Hello dear Comrades, I have a question that’s haunting my mind for the last couple of weeks. I’m gonna try to keep it short: why do the elites/oligarchs/big capitalists (so not the petty bourgeois) keep doing everything that they do (i.e. both financial games and trickeries and unspeakable atrocities) in order to accumulate even more wealth?

Let’s make a thought experiment: if a family has 50 million dollars, and let’s say half are immobilized in villas and yachts, while half are invested “productively”, the family could afford to maintain their lifestyle thanks to passive income/rents without lifting a finger. So what compels them to work hard (not productively, but still hard) to ammass ever more money? Surely it’s easier to sit in a pool all day and collect tithes rather than strategizing about the new merger, the new apartment block to buy, the next politician to bribe ecc.

This thought experiment gets even more absurd when we get to billionaires, they could literally afford everything on earth and yet we see ghouls like elon musk spending all day manipulating the stock market/public sentiment on xitter, cutting the US government to pieces in DOGE or planning the next grift with his companies, couldn’t he just sit back, relax and withdraw from public life? If I was him I would prefer to do so.

Is it some kind of mental disturbance like sociopathy? Are they part of a secret cabal? (Not unlikely considering the whole Epstein thing) do they just like seeing number go up?

Idk if all of this makes sense, it’s just a rant after all ¯_(ツ)_/¯

  • Muad'DibberA
    5·
    19 days ago

    Think of it as a game of monopoly. There can only be one winner, and if you don’t play as ruthlessly as possible, you will end up like all but the winner: bankrupt.

    The logic of capitalism demands that they play this way. The bigger your lead, the more mistakes you can make, but anyone who stops playing completely, or who makes too many mistakes will lose.

    So what compels them to work hard (not productively, but still hard) to ammass ever more money?

    One side point: most capitalists hire advisors and managers to do this for them. They don’t actually need to work that hard. Musk spends most of his day shitposting on twitter.