PallasRiot on Nostr: In a capitalist society the wealthy have two potential broad strategies for ...

In a capitalist society the wealthy have two potential broad strategies for increasing their own position. They can work to increase their own wealth in absolute terms or they can work to make everyone else poorer and themselves richer in relative terms. The richer someone is the less they gain from increasing their wealth in absolute terms, making it more and more attractive to immiserate everyone else in order to increase relative standing.

In other words, if everyone is getting silver and you're getting a bunch of gold then you're very well off, but if everyone is squatting in mud shacks and you have clean clothing you have a level of power that the difference between gold and silver can't begin to approach. Even if the oligarchs lose wealth in real terms, as long as the difference between what they have and what everyone else has increases they're winning.