"The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy." - venture capitalist @paulg in Jan, 2016 paulgraham.com/ineq.html
Fascinating how Silicon Valley vc @paulg has a pretty straightforward Marxist interpretation of the mid-20th century. He just thinks monopoly finance, not utopian socialism, is the end state of history. 
Another business Marxist is @benthompson. Here he is noting an inevitabilist view of historical evolution, with Amazon Go-style automation with no need for labor being the end state. Strategy is so often just another word for anti-competitive tactics and monopoly planning.
American society is right now organized around right-wing Marxism. We turned away from Jeffersonian style anti-monopolism in the 1970s. It's confusing because the planners are conservative businessmen, and they use the language of Jefferson. But Marx today is in the board room.
At the 1899 Chicago conference on trusts the socialists were with the business planners on praising, or least believing in, the need for monopolies. The language is so perverted and polluted after decades of misrepresentations, but there we go.
I mis-characterized a piece of @benthompson's view. He doesn't believe in a post-labor world.
The more important part of the problem is this. Right and left wing Marxists see technology as an apolitical thing, which is a specific way of seeing history unfold. It has its roots in Marx, Veblen, Schumpeter, and Galbraith. Technology happens, and we adapt to it.
The Brandeis/Jeffersonian view is that *how* and *whether* technology is deployed is a political choice. Technology doesn't just happen. How we structure the deployment of knowledge is about both what we figure out and how we organize our political choices around that knowledge.
For example, self-driving cars are not *the future*. They are *a future*. Lots of infrastructure spending and political choices are going to have to go into their deployment and how the market structure looks. Same with pretty much all technologies. None of this is inevitable.
