“System Error,” a documentary now available on demand, uses a series of quotations from Karl Marx to offer diagnoses of the modern economy. Its central idea is that “growth,” as an economic mantra, has become such an article of faith globally for politicians and financiers that they have become blind to its potential limits and consequences. Toward the end, the movie, directed by Florian Opitz, projects a world in which capitalism will devour itself: Thanks to automation, jobless workers won’t have the wages to pay for the goods that ostensible prosperity has produced.

Tim Jackson, an ecological economist at the University of Surrey in England, says that in nature, mechanisms that grow unchecked “end up basically killing their host.” The film lays out the environmental effects of rapid transformations in agriculture and transportation, and it notes ways in which markets and trading have become divorced from the public and the broader economy.