Karl Marx believed machines would eventually turn workers into something disposable. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that industrial labor had already reduced the worker to “a mere appendage of the machine.” In Capital, Marx argued that machinery would create a permanent “industrial reserve army” of unemployed workers. As automation increased, workers would lose bargaining power while capital consolidated control. The proletariat would become poorer and more desperate.

From that condition, Marx believed revolution would follow. That prediction sits at the center of his entire framework. But history moved in the opposite direction.

For more than two centuries, automation has not destroyed the value of labor; it has multiplied it. Machines allowed a single worker to produce far more than workers in earlier eras. Instead of becoming obsolete, workers became dramatically more productive.

The result was one of the largest expansions in prosperity the world has ever seen. Living standards rose, productivity soared, and workers did not become powerless appendages of machines, they became operators of increasingly powerful tools. In other words, Marx’s prediction about automation degrading labor has already failed. Interestingly, another economist anticipated something very different.

Nearly a century before Marx wrote Capital, Adam Smith described how tools and machines expand the productive power of labor. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith explained that improvements in machinery allow a single worker to accomplish the work that once required many. His famous example was the pin factory. A small group of workers using specialized tools could produce thousands of pins in a day. Without those tools, one worker might struggle to produce a few dozen. The machine did not replace the worker. It multiplied the worker’s output.

History has largely followed Smith’s model rather than Marx’s. Industrial machinery, electricity, computers, and the internet did not create a permanently-unemployed working class. They created a far more productive........

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