Capitalism’s deepest illusion is that its crises come from outside—from technology, from globalization, from climate change—rather than from the system’s own internal architecture. Yet across the entire heterodox spectrum, from Marxist accumulation theory to Schumpeterian innovation cycles, from Keynesian demand management to world‑systems expansion, from Minsky’s debt‑driven instability to ecological economics’ biophysical limits, the verdict is astonishingly convergent: capitalism cannot function without perpetual growth. Competition compels expansion; debt requires rising incomes; welfare states need a growing tax base; innovation escalates throughput; global markets must open ever faster; even efficiency gains rebound into greater consumption. Every mechanism designed to stabilise the system ends up intensifying its dependence on expansion.

The problem is not that we fail to understand the logic. The problem is that we refuse to see what that logic makes of us. We narrate growth as necessity, prudence, or progress, but the truth is starker: we have become the blind engine of our own undoing, reproducing a system that tramples social cohesion, erodes democratic agency, and burns through planetary limits—not because of malfunction, but because its operating code demands it. What we call “externalities” are simply the shadows of ourselves we have disowned.

The growth imperative is not an abstract elephant lurking in some distant policy sphere. It is us—our institutions, our incentives, our desires, our fears—moving forward without reflection, even as heterodox traditions illuminate the full structure of the trap. Until we confront this, we will keep mistaking symptoms for causes, crises for anomalies, and collapse for surprise.

The first act of transformation is not technical design or policy reform.
It is opening our eyes.

#transformation #leadership