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.
It is not quite a difference of time, but something that has to be dealt with is that Marx’s idea of Revolution hasn’t panned out. Instead of the most advanced capitalist economies that had revolutions, it was the semi-periphery (Russia, China, then later decolonializing nations.)
This does tie into qualitative differences from Marx’s predictions because both factory workers or highly concentrated proletariat who could easily be organized didn’t continue increasing until they were an overwhelming majority. Even though the majority of the population was proletarianized, factory work topped off at 20-30% in most capitalist nations. This was the only point where dialectics was kind of ignored, there would be an antithesis, or saturation, rather than the current trends continuing until all firms consolidating and everyone working in a small handful of factories. The transition to service and logistics work starts much earlier in the process of industrialization.
This along with the extreme atomization of capitalism going almost a century longer than Marx expected is likely why the proletariat is so inert.