Marxists believed that the engine of revolution in the industrial age would be the industrial working class. That was clearly a mistake. The engine of revolution, for the past 400 years, has continued to be the bourgeoisie. It is decadent, all right, but the working class is even more so. The decadence of the bourgeoisie, at a guess, coincides with that of the human race.

The reason for the mistake was sentimentality. Marxists, like Christians, think that suffering has to *mean* something.