Lately, I have been trying to catch up with texts I really ought to have read myself rather than relying on secondary sources. I’m still focused on Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, as discussed here earlier, but have made a little detour to read Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto. As well as the excellent introduction by Marshall Berman, which I enjoyed immensely, I am glad to have stumbled across the following, which is so relevant for now:
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine (Marx and Engels, 2011[1848]; loc 849).
PS. Click on the Berman link… it’s really good!
PPS. Edited to correct the terrible autocorrect in an earlier version, which replaced a badly typed Engels with Hegel!! (which would have been a neat trick…)
I chatted about this text with a large language model and turned our conversation into two text/images, both of which I would print at A1 or something similar.