When reading through Marx I can’t help but think that capitalism has gotten even worse today than it used to be back then, meaning that the actual mechanisms that drive capital now need much more exploitation and in more forms than they used to.
Also I wonder if some changes of capitalism have also caused the working class to be so completely numb. Workers of the 19th and 20th century knew that the capitalists have opposite needs to them and only through fighting them could they stand to improve their situation. However today people just seem uninterested to really fight for themselves despite the proletariat being a much larger percentage of society compared to the past. I know I’m leaving out some important struggles going on when I’m saying this, but it still makes me wonder what made workers in the past centuries so much more class conscious.
I don’t believe that much, if anything, that Marx critiqued about capitalism has changed on a structural level, but the flow of capital is so complex today, and the collected capital has become so much larger, that it begs the question if this has created some superstructures of capitalism today.
One of the big changes was Imperialism - to the point that when Lenin wrote it, if Marx was around he probably would’ve been like “oh yeah that makes sense” lol
One of the largest differences between capitalism in the 19th century and the 21st century is that it is truly globalized. There are no more frontiers to expand into. Theres imperial super profits to generate, there’s maybe some very distant isolated tribes, but there is no where else to disrupt and expand into the way they did during the scramble for Africa or whatever. We are all in capitalist relations with each other now. They still had plenty of feudalism in Europe all the way up to WW1 if you want to pick a date
For why the imperial proletariate in the global metropol doesnt agitate - they do and did but the state is remarkably efficient at destroying agitators. They’ll kill anyone who gets close like Fred Hampton. And there’s something like a comprador character to the imperial side proletariate, they’ll tolerate the international proletariate getting fucked so long as things stay mostly the status quo and they get enough of what we call (derisively) Treats. Between the modern Bread and Circuses and the whip hand of surveillance capital, people dont feel drawn enough together to risk revolution (for now)
There are no more physical frontiers to expand into, but there is still the frontier of people’s time and attention that is now the objective being expanded into. And perhaps also a maximization of the world’s human population. Ultimately, it has always been people that mattered more than land area.