 As we have to keep selling in order to keep buying, we must persuade others to buy our goods just to ensure our survival, which leads to the production of goods with no previous use that can be sold to sustain our ability to buy other goods.Kovel stresses that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities – such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence – are unrewarded, while unnecessary economic activities earn certain individuals huge fortunes.Capitalist expansion is seen by Kovel as being "hand in glove" with "corrupt and subservient client states" that repress dissent against the system, governed by international organisations "under the overall supervision of the Western powers and the superpower United States", which subordinate peripheral nations economically and militarily.