The majority of factory jobs have been outsourced to other countries, and many of the manual labor jobs we have here are being filled by marginalized races who are willing to work for less than they are legally supposed to be paid - and in many cases they have no choice if they're illegal aliens. Most of what we have left here is white collar drudgery; retail workers, the service industry, paper pushing desk jockeys - these are the proletariat of late capitalism. To many, this might seem like proof of the progress capitalism is making (if you ignore the groups that suffer for our marginally-better lifestyles in the US), but it really is only keeping up with the rampant consumerism that has grown with capitalism. The more garbage that the bourgeois produce, the more they need to pay us so that we are able to shell out cash to buy things we don't need or want. For every cent minimum wage increases, the means of production have only been revved up more to usurp even more money out of our bank accounts. But the brilliant thing about all this is that we learn to enjoy this. We love having our stuff. People will spend almost a third of their life (really half of it unless you're a lucid dreamer IMO) working a job they hate to buy more shit - either that or they have families and have to work their asses off to support them, and in many cases this is because they gave into the idea that breeding is your duty and abortion is evil. In either case, the point I'm making is that people have become far too comfortable in the most educated parts of the world to give a shit about revolution. Our human tendency to think only in the short term is aggravated to the extreme by late capitalism; why put in all the time and effort and even capital that goes into fighting the status quo when you have an endless conveyor belt of cheap, disposable thrills to pass the time? Even the desire for power isn't a match against this. The rise of suburbia in the 50's (and the sexism and nuclear family structures that linger today) meant that it was now possible for someone who wasn't bourgeois or a farmer to own their own house, their own land, their own little serfdom (complete with serfs: the man's family). This kind of thing still persists in a similar way; people still believe that they can "make it" by getting a job that pays enough for them to own a home and a decent car, maybe own a business. They're still proles, but they have the sense of having dominion over something. It's enough to keep all but the most sociopathic (i.e. Your typical porky) happy. This is why we need catastrophe. People need bad things to start invading their lives, their homes, take away their toys, otherwise we won't ever be able to get past the apathy that late capitalism has created.