Why Capitalism Needs Infinite Growth To Survive

Why Capitalism Needs Infinite Growth to Survive

Or, 'Even The Goddamn Money Is Privately Owned '

So, you know how capitalism apologists always say that we need a high growth rate in order to ensure high standards of living? Didja ever notice how they don't actually give a shit and a half about the magnitude of resources people are able to access, only that the rate of change is positive? There's a structural reason for that. It's a dogshit one, but like, it's pretty influential.

It starts with Fractional Reserve Banking. Been around for a while, basically ever since paper money was invented. When a bank takes a savings deposit, it can lend most of that deposit back out to someone else. The person who takes out the loan will spend the money on something, and the person who receives the money will put it in their savings account, and the cycle repeats.

The reserve requirement in the US is 10%, which means that through this multiplier effect, the commercial banking system can expand the money supply printed by the government by up to a factor of 10x. In other words, ~90% of the money in circulation is privately owned, and crucially, it carries interest.

So, almost every dollar out there needs to get paid back to a lender, with some extra dollars sprinkled on top (as a treat). This is only possible if there is always more money in the future than there is in the present, in order to make up the missing difference.

This means capitalism is always operating in some mixture of three states:

1. The increased flow of money is spent on an increased flow of stuff, which is growth.

2. The increased flow of money is spent on the same amount of stuff, which is inflation.

3. The flow of money does not increase, so the loans cannot be repaid, so the banks crash and pull the plug on the money printer and now nobody has permission to do anything anymore and the entire system crashes and everything is terrible but it can probably be fixed with austerity guys, I promise, just one more public service cut, it'll fix everything this time, trust me bro

The State can come in and print a whole bunch of money to shift the economy from situation 3 to situation 2, but you can't print more resources. That requires pulling a bunch of energy and materials out of the ground. And so they pillage the Earth, and they lie about trying to cut back in the future, and they greenlight new fossil projects, and they pillage even faster, and they profit.

Capitalism can often feel insurmountable, but part of that is because, ever since World War 2, there have been easily extractable deposits of petroleum that have let the system constantly accelerate to insane levels of material throughput. That won't last forever. Fossil fuels and mineral deposits get harder to extract as time goes on. And every time the extraction system has even the slightest hiccup, capitalism reveals itself to be as fragile as a shark, choking to death as soon as it stops swimming.

PICTURED: How energy and mineral resource depletion built up to trigger the 2008 financial crisis, and radicalized an entire generation

@sapphicsclub

Lmao

YOU'VE GOTTA FIGHT!

FOR YOUR RIGHT!

TO BIIIIKE LANES!

[On the capitalism cooking show]

"What you really want is to broil that planet long enough that the civilization falls right off the bone. See how tender and systemically vulnerable that society is? That's good stuff right there"

A photorealistic depiction of my commute to work

Profit is the passive income skimmed off the top by a capitalist, by using the power of their ownership to direct money. If workers own the producion and make money from it and keep it, that's just their income.

I fucking hate this "capitalism is when you make money, the more money you make, the more capitalism it is" mindset people have gotten. No, an artist selling their own work is not them engaging in capitalism, it's literally a worker owning their own means of production.

Remember capitalism is someone profiting off of someone else's labor though owning capital. It is not simply the act of profiting at all.