Thoreau Anticipates Marx

Ten miles from Concord, the mills of Lowell were filling with workers, and the Communist Manifesto appeared while Thoreau was at Walden. So Kaag has given this episode the most provocative title he can defend: Thoreau Anticipates Marx. He knows something about alienated labor; his first job, at fifteen, was packing trucks in a Pennsylvania warehouse, and what that summer taught him is in here. Thoreau was no enemy of machines, he improved the pencil, so where does he draw the line? There is a dam in this episode, and a sledgehammer. And at the end, the real reason he grew his own beans and built his own house.