There is today no ‘marxist social science’ of any intellectual consequence… [but] no one who does not come to grips with the ideas of Marxism can be an academic social scientist. C. Wright Mills, 1962, p. 11.
For Marx, the agency of historic change—the proletariat—is a built-in feature of capitalism… There is now no substantial reason to believe that Marxist revolutions will come about in the foreseeable future. C. Wright Mills, 1962, p. 468
In his incisive “Preface” to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx explained “the guiding principle” of his voluminous studies: