“I didn’t turn on my heating for seven years because I paid off debts and wanted to save money to buy clothes for my child,” columnist Emine Uğur wrote in last year. Fidelity. I had to think about it during the General Reflections. The government spoke of an energy and purchasing power crisis, pointed to Ukraine and commodity prices, and came up with the energy price ceiling, a temporary measure to help us through the sourest of the apples.
But, I wondered: weren’t there always people who couldn’t pay for their groceries? People without money for a warm house? In 2022, have we really been taken by surprise by a unique set of unfortunate circumstances, or is something happening this year that has always happened, but now on a larger scale? Isn’t the difference mainly that the current misery also affects people from the middle class, who previously thought themselves comfortably immune to the more vicious depths of economic disaster?
“The crisis is still seen as a short-term problem that will solve itself over time,” write economics professor Kevin Albertson and sociologist Stevienna de Saille. The Conversation. “This is a misdiagnosis.” We blame war and pandemic, they argue, but actually we are in a slow-motion crisis that has been decades in the making and will continue for some time to come.
pyramid scheme
In an earlier article Albertson noted that the global economy has been living too much for a long time. “What we have experienced in ‘growth’ in the last four decades is not because of increased prosperity, but because we have borrowed with the future as collateral.” For every euro of global economic growth, global debt increased by two euros, Albertson explains. Someday someone will have to pay that back. Our ecological debt is certainly just as great: much growth was – and is – possible only because we structurally took and destroyed more from the planet than the earth could replenish and recover. All the while, our leaders have congratulated themselves on increasing prosperity that was actually a kind of pyramid scheme. But one day bean will come for his wages.
Perhaps 2022 will not be a catastrophic year in which everything goes exceptionally wrong, but the year in which the pyramid begins to collapse. And the current crises are not so much crises, but the dramatic but logical consequence of earlier economic choices. Of course war and corona cause trouble. But the biggest problem is capitalism.
Capitalism
An example. On Budget Day, the government told the king that it is ‘contradictory that livelihoods are under pressure and poverty is increasing in a period of economic growth and low unemployment.’ But that’s not contradictory, that’s how capitalism works. It just stands out now. Mirjam de Rijk wrote in The Green Amsterdammer that, adjusted for inflation, collectively agreed wages fell by about 7 percent while the economy declined by
5 percent grew. We are not, as Minister Sigrid Kaag said, ‘collectively getting a bit poorer’: people are getting poorer, and companies and their bosses are getting richer. Shell made a profit of 20 billion euros in six months.
And that is, again, no coincidence. Because capitalist governments do not primarily strive for happy (or warm) citizens. They strive for economic growth, writes Jason Hickel in Less is more. The idea is that if there is enough profit and growth, the lives of those citizens will automatically improve. But now that so many people don’t have enough money for food or energy, and the earth is moaning and groaning, laughing at Shell & co, it’s clearer than ever that it doesn’t work that way.
What we need is a government that offers more than just wipes the blood. A government that dares to choose well-being over growth and profit. A government that again subordinates the interests of big business to the lives of people. Preferably today. Because we are cold.
Asha ten Broeke is a science journalist. She writes a change column with Elma Drayer every other week.