Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[joshcryer]

32. I didn't say historical materialism said that.

I said that it should have.

Marx makes a case that technology drives change in the economic relations of a given mode of production. Which is objectively false. The mode of production is completely dependent upon the agency of the producers, the technology has absolutely nothing to do with it whatsoever. What Marx failed to realize is that the hierarchical mode of producing technology is intrinsically capitalist and impossible to emancipate by the workers without actively changing how that technology is produced.

It's one thing to take over a factory and run it like a capitalist industrialist while having workers committees handling the overarching power structure.

It's another thing entirely to free a factory and allow individuals to come and go as they please and work at their leisure whenever they wanted to.

It's the difference between sitting on a factory line putting the widget in a gadget over and over again all day long and then at the end of the day not having the gadget, or being a free agent, walking into a factory, following instructions to make a gadget, it may take all day to make just one of them, but by the end of the day you have your gadget. One mode is hierarchical, capitalist, one mode is non-hierarchical, socialist.