It was the Industrial Revolution, stupid

It wasn't the focus on capital or labor or government that made for the problem. The communists were no better than the capitalists; and if the fascists were worse than both of them, it was not a distinction that made all that much of a difference. The labor unions and the government officials and the corporate managers all belonged to an ideological movement that supported a materialist orientation that was defined and shaped by the Industrial Revolution. As far as the ultra-Orthodox were concerned, they focused on the Enlightenment and the Emancipation and shaped their counter-insurgency to deal with the Enlightenment's ideas and the Emancipation's social practices. The real culprit, however, was the Industrial Revolution and the resource curse it had unleashed on the world. That curse the ultra-Orthodox embraced with both arms, becoming avid exponents of its ideological off-shoots and its ways of shaping man's relations with his environment. The problem with the rabbinic tradition is that it doesn't go deep enough. It was the Bible that was truly revolutionary, not the Pharisees. It was the Bible that forewarned against the runaway hubris which technology would unleash. The Tower of Babel is a cautionary tale not about building ziggurats but about using bricks and mortar and bureaucratese. That the contemporary rabbinate focuses on the ethics rather than the politics or economics or ideology is because the contemporary rabbinate is still flogging the Talmudic horse rather than embracing the ancient biblical teachings that reached to a deeper place.