It is not a spectacular passage. It has no martyrs, no barricades, no smouldering ruins. What it leaves behind, instead, are flats occupied by tenants who will never become owners, bank accounts without physical cash, music without records, films without cassettes, work without long-term contracts — an existence in which almost nothing truly belongs to the person living it.
The most enduring chains are not those a man feels at his wrists, but those he comes to call ”safe”.
When man ceased to be necessary — the slow birth of a world in which survival becomes a granted privilege
There are historical transformations that contemporaries only recognise after they have already occurred. The Industrial Revolution did not arrive one morning to the beat of drums and notices posted on walls. It came in through the back door — in the workshop of a blacksmith in Birmingham who noticed he was receiving fewer orders, in the hands of a weaver in Lancashire who had lost his clientele without anyone ever telling him why. The truly decisive changes do not arrive announced; they arrive disguised as convenience.
The West today looks, on the surface, like a victory. The shops are full. Deliveries arrive in twenty minutes. Screens pulse in every flat, every pocket, every waiting room. A man from 1950, had he been able to peer through a window at this world, would have believed he was witnessing the prosperity Marx had written about, without the conflicts Marx had predicted. And yet, beneath this illuminated, connected surface, there unfolds — quietly and methodically — one of the most profound transformations of the human condition in the past several centuries: the passage from man as producer to man as recipient.
