Something the communists never understood is that capital is only powerful in the presence of scarcity. Once there is an excess of capital, the capitalist loses

Something the communists never understood is that capital is only powerful in the presence of scarcity. Once there is an excess of capital, the capitalist loses his power, but due to overproduction, it is now possible to hire less than 100% of the population. You get a double crisis with both excess capital being dismantled and mass unemployment. The sphere of production and circulation are impacted simultaneously. So you have an excess of resources and labor, but also not enough money to buy it, because access to resources is gated behind money and money is earned in correlation to productivity. In its essence, you need to be productive in an economy which no longer needs further production, simply for the sake of obeying the "productivity <=> money" rule. If this wasn't clear maybe this example is more illustrative: house prices go up by 50%. You need to work 50% longer, but this doesn't mean the economy will actually consume 50% more just because you need the money for the house. In the scarcity regime you don't have to think about this at all, there is enough of a backlog to just work through it. Now, if you were to object that poor people still have unmet needs, then the answer is that rising wealth inequality is allocating money to people with a lower propensity to consume. That by the way is where positive capital returns eventually end up, simply because exponential growth outpaces the human brain at some point.