I was talking to someone and they said their high school teacher said that Marx didn't really account for the rise of the middle class. I've been reading about the Biedermeier art tradition that celebrates the rise of the middle class in Germany between 1815 and 1848. Das Kapital (1867–1883) is after that period, so I'm not sure if saying he wasn't aware of the middle class is accurate. But that got me thinking. If increased middle class is the antidote to socialist thinking, if you were really afraid of socialism, the way the right pretends to be, then you would work to expand the middle class, and not contract it. And yet the opposite has been done. So they're not really afraid of a socialist revolution in the voters of a democracy. Or they want to push it as far as they can, and only when it's really being voted for will they begin to accede to the technique for killing off revolutionary fervor. The way the middle class exploded after WW2 is through...