> Keep reading nineteenth-century European texts to bring you
> up to speed on the specific social relations of 21st-century American
> society.
Again, you’re grasping - this time by constructing a strawman. The point of reading older texts isn’t for specifics of contemporary social relations, but for an understanding of why it’s important to talk about “social relations”, which ones matter, in which ways, and why. (You’ll misunderstand all of that, for precisely the reasons that are at issue in this exchange.) If you think Marxist ideas are dead and buried you've evidently managed to remain uninformed not only about those ideas, but also about the surge of interest in them since the 2008 crash (see, e.g., http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism). And your snarky belligerence isn’t enough to compensate.