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 it 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 petty 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. McDonnell Douglas and the military industrial complex (a term coined by an American president, not a leftist dissident), on the other hand, produce the most destructive, evil, and disastrous products in the history of humanity. Then, by means of mass mediated propaganda, it makes a patriotic virtue of doing so. Why don't we see boycotts of Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and so on?
No military; no Nike. Get your priorities straight.
While the so-called left contents itself with bickering over boy-germ/girl-germ arguments; 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 – governments and big business get away with murder, theft, collusion, fraud, and treason – but mostly murder.