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Interesting Analysis of Karl Marx’s Writing
I’ve not read much Marx. What I know of his work reduces to knowing what others think about what they’ve heard about other people reacting to what they think his work was.
That being said, I just finished the Partially Examined Life episode on him, and it was fascinating.
In short, the takeaway I got from it was that we should not necessarily think of Marx as “the Communism guy”, but rather the science fiction guy who wrote about the social implications of what would happen when technology eliminated the need for people to work.
And it’s kind of happening already, right? As I and may others have said many times…the jobs aren’t coming back. They’re going to computers, automation, robots, AI, self-checkout, etc.
So at some point we’re going to be left with a population that has nothing to do. Or, more accurately, no reason to have to perform labor, since it will be done by machines.
What happens then?
Marx wrote with industry as his backdrop, but he was almost prescient with regard to higher tech levels. And you can easily see his analysis as addressing that future state.
Anyway, I found it an interesting way to look at his ideas.