When reading through Marx I can’t help but think that capitalism has gotten even worse today than it used to be back then, meaning that the actual mechanisms that drive capital now need much more exploitation and in more forms than they used to.
Also I wonder if some changes of capitalism have also caused the working class to be so completely numb. Workers of the 19th and 20th century knew that the capitalists have opposite needs to them and only through fighting them could they stand to improve their situation. However today people just seem uninterested to really fight for themselves despite the proletariat being a much larger percentage of society compared to the past. I know I’m leaving out some important struggles going on when I’m saying this, but it still makes me wonder what made workers in the past centuries so much more class conscious.
I don’t believe that much, if anything, that Marx critiqued about capitalism has changed on a structural level, but the flow of capital is so complex today, and the collected capital has become so much larger, that it begs the question if this has created some superstructures of capitalism today.
If aliens looked at our planet, the only meaningful thing they can say our civilization produces is more and more CO2 in the atmosphere and more and more farmland for pigs and cows. It looks like total nonsense at a birds eye view
they’d assume it’s a messed-up low tech terraforming project to heat up the atmosphere utilizing big farting land mammals, covering large amounts of land in sunlight-absorbing black paste, and literally just setting a bunch of shit on fire
we are paving the way for our descendants, the people of plastic, which will have transcended organic life