> Think Karl Marx, not Edward Gibbon. This is one of the more important sentences in this piece and I'm surprised they didn't expound on it. marx is obviously

> Think Karl Marx, not Edward Gibbon. This is one of the more important sentences in this piece and I'm surprised they didn't expound on it. marx is obviously linked to socialism (for good reason) but Marx was hardly unique in this leaning at that point in history. For example, Abraham Lincoln sounds an awful lot like Marx here [1] eg: > Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Sounds an awful lot like the Labor Theory of Value [2] doesn't it? Anyway, what the authors are referring to here is Dialectical materialism [3], which is the more important output of Das Kapital. Why? Because it frames economics, politics and history in terms of material outcomes, which is a far better predictor and explainer of such events than principles, philosophy or other "superficial" factors. Put another way: you can analyze events through the lens of capital and wealth. War and revolution can be viewed as the ultimate means of wealth redistribution and an inevitable outcome of extreme wealth inequality. So that's the similarity the authors alluded to when this reference to marx. Marx referred to material conditions. This piece used energy as the basis for analysis. [1]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-messa... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism