Marx Today: Dead, Alive, or Undead?
Is Marx still relevant in the 21st century? The 2008 financial crisis, rising inequality, and the return of Marxist analysis in mainstream debate.
The Marx Revival
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marx seemed irrelevant. Capitalism had won. Francis Fukuyama declared 'the end of history.' Then came the 2008 financial crisis — the worst economic crash since the Great Depression — and suddenly Marx was back.
Sales of Das Kapital surged. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) — which documented the return of inequality to 19th-century levels — was explicitly in dialogue with Marx. Even mainstream economists and Financial Times columnists began using Marxist concepts like 'surplus value' and 'concentration of capital.'
The reasons are not hard to find. Wages have stagnated while corporate profits have soared. The richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. Technology platforms have created new forms of monopoly. Climate change can be read as a crisis of capitalism's inability to account for long-term costs. Marx's specific predictions about revolution were wrong, but his diagnosis of capitalism's tendencies looks more prescient than ever.
