First Marxist thought:
At a carnival when I was twelve, my friends and I won bright prizes: tiny spinning tops, plastic men with parachutes, temporary tattoos, goofy eyeglasses, poodles and ducks and dinosaurs and swords. After I’d hauled it all home, when I was later readying to throw it all away, I realized that a factory made each thing. A machine existed to mold each object, and a person or many people ran each machine, and people made the machine itself, made all the metal parts to make the plastic toys that were shipped in a plane or train or truck, driven by a person, from somewhere else to me in Arizona. Another machine, run by another person, or many, made the boxes it all was shipped in. All that labor for a thing I didn’t really want or need. All that labor for each and every thing.
( … )
The Laurel Review Vol. 48 No. 1, Spring 2015