Capitalism vs. Life

The October 2009 issue of Monthly Review has this great quote from Paul M. Sweezy:

Paradoxically, the further we look down the road into the future, the clearer the choice between capitalism and socialism becomes. Capitalism is a socioeconomic system that cannot exist without expanding. it was not only Karl Marx who said that: it is the credo of every capitalist and the taken-for-granted axiom of bourgeois economic science since the days of Adam Smith. On the other hand, the very idea of a permanently, expanding economy in a finite environment is a hopeless contradiction. For a long time, roughly the first four or five centuries of capitalist history, this contradiction was ignored or evaded by pretending that the environment is for all practical purposes infinite, hence capable of supporting a permanently expanding economy. This pretense is now, in the second half of the twentieth century, wearing thin. Stated as an abstract proposition it is obviously absurd; concretely, evidence is piling up for all to see of a perilous collision between a relentlessly expanding economy and an already over-taxed environment...

So far most people, in becoming aware of these problems, see not capitalism, but the excesses and excrescences of capitalism, as the villain of the piece. But this doesn't get to the root of the matter. If by some miracle all the excesses and excrescences were to vanish, the contradiction between an inherently expanding economy and a finite environment would still be there. (Originally published in the Monthly Review 40th Anniversary Booklet, May 25, 1989.)