this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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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.

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[–] iByteABit@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The existence of the internet and eradication of real communities is probably why

[–] radio_free_asgarthr@hexbear.net 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well, it did further accelerate atomization. But this was always a tendency of capitalism and actually was already trending this way for a long time. I don't know of a better single citation than "Bowling Alone" even if it is a very centrist liberal perception/interpretation. But this was already more extreme than Marx would have thought in the 90s. A more anecdotal piece of data is that my grandfather was always opining on my parents along with me, my siblings and cousins lack of community and group participation, in contrast to him and his friends volunteering for church activities, rotary clubs, VFW events, etc.

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What if we hegel this thing and we just accelerate the process of atomization until it saturates at its limit, it splits the atom, and there's a nuclear dialectical reaction?

[–] MidnightPocket@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

We just keep getting school shootings from this visible-disgust

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago

Eventually it synthesizes into a new stage, school civil wars, and eventually school imperialist wars or even school world wars.