Democratic Primaries

It takes on especially acute form among people with an explicit attachment to Marxism. And yes, Sanders has form as a Marxist, dating from his college days, and its lineaments can still be glimpsed through his speeches and actions. Marx was a decent diagnostician, and there is much that is quite useful to be gathered from his writings concerning his own time. But he was lousy at prescriptions, and a damned poor prophet. It is of course no part of Sanders' intent to establish some dictatorship of the proletariat on the lines many think Marxism enjoins on its followers, but he does still follow the teaching in taking the class struggle as the chief object of politics, to which all else must be subordinate, and takes the classic revolutionist's view, dating to the early twentieth century and the rise of Labour and Social Democrat parties, that these should not be allowed to succeed in diverting the workers from the revolutionary change Marx predicted must come.