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.
I thankfully have real work to do generally, but the corporate stuff on the side is completely infuriating to me.
Just pointless rituals one after the other, driven by people who serve as the middle men who keep the executives safe from harm and from having to talk to workers, while fully believing that their fake busy work is something of essense.
Most of it consists of logging our work to various company platforms every day, when it's completely possible for management to derive all of that data from a single source instead. One of the tasks is updating the task's story points (an effort estimation of sorts) after the task is complete according to the time it took, while the time is also separately logged by us and updating the estimations defeats the point of estimating in the first place.
It's complete insanity, and the only real purpose of it is so some corporate analyst/consultant/whatever who has not the slightest idea of what the real job consists of, gets to see some red and green lines on a chart, thinking that any of that data bears any relation to reality.