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)_/¯
Capitalism is kind of like a control system that selects for accumulation and profit. The ones at the top are those that have been filtered for, and have the most. If they fail, they are filtered out. This is why Marx many times explained how capital itself is above individual capitalists. I recommend reading Marx on Capital as a Real God by Ian Paul Wright, for a bit of a funky explanation of this.
The mechanisms of capitalism demand reproduction on an expanded scale. Simple reproduction on the basis of capitalist development isn't really sustainable, they are propelled forwards. In other words, grow or die, at economic scale. Individual megafirms, the ones with the elites at the top, have to continue growing and swelling until they burst, because they are not the masters of capital. That doesn't make them guiltless, but more like priests of capital, as Roderic Day puts it.
Came here to post that very link. Such a good breakdown.