The Communist Manifesto
(Graphics in this post are provided by a robot artist, DALL-E)
My central thesis here is that the social effects of cheap energy were missed by Marx. This is worth a book-length treatment. What follows is little more than a sketch of the idea.
As documented by Rachel Maddow in "Blow Out," the discovery of cheap energy (just coal in Marx's time) was, and is, immensely disruptive. In the time of Marx, this meant cheap energy competed directly with human labor, driving the cost of labor to minimum subsistence. Little did he know it would be possible to drive human labor almost entirely out of the picture. In our time, physical "work" is overwhelmingly what machines do. Keeping machines working is what people do.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Without getting too far into "cause and effect," it's clear that capitalism and a dramatic increase in the availability of cheap energy arose together. The conditions Engles and Marx prevailed in the coal mines and the factories whose machinery ran on coal-powered steam. The concentration of workers (made necessary because both the coal miners and the factory workers needed to concentrate at the work site) created the "proletariat" featured in the Manifesto. Marx has nothing to say about the state of serfs, the agricultural equivalent of the "proletariat." When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, this turned out to be an essential distinction. Generally speaking, we see that Marx was guilty of "lumping" - the error of grouping people into large groups, then treating membership in that group as real. Even then, society was far more complex than a configuration of two classes.
Marx oversimplified even the situation he thought was crucial. He entirely missed the central role of cheap energy and the emergence of what we now call neoliberalism - the operation of the "free market" unchained by political or moral concerns. To be fair, Marx was himself one of the founders of a discipline that we now call "economics." He struggled to understand why prices were what they were. Today, we would say prices are determined by what people are willing to pay. Back then, he thought that the "fair" price was the amount of work plus a "profit" that went to the owner of the means of production (mine or factory). Today, we would see the marketplace at work. Abundant energy drove down the price of work (machine or human). Abundant human workers meant that human labor was cheap.
In short, there is no mystery behind the appalling condition of factory and mine workers. If we want to see a modern example of this, we can see the same forces at work where the worst conditions on the planet exist: in miners working the illegal mines in the Congo and the crowds scrabbling through garbage mountains in India and South America. In these places, we see the ultimate result of driving the cost of human labor to zero.
ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS
C02 emissions as a result of burning fossil fuels follow a curve like this:
Whatever Marx thought was going on in the class struggle in England, it's plain that industry at the time was undergoing another revolution that is still ongoing: the advent of cheap, abundant energy.
Along with the effect on labor, this particular form of energy required massive new investments in mines and factories. That meant that the benefits of the energy revolution went to the owners of capital. The name for this system is capitalism. What Marx saw was not a historical evolution from feudal society but the re-structuring of society to fit the realities of a world run on cheap energy.
Marx saw this as vaguely connected to the class struggle, which happened to be happening simultaneously in Europe. However, the revolutions in Europe had nothing to do with improving the conditions of the worker. They were about unseating hereditary royalty to give the emerging middle-class political power. In this, they mostly failed, but in Marx's time, there was a hopeful air of revolution.
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