In Marxism, the proletariat is the class destined to liberate humanity through the revolution. Its claim to moral and political authority rests on its position as the exploited class, the ones from whom value is extracted, the ones whose chains the revolution will break.

What happened to the proletariat in the West, however, did not match Marx’s prediction. Across the 20th century, the working class in the United States and Western Europe did not radicalize. It got richer. It bought houses. It sent its children to college. It joined the middle class. By the 1960s, the Western proletariat had stopped being the revolutionary subject Marx had identified, and Western Marxists faced a problem: the engine of their politics had defected.

The pivot they made was to relocate the position of the oppressed from the working class to a series of identity categories. African Americans became, in this remapping, the new proletariat, the permanently oppressed group. Women became another. Colonized peoples became a third. Sexual minorities became a fourth. By the 1970s, the academic and activist left had abandoned the working class as its constituency and built a coalition around identities defined by their relation to historical injustice.

Herbert Marcuse, an influential European Marxist wrote: “the new revolutionary subject was no longer the worker but “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.” Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) had already made the analogous move for the colonized world. The Frankfurt School, the New Left, the second-wave feminists, the third-world liberation theorists, all of them were performing variations of the same operation. The proletariat had failed. New victims had to be found.

The West deserves enormous credit for being the first civilization in human history to abolish slavery. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, paying compensation that bankrupted the imperial treasury for decades. The American Civil War, fought primarily over the preservation and extension of slavery, cost six hundred thousand lives, a higher proportion of the population than any war the United States has fought before or since. The Western abolitionist movement, drawing on Christian moral reasoning, made the argument and won the political fight that ended an institution every other civilization in human history had practiced and were still practicing as the West was abolishing it. Not only that, but if it weren’t for the West, slavery companies could be listed on NASDAQ today.

Watch what the left has done with African Americans, one of its assigned constituencies. In every American classroom, every Hollywood film, every progressive news outlet, the West is framed as the unique villain in the story of slavery. America is read as the slave-owning nation, full stop, not as the nation that fought a brutal war to end it. The first Western civilization to abolish slavery is portrayed as the original and definitive sponsor of slavery, while the Muslim slave trade, which began in the seventh century, lasted into the twentieth, took an estimated seventeen million African captives, and routinely castrated the men so they would not reproduce, is barely mentioned in any American textbook.

The new Marxists’ model needs African Americans as permanent victims. If they are allowed to register that the country in which they live abolished slavery at enormous cost, that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded, that black Americans now have legal equality, voting rights, and access to every institution of American life, that they have produced the wealthiest and most influential black community in human history, then the moral capital the model extracts from their suffering begins to dissipate. So, the suffering must be kept in continuous circulation: every police killing must be read as a lynching, every disparity must be read as the persistence of slavery. The left does not want African Americans to thrive in a way that would close the wound. It wants the wound to remain open, because the wound is the capital.

Women is another example. The West has done more to advance the legal, economic, and social position of women than any civilization in human history. Equal access to education, equal employment law, the dismantling of the legal subordination that defined every pre-modern society and many of the post-modern ones, the emergence of women as full participants in every profession, these are Western achievements, accomplished within a century. Measured against any other civilization on earth, the West is the most pro-female civilization that has ever existed.

The left’s framing of this record is, again, the opposite. Women in the West are presented in mainstream........

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