If your material conditions aren’t basically forcing you to always try and find a way out (when you’ve already gained the beginnings of communist consciousness), you might just be struggling with the fact that your own life isn’t really that bad, and slipping into old habits.

Keep reading Marxist theory and developing your class consciousness and killing the little bourgeois-self in your head trying to commandeer your brain.

I think it’s recognition as an equal being on equal footing worthy of equal respect, not as an object of domination. In that equality the master can recognise themselves unalienated, and see themselves as a person worthy of respect in their own right. What worth is the respect gained from a slave who you dominate mentally and physically? It’s an incomplete recognition in its own right that doesn’t see the master as the full human they are as well.

Losurdo’s “Class Struggle” talks a lot about the multiplicity of class struggles through this lense.

Happy to be corrected on the above by any Hegel pros.

One thing to note is that machinery does not impart value onto the things they produce because they can produce so many things for a relatively low fixed cost. Marx equates the infinitesimal value imparted by machinery to that of the forces of nature. This is an important part of why the exchange value of goods produced by machinery drops dramatically.