I like the perspective of Yanis Varoufakis in his book,
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
It describes how what we are seeing with the tech industry has a similar essential character to prior developments that allowed for the control and subdivision of any great public commons, where digital platforms extract value not through profit from competitive markets but through rent extraction enabled by platform ownership. Traditional capitalism relied on profits generated through commodity production and market competition. Big tech platforms instead extract rents by owning the digital infrastructure where economic activity occurs. They charge for access to their "cloud fiefs" rather than competing in traditional markets.
It closely ties into Cory Doctorow's "enshittification", described in a great
video presentation here. He has since written a book on the subject and the term has been introduced into many dictionaries shortly after it was coined.
Generally, the idea that wealth accumulation leads to upheaval is flipped on its head to examine whether upheaval can cause wealth equality in Walter Scheidel's book,
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Rather than saying that inequality causes instability such as world wars, Scheidel says that a war might be one of the only ways to even temporarily regain some measure of equality. He examines economic equality across a very broad geographic and temporal landscape, finding that the default mode of essentially any post-agrarian civilization is for inequality to constantly increase in times of peace. In his analysis, economic equality can only be temporarily imrpoved at times of what he calls the "four horsemen": mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues that kill a sufficient amount of the overall population that the current economic system becomes impossible.
