Indicating Labor’s future climate-change policy, Bill Shorten said recently that it would “be guided by best science and best economic argument, which is a market-based system”.

No justification was presented for the claim that a market is the best way to deal with climate change. It was as though Shorten were stating something beyond question: smoking is bad for your health, Australia is an island. This certainty is akin to a religious belief; it has little evidence from the real world to support it, and it is contradicted by the fact that our current market-based system has produced the problem.

As Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, the greatest possible spread of markets is inherent in capitalism: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Capitalism spreads markets not only extensively or geographically, but also intensively, by continually forcing all sorts of services and relationships to become commodities.

The spread of capitalist markets broke down previous national and local isolation and made possible the great expansion of technology and production of the last two centuries. But with them came pillage, exploitation, famine, environmental destruction, oppression, genocide and war, including war for markets.

Markets, even if worldwide, are a sign of social underdevelopment. They are a way of connecting two or more individuals in the absence of a practicable alternative – for example families, whose members normally relate to each other according to affection and/or tradition, not by payment, or football teams, whose members pass the ball to each other without first auctioning the pass to the highest bidder.

Markets are simply buying and selling by isolated individuals – isolated precisely to the extent that they have to rely on markets. There is no more reason to expect such buying and selling to solve social problems than there is to expect them to solve a quadratic equation or put the cat out.

Most importantly, markets in capitalism are also a necessary part of the process of exploitation, of some people getting rich at the expense of others. That is the main reason that capitalists and their ideologues insist that markets be used to address almost any problem or goal. There are two aspect of this.

One, looking only at history and capitalism’s role in displacing previous oppressions, the role of markets appears positive. This appeals to many (fortunately, not all) union leaders, whose role pressures them to look to the past more than to the future.

Two, and increasingly important since around 1900: if any widespread social problem were even partially overcome by ordinary people acting by other means – through their government or outside it – this would begin to raise doubts about the necessity of markets, and hence of capitalism itself.

That brings us back to climate change. Throughout history, some earlier societies have destroyed the environment on which they depended and therefore ceased to exist, but other societies arose or continued in different locations. Today, capitalism girdles the globe; if it destroys that, there’s nowhere left for the rest of us to start anew.

Bill Shorten, and too many others, are betting that markets can overcome climate change. They are betting the world on it. If they lose – and if market measures are all, they will – we all pay.