Reminds me of a thought experiment I read recently (credit to Benjamin Kunkel), intended to illustrate surplus labor value:
Imagine the entire economy consists of a single firm, with however many employees. For the firm’s owner to realize a profit, the revenue from selling goods must exceed the wages paid. But since there are no other employers, the firm’s employees are also its sole customers. The only way a profit can come about is for them to take on debt. When one then regards the situation with a real economy, that has many such firms, the same logic still applies. Except other forms of financialization come into play: colonization of new territories, the invention of increasingly convoluted financial instruments, fractional reserve banking, etc. It’s an unsustainable process predicated on eternal expansion… So, yeah! Pyramid scheme.
Is that the sense in which you were thinking?
