Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[BOG PERSON]

35. you remain wrong about the "new productive faculties"

remember earlier up thread where we were talking about written language and the agricultural revolution ?and which came first? that is the classic exxample of new productive faculties changing the mode of production: the transition from hunting/gathering societies to slavery

why do you insist on technology being liberatory? how can you say that in the year 2013 when automation has only thrown people out of productive work and the only leisure time people can get anymore is unemployment? under capitalism technology is the ultimate scab. do smart phones and free wi-fi somehow mitigate this? is participating in the spectacle a sufficient consolation prize for the liquidation of organized labor in the imperial core? don't you know twitter and facebook and the entire internet is company property ?

your main criticism of marx appears to be that he doesn't share your techno-optimism. it's true taht marxism doesnt look at technology as an emancipating force under capital and it's absolutely 100% correct on this. this is non-negotiable. i will not budge on this point. technocrats will not lead us to the promised land. under capital technology is chiefly a weapon to be deployed against labor. it s a way of robbing of the worker control over the pace of work, as well as countervailing wage raises and limitations imposed by labor on the length of teh work day. but the ultimate aim of technology under capital is to make the worker superfluous to the production process - this is the real meaning of *efficiency*, the real purpose of labor saving innovations - and this will ultimately be capital's undoing. the working class will inevitably be forced to abolish work, for the sake of its own survival. he who does not eat, shall not work.

i dont know what you find so intensely disagreeable in that quote from Poverty of Philosophy, maybe you have an allergy. because it makes perfect sense. capital IS a social relation, or else its just in your head, OR we are stripped of our agency as human beings. all marx means about the hand mill versus the steam mill is that capitalism accelerates the development of the forces of production in a way feudalism never could - due to pressures of capitalist competition and labor recalcitrance (unionizing, demanding wage raises, better working conditions, etc)

"The production relations of every society form a whole." this is integral to marxist understading of the capitalist mode of production. it is part and parcel of an understanding of the commodity-form.

the commodity-form contains within it the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, between exchange value and use value - the separation of production and consumption that is imposed under capital (alienation). all the contradictions of capitalist society - poverty; unemployment; the intermediate classes that vacillate b/w bourgeois and proletarian poles depending on the balance of forces domestically and internationally; crises of overproduction; financial skulduggery; etc - emerge from this point of separation, and it is the historical task of the working class to take this separation to its logical conclusion, to finalize this divorce - "from each according to their ability to each according to their need". but as David__77 posted below, that is something way off in the future

tbh i think youre pushing this "hierarchical mode of production" junk because it lets capitalism off the hook and diverts attention to the modern state - specifically postcolonial bourgeois nationalist states that ahvent fully succumbed to neoliberalism and imperial belligerence or they block their citizens access to ostensibly "horizontalist" social media or they just generally get in our way

i wonder if you think capitalism is even a thing? is it just a recent articulation of the age old hierarchical mode of production? famine, war and pestilence - all that stuff is parenthetical to hierarchy.