Part 1: The Paradox of Capitalism: Infinite Growth in a Finite World
Abstract: This article critically examines the alleged structural necessity of armed conflicts within the capitalist economic system. We argue that, in a world of finite resources and a constantly growing population, the logic of unlimited capitalist growth leads to intrinsic crisis dynamics. War, far from being a mere exogenous event, can function as a mechanism of economic reboot and regeneration. We therefore contend that there is an urgent need to transcend this model towards alternative paradigms that prioritize conscious population control and social well-being, rather than mere capital accumulation, with a view to global sustainability and equity.
1. Introduction: The Paradox of Unlimited Growth and its Critical Roots
At the heart of the dominant economic paradigm, capitalism, pulses an imperative: continuous, ideally unlimited, economic growth. Yet, this pulse violently clashes with an inescapable biophysical reality: our planet is a closed system with finite resources and a limited carrying capacity, while the human population is in constant and relentless expansion. How can a system intrinsically dependent on perpetual growth operate effectively in a context of physical limits and increasing inequalities?
As early as the 18th century, far-sighted thinkers warned against the consequences of unregulated growth. Thomas Robert Malthus, in his influential An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) [36], expressed profound concern that population growth, proceeding geometrically, would inevitably outpace the growth of food production, which proceeded arithmetically. His "laws of population" suggested that humanity would be condemned to cycles of misery, famine, and "positive checks" like wars, famines, and epidemics, unless "preventive checks" (birth control) were adopted. Although technological innovation and capitalist expansion (including colonization and globalization) have partly mitigated Malthus's more dire predictions, the core of his fundamental insight into the limits of exponential growth in a finite environment still resonates today.
While Malthus's vision placed the limits of growth in the demographic and productive spheres, later thinkers extended this critique to the very nature of capitalist economic growth, highlighting how it has historically been based not only on incessant exploitation of natural resources but also on the extraction of value from less affluent classes and, from a geopolitical perspective, from the resources and labor force of peripheral nations.
Karl Marx (1867) [37] and Friedrich Engels, in their foundational works (Das Kapital, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State), analyzed capitalism as a system intrinsically devoted to capital accumulation through the extraction of surplus value from labor. Their critique, though not directly focused on ecological limits, illustrates a growth model that thrives on structural inequality and the constant search for new sources of profit, such as today's production offshoring to reduce labor costs. In the 20th century, the Frankfurt School, with figures like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1947) [17] (Dialectic of Enlightenment), extended this critique to the instrumental rationality of capitalism, highlighting how its logic of domination applied not only to nature but also to human relations. More recently, the emergence of ecological economics has provided a rigorous framework for understanding the unsustainability of the current model. Kenneth Boulding, with his celebrated essay "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" (1966) [4], introduced the concept of the "spaceship economy" to emphasize that Earth is a closed system with finite resources. Herman Daly, a pioneer of ecological economics, strongly argued that a sustainable economy must operate as a "subsystem" of a finite global ecosystem, promoting the concept of a "steady-state" economy as an alternative to unlimited growth (Daly, 1996) [8].
World-system theories by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) [46] and dependency theory by authors such as Andre Gunder Frank (1967) [14] have further demonstrated how the growth and prosperity of "core" capitalist nations have been historically and structurally linked to the underdevelopment and exploitation of global "peripheries," in terms of both natural resources and cheap labor. This perspective provides a framework for understanding how the intrinsic need for new resources, markets, and cheap labor within the logic of capitalist growth can lead to dynamics of conflict, economic domination, or neocolonialism, as observed in the race for critical minerals in some African regions.
It is within this historical context of critiques of growth, both demographic and exploitation-based economic growth, that our central thesis is situated: How can a system that, by its nature, seeks unlimited growth operate in a context of intrinsic limits and increasing inequalities without resorting to systemic "reboot" or "purge" mechanisms? We propose that armed conflicts, far from being mere external interruptions, can act as "shocks" that, through mechanisms of destruction and reconstruction, manage to restart or accelerate economic cycles, making war an endogenous, albeit socially disguised, element of the logic of capitalist growth.
* Board Member, SRSN (Roman Society of Natural Science)
