The permanent arms economy deserves a special mention here.
What an ingenious invention it is.
On the one side, we have an economic system that promotes population growth: capitalism. Capitalism depends upon overproduction and therefore creates overpopulation. On the other side, we have the 'permanent arms economy' (Ernest Mandel, 1975, chapt 9), the largest sector of the global consumer goods industry. It designs and builds products to murder people en masse.
That's why it annoys me to listen to so called " lefties" bash Nike and such. Sure, they're exploitative. All industry is exploitative. That's what industry does: it exploits people, their governments, their land, and their oceans. It even exploits their words and thoughts. But it does so with your cooperation.
Nike produces shoes. The military industrial complex (a term coined by an American president, not a leftist dissident), on the other hand, produces the most destructive, evil, and disastrous weapons in the history of humanity. Then, by means of mass mediated propaganda, it makes a patriotic virtue of doing so.
So why complain about slave labour when a murderous system is required to support it.
No military industrial complex, no Nike. Get your priorities straight.
While the so-called left contents itself with bickering over gender, consumption; arguments about race, ethnicity, and microsociological trivia; arguments about everything trivial – like "self-fulfillment", and all the other irrelevant bullshit cooked up by Mills and Boon and CNN and Womens' Weekly and The Times and The Financial Review – the military industrial complex gets away with murder, theft, collusion, fraud, and treason – but mostly murder.