Marx revisited: "We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us. There are no gods out there to strike us dead if we do."

Berlin.

A long read, but worth the time. Gotta keep those Republicans guessing, natch.

KARL MARX, YESTERDAY AND TODAY: The nineteenth-century philosopher’s ideas may help us to understand the economic and political inequality of our time, by Louis Menand (The New Yorker)

... Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of all. That is our essence as a species. A system that transforms this activity into “labor” that is bought and used to aggrandize others is an obstacle to the full realization of our humanity. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as all previous economic systems have self-destructed. The working-class revolution will lead to the final stage of history: communism, which, Marx wrote, “is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself as this solution.”