Comradeship // Freechat

I wouldn't frame this in terms of inflation or deflation, because those are terms for prices. Prices change, but below them, there is the actual value. And it's true that capitalism has a "problem" (a structural contradiction) related to overaccumulation of value. More and more value tries to enter circulation as capital and generate profit, which then only adds to the mass of capital seeking profitable investment. This is an exponential process which can't possibly go on forever on a finite planet. Productivity going up doesn't help either. As Marx showed, it actually leads to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as only human labor generates profit.

Besides wars, financialization and feeding bubbles, boundless consumption is one way to not solve the problem, but delay the crisis temporarily. And it's also true, that the 1% make up a large and increasing part of total consumption.

However, billionaires generally consume only a small part of their wealth and they also don't simply "hoard" it. Instead, they and their firms and companies are forced to reinvest or lose out to competition. So it's exactly the opposite to what that teacher said: their net effect is to accelerate circulation and fueling the problem of overaccumulation even more.

And that's not even the main way of how they do it. What's more, they are so invested in the whole system, that they have a heavy interest in using all their significant political power to keep even money that isn't theirs circulating faster and faster by deregulating financial and environmental regulations, privatizing state assets and services as well as promoting and funding imperialist wars which forcibly open foreign markets up to circulation.

So this idea, that billionaires are actually good for the economy has no basis in reality and is pure ideology, but where does it come from? It goes back to Mandevilles "The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits" (1714). At the time, it was used to justify the excesses of the aristocracy.

David Harvey refers to it and mentions, that even before overaccumulation, there is the structural problem of who's going to generate the demand to realize the surplus value stolen from the workers. The workers certainly can't buy the surplus product. The capitalists can't either, they need to reinvest. Rosa Luxemburg first pointed to the solution: colonialism. Capital constantly needs to expand violently and open up new markets. There is no way around it (except revolution of course). But this too can't go on forever on a finite planet.