I recent read Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals.

In the book Fried and Hansson do something that Marx and Engels did for an earlier generation: describe how a technological change affects the worker. Marx and Engels described how the industrial revolution affected largely agrarian workers, while Friend and Hansson describe how the internet revolution is affecting knowledge workers.

In the same way that Marx's exortations must have appealed to newly minited factory men, Fried and Hansson's catchphrases like, "planning is guessing" and "meetings are toxic" just feel right to a generation of workers.

The similarities end there of course, Friend and Hansson are capitalists through and through and don't feel as if there are describing a historical inevitably.

One of Marx's concepts is alienation. Best summarized in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

The fact express merely that the object with labour produces - labour's product - confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the produce.

Workers who previously produced goods by hand for largely their own consumption moved into factory work, making durable goods largely for the consumption of a middle class they had little hope of joining. This created a very real feeling of alienation.

Now, more than 150 years later, the vestiges of that factory mentality are still in our knowledge workplace. Take this passage from Rework:

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

In the world of assembly lines where the pace of production is not in control of the worker, how long you work does determine how much you produce. Now freed of the assembly line, knowledge workers can work at their own pace - with the best working more quickly.

Marx's power came from the fact that he was describing a feeling that workers had just begun to be able to express themselves. I believe that Fried and Hansson are doing the same thing and all knowledge workers have to loose is the chains attaching them to their keyboards.