Marx never witnessed a fully-automated factory in operation. He'd poop out 26 pallets of perfectly-stacked, completely-uniform dry-stack quake-resistant mortarless bricks onto the trailer of an all-electric self-driving truck, and his jaw would have to be picked up off the ground by a robot arm executing an optimized gape-stopping program.
They're pushing for communism, because it is increasingly apparent that they have been screwed by the existing system from a moment dating to some time before their parents were born, and they'd prefer not to be. Since no other system has been publicized such that it has given them some hope of not being screwed, they are increasingly choosing the option of being slightly less screwed personally at the cost of the whole economy being more screwed.
It's just the Nash equilibrium. Once the voting leverage for screwed people passes a tipping point, their choices will become reality, and everyone who might prefer some other option will have no better chance of a President of the United States trying to get a Supreme Court justice appointed within the last two years of their term, when a unified voting bloc controls Congress.
somebody has no idea what Marx was actually like, said or wrote...
> But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself;
Early Marx's entire vision is foundationally based on the scarcity labor tipping point you're describing. He wrote a lot more after that as well.
Marx is irrelevant to younger generations in the US. Obsolete. We don't really need to discuss him.
They can see with their own eyes what he could only imagine and speculate upon, and then some. And what they see is that not only are factory-owners richer than non-owners, who aren't really even "workers" any more, but that some owners have insignificant need for labor, and that even they are inferior to the owners of the machine specifications and procedures, the holders of patents and trademarks.
They can also see the output of factories that produce modern war materiel. Pilotless aircraft can carry missiles aloft, linger a while, and then rain fiery hell down upon people who never even knew they were up there. A single bomb can end tens of thousands of lives in a flash of light. Even a single person can unremarkably buy enough firepower from the consumer supply chain to terrorize an entire city for a few hours, from a rented hotel room. A private company can reach orbit. A religious cult can synthesize and deploy chemical weapons. Seaworthy cities, powered by uranium, with miniaturized airfields as their roofs, are becoming obsolete, thanks to machine-controlled weaponry.
Nobody is that visionary, as to predict the politics of a world that has reached the bounds of human imagination, and then continued to progress another 50 years.
When people stay home, and don't go to work--either voluntarily or laid off--for fear of a global pandemic, the stock market still rallies. The event that is as near to a general strike as I have seen in my lifetime is being dismissed as a temporary inconvenience to business owners. We all saw how the former Soviet Republics delivered up all their capital into the arms of a few oligarchs within a matter of years as the former government order crumpled. Who now has the power to wrest control of Gazprom from Vladimir Putin?
The youth in the US need never have even heard the name Marx. They can come by their new brand of communism completely from scratch, just by reflecting upon the history of the last 50 years, and extrapolating the simplest of models into future decades, and onto additional simple models of water use, housing starts, and climate change. It is easy to see that a mere handful of people are looting the entire planet, and if that is allowed to proceed unabated for a few more years, an inflection point will be passed, such that even a concerted, aligned, and organized effort by 99.9% of the human population cannot stop it peacefully via the existing institutions.
I'm a little confused by the first part because yeah Marx never saw a modern factory but he was there at the beginning of industrialization. Marx collaborated with Engels whose family owned large textile factories. I think he saw what was coming and was saying that under capitalism the owners of these factories are going to be in charge of everyone else. Also that capitalism is inherently unstable and prone to cyclical crisis which empower the capitalists and impoverish workers. At least in the US, it appears to me he was correct.
They're pushing for communism, because it is increasingly apparent that they have been screwed by the existing system from a moment dating to some time before their parents were born, and they'd prefer not to be. Since no other system has been publicized such that it has given them some hope of not being screwed, they are increasingly choosing the option of being slightly less screwed personally at the cost of the whole economy being more screwed.
It's just the Nash equilibrium. Once the voting leverage for screwed people passes a tipping point, their choices will become reality, and everyone who might prefer some other option will have no better chance of a President of the United States trying to get a Supreme Court justice appointed within the last two years of their term, when a unified voting bloc controls Congress.