Giving poor people enough money to spend on things they WANT and not just what they need would be a huge boon for the economy, and the fact that the ruling class avoids this like the plague confirms that it’s not the economy they care about but *their* economic interests.
This is the main reason the stock market is usually talked about as if it simply IS “the economy.” In reality only the very rich own a significant number of stocks. The stock market has done very well during the pandemic, as have the rich, while the rest of us are in a recession.
The continued existence of the poor as a class is more useful to the rich in the form of an exploitable underclass than they would be if they were more active consumers. Having an army of the unemployed waiting at your door allows you to better exploit your employees.
So a class analysis allows us to make sense of what would otherwise seem like an inexplicable inefficiency or contradiction in the system: how we purposefully avoid economic prosperity through even modest wealth redistribution. The rich act in their own interests exclusively.
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