"Today's demonstrators retreat to coffee shops, video games, university dorms, and, at worst, rundown housing and a minimum of state income support when they're cleared from the streets. They don't have the same desperate incentive to revolt as did the early industrial working class."
This could have been written any time in the last 200 years and have made just about as much sense as it does now. Really desperate men and women, incidentally, stay home and cringe, not go out and fight, so that is nonsense hnow as it woujld have been in 19789 or in China in 1935. Check out accounts of massacres over the last couple centuries of demonstrators: Almost always they were shot in the back as they "charged" the police. Demonstrators aren't stupid; they run and demonstrate another day, and another day and another day.
And it takes a lot of them that get no where before the 'virus' of resistance spreds sufficiently to where they can build on each other: and this usually doesn't happen. Times of really large and aggressive resistance have been few and far between. And it is never possible to predict before hand when they will build to really great heights. No one in 1789 knew or guessed what was going to happen in a year or two; ditto the scattered resistance of the early 30s or the the Montgomery NAACP when they launched that bus boycott.
To always be comparing scattered resistances of "today" against the high periods of the past is a sure recipe for dispair and inaction.
As Luxemburg and Benjamin and others have known, the odds really are against us. The greater probability is barbarism. But that is no excuse for sneering at those who try to start something. Many many many such false starts are the ONLY route to a better future. Praise them, don't compare them to a mythical past.
Carrol