Political Memes

We are within Capitalism, so without replacing it with a better system, we cannot remove accumulation.

I am not advocating for putting a cap on accumulation in Capitalism, I am advocating for replacing the entire Capitalist system with one where accumulation is not only impossible, but unnecessary and unwanted.

I think this is where capitalist understanding of capital goes into contradiction with marxist understanding of capital. I won't go over everything in Das Kapital that relates to this topic, but I'll give the short gist. Capitalism takes a very general "everything is capital" approach which means whatever money you collect is capital. Marx defined capital different to show the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. From the point of view of money it becomes capital when you use that money for the specific purpose of making more money.

Let's say you give someone the tools to make a thing and then you pay them $40 to make that thing. You then sell that thing for $50 making $10 for yourself from that. If we imagine this as a black box, you put in $40 and you get $50. Collect until you have $80 and then you get back $100. That is capital. You do nothing but you make money and you use that money to make more money.

What isn't capital is if it costs you $40 to make something, you sell that thing for $50, you take that $10, collect until it's a million and then buy a house or something. That is not capital because that's the product of your labor and that money returns into circulation.

You're allowed to keep your money because you've earned it. Your neighbor is allowed to keep his house, his cars and all the savings assuming he did the worth to earn it. There is no actual cap beyond what you're capable of earning from your labor. I won't get into the "what if he didn't earn it" or the "Person X made billions of their own work" discussions because I'm not here for that. I'm here to give a quick explanation to your questions because we're not taught Marxism. The outcomes of Marxism comes across as very nonsensical and puzzling, when all you've been taught is capitalism. If you don't care to read Das Kapital this is a good summary where the 4-5th video starts to get into the meat of the subject