Locust Capitalism: Consume Everything, Then Move On

Today's Wealth, Tomorrow's Desert

We increasingly hear about a future in which artificial intelligence will make it possible to build million-dollar businesses with a single employee. The prospect is presented as an extraordinary triumph of efficiency: lower costs, fewer employees, higher productivity, and greater profits. Yet almost no one seems concerned with asking a basic question: what happens when an economic system becomes increasingly capable of producing wealth while becoming less capable of distributing the income people need to buy what it produces?

As a former economics student, I see a contradiction in this vision that deserves closer examination. Not because a business with a single employee is necessarily abnormal, or because automation should be resisted, but because the success of an individual company does not automatically translate into the sustainability of the economic system in which it operates. A business can become extraordinarily profitable by reducing its need for human labor. If this logic spreads without the development of alternative mechanisms for distributing income, the collective outcome could be very different from the sum of individual successes.

Industrial capitalism found one of its principal engines in mass consumption. The Ford Model T represented a transformation in which standardized production made automobiles accessible to a broader public. Henry Ford is also remembered for the wage increases he introduced in 1914, which helped make industrial employment more attractive, although it would be simplistic to interpret his strategy as merely an attempt to enable workers to buy the cars they manufactured. The underlying point remains: production, employment, and consumption could reinforce one another.

Artificial intelligence could weaken that connection. If machines allow goods and services to be produced with an ever-smaller workforce, those who own the technology may increase their returns without necessarily sharing the benefits with the rest of society. The question will not simply be how many jobs are eliminated or transformed, but also who owns the means of production and how the resulting wealth is distributed.

The Locust Economy

Perhaps, however, we are still reasoning as though capitalism must necessarily have an interest in ensuring the prosperity of consumers. What if a growing part of the economy could afford to disregard that concern, at least in the short term?

Consumers might continue to spend through accumulated wealth, investment income, and inheritances. But this possibility does not solve the problem. It shifts the issue to the distribution of ownership. A society in which a small minority owns the means of production while many depend on inherited wealth risks turning access to prosperity into a family privilege, diminishing the role of work as a source of economic independence and social mobility.

The mobility of capital already allows many investors to move their resources among companies, industries, and countries in search of better returns. Large corporations can relocate operations, reorganize supply chains, or abandon markets that are no longer profitable. Not all investors pursue short-term strategies, and not all businesses behave in the same way. The problem is structural: when the social and environmental costs of economic decisions are not adequately reflected in financial calculations, private gains can be achieved while substantial consequences are left to others.

This is the logic of locusts. A swarm arrives in a field, consumes what it finds, and moves on when the food runs out. It has no need to restore the soil because its survival depends on finding another place to exploit. Applied to the economy, this image describes a system in which capital can profit from a resource, a territory, or a community without assuming a proportionate responsibility for its future.

Loretta Napoleoni's Rogue Economics provides a useful point of reference for examining the contradictions of the global economy, its opaque corners, and the activities that flourish when oversight and the regulatory capacity of institutions prove inadequate. The locust metaphor extends this criticism to the risk that the pursuit of returns becomes a process of extraction, in which what matters is the value obtained today rather than what remains tomorrow.

Fossil Water and a Mortgaged Future

In some arid regions of the world, communities rely on fossil groundwater accumulated underground during geological periods that were far wetter than the present. These reserves can sustain agriculture, supply settlements, and encourage economic development. However, they often recharge so slowly that they are effectively nonrenewable on a human timescale. When extraction consistently exceeds replenishment, present prosperity is financed by consuming a resource that future generations will not have access to under the same conditions.

The metaphor applies equally well to the economy. Natural capital, professional skills, public trust, productive capacity, and household purchasing power can all be treated as reserves to be depleted. A company can improve its margins by cutting training. A region can lose expertise when production moves elsewhere. A community can see its tax base shrink just as its social needs increase.

Consumer demand, too, can be treated as a resource that cannot be taken for granted. If income becomes increasingly concentrated among those who own capital, the purchasing power of a substantial part of the population may weaken. The system can continue operating through the spending of the wealthy, investment income, credit, or public expenditure, but these mechanisms do not automatically guarantee widespread prosperity. Credit, for example, can temporarily support demand, but it cannot indefinitely replace inadequate income.

The danger is creating wealth that consumes the very conditions on which its existence depends. No one needs to deliberately decide to destroy those conditions. It is enough for each participant to pursue an immediate advantage without bearing an adequate share of the collective costs.

Degrowth and the Difficulty of Slowing Down Without Consequences

In response to these contradictions, the idea of happy degrowth proposes reducing waste, limiting unnecessary consumption, easing pressure on natural resources, and making more room for human relationships. It is a perspective worth discussing, particularly when economic success is measured almost exclusively through growth in gross domestic product. Yet there is a considerable gap between the ideal of a more restrained society and the practical possibility of achieving it without serious repercussions.

Modern economies are interconnected systems. Employment, pensions, public debt, mortgages, investment, and essential services depend on income flows and financial arrangements that do not automatically adjust when production declines. If demand falls, businesses may cut investment and jobs. If employment and incomes decline, tax revenues may contract precisely when the need for social protection increases. An unmanaged contraction can therefore trigger a recessionary spiral in which lower consumption generates further income losses.

This does not mean that every form of degrowth is impossible. Reducing waste, repairing rather than replacing, using fewer natural resources, and prioritizing socially useful activities are all goals compatible with an economy that continues to innovate. But an economic contraction does not become happy simply because someone advocates it. We must distinguish between selectively reducing harmful activities and a recession that destroys productive capacity, jobs, and economic security.

International competition presents another obstacle. A country that unilaterally slows investment and production while others continue accumulating capital, innovating, and capturing markets could lose expertise, employment, and strategic autonomy. A transition would therefore require agreements, industrial policies, appropriate tax systems, and a reorganization of income distribution. It would not be enough to encourage citizens to want less while the cost of essential goods and services continues to rise.

The deeper difficulty is that capitalism is not designed to stop simply because society has reached a level of prosperity deemed sufficient. Competition pushes businesses to improve productivity and returns. Investment requires the prospect of future gains. Governments must sustain public spending systems built around particular economic foundations. A society can decide to change these priorities, but it cannot ignore the mechanisms that hold the system together.

Happy degrowth, then, is not necessarily an impossible theory. It is a difficult transformation to achieve without simultaneously addressing ownership, welfare financing, debt, employment, and competition among economies. Otherwise, the risk is that voluntary restraint becomes a lifestyle choice for those who can afford it and enforced poverty for those who have no alternatives.

When Wealth Disappears, Conflict Remains

Imagine a region whose prosperity has been built around a major industrial plant, an extractive industry, or a sector capable of attracting investment and employment. Supporting businesses, shops, housing, services, and family expectations develop around that economic activity. Then capital moves elsewhere, production becomes automated, or the resource that sustained the local economy runs out.

The investor can record a loss, sell the investment, and look for opportunities elsewhere. The community cannot liquidate its existence so easily. Homes, debts, infrastructure, families, and workers with skills tied to a declining industry remain. So do local governments, which must continue providing services even as the tax base that finances them shrinks.

This is where economic decline can turn into social conflict. When opportunities disappear, people lose more than disposable income: they lose the ability to imagine a future. Young people leave in search of opportunities their hometowns can no longer provide. Businesses close, services deteriorate, and families compete more fiercely for jobs and public resources. The loss of population and expertise can deepen the crisis further.

Poverty does not automatically produce conflict, much less violence. Yet it can manifest itself through strikes, protests, political polarization, hostility toward institutions, and tensions over the allocation of resources. When economic losses combine with inequalities perceived as unjust, a lack of prospects, and institutions unable to respond, resentment can become fertile ground for more serious confrontations.

The paradox is that the economic system may consider an enterprise finished while the society that supported its development is only beginning to face the consequences. Capital moves; people remain. The return on an investment can be measured in numbers, while the cost of social disintegration is spread across thousands of lives and may become visible only years later.

There is no need to imagine a conspiracy of businesses deliberately plotting to impoverish entire regions. It is enough for each participant to pursue its own interests without being required to bear an adequate share of the collective costs. The outcome can become irrational for society even when each individual decision appears rational from the decision-maker's perspective.

Universal Basic Income Is Not Enough

At this point, universal basic income is often proposed as a solution to technological unemployment. If machines produce wealth in place of human beings, the argument goes, a portion of that wealth can be redistributed so that everyone can continue to live and consume. Such a policy could provide protection and support demand, but it would not automatically solve the underlying problem.

Where would the necessary funding come from? How would the gains from automation be distributed? Who would control the technological infrastructure and the capital generating the profits? And how much autonomy would people retain if their survival depended on financial transfers without any meaningful opportunity to participate in economic decisions?

Universal basic income could form part of a new social contract, but it should not become the price paid to make the permanent exclusion of millions of people from productive life acceptable. Work is not merely a source of income. It can provide skills, relationships, recognition, and opportunities to contribute to society. Losing a job does not necessarily mean losing all these things, but a society that fails to create alternatives risks depriving some of its members of both economic independence and a recognized social role.

The issue is not whether every existing job should be preserved, even when it is unnecessary or harmful, nor whether technological progress should be prevented from improving productivity. It is whether technological progress will translate into greater freedom for people or increasing dependence on those who own the machines.

Who Will Remain When the Locusts Have Left?

The problem with contemporary capitalism is not necessarily that it will exhaust every resource or that all businesses will behave like destructive swarms. It is that a system focused on maximizing returns can continue to work for those able to move their capital even as the regions from which that capital extracted wealth become less productive, less livable, and less capable of offering their residents a future.

Artificial intelligence could intensify this contradiction by allowing increasingly small organizations to control economically significant activities with very few employees. But the outcome will also depend on ownership rules, competition, taxation, labor policies, and the ability of institutions to distribute the benefits of automation. Technology creates possibilities; it does not, by itself, determine who will benefit.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to choose between infinite growth and degrowth, automation and employment, or profits and redistribution. It is to build an economy in which the wealth produced is not systematically separated from responsibility toward the people and places that make its creation possible.

Locusts do not need to destroy the planet to prosper. They only need to keep finding another field to consume. But resources, communities, and opportunities to shift costs elsewhere are not infinite. When an impoverished region can no longer offer its residents a future, the problem does not disappear with the investors. It remains, becoming an economic, social, and political challenge.

Perhaps the decisive question is not whether capitalism will survive artificial intelligence. It is whether it can preserve the social conditions that make its own prosperity possible.

Because when there is nothing left to consume, who will still have an interest in rebuilding what has been destroyed?

From Moscow Gold to Market Gold

The Left Did Not Just Lose Its Soul

Perhaps the Western Left did not merely lose its soul. It also lost something far more tangible: a source of material power.

For decades, the Soviet Union represented the great political and ideological reference point — and, through channels documented by numerous investigations and historical accounts, also a financial one — for the international communist movement. The story of so-called “Moscow gold,” explored in a body of investigative literature under the same name, belongs to that controversial history in which politics, ideology, and financial resources became deeply intertwined.

Then that world collapsed.

With the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the Western Left found itself without that reference point and immersed in a profoundly transformed economic system. Globalization was advancing, finance was gaining enormous power, capital was becoming increasingly mobile across borders, and the market was gradually being presented not as something to regulate and restrain, but as the natural environment within which politics had to operate.

This is where we can begin to understand an important part of the Left's transformation.

Not necessarily because someone issued orders from above, nor because every left-wing leader suddenly became an advocate for the interests of major financial lobbies. That would be an oversimplification.

The deeper point is this: when the material conditions in which a political force operates change, so can its sense of what is possible, desirable, and even realistic.

When the Funding Changes, So Does Political Independence

In Italy, during roughly the same period, direct public funding for political parties was also phased out.

Politics, of course, did not stop requiring money. It simply had to find resources through other means and from other sources.

This does not mean that investment funds, multinational corporations, banks, or major companies automatically “buy” political parties. One thing is documented political financing, another is lobbying, and yet another is the convergence of interests. Confusing these categories would turn a serious political question into a conspiracy theory.

But one question remains legitimate: how genuinely antagonistic can a political force be toward an economic system on which, at least to some extent, its own ability to raise money, communicate, and compete depends?

At the same time, the Left was gradually losing its traditional roots among the working class and lower-income communities, while the economic world it had historically viewed with suspicion was becoming increasingly powerful.

A historical paradox was therefore taking shape: a political movement born to limit the power of capital was gradually coming to accept the economic system created by financial globalization as inevitable.

No longer the Left seeking to transform capitalism.

Increasingly, the Left seeking to manage capitalism.

From the Social Question to the Politics of Identity

The transformation was not merely economic. It also changed the political causes through which the Left sought to redefine its identity.

Many of the civil-rights causes that now occupy a significant place on the Left's agenda had, for decades, been the distinctive territory of Italy's Radical Party under Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino: secularism, individual rights, personal autonomy, civil liberties, and opposition to prohibition.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about a political movement adopting those causes. The problem begins when identity politics comes to occupy the space left vacant by the social question.

Because while the Left was increasingly focused on identity, recognition, and individual rights, the world of work was changing beneath its feet. Precarious employment was becoming structural, wages were losing purchasing power, stable employment was becoming increasingly inaccessible to younger generations, and trade unions were losing part of their ability to represent workers.

The Left was becoming increasingly attentive to differences of identity at precisely the moment when it was becoming less capable of representing economic differences.

The old questions — Who owns? Who works? Who gets paid? Who loses? Who controls wealth? — were gradually giving way to another question: Who am I, and what recognition am I entitled to?

Both sets of questions are legitimate. But they are not the same question.

And one cannot become a way of avoiding the other.

The Forgotten Worker and the Abandoned Peripheries

The paradox became particularly visible in the working-class neighborhoods and urban peripheries.

For decades, the Left had built a substantial part of its identity there: public housing, public schools, factories, unions, social services, community organizations, cooperatives, and local party branches. Its presence was physical before it was electoral.

Then that presence gradually disappeared.

Party offices closed. Factories declined or moved abroad. Work became more fragmented, and precarious employment replaced stable jobs in many cases. At the same time, the Left's political language became increasingly sophisticated when it came to rights and increasingly distant, in the eyes of some working-class voters, from their everyday concerns.

Not because those people had suddenly become hostile to rights.

But because they also had much more immediate problems: insufficient income, insecure employment, housing they could barely afford, and an uncertain future.

The paradox is hard to miss: the Left became more attentive to differences of identity just as it became less capable of representing differences in economic circumstances.

The fundamental questions once were: How much do you earn? How much do you work? What rights do you have on the job? How secure is your contract? How much bargaining power do you have against your employer?

An increasing share of political debate has instead shifted toward recognition, identity, and cultural discrimination.

The issue is not choosing between rights and work.

The issue is that working people need both.

And when someone in a precarious economic situation feels that no one is seriously addressing their material circumstances anymore, they may begin to wonder whether that political force still represents their world.

When the Left and Right Stop Being Alternatives

This is where Diego Fusaro's provocative argument becomes interesting.

According to this interpretation, the distance between today's right and left has become, at least on certain fundamental issues, much narrower than their electoral rivalry suggests. Atlanticism, support for Israel, and acceptance of the neoliberal economic order would, in Fusaro's view, be among the areas where the traditional conflict between left and right has progressively diminished.

One may agree or disagree with that interpretation. But the question it raises deserves to be taken seriously:

How genuinely alternative can a Left be if it no longer challenges the fundamental economic premises of the order that governs the world?

If the differences remain primarily cultural and identity-based while the underlying economic and geopolitical framework is largely shared, voters may eventually come to see political competition as a choice between different ways of administering the same system.

And that may be one of the roots of the crisis.

When You Lose Your People

Perhaps this is where we should look for part of the explanation behind the Left's current crisis.

Not simply in the abandonment of a particular economic ideology. Not simply in the collapse of communism. Not simply in globalization.

But in the growing separation between part of the Left's new political class and the social world it once represented.

The Left has conquered new cultural territory while losing some of its social territory.

It has learned to speak the language of individual rights while partly abandoning the language of redistribution.

It has defended the recognition of differences while struggling to explain how economic inequality can actually be reduced.

And so something seemingly paradoxical has happened: part of the working and lower-middle classes have stopped recognizing themselves in the Left even as the Left continues to regard itself as their natural political representative.

Perhaps the crisis is therefore not that the Left has lost its soul.

Perhaps, more simply, it has changed its constituency.

What If the Final Push Comes From Outside?

There is one final element that makes this transformation even more unsettling: the changing international order.

For decades, the West took for granted that its economic and geopolitical model would remain at the center of the world. Today, that certainty appears considerably less secure.

The rise of the BRICS and, more broadly, the consolidation of economic and political relationships outside the traditional Western axis represent a phenomenon that cannot simply be dismissed as a new Cold War. The countries involved have very different interests, political systems, economies, and strategic objectives.

That is precisely what makes the phenomenon so interesting.

The fundamental question is not whether a new bloc is emerging that will simply replace the West.

It is whether the international economic order built after the Cold War is gradually losing its central position.

And this is where the Western Left may find itself facing a historical paradox.

After abandoning the old world, it may have integrated itself so deeply into the new one that it has become part of the very order now at risk of entering a period of crisis.

This would no longer be merely an electoral crisis.

It would be the crisis of a political force that, after losing its old point of reference, became too deeply identified with the new one.

And so the final question would no longer be which new slogan the Left should invent in order to win again.

It would be much more radical:

Who does it really want to represent?

Because a Left that loses the world of work, the peripheries, and the social question may continue to win cultural battles.

But sooner or later, it may discover that it has stopped representing the very people for whom it was originally created.