Marx’s scorn for traditional life—peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers—was not just economic. It was moral. He saw these classes as obstacles to progress. Their way of life was “narrow,” “primitive,” and doomed. In this, Lasch argues, Marx revealed his deep hostility to anything that could not be absorbed into the rational, industrial, urban machinery of modernity. Family life, religion, local loyalties—all were to be swept away by the dialectic. “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement… the qualities of the rabble.” And yet it is precisely these “primitive” structures—family, faith, tradition—that gave people meaning and rootedness. Marxism, in its zeal for the future, treated them not as human needs, but as bourgeois illusions.