The founding insight of the socialist tradition was that the central conflict of modern society is a relation, not a sentiment, between those who own the means of production and those who own only their labor. That relation, and not any catalog of identities, was the ground on which the left proposed to build a majority and to extend democracy into the economy. This frame, which even the revisionists who broke with Marx on tactics kept intact, the new new left has largely walked away from, and it did so with intellectual help. More








