As a materialist, Marx was chary of ideas which were divorced from historical reality, and thought that there were usually good historical reasons for this separation.
Marx's theory of history is not a "teleological" one. A teleological theory holds that each phase of history arises inexorably from what went before.
Social democracy is one bulwark between itself and disaster.
Modernity is not meant to be mindlessly celebrated, but neither is it to be disdainfully dismissed. Its positive and negative qualities are for the most part aspects of the same process. This is why only a dialectical approach, one which grasps how contradiction is of its essence, can do it justice.
A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap wage locations in the "underdeveloped" world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet altogether.
