When M2 left on Wednesday, I started thinking back on some of my favorite moments from this past year with him, and I also got back to working on some of my academic writing (along with contemplating a new theoretical article). I got to thinking about one of my favorite stories from this past year.
One evening at dinner, M2 and I were talking about life and his job (engineer at a tech factory) and about how corporations, profits, salaries, and so on. And he said,
"You know, I've realized that there's something fundamentally screwed up with the way that large companies work. They're so completely focused on production and profit...they want to make more and more money, so they raise the price of the goods they produce. And maybe they raise their workers salaries (to keep up with inflation), or maybe they don't, or maybe (in pursuit of even more profits), they cut salaries or even lay off workers.
Take the example of Apple*. Every year the company comes out with a new phone that isn't really *THAT* different from the previous version. And yet, it's always WAY more expensive.
And the company produces phones so that people will buy them. It NEEDS people to buy them so that it can make the profit$$$. But people themselves don't really need smartphones. They're nice to have, but not a necessity.
So people work and work to produce goods that they don't really need, and to top it off, they aren't even paid enough to be able to purchase them."
And I turned to him, clapped a little, and said, "Congratulations!! You just passed Marx 101."
In effect, M2 figured out on his own Marx's critique of capitalism (which is completely different from his theories on communism).
*name of company changed to protect privacy
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