Sublime

But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

Kierkegaard and Marx are not only Hegel’s most trenchant critics but also his most important appropriators.

“To develop in greater spiritual freedom, a people must break their bondage to their bodily needs—they must cease to be the slaves of the body. They must, therefore, above all, have time at their disposal for spiritual creative activity and spiritual enjoyment.

History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action—the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities. So the Industrial Revolution brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, social

Third, and most important, Hardt and Negri maintain that with immaterial production all the dichotomies that characterized labor in the industrial era—productive/unproductive, production/reproduction, labor/leisure, waged/unwaged—vanish, so that labor ceases to be a source of differentiation and unequal power relations.8 In the place of the former

The challenge was how to ensure that capitalism served the people. Some supposed answers came from Europe and Russia. One was state ownership of monopolies and the largest enterprises—socialism, as it was called. A more radical one was found in communism—common ownership of all “means of production,” in Karl Marx’s words. A third was to turn large