The definition of capitalism is a society organized around ‘capital’ or ‘surplus-value’. This is opposed to societies organized around ‘exchange-value’. Surplus-value has a logic to its own. It forces us to over-produce and over-consume. We need advertising to teach us to constantly over-consume. The reason capitalism causes climate change is because we over-produce, and treat nature as a natural resource to be exploited for production.

I’m seeing a lot of Medium writers conflate ‘capitalism’ with mass production and industrialization. The two are not synonymous. Communist and socialist governments can mass produce just as much as capitalist ones. In fact a ‘command economy’ can do it much better.

As we move from a mass production industrial economy to a postindustrial economy there is much talk about ‘capitalism’ but often what we should be talking about is ‘production’ and have more ‘sustainable’ forms of production. In other words how do we eliminate mass production and produce just enough.