From foreign interventions to climate breakdown, our global crises stem from the same demand: unending profit.
Ask most people to define capitalism, and they will describe markets, local enterprise, and trade. This is a common misunderstanding. Human societies traded goods, ran markets, and operated businesses for thousands of years before capitalism ever existed.
What sets capitalism apart is how production is organized. It is not designed to satisfy human needs, provide public goods, or keep ecosystems stable. It is locked into a single structural requirement: the endless accumulation of profit.
That requirement creates a permanent problem. To keep expanding, core capitalist economies require a vast outside world—a periphery—that can supply cheap labor, land, energy, and raw materials. When nations in the Global South try to break away from this arrangement and use their land and labor for their own citizens, they threaten the supply chains of global capital.
The response from core powers is rarely peaceful. For decades, attempts at independent economic development across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have met economic blockades, orchestrated coups, or direct military action.
To make these interventions palatable to domestic publics, Western governments routinely construct narratives about national security. We are asked to believe that small, economically squeezed nations pose an existential military threat to the most heavily armed states on Earth. It is a thin excuse. Small nations do not pose a military threat to global superpowers. What they threaten is access to cheap resources, mining concessions, and critical shipping corridors like the Red Sea or the Strait of Hormuz.
This same economic logic explains our collective failure to halt climate breakdown. Ecological collapse is not an accidental oversight of modern life; it is the direct outcome of a system that demands infinite physical expansion on a finite planet. Capital accumulation drives the relentless extraction of fossil fuels and minerals for the same reason it drives foreign interventions: to keep the engine running at all costs.
For a long time, political movements have fought these battles in isolated silos. Environmentalists focused on emissions, trade unions on wages, anti-war groups on foreign policy, and indigenous groups on land rights. But these issues are connected at the root.
When climate activists blockade weapons manufacturers or march against foreign interventions, critics often call it a distraction. It is anything but. Activists have recognized that you cannot protect the climate while ignoring the economic engine that fuels foreign violence. Both spring from the exact same cause: an economic order that treats human lives and ecosystems as disposable inputs.
If we want to stop endless conflict and ecological degradation, we have to talk about a post-capitalist transition. For wealthy nations in the Global North, that means degrowth—scaling down resource consumption and high-carbon production while expanding public services and human well-being. For the Global South, it means securing economic sovereignty so nations can use their own resources to feed, heal, and house their own people.
Until we name the system driving these crises, we will spend our energy fighting individual symptoms while the cause continues unchecked.