Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's just that economic stagnation or recession currently means some people are going to be starving. And if you actually look at the world, with its still growing population in some countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing to do with capitalism, or The Man.
Japan hasn’t had much GDP growth since 1990. You could say that its economy is stagnating. Yet starvation is hardly a defining phenomenon for its population. They have one of the highest life expectancies. Healthcare is widely available. Technological progress did not stop. And wealth inequality in this economy is among the lowest in the world.
I'm a N. American developer who worked in Tokyo for 6 months back in '94. The most striking aspect of Japanese culture that is not present in N. America is a shared identity that everyone collaborates to make Japan and Japanese culture better. The common everyone, it seemed, held that value. Which is 100% absent from N. American culture; here our cultural value is "get mine, from you if possible, f everyone else" it seems.
That applies to the economy as a whole. It doesn't mean that every single corporation in the economy has to grow, beyond the general rate of GDP growth.
Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's just that economic stagnation or recession currently means some people are going to be starving. And if you actually look at the world, with its still growing population in some countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing to do with capitalism, or The Man.