“Marxism as a serious political system came crashing down with the Berlin Wall in 1990. Aspects of it certainly linger in European-style “social democracy” and in surviving elements of the New Deal in America. Every time you suffer an energy blackout, for instance, you are probably suffering from the Depression-era laws that let to a fragmented electricity transmission grid in the name of preserving jobs.
Yet the instinct to broadly and aggressively apply the tools of Marxism–central planning and government control–lives on. The instinct is the same as it was when Marx articulated it in the nineteenth century, but the old justification just doesn’t fly. Free enterprise has proven itself not to oppress the working man, but to free him.
If the working man is no longer oppressed, the central tenant of Marxism no longer applies, but surely there must be another victim of capitalism to take its place? Women and minorities have advanced themselves under free enterprise just as surely as have the working man, and so they are not ideal candidates.
Luckily for the Left they have a victim ready on the shelf. This time it is one that will not exercise free choice in rejecting the ministrations of those who claim to speak for it. In the leftist’s world view, the worker has been replaced by “the Environment.”
Iain Murray, The Really Inconvenient Truths, Regnery 2008, pp 210-211.