I think capitalism is being misused in this sentence, and that is making it hard for people to make sense of. Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism. Being able to own companies, property and hold currency are all features of capitalism. If you are trying to say "infinite growth is unsustainable" that stands on it's own and is worth discussing.
> Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism.
The problem is that private ownership leads to the classic collective action problem, where actions that are individually rational to each private owner have consequences that are collectively irrational and make the world worse off.
This is not to say that private ownership should be abolished. But there has to at least be a heavy collective counterweight to self-interested wealth accumulation.
A problem with capitalism may be that it is a very broad category, and that currently we have a particular nasty flavour of it, that deserves its own name (e.g. hypercapitalism?) to avoid the endless discussion & confusion whether its all good and natural, or utterly broken (at least for the common folks participating in it).
It seems to me we had a form of capitalism that flourished (piggy-backed) well on top of democracy, and now it has morphed into a form that thrives best in a plutocracy (where democracies are eventually just Putin-style husks of their former glory).
> currently we have a particular nasty flavour of it, that deserves its own name (e.g. hypercapitalism?)
Corporatism.
It's publicly-traded corporations that cause many of these negative effects:
* Since investors treat corporations as black boxes that are just numbers going up or down, they are separated from the non-financial ethical consequences of what the business does. We all, through our 401ks, probably own stock in companies doing outright horrendous things to human rights in developing countries or harming the environment.
* Investors put pressure on corporations to grow at the expense of all other things. Corporations that fail to prioritize that will be replaced by better-capitalized corporations that do. It is an evolutionary environment where the primary selection pressure is growth.
* An effective way for a corporation to grow is, instead of competing, simply acquire competition to reduce selection pressure and then do things like regulatory capture to rig the system.
> Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned.
Just a nitpick, there is another condition, which is that the labor is traded on the free market under capitalism. I can imagine a society where everything is done in cooperatives where the workers are also the owners (they have shared private ownership).
The natural state in capitalism is that a worker owns their own means of production - their time. If one wants to trade their time into a collective, that is their time to trade. Slavery breaks this, and one of the more interesting facets of the American civil war was that the North (anti-slavery side) was much more efficient than was the South (which favored slavery), even in agriculture.
Labor is not capital (means of production), it's not being "owned", since one cannot accumulate it. That analysis is deliberately obfuscating problems with capitalism, which stem from capital accumulation. (And if anything, it is slavery that turns labor into actual capital.)
