The chosen meme

Marx, if he was honest (which he sometimes was), had never fully mastered Tik Tok, nor any of its rivals in the post-truth data-harvesting business.

‘Well, duh,’ said Laura.

He had, however, written extensively on the American civil war.

‘Not the current one,’ he said, ‘but the previous one; it brought an end to formal slavery in America - and by proxy to serfdom in Russia.’

‘That’s nice, Dad,’ said his daughter. ‘But now people are attacking you on social media and you have to find a way to fight back.’

Easier said than done. Words were his weapons. And German words at that. He had no real answer to the nimble-footed attacks of the always-online social media crowd who seemed to arrive and disappear without warning. Each time he stepped into the online world, Marx felt like one of those sharks in Blue Planet who plough into a school of sardines only to find that they have all disappeared before he could close his mouth.

And yet the lineages of the American conflict seemed eerily familiar. Then as now he took the leading voices of English mercantilism to task for their amoral commitent to nothing but profit.

‘I see you’ve been attacking the Economist again,’ Engels remarked. ‘Hardly a fair fight. Your words will never win against their cartoons.

‘Plus ça change…’ added Laura.

‘Plus, say, the meme I chose,’ Marx said sadly.