In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx famously commented that human beings “make their own history . . . but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The career of Senator Bernie Sanders, who this week ended his second bid for the White House, has illustrated Marx’s point. After getting elected to Congress, in 1991, as an independent democratic socialist—the first self-identified socialist to be sent to Capitol Hill in decades—Sanders spent more than twenty years as a marginal figure. Although he caucused with the Democrats, and even chaired the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, his leftist views set him apart from much of the Party, including its leadership.

Then came the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, when almost all elected Democrats cleared the field for Hillary Clinton, and Sanders stepped into the vacuum as the anti-establishment candidate. Initially, many political analysts dismissed his campaign as a quixotic venture that would go nowhere. But these analyses ignored the historical “circumstances,” which, for Marx, refers to the economic environment, and how they had changed over the previous three decades.

On the face of things, the U.S. economy seemed reasonably healthy in early 2015. The recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was continuing, payrolls were expanding, and the unemployment rate had dipped to about 5.5 per cent. But appearances can be deceiving. “This country today, in my view, has more serious crises than at any time since the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties,” Sanders said on April 30, 2015, when he launched his candidacy at a press conference on Capitol Hill. “For most Americans, their reality is that they are working longer hours for lower wages in inflation-adjusted income, they are earning less money than they used to years ago, despite a huge increase in technology and productivity.”

Sanders should perhaps have said “stagnant wages” rather than “lower wages,” but his general point was indisputable. Between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 2015, according to Labor Department statistics, the weekly earnings of the typical (median) American worker had risen by ten dollars in inflation-adjusted terms. That’s right: a rise of ten dollars over thirty-six years. During the same period, corporate profits, stock prices, and the compensation paid to senior corporate executives had skyrocketed. In 1980, according to an analysis from the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, C.E.O.s earned about thirty times as much as typical workers; by 2015, that ratio was close to three hundred to one. Income inequality was quickly rising toward levels not seen since the nineteen-twenties.

“All over this country, I’ve been talking to people and they say, ‘How does it happen?’ ” Sanders said in his 2015 speech. “ ‘I’m producing more but I’m working longer hours for lower wages. My kid can’t afford to go to college. I’m having a hard time affording health care.’ How does that happen, while at exactly the same time ninety-nine per cent of all new income generated in this country is going to the top one per cent? How does it happen that the top one per cent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety per cent? . . . My conclusion is that this type of economics is not only immoral, it’s not only wrong: it is unsustainable.”

Again, Sanders had elided some subtleties. When he spoke of the top one per cent’s income grab, he hadn’t taken into account taxes or government transfers, such as Social Security, that people receive. When you did account for these things, the share of income growth going to the top one per cent of households was a bit lower, although still very large. When talking about the distribution of wealth—which includes real estate, durable goods, and other items of value, as well as financial assets—Sanders had actually understated how lopsided it was. Academic studies showed that households in the top one per cent owned considerably more wealth than the bottom ninety per cent combined, not just “almost as much,” as Sanders had said.

Since that initial press conference, Sanders’s ringing indictment of American capitalism, particularly his vehemence toward billionaires, has become familiar, almost to the point of parody. (Who could forget Larry David’s affectionate sendups of the Vermont senator on “Saturday Night Live”?) But the Sanders message resonates for a simple reason: it is based on a harsh reality. After four decades of globalization, deindustrialization, diminishing labor-union rolls, and corporate capture of the political system, the U.S. economy resembles, in some important ways, the descriptions of capitalism found in the dense tracts about “monopoly capitalism” that leftists of Sanders’s generation studied. The working class, or large parts of it, is immiserated. The middle class is squeezed. The upper class prospers tremendously. And many sectors of the economy are dominated by a handful of huge firms.

That picture is an oversimplification, of course. As the unemployment rate fell to very low levels in recent years, workers gained more bargaining power, and wages and incomes edged up. Responding to grassroots pressure, some Democratic states introduced a minimum wage of fifteen dollars, and the business models of firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook attracted critical attention. But these hopeful signs were more than offset by the feed-the-rich tax cut that the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through in December of 2017 and the Trump Administration’s steady efforts to undermine environmental, labor, and antitrust standards.

In his 2020 campaign, Sanders sounded his familiar economic themes, reasserting his support for Medicare for All, eliminating student debts, and raising taxes on the wealthy. Although his campaign ultimately foundered, he and Elizabeth Warren shaped the policy agenda, a fact reflected in Joe Biden’s economic positions. The presumptive Democratic nominee has proposed tax hikes primarily on the wealthy that would raise four trillion dollars over ten years, tax credits for low-income renters and first-time homebuyers, a national minimum wage of fifteen dollars, and student-debt cancellation for those earning modest incomes.

To be sure, the Democratic Party’s embrace of equalizing economics remains a partial one, but the cataclysmic impact of the coronavirus could conceivably generate more political pressure to rebalance the economy. As the C.E.O.s, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity partners have retreated to their second homes, the shelf stockers, grocery clerks, subway conductors, bus drivers, delivery workers, nurses, doctors, E.M.S. workers, hospital orderlies, and public-health officials have emerged as indispensable gallants. Without their contribution, it turns out, there would be no functioning society to generate the rewards enjoyed by the overclass.

The recognition that society is an organic whole in which all sorts of people do indispensable things, many of which go under-rewarded by market economies, has long been the basis of socialism and social democracy. Sanders accepted this solidarity principle a long time ago. Even as he departs the Presidential stage, the “circumstances” are making the egalitarian agenda he promoted more relevant than ever.