Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they’ll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn’t bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn’t have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.
Back serfdom and nobility.
There is no End Game.
They’re insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as “banality of evil” because it’s so routine and common place in their circles.
People might point to Musk’s old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.
Don’t forget, those of us who “produce” aren’t even a consideration.
The working class will starve. We’re already working on it with inflation, but managing to keep enough calories coming in.
Soon, the billionaires will have no labor to produce food, and no labor to stock food, and no labor to handle their banal shit.
Then, they will hunt us for sport. Or, more likely, a few class traitors will hunt and butcher us while they go hungry and the billionaires eat of our flesh.
So, eat the rich before they eat us. Got it.
most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food. No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
Bold of you to assume the rock bottom of wealth inequality includes the ability to purchase food and is survivable.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it. The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down. At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
Money doesn’t come from people, it comes from the fed issuing debt. The economic “value” backing that money also doesn’t necessarily come from people, it comes from control over things that are valued, which may include human labor, but that labor can be automated. The actual value of human life is not represented by money or other financial instruments.
Economic constraints aren’t preventing the world from decaying into an enormous desolate golf course.
There’s a critical point in wealth disparity where money begins to lose value. As the amount of wealth that can be extracted from the working class dwindles and the people who have too little find other ways to barter with each other.
Fun fact, we have already seen an early attempt at this. And while I think we’re still a ways away, it’s not exactly without precedent.
wealth that can be extracted from the working class
This is my point though; they aren’t going to need to do that.
That, at present, is where the wealth is coming from.
If the Fed just keeps printing money, eventually that too loses all value. It needs to actually be able to buy things. Sure it’s backed by US securities and bonds, but if the US isn’t capable of collecting taxes, because it’s people aren’t making any money and have started to barter amongst themselves, then they can issue all the bonds and bills they want and it won’t mean a damn thing.
Money is their only real leverage. They’re racing to find the minimum amount of money they can give us and still maintain that leverage.
That, at present, is where the wealth is coming from.
I would argue that increasingly it is not. The relative value of labor is and has been declining due to automation.
Money is their only real leverage.
It isn’t - there is also legal ownership, of natural resources and other types of property, and there is the force backing that ownership, which is also subject to automation.
If you are skeptical about the idea that wealth can exist at all independently from labor, consider the distinction between a dictatorship with an economy based on oil or mining and a more democratic country with an economy based on a diverse array of skilled professionals. Yes, in both cases laborers are involved in what the country produces, but in the latter, circumstances give them more leverage, because their active engagement and relative consent is more of a prerequisite to achieving that product. That leverage equates to a higher market value of their labor. I can imagine a future where everyone is effectively reduced first to slaves in a mine and then to skeletons next to mining robots.
They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the “owners” of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.
Capitalism isn’t neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can’t control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can’t be exploited for profits, to violence. But they’re as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.
We don’t overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn’t matter, the system has a logic all its own.
The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that’s why we have to fight and win for a better system
Socialism or barbarism!
In mobile gaming we have an issue with whaling. A game will come out monetized beyond reason, and it doesn’t matter if 99% of players quit in the first hour, 1% of players have more money than brains and what they pay will make the game profitable. This is so effective that the play store now has no games worth playing because this is a far more lucrative business.
I see a lot of people taking about capitalism inevitably collapsing, but if all the money is collected in the hands of the 1%, products for the unreasonably wealthy will be the lucrative market. It doesn’t matter if only two people buy cars a year if the cars are sold at such a markup that it covers the annual expenses. Some my think that’s unrealistic, but we already have people who will spend a hundreds on a brick with a brand name on it. The ultra rich pay hundreds for a beige shirt that’s slightly higher quality than Walmart.
We’d be better off going back to barter than trying to peacefully pry the system from their clutches.
I dunno playstore has Balatro, Slay the Spire and many more indie games that don’t have microtransactions and are great.
But they’re the minority, most games have gatcha/pay-to-win mechanics. It’s actually hard to find some simple games where you aren’t harassed to buy things.
There are some good indie games, and many more can be ported to phones, but the list is still small.
I’m not an economist but I don’t think an entire economy can support itself on whales. We built an entire society off the idea that you need poor people to do jobs no one else will do. If those people starve to death, it’s not like rich people will just do their jobs because they need to be done. Your theory here only makes sense to me if I look at a couple individuals at a time.
I never said they’d do away with us, we simply won’t be part of the “economy”. The fineries of life will become increasingly limited to the haves and we have-nots won’t be considered in the metrics in the same way that some people do tolerate the ads in a game otherwise meant to catch whales. We’ll still work for our wages and spend it on our necessities but the island of what is meant for us will shrink and eventually lottery players will dream of ordering pizza instead of owning a
yachtbuying a nice carpaying off their debts.I kind of get what you mean, and again, not an economist, but I think the only way this capitalism thing ever “worked” was if money constantly flowed. If parts of that flow stop, it’s eventually gonna cause problems even for the rich that even “whales” can’t solve. We’re talking about whether or not money holds any value. Even a lot of billionaires could end up without much in terms of resources if that were to happen. Having a fancy car and house suddenly means a lot less once money is meaningless. I think it’s hard to even fathom all the effects of that, even for people who study economics. We are a few generations deep in this particular kind of society. Hurts my head to think about because it’s so foreign for me to imagine a world without money.
We’d be better off going back to barter than trying to peacefully pry the system from their clutches.
Normal people would just start selling the beige shirts…
Slavery for us, power for them. That’s it. We get nothing, they get everything.
Hasn’t that endgame been pretty much reached?
If it’s still getting worse, then no
It’s like a Dark Souls game. Many of the bosses are tough, but the final boss is just some guy and is rather easy to cheese with parries. The mobs you have to fight to reach the final boss are harder than the boss itself.
You’re supposed to recognize their undisputed superiority and turn yourselves into automatons for their pleasure, having no other options available to you.
Of course that never actually works, as it always ends up with someone like Moses or Jesus figuring out that you can, in fact, live perfectly fine in this world without their economic systems. As long as you’re willing to deal with the natural world directly.
Except this time we’re so far along that the natural world itself is a victim.
It gets harder and harder to reject the system and “live a simple life”.
Rural areas are food deserts covered in huge factory farms. Cities force you into the grind through high rent. Alternative livestyles are criminalized. Emigrating requires lots of money and there are no frontiers left to live the rugged way.Yup. It’s going to suck a lot.
That still won’t ever make their stupid idea actually function in reality. They’re far too dumb to directly control everyone’s lives.
The world is not a zero sum game. that alone defeats your premis-
With AI and automation, I think the 1% will want less people (bugs) around them in a not so distant future. We might have they answer to this question soon enough. Spoilers : we lose.
Who will do all the things though? ChatGPT can’t clean my toilet or wash my dishes.
Also, what is the point of being wealthy and powerful if there’s no one to rule over?
I’m sure the oligarchy would be happy with just a couple of millions of poors to rules and clean their toilets. The rest vast majority of us will be useless. I prepare myself for this scenario, I wont leave without a fight.
Money isn’t finite, that’s why billionaires and soon trillionaires exist. They couldn’t ( or literally had to be an emperor) when money had a closer relationship to reality or was gold. Anyways, because of the nature of our currency now, the size of their pile has zero effect on the size of your pile. “No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.” not how it works. If you add up the 20 richest Americans, you get close to 2.7 trillion, which is the estimated amount of physical cash in circulation. None this shit is real. American national debut is 36 trillion. Ever saw an actual cash shortage? Like not a personal one, the money not existing to complete a transaction, like not being able to move cash you hold to another person because of lack of availability of signifiers? Not a thing anymore.
What’s the end game for cancer?
There isn’t one, it doesn’t matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.
The billionaire space race reminds me of Devil facial tumour disease (NSFL).
It’s the only cancer (that I know of), that can reliably spread to a new host.Edit: I did some reading, there are more but that is the one that feels most terrifying. I posted the article on creepy Wikipedia.
This is the answer. These people have no plan other than “make more money today”.
Live, laugh, love.
Live in the moment.
YOLO!
🤮
Eloquently phrased.
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
They’ll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.
So what’s the way out, you propose?
