I dusted off my Marx the other day. The first Marxist I ever read was Leon Trotsky. A book of his writings had somehow found its way into my high school library. I could never figure out what he meant by metaphysics but, still, I felt as though I was reading something dangerous. Marx in the original came in university in the class where I also learned that when faced with an either/or question on an exam, opt for a bit of both. Real life is mostly ambiguous.
The news depicts a world riven by binary divides typically attributed to a mug’s gallery of culprits ranging from the broadest of the broad – the web or social media – to the recent past of American politics – Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and Trump – or to global bad actors like hackers from Russia, China, or North Korea, Elon Musk or that misogynist who was just arrested in Romania.
Marx connected an era’s social structure to its economic structure, and although capitalism never collapsed, it instead underwent four “revolutions”: coal, gas, electrical/nuclear, and the one in which we now live – the digital. The fourth industrial revolution’s substrate is binary; ones and zeroes structure everything. Everything sits on a heap of either/ors. There is not much space for ambiguity anymore. It is inimical to a system that has supplanted understanding with control. Maybe those of us who grew up before computers were in every household, before phones could be carried around, before digital knowledge pervaded everything, are the proletariat of the fourth revolution. We need to revolt? We have nothing to lose but our screens. But ... wait ... what about my pickleball sign-up app? How would I get new books? Shazam’s pretty cool too. Never mind.