Capitalism’s growth fetish inherently opposes ecological sustainability

Evidence

What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market … The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 41

Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 41

Categorization

• BMF: The image of capital sloughing off a used earth husk and Wall-E’s Axiom ship where all labor is by robots strongly evokes the fully automated self-sustaining spaceship-society logic in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• XREF: Builds on ch3 claim that capitalism converts everything into monetized aesthetic objects — environmental catastrophe here is absorbed as marketing simulacra rather than confronted. — connects to: Capitalist realism falls only to internal inconsistency, not moral critique — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 36; Climate catastrophe demands constructing a collective subject that does not yet exist — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139; Capitalism requires perpetually unsatiated desire to maintain civilizational growth — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3420 (+8 more)
• FICTION: The fantasy of the earth as a disposable husk — capital abandoning a spent planet for a new one — is raw material for an environmental sci-fi premise.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 41

Related

• Capitalism sustains living standards through destruction and waste of resources (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism requires perpetually unsatiated desire to maintain civilizational growth #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3420
• Unlimited economic growth necessarily consumes nonrenewable resources, making sustainable growth an oxymoron #corroborates (0.85)
• Postmodern nature imagery memorializes a nature already systemically eliminated by capitalism #exemplifies (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 396