Criminalizing capitalism is essential for sufficiency and wellbeing
The Structural Crime of Capitalism
The world is gripped by what is often called a “polycrisis,” but the catastrophe is not an accident—it is the logical consequence of a financial system designed to serve the interests of a rentier elite at the expense of society and the biosphere. In its modern, rentier-driven form, capitalism is not simply about markets or innovation; it is a complex machine that systematically incentivizes and rewards large-scale destruction of nature (ecocide) and the marginalization and suffering of entire populations (genocide).
At the core of this structure is the transformation of every shared resource—land, water, air, homes, even healthcare—into private property to be owned, speculated on, and used to extract passive income (rent, interest, dividends). The pursuit of rentier income means wealth is continuously funneled upwards, demanding that economies expand endlessly regardless of social need or planetary boundaries. Every generation must extract more from the earth and from people below, simply to repay debts whose total (principal plus interest) always outweighs what has actually been created—a mathematical predicament (P≠P+I where I is interest) that guarantees, by design, systemic default, crisis, and ecological exhaustion.
These regular financial crises, ever-increasing inequality, and mounting ecological collapse are not “failures” of regulation or unintended side-effects—they are outcomes written into the architecture of the system itself. The laws, policies, and institutions of modern capitalism deliberately externalize social and environmental harm in pursuit of private gain. Pollution, overwork, resource depletion, and social exclusion become inevitable, so long as they maximize returns for owners and creditors.
The Case for Systemic Criminal Liability
Traditionally, “crime” conjures images of lawbreakers acting outside the system. But what if the greatest crimes occur within, as the direct result of a system’s logic and rules? International human rights law now increasingly recognizes that systemic, predictable harm—especially when ignored or abetted by powerful institutions—can and must be criminally addressed.
Emerging ecocide statutes and genocide conventions make clear: It is not enough to prosecute “rogue actors” or singular corporate scandals. Responsibility must be assigned for the structural conditions that make mass destruction and deprivation routine, profitable, and legally invisible. Where entire populations are denied basic rights to food, water, education, and healthy environments—largely to service debts or maximize returns for creditors—then those financial and institutional structures become the direct enablers of mass harm.
Empirical evidence is overwhelming. The rentier-dominated global system now extracts trillions annually from the public, both north and south, prioritizing debt payments and profit repatriation over health, social investment, and ecological renewal. The result: over three billion people live where interest payments outweigh spending on education. The “need” for perpetual growth and repayment accelerates deforestation, pollution, and climate change—even as essential health and social infrastructures are cut back under “austerity” to stabilize financial returns.
In this perspective, sufficiency and wellbeing—the ability for societies to have enough, within planetary boundaries—become structurally impossible as long as the foundational rules of debt, rent, and institutionalized extraction remain untouched.
Belgium’s Pioneering Ecocide Lawsuit
This recognition is no longer merely academic. In early 2025, a landmark legal complaint was filed in Belgium, drawing on empirical and mathematical proof of systematic harm. The case alleges that the country’s main financial institutions, including the central bank, are structurally complicit in systemic ecocide and genocide: they are not the neutral managers of the financial system, but its principal enablers and beneficiaries, presiding over an architecture that ensures large-scale, ongoing destruction and deprivation.
The Belgian public prosecutor, rather than investigating, immediately forwarded the complaint to the National Bank—the very institution named as a primary defendant. The High Council of Justice declared itself “not competent,” and oversight bodies declined to intervene. This isn't just bureaucratic evasion; it demonstrates the mechanisms of regulatory capture that allow the most powerful actors to remain above scrutiny, while the cost is borne by the public and the planet.
This legal campaign has international significance. For the first time, it grounds criminal liability not in individual or “rogue” actions, but in the systemic design and failure of financial structures to uphold non-negotiable duties of rights protection. It invokes Belgium’s new ecocide law and international conventions on human rights, establishing that public officials and financiers can be held personally and institutionally responsible for participating in, facilitating, or ignoring mass harm generated by their systems.
The Mathematical Proof: Systemic Ponzi and the Logic of Harm
What sets this case apart is its mathematical clarity. In the current monetary system, all money is issued as debt, with compound interest attached—but only the principal is created, not the interest. Across an entire economy, this sets up systemic violence: not everyone can repay, defaults are inevitable, and the system can only be kept afloat by constantly expanding new debt. This is the classic blueprint of a Ponzi scheme, now legalized and institutionalized at global scale.
Banks and asset managers profit not by adding productive value, but by extracting unearned rents and interest. Biodiversity loss, resource extraction, pollution, and social exclusion are not unfortunate “side-effects”—they are revenue streams, essential to keeping the scheme running. Every year, trillions in interest payments flow from households and governments to the financial sector, draining resources from real needs—education, healthcare, social care, and climate adaptation.
The Duty of Transformation
What can be done? Incremental reforms or cosmetic “green finance” are inadequate when the underlying logic remains untouched. The law, public accountability, and academic integrity must align to dismantle rentier capitalism’s most destructive features. This means:
Recognizing that crimes of ecocide and genocide are not the exception, but a structural outcome of unchecked rent extraction and institutional impunity.
Strengthening and enforcing laws (like Belgium’s ecocide statute) that hold both private and public power to account—no matter how high.
Reimagining credit and money as public goods, not private commodities, ending interest-based debt cycles and prioritizing investments in social and ecological renewal.
Supporting legal action and transformative scholarship that expose and prosecute the systemic and institutional enablers of harm, not just their symptoms.
Conclusion: From Complicity to Wellbeing
Criminalizing systemic capitalist harm is not utopian, but the necessary precondition for sufficiency and wellbeing. Only by confronting the architecture of extraction and exclusion—by treating mass harm as a legal and social crime—can humanity reclaim a future within ecological limits.
The Belgian lawsuit is only the starting point. Across the world, communities, thinkers, and advocates for sufficiency are demanding not cosmetic reform, but an end to the reign of organized irresponsibility. The path to wellbeing demands nothing less than transformative accountability, the restitution of public control, and the legal prohibition of structures whose “success” depends on the destruction of life itself.
Links to preceding articles concerning the lawsuit:
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