With the collapse of the Soviet Union it has become fashionable to discuss the teachings of Karl Marx as a dead philosophy or philosophical dead end. While there are particular areas of Marx's theories which clearly need reexamination, such as his views on gender, clearly there remains much relevance in his concepts for our age. In material terms the world has not completely abandoned the Marxist experiment. China certainly has not abandoned its Marxist experiment (and represents the largest government in the world in terms of population governed). In the Middle East, Muslim philosophers and economists still embrace Islamic economics whose basis lies on the Marxist doctrine regarding the equal distribution of wealth. Even in the United States, the bastion of capitalism and class competition, there exists relevance for Marxist ideology and observations. Particularly when one considers some of our most pressing social issues such as the fact that over 44 million Americans have no health care.
While Marxist experiments might be dead in many parts of the world, perhaps one of the remaining important uses of Marxist doctrine is in terms of social study and historical commentary. Karl Marx emphasized the conflicts between bourgeoisie, proletarian, and aristocratic classes and we still tend to look at society in these terms. For example, our current president and his Republican opponent in the last election both ran on a platform of legislating new aid packages for the middle class - from education incentives to tax relief for children.
Marx spent most of his adult life preoccupied with the study of the inequalities characteristic of a capitalist society. Today, economists and sociologists still conduct studies using Marxist constructs as in the current studies where they note that the gap between rich (the haves) and poor (have nots) in this nation is widening at unprecedented rates.
In the Cambridge Companion to Marx (19...