I've done a fair amount of research, and as far as I can tell, Carl Marx never once had sushi.

Hey, it's Arov, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

Specifically, Karl Marx is different than Marxism. Carl Marx was an economist who thought very deeply

about a lot of critical issues, and in fact, he agreed with Adam Smith, father of the free market,

and with Schumpeter, father of creative destruction, in a whole bunch of

different ways. First, the Adam Smith part. What Karl Marx did after he did the math was realize

that capitalism was a system that was inevitably going to take everything it could from the worker, that once a

capitalist finds a machine that is efficient, it is in his or her interest to use that machine

and to pay workers less. Or if there is no machine, it's in the capitalist's interest to pit workers

against one another to pay them as little as possible. Because if you own the means of production,

the factory, you have something the workers don't have, which is the means of production.

So if you can pit workers against each other and they will bid down and down to get the job,

you come out ahead.

He saw this and said, workers of the world unite, because if you don't, the capitalist will simply take more.

Adam Smith saw the same thing and said,

buy a pinmaking machine, buy a machine that will enable you to own the means of production

and go forward. So, that's what the laptop is, the means of production. That's what our

connection to the internet is, that what's

happened in the last 10 years or so is that the workers of the world have been given access

to almost precisely the same machines that giant capitalists have. But what I really want to

talk about is his other breakthrough

idea, which he interpreted differently than Joseph Schumperter did. Here you go. Capitalism says,

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