Marxism in the 21st Century

Abstract

With the decline of worldly existent communism at the end of the last century, many commentators, politicians and journalists, have signed the death certificate of Marxism as a social and political theoretical tool. The claim was that the ‘ideological phase’ of history was dead and gone and that the triumph of liberal democracy was an assured verity of the new century. In light of the 2008 financial crisis and the growing difficulties of a neo-liberal agenda, this claim seems to have been, at the least, an exaggeration. Further, the extensive and intensive expansion of consumption models and globalized culture has shown that neo-liberalism does have an ideological agenda and that the critique of this agenda, the very critique of present-day capitalism that imbibed the spirit of Das Kapital, is as crucial and important now as at any time in the past. Marxism, as a result, cannot be ignored as a method and/or tool of critique.