We normally think of capitalism as a system that generates so much (just consider the extraordinary cornucopia of stuff that’s displayed on television and in shopfronts). But in reality it is a system that is organised around the constant production of scarcity. Capitalism transforms even the most spectacular gains in productivity and income not into abundance and human freedom, but into new forms of artificial scarcity. It must, or else it risks shutting down the engine of accumulation itself. In a growth-oriented system, the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying
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