When I write about the demise of the industrial nation-states and their replacement by a liberal empire economically based on financial speculation, I must add that the old world was not just engineers and workers and conservative politicians, but that it was a rich and diverse world. It also included eccentric intellectuals who developed crazy theories in the faculties. And cute little students who waved banners and tried to destroy capitalism with free sex. And drugged-up hippies. It was all part of the world at the time, it made it more colorful and fun, and the world knew how to keep it within bounds.
In this, the American systems sociology theorists had the absolutely correct vision that the beaded ladies and the suited captains of industry were actually parts of one system capable of functioning quite equitably.
Note that no such dissent exists in our world. We also have student radicals, but they are desperately conformist. They offer nothing but an aggressive and intolerant repetition of phrases determined by corporate power, and a constant spiking of each other. The least free section of society.
It is also because of this history that I am so skeptical of interpretations that the democratic capitalism of the industrial nation-states was destroyed by neo-Marxists. Of course they would have destroyed it if it were up to them. But where would they have gotten the power to do it! Does anyone really think that the whole of the most powerful civilization could have been destroyed by a couple of stoned college girls? The causes must be somewhere else.