Here's the bit that resonates with issues often discussed on HN:<p>"In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”<p>The sorcerer will always imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee, then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends. Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness."
One has to be really in thrall to an ideology to write
" (a manifesto) ... needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom. No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London."<p>How about an evidence-based cost/benefit analysis?
The problem with these common ownership ideas is that hierarchy is inherent in human structures.<p>Whether it's labeled 'for the people' or not, you end up with the same distribution of decision makers and benefactors concentrated at the top.<p>It's not a problem in capitalism but one of humanity or maybe even natural law.
I think I saw the article a few minutes ago on the first or the second page, and now it's already on the 13th, the last one, the last item. Wow. That's fast. Correction: it's gone from the pages completely as I posted this.
Here is an interesting related tedx talk about the proportion of rich people in Nordic socialist countries <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU</a>
Here's the bit that resonates with issues often discussed on HN:<p>"I believe that Marx and Engels would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilized."