Capitalism inherently serves to concentrate wealth since the ones with the money make the rules. As wealth disparity increases and people get poorer they can't buy as much stuff and growth dries up. Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that's unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it. That's quite a problem, and it's one which might feel familiar to the astute reader.

[–] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml 26 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Hey I recognize this happening.

[–] MaeBorowski@lemmy.ml 9 points 12 hours ago

seen-this-one

[–] Yliaster@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that's unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it.

I didn't get this part. Please explain?

[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 18 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

The money they collect is the money we pay them minus the money they pay us. If we can't pay them more the only way to get more is for them to pay us less. Gross simplification obviously. Then the typical strategy is to blame immigrants or Jews or whatever for the decrease in living standards, and crack down on anyone who tries to improve things.

Edit: this is sort of a meme-ified version of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which is the real theory of how economic crises in capitalism come about and not really the same as what I'm describing here, but along some similar lines. It's worth reading about from actual scholars in detail if you're interested in that sort of thing.

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 17 hours ago

Imagine that the entire world is a 100 people neighbourhood and you start selling peanuts, at first you start growing by acquiring more clients but what happens when everyone is already your client? How do you grow at that point?