by Daniel Gurpide
Having been proved empirically wrong, Marxian economics do not merit more than a footnote. Marx’s lasting enthusiasm for the working class was due to his belief that within the framework of bourgeois society the factory hand would be condemned forever to a life of misery in eternal bondage.
He never realized that modern technological society, with or without exploitation, could ever provide the working man with a middle-class existence.
The New Left had to abandon its innermost hopes for a revolutionary rising of a no longer existing proletariat now integrated with all its material interests into the process of production.
In addition, no modern industrialist wants merely to exploit his workers- they should be happy, well-paid consumers.
The utter inanity of Marxian economics is so evident that the person who is first and foremost a revolutionary and merely seeks for a rational excuse to preach the overturn of the existing order has to look in other directions, towards other social layers to whom preach the revolutionary gospel.
That’s why the New Left, Cultural Marxism and Postmodernists appeal to the outcasts of modern society, to the eternal Lumpenproletariat, the term understood not in a sociological sense.