Technology

Yeah, but we do sacrifice our bodies for labor. We just have better medicine these days. Sitting for 8-12hrs a day, lifting/bending for 8-12hrs, etc. It’s all sacrificing our bodies, causing physical pain. We have different kinds of pain now, because there were never really jobs back then where people sat for so long. Since the Industrial Revolution, we still sacrifice our bodies for capitalism. We’re just not bending over in fields as much (though, the most exploited among us still do, I.e. immigrants), we instead bend over machines and hunch over computers.

You definitely hit on something that I didn’t: our shackles are now invisible. We have powerful computers in our pockets, where we misspend our “leisure” time—still in service of capitalism. And there are all of these “amenities” that the ownership class points to so they can say, “please, you don’t have it that bad with your starbuckses and iPhones!” The means with which they extract more value from us have become a literal science. They addict us in order to suck up all of our attention and free time we have away from injecting value with our labor, so we can continue to inject value into their system with our consumption (and more recently, with our data profiles they are always building). They have made our chains invisible, where once, yes, we were sometimes literally shackled to our jobs and the property of the landed gentry, aristocracy, and church, but now even our injected value is nearly invisible. Literally everything about us as people has been monetized. And thus we have greater wealth inequality than the gilded age.

It’s not that we didn’t learn anything from history, it’s just that the wrong people learned how to avoid the wrong repercussions for recreating the same history.