What's the endgame when the rich have all the money?
What's the endgame when the rich have all the money?
Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they'll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won't be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there's no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer's shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can't buy anything with it.
What's the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
They don’t think about endgame. The life they live is one without consequence; they have no intention to start thinking ahead, that’d make them uncomfortable.
Also, this endgame is already manifesting. Remember all those headlines about millennials killing “X” industry? Less wealth in the working class for luxuries that previous generations would have enjoyed at the same age. Before long it’ll be not enough wealth for certain luxuries outright.
It’s even better than that, because the massive inequality created by Capitalism has already got us to a state where the human population is going to collapse within the next few decades, even if climate change doesn’t do it first. Simply, most people never feel like they can afford to start a family during the years when they would have started one before. The oligarchs know this and are freaking out about birth rates now, but it’s already too late - can’t be King of the mountain if the mountain is only a hill.
The end game is 1 person with all of it.
There are 3 key necessities for UBI/freedom dividends:
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It redistributes power not wealth. Bad greed is oligarchy capturing your rulers. UBI weakens politicians discretion, because just paying everyone more cash instead of their corrupt ideas is "idiocracy proof". Power redistributed to workers where everyone who wants a job gets 5 recruiter calls per day offering a better job. We all get greater power to say no to anything. Quality of life becomes exceptional without crimes of desperation, and the divisive hate that is easily manufactured from crime.
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Redistribution means massive economic growth and overall prosperity even as it all trickles up to make the rich richer. "Velocity of money" is the key economic concept, but as income trickles back up to workers and owners, it means that the rich have to invest more to take all of our money.
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The alternative is genocide. Oligarchy having all of the money and power, and AI/robotics to do work, means robocop detroit for Americans, and war on rest of the world to take their land. It doesn't matter that far more wealth can be generated with more people to sell stuff to. The logic of pillaging America/world for oligarchs with ever decreasing tax rates on corporations and the rich means more relative wealth and power for the oligarchy and its political minions.
This 3rd point is similar to yours. Except its not just "This is America, if you don't make money you're a douchebag", and the rich just give up on life, it's "you need to be exterminated because you are useless to the rulership."
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A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn't bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn't have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.
Feudalism
If they thought as effectively as the question in the title, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing.
I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority's material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don't want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today's ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.
the conspiracy brain in me, looks at ranting from people like elon musk, who say there's going to be a population collapse, and Im thinking of Resident evil, (the bad movies).
I think they're banking on the hope that in 20 years there's going to be billions fewer people in the world, we're already close to setting it off with the unprecedented increase of state vs state wars since 2020. Azerbaijan/Armenia, Israel/Levant, and even bigger ones that we've not seen since the 80s like Russia/Ukraine and with all probability, China/Taiwan by 2028 at the latest.
they're banking on there being less people to feed, house, and otherwise provide for. so they can fall back to a kind of corpo-feudalism
There is no End Game.
They're insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as "banality of evil" because it's so routine and common place in their circles.
People might point to Musk's old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.
Robocop sort of addresses this.
The same as with all cancers unless it's killed in time.
the first corporate war probably
I read a short story years ago about just this. Quite an interesting read if anyone is interested.
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
Funnily enough Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame (not the quantum leap guy) wrote a play called Endgame, also punning on the chess term.
A man who can't walk or see has the only combination to the food pantry, a man who can't sit down is the only one who can take him there to open it. They are the last two people alive. They both continually try to out do each other and come out on top as they can't trust each other to live in peace.
most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food. No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
Bold of you to assume the rock bottom of wealth inequality includes the ability to purchase food and is survivable.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it. The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down. At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
Money doesn't come from people, it comes from the fed issuing debt. The economic "value" backing that money also doesn't necessarily come from people, it comes from control over things that are valued, which may include human labor, but that labor can be automated. The actual value of human life is not represented by money or other financial instruments.
Economic constraints aren't preventing the world from decaying into an enormous desolate golf course.
They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the "owners" of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.
Capitalism isn't neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can't control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can't be exploited for profits, to violence. But they're as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.
We don't overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn't matter, the system has a logic all its own.
The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that's why we have to fight and win for a better system
Socialism or barbarism!
An economy where we all sit in a hoemless shelther watching the five rich guys sell the same five products to each other again and again
You’re assuming a level of competence for rich people that is unfounded.
It is a mental desease. If I hoard umfathomble amount of newspapers, I would be called a messi. If it is capital wealth, someone is a genius. They collect to fullfill an emptness in themself. It is a delusion. It is never enough and only the continiues ammassing can give them the feeling of success and control. Consumption as a Stimulus. It is not about the amount, it is about the growth. The way you took to the next number/amount. Distancing yourself further from the others. While getting confirmed by enjoying, what many can not affort. Wealth is the main storyline that is understood by every generation and culture around the world and is a globally accepted metric for desire and standing.
There is no Endgame. But a good perspective for them would be something like Elysium, while for us it is more like Gattaca - at best.
Its about control. When the stocks crashed in its a wonderful life, the evil banker was 'kind' to lend people money to switch over to being his customer. This brings them under their control.
I don’t think you can think of it as some sort of logical plan. It’s a bug, not a feature, of capitalism. What you are describing is the inevitable end of a completely free market with no regulation. The strong (economically) keep taking from the weak until we have the situation you are describing. From there the next step is dependent upon whether the weak form a cohesive identity and seize power (revolution) or stay fractured around smaller identity cleavages (race, religion, gender, etc) and are subjugated.
Take the money from other rich people. Possibly with an army of disposable humans.
In mobile gaming we have an issue with whaling. A game will come out monetized beyond reason, and it doesn't matter if 99% of players quit in the first hour, 1% of players have more money than brains and what they pay will make the game profitable. This is so effective that the play store now has no games worth playing because this is a far more lucrative business.
I see a lot of people taking about capitalism inevitably collapsing, but if all the money is collected in the hands of the 1%, products for the unreasonably wealthy will be the lucrative market. It doesn't matter if only two people buy cars a year if the cars are sold at such a markup that it covers the annual expenses. Some my think that's unrealistic, but we already have people who will spend a hundreds on a brick with a brand name on it. The ultra rich pay hundreds for a beige shirt that's slightly higher quality than Walmart.
We'd be better off going back to barter than trying to peacefully pry the system from their clutches.
I think the movie Elysium is basically what they want.
Not money, power. There'll always be affordable consumables: clothes, food etc. It's just the quality will go down to accommodate how squeezed the consumer is. But the limited resources: a stay at that resort, a home with space and good schools, the seats at the sports game etc those the prices will continue to race away. Which is just a different view of power (choice/control) shifting into the hands of an increasingly small proportion of people. Those places will still be full - but the chance of getting to them for the average person will grow dimmer with every passing year.
Feudalism
The same as any other accumulation process. Those unable to sustain themselves fall off the bottom and those with any remaining wealth are restratified into a hierarchy of the most to least wealthy.
The cycle begins again!
The rich don’t care about money, they care about capital. They want to own every house, automobile, factory, and natural resources. Money is a very temporary store of value so more assets can be purchased.
Slavery for us, power for them. That’s it. We get nothing, they get everything.
Implying their train of thought can go beyond "MOAR MONEH"
Also, they'd love to be slave owners, but since slavery was banned in most of the world, they have to skirt around with silly laws and whatnot, so wage-slavery works. Hell, it might even work better than actual slavery, since you can own all the stuff the wage-slave can buy and pay for!
There isn't an endgame.
maybe something akin to hungergames to keep masses under control
They will start a clone economy on different planets. Remember when we were cloning shit in the 90s? That. If people won't make enough babies to continue to grow the population then they will take over.
For a while it will be that they only have almost all of the money; a small portion will have to go to the workers so that someone exists to run things like power plants and farms and mcdonalds and shit. But eventually robots will replace all that, or slavery
This is a good, nutshell explanation of late-stage capitalism.
As far as the answer to "what's the endgame", I do not know. I suspect that many or most of these rich folks are so moneyblind that they don't know either. Or, they simply don't believe that their collective actions will eventually cause the system to fail.
But most likely, I think, is that they believe someone else will bear the majority of any negative impact. Of course this makes less sense in the face of a systematic collapse, but again: it's probably very difficult to see when you have dollar signs in your eyes.
guillotines
"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You'll_own_nothing_and_be_happy
Everyone here has written echoes of the same viewpoint: the wealthy got too greedy and so now the whole world will die as they stand and watch.
While I understand the allure of such narratives that paint a world falling into pieces at the hands of the ultra-wealthy, I think it's worth exploring an alternate vision of late-stage capitalism. One where despite being grim, we avoid descending into a completely unrecognizable dystopia.
In this scenario, nearly the entire workforce is displaced by robotic and AI-driven automation, leading to a massive societal shift. With most traditional jobs gone, the public faces mass unemployment and widespread poverty. Outcry erupts as the majority falls below the poverty line. With nearly all jobs displaced, for most people only two options remain: attempt entrepreneurship or face unemployment.
Confronted with growing public unrest, governments reluctantly implement basic welfare measures such as small universal basic income or food stamps, providing just enough for people to get by. Meanwhile, the majority of global funding is redirected toward research and development, primarily powered by these new forms of automation. This fuels breakthroughs in production and technology, eventually driving down the cost of quality goods. Over time, even those relying on minimal welfare begin to see modest improvements in their quality of life.
Meanwhile, the wealth gap grows wider than ever. Billionaires, enriched by the automation economy, turn their attention to ambitious but arbitrary ventures like constructing moon bases, developing underwater cities, or investing in life-extension technologies. Occasionally, these projects destabilize society—whether through anti-competitive practices or efforts to sidestep government oversight—but as long as governments hold their ground (a non-trivial task), their effects on the majority remain limited.
What results is a fragile balance: a world with basic welfare programs supplying the masses, incremental technological progress, and a stark divide between the majority and the ultra-wealthy. It’s far from utopian, but it avoids outright collapse. As innovation continues, life gradually improves for everyone—even though the wealthiest always dictate the terms and reap the greatest rewards.
They never will. But they’ll likely always have most of it. The government will print money just enough to keep inflation low-ish but allow people to feel comfortable enough to spend it. Big corps will eventually accumulate them and hoard it.
It's probably something like the story within the story For the Benefit of Mankind by Liu Cixin.
The world is not a zero sum game. that alone defeats your premis-
Check out Timeless with JT
With AI and automation, I think the 1% will want less people (bugs) around them in a not so distant future. We might have they answer to this question soon enough. Spoilers : we lose.