This essay is rooted in Marx, Fanon, Freire, Gramsci, Piketty, Harvey, Chomsky, Klein, Marcuse, Debord, Bourdieu, Bakan, among others.
1. Perpetual Growth
Capitalism is structurally dependent on infinite growth. In Marxist terms, capital — wealth invested to generate more wealth — must constantly expand to survive. This is not a flaw; it is a design. Profit cannot sit still. It must be reinvested, markets must grow, resources must be extracted, and consumers must be manufactured. It is a system that only functions through acceleration.
But this growth imperative confronts a paradox: it is a linear system operating on a finite planet. The materials economy — extract, produce, consume, dispose — follows a path that ends in collapse. We have 5% of the world’s population and consume 30% of its resources. When we run out, we simply take more — usually from the Global South. Growth continues, not because it is sustainable, but because it is enforced — violently.
This violence is not metaphorical.
To secure growth, the West has orchestrated regime change, installed dictators, and propped up extractive industries across Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. From the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Chile to the corporate pillaging of Congo and Bolivia, the system enforces compliance with capital accumulation. Those who resist — whether Indigenous land protectors, anti-imperial movements, or labor organizers — are criminalized, assassinated, or sanctioned into starvation. Growth is not passive; it is imperial.
After World War II, U.S. policymakers explicitly declared that “our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life.” It wasn’t just about economic stimulus — it was about turning citizens into consumers. That same logic persists today. After 9/11, the American public was not asked to reflect or organize — it was told to shop.
This is what perpetual growth means: an insatiable appetite dressed as prosperity, enforced by empire, and disguised as normal life.
2. The Manufacture of Need
Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man both reveal how capitalism engineers desires to sustain itself. Advertising is not a communication tool — it is a machine for manufacturing discontent.3. The Engineering of Dissatisfaction
Fashion, social media, and perpetual product upgrades enforce the structure of planned obsolescence — not only of objects but of self-worth itself. When clothing styles shift every season or the latest phone model renders yours outdated, the message is clear: who you were last year is no longer enough. Instagram amplifies this by training users to compare their lives to polished illusions, ensuring chronic inadequacy.Capitalism enforces two kinds of obsolescence: one is planned, where products are literally designed for the dump; the other is perceived, where we are manipulated into discarding perfectly usable things. As a result, 99% of what we consume ends up in the trash within five months. The system does not want durable goods — it wants disposability disguised as freedom.
4. The Externalization of Cost
Noam Chomsky and David Harvey have long detailed how neoliberal capitalism profits by pushing its costs onto society. Healthcare, environmental damage, and worker well-being are treated as externalities. Marx exposed this logic as the essence of exploitation: profit is not what remains after costs — it is what is extracted by avoiding them.Consider a simple cup of coffee: suppose the labor, materials, transport, and healthcare for the worker all cost $1 each. A capitalist seeking maximum profit might try to eliminate the healthcare cost. But this cost doesn't disappear — it shifts onto the public. The worker, if sick, turns to the ER. The unpaid bill? Covered by taxpayers. This is not an accident. It is how the system is designed.
Worse, the very materials that make our consumer goods — oil, metal, timber, and labor — are often extracted from the Global South. These nations pay the price not only in stolen natural resources but in toxic waste. The U.S. government alone extracts 5 billion pounds of toxic chemicals annually and exports the burden abroad. We don’t see these costs on a price tag — but someone, somewhere, is paying in poisoned rivers, collapsed ecosystems, and lost futures. The worker, if sick, turns to the ER. The unpaid bill? Covered by taxpayers. This is not an accident. It is how the system is designed. The “free market” is a myth; the real system is a series of unpaid debts handed to the public.
5. Quantification and Commodification of Life
Capitalism turns everything — objects, ideas, and even human lives — into quantifiable economic units. 'Quantifiable' means measurable, exchangeable, capable of generating profit. 'Unit' implies separation — individuality divorced from collective meaning. In this logic, everything acquires a price tag, and nothing is sacred unless it can be sold.Take the internet: built by the military with public funds, it was meant to facilitate communication. Yet we now pay private corporations — often run by billionaires — to access what we already collectively created. The same is true for medicine. Pharmaceutical breakthroughs often begin in publicly funded university labs, only to be patented and privatized by corporations. This is not innovation. It is legal theft.
What once existed as non-material — community, knowledge, culture — is being forcibly converted into revenue streams. Intellectual property rights now stretch far beyond inventions: they extend into genomes, seeds, and life itself. The ultimate irony is that capitalism has found a way to privatize evolution — to claim ownership over the very mechanisms of life.
Social security offers another example. As a public good, it exists to support lives, not markets. But when privatized, it becomes another avenue for capital accumulation. The message is clear: if it cannot be monetized, it will be dismantled or reengineered until it can. This is not economics. It is the quantification of being.
6. Institutionalized Aggression (Market Competition)
In Marx’s critique and Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence, competition is not playful rivalry — it is elimination. Joel Bakan’s The Corporation shows how businesses, legally structured to maximize profit, will destroy anything in their path. Bourdieu calls this “symbolic capital warfare” — the conversion of economic strength into dominance.To clarify, competition as a human being — such as a footrace between friends — has no bearing on one's survival. Win or lose, your life remains stable. But competition as an economist sees Starbucks forcing out Tully’s, not through better coffee, but by crushing its labor and real estate capacity. Workers lose jobs. Neighborhoods lose diversity. Instagram, in this arena, becomes a tool of economic aggression: individuals compete for attention, brand deals, and relevance, adopting capitalist logics of marketing and self-commodification.
In capitalism, competition doesn’t produce excellence. It produces extinction. And we are taught to cheer for it.
7. Structural Unemployment (Reserve Labor Force)
Marx’s concept of the “reserve army of labor” is echoed in Thomas Piketty’s and David Graeber’s work: unemployment is not failure — it is a feature. The Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates to balance profit and people. When employment rises, wages threaten to increase — and so unemployment is deployed to discipline labor. Labor is not sacred. It is manipulated like any other commodity.Full employment would empower workers to demand higher wages and better conditions. But by maintaining a certain level of unemployment — typically around 5% — the system ensures that employed workers remain replaceable and compliant. Economists refer to this as jobless growth: capital continues to generate profit while more humans are excluded from participation. In such a structure, social well-being is not the goal — market efficiency is.
8. Valuation of Scarcity
Scarcity, in economic terms, refers to the fundamental tension between limited resources and unlimited desires. But under capitalism, scarcity is not merely a logistical challenge — it is a deliberate mechanism for value creation. In cognitive science, scarcity also impacts perception: what is scarce appears more desirable.From diamonds to housing, from insulin to clean water, scarcity — whether natural or engineered — justifies price hikes and accelerates inequality. Thorstein Veblen and Karl Polanyi both noted that in capitalist systems, scarcity is not solved; it is preserved, because it keeps profit margins high. In the U.S., which has only 5% of the world’s population, we consume nearly 30% of the world’s resources. When we run out, we extract more — from somewhere else. The Global South becomes not only our mine but our landfill.
As Naomi Klein shows, crises like climate change or pandemics become economic opportunities, not warnings. In this ideology, abundance is inefficiency — and suffering becomes monetizable.
9. Standardization and Homogenization
To function efficiently, capitalism requires a homogenous context. Unlike the Roman Empire, which allowed local languages and customs under centralized rule, capitalism flattens difference. It standardizes everything — language, law, culture — in the name of efficiency.Take language: marketing campaigns and financial systems increasingly operate in English, eliminating linguistic nuance.
Or law: there once were diverse legal systems across U.S. states, especially concerning capital and labor. Today, laws are harmonized to serve capital uniformly — ensuring predictability for corporations at the expense of local autonomy.
This standardization transforms citizens into consumers. In the eyes of economists, consumers are not individuals — they are data points, interchangeable, predictable, and programmable. Hence, social media like Instagram further streamlines expression and desire, rewarding behaviors that align with marketability. Variety becomes inefficiency. Sameness becomes virtue. Capitalism doesn’t just want consumers — it wants clones.
10. Amorality as Operating Principle (The Most Devastating Commandment)
Joel Bakan’s psychological profile of the corporation reveals the truth: capitalism is not immoral — it is amoral. Weber’s “iron cage” of instrumental reason echoes here. The system does not evaluate what is just. It only counts what is profitable. CEOs are legally required to serve shareholders, not humanity.Fanon would call this the clinical pathology of empire: a structure that kills not out of hatred, but indifference. The most devastating trait of capitalism is that it feels nothing. And in its pursuit of profit, it turns society into a sociopath.
Capitalism, then, is not a neutral arrangement of markets. It is a total worldview — one that converts existence into asset, soul into service, and future into profit. The real question is no longer whether this system works.
The question is: for whom — and for how long?