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)_/¯
Under capitalism: Working class people think in terms of owning a house or a hobby item they like. Billionaires think in terms of owning countries.
The working class is (forgive my wording if it misuses terminology at all) alienated from the means of production and distribution, and as a result, alienated from power. Their sense of power gets reduced to a very confined scope of trying to have some kind of control over their personal life in their personal space (such as an apartment or a house, if they are not homeless on top of everything else - sometimes a singular room in a house, as they may have to share space with others and thus share control over what happens in it).
Billionaires are in touch with the means of production and distribution through ownership of capital and so they have a very direct relationship with large-scale power. In fact, they can't really be a billionaire and not engage with the dynamics of large-scale power and ownership. Unless they want to try to sign off all of that capital/power to someone else (highly unlikely, since it would now mean they're in the working class and subject to its oppression and anxieties), they're going to be compelled by their position to manage the capital. Managing the capital requires a mindset of accumulation. If they don't do anything with it, it can go into decline, lose its value, get bought out, etc., and then we're looking at them heading toward being in the working class through loss of their capital that way. Capital doesn't stay in a static state of value, but fluctuates based on the value of property, stocks, etc., so they have to stay ahead of this. This means looking for ways to increase the value of the assets they have. In order to increase the value, they have to do the typical capitalist things: exploit the working class, be a landlord, take advantage of imperialism, etc.
In order words, although you can probably be a billionaire who hands off the labor of growing your capital to a third party in exchange for a cut of the plunder, you can't really sit on the wealth and not have anyone do anything with it and still maintain it. Because its value is part of a fluid system, a system where entities are in brutal competition of win/loss, looking to take control over somebody else's thing to strengthen the power of their own.
There's probably a more technical diamat language way to explain it, but it's like a whole different relationship to power, is what I'm trying to get at.