From 1949, when Mao Zedong's communists triumphed in China's civil war, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, Karl Marx's historical significance was unsurpassed. Nearly four of every ten people on earth lived under governments that claimed to be Marxist, and in many other countries Marxism was the dominant ideology of the left, while the policies of the right were often based on how to counter Marxism.
Once communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellites, however, Marx's influence plummeted. On the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth on May 5, 1818, it isn't far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?
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