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This is an older article, I believe, or an extraction from a longer work by the same author. This is not necessarily the root of America-bashing but it is definitely a description of the first odd turn Marxism took to explain away the clearly invalid predictions in the Manifesto Of The Communist Party that were turning up even during Marx's lifetime. The "immiserization" process included features that were measurably incorrect, including increasing illiteracy on the part of the proletariat, increasing "alienation" caused by falling wages, decreasing employment, and the one cited by the author, falling profits. This was predicted in 1848 by Marx - the Manifesto, despite being credited to both he and Engels, was nearly entirely Marx - and was not all that unbelievable given the social turmoil of the late industrial revolution and the revolutionary atmosphere of 1848.

But by the mid-1860's, when Marx wrote Capital, it was already becoming apparent that this set of events was at least delayed if not outright invalid. By the time Baran wrote his thesis it was so glaringly wrong that something had to be done to preserve it, and that Baran did by proposing that the immiserization had been distributed to the developing world, not, incidentally, in the least Marxian in that the newly immiserated were not the industrial proletariat.

There was another turn in the plot in the French academe in the 1960's when such luminaries as Foucault proposed that Marxian power relationships between economic classes were, in fact, prevalent between classes described by ethnicity, sexual preference, gender, sanity, nearly anything but economics so long as the Marxian "class consciousness" was retained, and sometimes despite the fact that it wasn't.

Marxism's true roots were always sociological rather than philosophical, historical, or economic, and by the time of Foucault practical Marxism had been systematically stripped of nearly everything but. Though yet another twist its remnants found a home in post-modernism, with the latter's heavy emphasis on dialectical and textual analysis and its distillation of modern thought into a form of quasi-literary criticism. None of this is what Marx had in mind; indeed, if his reactions to similar heresies during his lifetime are any guide, he would have exploded.