Sublime

As Marx observed, power belongs to those who control the means of production.

The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock, must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal, or continually tending to equality. If, in the same neighbourhood, there was any employment evidently either more or less advantageous than the rest, so many people would crowd into it in the on

One of Adam Smith’s most intelligent and penetrating readers was the German economist Karl Marx. Marx agreed entirely with Smith’s analysis: specialization had indeed transformed the world and possessed a revolutionary power to enrich individuals and nations. But where he differed from Smith was in his assessment of how desirable this development m

An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the factory.

They oriented the less fortunate towards three sustaining ideas: that they were the true wealth creators in society and were therefore worthy of respect; that earthly status had no moral value in the eyes of God; and that the rich were in any case not worth honouring, for they were both unscrupulous and destined to meet a bad end in a set of immine

Kropotkin’s Anarchist Communism, the twist in the text quotation on the front cover (‘Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor’)

For Marx, however, these new industrial feats were just the tip of the iceberg. He believed that such changes in technology, production and social life, would come to form the basis of an entirely new society. This reflected his view of history as unfolding through an ensemble of fields encompassing not only technology, but also politics and our id