I often rant about the people who are stuck worshiping the 19th Century Dutch recluse who lived in London. I tend to call them damnMarxists, one word. But the reality is that most Lefties are more accurately referred to as damnDickens-Marxists.
Why? Because they are trapped in the observations of two men living in Britain who were one year apart in age: Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Karl Marx and Charles Dickens both observed a world that had only fifty years of rudimentary experience with industrial commerce. They were observers in the earliest years of industrial commerce.
When
both men came of age in the 1830's there were no elevators to make
skyscrapers, canals were just being built for transport, horse and
wagon were the main mode of transport, bicycles hadn't been invented.
Trains were virtually unknown as were any form of telegraph. England,
particularly London, had no sewer system no bathing, no toilets and
dentistry was done by barbers. Ships had sails, but only a few masts, since
square riggers were yet to come, muskets were common as were swords and
dueling. Department stores, fixed pricing, cash registers and the
notion of doctors with clean hands were only to come in the last part
of either man's life; after most of their writing had been done.
Dickens
described the lot of most people, not just poor, but most people in the
foul smelling, illness bound London. It was miserable and Dickens saw
the cause as industrial commerce. Karl Marx saw the same thing, with
the additional cause in the rudiments of global trade. England and much of
Europe were buying global supplies with the protection of armies and
navies to maintain modest stability with local communities mostly in
rebellion.
That is the world most lefties still see today. They see Dicken's poverty all around them, they see Marx's elitist class analysis and labor theory of value based on mid-19th Century industrial commerce. Marx's and Dicken's world had only the rudiments of technology, rudiments of international trade, no agricultural surpluses and no significant banking or capital markets...certainly no government regulation of contracts, labor law, health codes or anything else.
A Lefty view of the world is pretty much the way an angry 2 year old sees the world.