Marxism is so anachronistic, it's pretty funny to hear someone talking about the workers and the "means of production", that made sense in the time it was written when the economy was an industrial society. There were factories and farms and that was most of the economy. How many Americans actually work as farmers or factory workers? We live in an information age so the class warfare nonsense, especially in America is almost laughable if people didn't actually think it made sense.
We live in an age where everyone has access to the means of production, thanks to capitalism, almost everyone on Earth can access the internet. Wealth is not a fixed amount. Wealth is created by anyone who wants to create it. Anyone can make a youtube channel and monitize it. Anyone can write a book or an app. Every time you sell a copy of an ebook you just created wealth from nothing. It's the information age, industrial age theories no longer apply. Not that they ever did, any place that has applied Marx's theories has ended up with masses of their own people starving to death, wide-scale famine. Here in America, thanks to capitalism, literally zero people starve to death because they cannot acquire food, sometimes people starve as a result of abuse, neglect or mental illness but there are zero people who starve for lack of food. Thanks capitalism. You know what happened when the Pilgrims tried socialism?
The internet seems far from the end-all and be-all of the means of production to me.
The information age is based on the immaterial, but the material inevitably continues to exist and have dominant influence over our lives. The computers still have to be manufactured, the energy is still squabbled over, and industry is still alive and well.
Moreover the internet doesn't seem to me so widely available as portrayed.
A quick search shows that internet penetration in Africa was less than 50% in Q3 of 2020. That's more than half of Africa, which is just under a fifth of the world population, without internet access. The whole world total was just under 2/3, which is a far cry from almost anyone on earth. That or we have very disparate definitions of 'almost'.
For what it's worth I got my stats here.
Africa has a fair number of countries suffering from communism.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/53b17013e4b0f83f2d8a8a4a/1412425534717-JW7COYMX0RCN1BJ45IE1/?format=1000w&content-type=image%2Fjpeg
Your source says there are currently 5 billion internet users, that's the vast majority of people.
Of course there are still factories and farms but people are not limited to those vocations, in fact no one is limited to any vocation! That's why they idea of class warfare is silly in the United States, in other societies there are actual fixed castes and you can't really transition between them. Here in America anyone can be anything they want to be, you don't have to be born to a royal family to own land or be an aristocrat to form a corporation. An untouchable can come here from India and become a wealthy scientist and inventor. Most Americans occupy different socio-economic strata over the course of their lifetimes. There are no fixed classes so that makes class warfare ideas even sillier.
Thanks for stopping by @funbobby51 ! I'll refer you to the reply of@a-non-e-moose who essentially said everything that needs to be said. I'll add that you shouldn't "thank capitalism" for anything. Whatever progress we've made is because of us wanting to understand the world we live in, our curiosity, and our wish to better our lifes; no particular economy is needed for those basic human traits to exist. And historically we've only been as successful as our ability to organize in ever bigger societies has allowed us to be. Capitalism does the opposite...
With communism and socialism people literally starve to death en masse, it happens very consistently. With capitalism there is enough food for everyone. That does not happen because of us wanting to understand the world we live in. It is because there is a profit motive to produce as much food as efficiently as possible. Neither of you answered my question about the Pilgrims.
And that's exactly why it's such a fake system. We produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, and still there's widespread hunger. The average city has more empty buildings than homeless people. Capitalism doesn't provide according to need, it only provides what makes profits. And for profits to be made, we manufacture scarcity; so even with enough food to feed 12 billion people, hunger MUST exist. Even with enough houses, homelessness MUST exist. And even with the ability to provide jobs for everyone that wants to work, for example by moving to a 4 hour work week, joblessness MUST exist. Capitalism requires poverty as an incentive and a threat, for people to accept low wage jobs with abysmal worker protection.