When the purchasing power of currency goes down, the people with the most currency actually lose the most, meaning the rich. In this way, there is a flattening effect. In cases of hyperinflation, having 3 million dollars is scarcely better than having 300, and money is revealed to be the apparition that it actually has been all along. The negative impacts of being unable to purchase basic goods and services also acutely affect the working class, but in a lot of cases that's already true in a "healthy" economy.

This is the reason the bourgeoisie is always pulling their hair out about it. It's also only ever used as a pretense to do austerity and extract even more wealth from the working class while cutting basic services.

Since value comes from labor instead of markets or scarcity, inflation also literally wouldn't effect our standard of living in a meaningful way at all if we set in place robust mutual aid networks and centers and divide the labor in a more just way.

When the narratives of capitalist realism and market necessity start to erode, this is actually a good thing, and this is the case with inflation as long as we are organized and prepared to exist beyond the market.

    • poopoobanana [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Rich people own a lot of assets, but I think they also own "a lot of money", as otherwise, who owns all of the money out there?

        • poopoobanana [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I find it hard to believe, do you have a good source?

          S&P 500 companies have ~$2.7 trillion in just cash. According to the IMF itself, the amount of money stashed in tax havens was ~$36 trillion in 2016. That by itself is most definitely more than the emergency savings of the entire world's working class. Also, around 50% americans have more credit card debt than emergency savings.

      • RION [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        any cash and/or savings they have is still a financial asset, and, as was said, is vulnerable to inflation unlike real assets

        • seitanicRights [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Those hoarded real assets, or at least the claim on them as private property, aren't going to last very long without a functioning market. Will you pay the cops to guard your vault with holo charizards? Useless hunks of metal? Bags of flour?

            • seitanicRights [she/her]
              ·
              3 years ago

              No, if you look through the comments, this is an Orthodox Leninist position

                • seitanicRights [she/her]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  That's a lot of words and conjecture you attributed to me. The line going down doesn't cause suffering. The violent enforcement of property is doing that. The line is a smokescreen, and y'all bought it hook line and sinker. Either way, I have COVID and just got out of a really long editorial meeting for a zine. I don't have the energy to continue this thread.

                  Fascism is more likely to emerge if the womb of American capitalism keeps nurturing it like Rosemary's Baby than an abrupt end to the already very similar corporate police state. Order doesn't necessarily get restored when the market fails, and I'm less terrified of the currently existing Blackshirts than the ones of the near future if things continue on this course. The economy is already collapsing. The proposed further austerity coming down the line will be enforced with violence. "Fighting inflation" is equivalent to that, and it isn't the default position. It is a neolberal position that itself has a pedigree descended directly from fascism contra both a planned economy and gift economies. There are enough resources to go around, and there is enough labor available to take care of everyone better than the present system does, even in a terribly implemented socialism or syndicalism.

                  This is not even to touch on the fact that we need to change the economic system yesterday, and the longer we delay that, the less of whatever future you think austerity would preserve there is left. That is to say, the present and future calamity implied by a continuation of the capitalist mode of production is much graver than even a tremendous amount of terror and violence stemming from an abrupt and immediate shift in human and biological terms.