today's richest countries (they define this level as 60,000 euros). Additionally, the platform proposes limiting global warming to 2 degrees C by 2100; transforming the structure of the global economy by reducing working hours from 2,100 per year to 1,000; a rapid decarbonization of the economy; shifting from material to immaterial-focused economic production; and substantial changes in both food patterns and land use that would allow global forest cover to rebound to the 1900 level.
Like the GJP goals, these targets are certainly good objectives for humanity. As the report stresses, the vast majority of people everywhere would benefit from these outcomes. But would these outcomes erase global inequality? Would they guarantee sufficiency and a high standard of living for every person on the planet, all the time, in accordance with each person's preference? And lastly, would they eliminate all risks of climate change? No, they would not. Which brings me to the final point about this report that the authors get right: they acknowledge these shortcomings. I'll return to this point in a moment.
From here, it's natural to wonder how the world might go about reaching these targets. First and foremost, the GJP argues for a progressive global tax, on both total wealth as well as income, that targets the wealthiest 1.5% of the global population. Eventually this tax would reduce wealth inequalities and thus would apply to a lower percentage of people over time. The GJP proposes creating a financial instrument called the Global Justice Fund to carry out the process of reducing inequality, to be funded through the wealth and income taxation. This fund would have the primary responsibility of distributing dividends to countries for the purposes of large climate investments for decarbonization, as well as improving high-quality education and health access globally.
For the sake of brevity (and at the risk of oversimplification), I will omit a detailed discussion of the more specific mechanisms by which the Global Wealth Fund would hypothetically operate under the Global Justice Platform. Suffice it so say that the authors support a very strict degree of transparent and democratic governance by double majority at the global scale.
What I want to highlight, more than the minutia, is the fundamental limit with a top-down approach that relies primarily on taxation reform policy. Ultimately, it does nothing to change the underlying structure of capitalism, namely, the private ownership and control of the means of production. Now, to be fair, the Global Justice Platform does pay some lip service to the need for "a new balance between public and private wealth", as well as calling for broader economic transformations. Unfortunately, the GJP is vague on what precisely these things might mean beyond stronger labor unions and worker representation on corporate boards. And again, neither of these constitute a fundamental change in the structure of capitalism.
It's easy to envision a scenario in which the wealthy, capitalist class uses their control over the means of production to weaken tax implementation, or evade it completely. In fact, the authors of the GJP go as far as to say that the platform can be implemented without the full participation of global countries (even without the wealthiest such as the U.S. or China), but fail to account for the possibility of capitalists flocking to these countries. While capital flight is often an overblown risk, such a direct attack on capital would be much more likely to produce a reaction unless the attack goes further to eliminate private wealth altogether.
Which brings me to another critique: the GJP is both too bold and not bold enough. Again, I do have to qualify this criticism with the fact that the authors are aware of this. They describe the platform as a "moderate" and "gradualist" approach that they recognize will be too radical in some opinions, and not radical enough in others. I'd say I'm in the latter camp, for the aforementioned reasons, and more (downplaying the role of violence in historical labor struggles and minimizing the externalities of "social democratic" capitalism in Nordic countries, to name a couple). In fact, the GJP does not explicitly name capitalism as the fundamental issue, but rather the excesses of capitalism.
Given this framing, it follows that the GJP seeks only to tame, or slow capitalism, rather than end it. And this is why I said, in the title and outset of this piece, that the GJP is a deal capitalism should take. Let me explain.
The GJP report claims that the current trajectory of planetary warming due to macroeconomic production is on pace for a 4 degrees C global average temperature increase. It's an understatement to say that amount of warming would be catastrophic, to the extent of putting human extinction within the realm of possibility. However, some leading climate scientists recently dropped this scenario from the suite of potential emission pathways (although there is legitimate disagreement about that decision).
Nevertheless, even without human extinction on the table (which would obviously end capitalism as well), the "more moderate" estimate of 2.5-3 degrees C of warming would still be unimaginably horrific for humanity, and all life on Earth. As the planet warms the potential for extreme violence and war only increases. Vast amounts of land may still become uninhabitable, ecological systems that we rely on may still collapse, and large numbers of people may be forced to relocate (as we're already seeing).
The increasing risks of climate change and ecological collapse could be enough on their own to potentially end capitalism at some local and/or national scales. And even if not, the resulting instabilities are very likely to substantially reduce productivity, and thus profits. To put it simply, extreme human suffering at the global scale is still very much a distinct probability, and the costs of addressing climate change now are far less than the costs of damages to come later.
In this light, the GJP looks like a very good deal for capitalism. In fact, one could draw similarities to the old New Deal of FDR that many believe saved US capitalism from itself in the early-to-mid-20th century. Or even the Green New Deal proposed more recently by US progressives. It's not untrue to say that these policy reforms did and would improve the standards of living for vast majorities of people.
Of course the mistake that followed the New Deal was allowing neoliberal reforms to erode the limited gains of the working class, and thus unleashed a new round of rapid, extreme capitalist expansion returning us to the inequalities of the past while also introducing new, unprecedented planetary risks.
All of this is to say that the GJP is probably the best deal capitalism could hope for in the long term. The capitalists should take it. And the rest of us should to, but only if we're prepared to take it further.
Ben Lockwood is the editor-in-chief at Brief Ecology. Ben is an ecologist and geographer in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at The Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Indiana University, and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Biology from Ball State University. Ben’s writing has been published in Nature, Clarkesworld Magazine, Area, Literary Geographies, and elsewhere. He also serves at the editor for both The Eco Update and The Rotting Leaf.