Karl Marx and European History in 21st Century

Abstract

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, led to believe that Marx’s ideas were condemned to oblivion. His way of conceiving history and in general his thought, in the new stage of absolute predominance of liberal democracy, seemed a thing of the past. However, the economic crisis of 2008 brought a return that soon manifested itself, in a striking way, in a growing number of books on Capital and of introductions to his work; in 2018, the year of the bicentennial of his birth, it looks like an authentic resurrection. This article seeks to establish a relationship with the ideas of Marx by taking as a starting point the historical context in which they were elaborated, very different from the 20th Century’s various Marxisms and from the Europe of our day.